What Destructoid means to me. (Dtoid PAX-Panel reflections)

So I've been on this website for the better part of a year now, seen it go through so awesome stuff (The Best Birthdayversery ever, some really bad ads, and a lot of other stuff that I'm sure everyone can think of that's happened since November/December of '07), and I'm happy to say that I've found my new home online. I don't post much, I kinda just idle in IRC, but I know this is where I belong now. The epiphany that I had while watching the PAX Panel was probably the weirdest, most enlightening video I've ever watched. I can't really explain it (but I'm gonna try!), and I love it.

So rewind to December of about 2004 or so, I was heavy into the Nintendo nsider forums (anyone? Anyone?), and I was pretty happy there. I slowly stopped going, as I was busy with marching band and other school related stuff. Then one day, during those amazing high school summer days (Well, not so amazing, but ya know...), I was incredibly bored, and I tried to go back to the forums, and they had deleted everything except the tech support forum. Needless to say I was shocked. The Nsider forums, in case you didn't know, were pretty active. Their fan fiction community was one of the best I've ever seen on the internet, and then all of a sudden, poof, gone. I didn't really know what to do at that point, I floated around to a couple of other forums and tried to get into them, but just couldn't.

Coming back to around November of last year, around the whole Cashwhore incident, my friend (who religiously followed gamestop), sent me some links to destructoid, Kotaku, and the like. I added the RSS feed of Destructoid's front page my bookmarks toolbar in Firefox because I liked the style of writing by most of the editors, and I didn't really have another source of gaming news or anything.



Well, one of the days when I was looking at the comments, I wondered well, I wonder if the links go to anything other than a profile? And sure enough, I stumbled upon the cblogs. It was like I stumbled upon a long lost library of ancient knowledge, with everyone's opinions about whatever they wanted to write about in the gaming world. I immediately made an account and started reading and commenting a little, not too much, but a little. I never made an intro post, but I did the lame little news posts occasionally with things that I thought were interesting that people didn't really know about, or that I didn't see on the site.

I also started going to the forums, but who cares about those right?



It was around the time of the Birthdayversery that I found out what this site really meant to some people. I don't remember who it was, but someone in IRC asked a very serious question to another community member, and that question was “What does Destructoid mean to you”. At which point I thought wow, that's deep.


I never really had the motivation to write this blog out until I watched the PAX panel the other day. Seeing the people behind the scenes of this great site in motion, talking about how they felt about the site that I spend so much time on, was incredible. Sure, I've seen pictures of them all before, and I'm sure it would've been more epic had I been there, but the video did it for me. I immediately thought: “Wow, this is exactly what my English teachers have been telling me for all these years (minus the grow some balls part, and the ridiculous visual aides).” And I couldn't help but think wow, this is the real deal, this is what's up, this is HOT! And here I am, writing this blog, finally. So thanks to Niero, Colette, Dale, Nick, and[size= 24]EVERYONE[/size] that makes this site as awesome and amazing as it is (yeah, that means you!)