Thank you very much, Grim. It was a wonderful post, and I can appreciate the sweat and tears it must have taken to get it all together for this week's Canon Fodder. It just feels so surreal for an update like this to come out and be so timely to our discussion.

The problem is... well, I hope you don't mind me illustrating with a Monty Python skit:

You know what? There's nothing wrong with your process. You guys appear to be on the ball as far as writing for a commercial entity goes. But at the end of the day, Gen II Mjolnir is still hideous, and that is a helmet designed after a decorative Corinthian helmet. It doesn't square with what I thought Mjolnir was supposed to be.

I dunno. I've been sitting here trying to write up a doctoral thesis about post-war development, and I don't know. I just don't have the energy or investment to do it anymore. I'm not convinced that diffusion of Mjolnir among the UNSC's military-industrial complex would lead to 57 flavors of Mjolnir, any more than America's fertile military-industrial complex (Seriously, have you seen Shot Show? They've got everything from tactical yoga pants to Siamese AR-15s) has led to 57 flavors of main battle tank. As for the rest? Normalization of neural interfaces? Integration of Covenant and Forerunner technology into the UNSC's industry? I wanted to see it happen, but *snap* it's done. It happened sometime during the UNSC-Covenant War or in the six years when the Master Chief was in cryo. Offscreen. Wasn't important. Not worth mentioning. A lot can happen in six years.

That's all. Halo is no longer beautiful, and the story is too poor and disjointed to make me care about the lore. And now when the story is great and has me on the edge of my seat for more, I still can't care about the lore because there's no guarantee that the rest of Halo's fiction will reflect it.

Thank you, Grim. And give Kenneth Peters a pat on the back. Any man with "Kith" in his vocabulary is a man to be respected.