These games, this site, this stuff, these events, these people, it all contributed to me being who I am today. I may have not been there at the beginning, or started as young (or as old) as some people, there may have been some missteps (I certainly made some mistakes), there may have been little things and big things that could've been better, but I wouldn't trade it for the world.

I can't tell you, I can't tell anyone, what all this has meant to me. There aren't words for it.

So, how about some pictures. Here are some I found again not long ago. Back when I was playing Halo 2 I took these and other pictures of me getting to the Scarab Gun, this must've been 2008, 2009... most of them were hard to make out, and the ones that showed me didn't exactly have flattering angles; I tossed them out after I took pictures of them, now I'm wishing I hadn't. I also had an impossible-to-make-out picture of amassed vehicles in Halo 1 and some pictures of the Halo 3 and ODST related stuff from short Bungie videos. (One doesn't even want to post.)

This one means almost as much, maybe just as much. It's a summary of my misspent youth (except it wasn't misspent and I wasn't terribly young).



All I can say is thank you. Thank you to the people who kicked things off, like Louis Wu and Hamish Sinclair. Thank you to the people I played with, like Gravemind and Inhuman. Thank you to the people I miss seeing talk, like nomis. Thank you to the people I look up to, like Stephen Loftus and Rockslider. Thank you to the people I argued with, like Cody Miller and Narcogen. Thank you to the people who made this place great before I got here, like poena dare. Thank you to the people who contributed to the site, like ZZombie. Thank you to the people I've met, like Leviathan. Thank you to the people I'll never meet, like Brian Morden. Thank you to the people I can't fit anywhere specific, like boll and Kermit. Thank you to the people who made the games. Thank you to the people who made the books. Thank you to the people who made the trailers and commercials. Thank you to the people who made wild theories.

But most of all, thank you. You, the person reading this. The one taking the time to look at this relic of the past, reading all these hundreds upon thousands of messages (that once upon a time were mostly all posted by me, for some reason). They could have been lost, maybe one day they will be, but you, oh reader mine, carry them forward with you, and you give hope for the future.

There are those who said this day would never come, that HBO would meet its end one way or another by this point. Truthfully, now silence fills this place, but I have faith it will live on in the way it's meant to.

HBO is not a thing, it's not a server or anything else. HBO is not a place, not a house in Connecticut nor 20 Celena Court, although it's like one. HBO is not even a person, Louis Wu is a great man in many ways but he is not HBO, although that is close to being correct.

It's people! HBO is people!

So in tru7h, Louis Wu is HBO, but so am I, and so can are you-- and really, truly, I thank God it's you.

I hope all of its people continue to find happiness.

And hey, if worse comes to worse?