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Hi Gaians!

It's been about 10 months since my last update, which was a week before the 2009 Halloween Event. Since then, I've worked at Gaia as a team lead of both Events and Sponsorships. I would say that I haven't been posting because I needed that time for sleeping, but I haven't been doing that either rofl One of the only bad parts of this last year has been my inability to keep up with the users of this site, and I definitely felt the void as I felt increasingly detached from what was going on in our community day-to-day.

It's been an awesome 4 years, 1 month, and 20 days at Gaia Interactive - it remains the best place I've ever worked, and I was very lucky to have been here as long as I have. I've made lots of friends in HQ and on the site, and I've learned more than can fit in my [unflatteringly large] head. It's been my dream to make video games since I was a little 5-year old boy playing Mario Brothers on the original NES. I feel as though Gaia has afforded me that opportunity, and more than that: to build huge games played by hundreds of thousands of people simultaneously. If Little Kid Fleep (LKF) knew what he'd be up to 21 years later, he'd probably have felt much better about life in general. For that, I owe Gaia (and especially Lanzer, who hired me all those years ago) an irresolvable debt. It’s not often you get to live your dreams.

On that note, I'd like to announce that after this post, I will be back to being a regular Gaia user. As of this Friday, August 27th, I will no longer be a developer for GaiaOnline.com. If you’ve followed my journal, you know that I eat, sleep, and breathe my work here at Gaia – so it'll be an interesting change to be able to enjoy the site from a different perspective. I decided to make this change for the very reason that my work here has been a huge factor in my life - I felt it was time for me to eat, sleep, and breathe other things (like food, actual sleep, and air).

I couldn’t be happier that Frontier Skies was the last product I got to work on here -- even if I didn’t get to do my usual teasers. Events have been my favorite thing to work on at Gaia, just as they were for many of you to play. There’s no better way to go out, I feel. Hey… we finally had an event that didn’t crash the site! Like ramoneguru says, “it only took us 7 years.”

I value the time I had here, and I’ve done my best to make the most of it. Everyone who works here is very lucky to do so, and I hope they all realize it. Gaia’s a magical place that I was fortunate enough to call my home.

Keep having fun, everyone!