We all know the narrative in Destiny's campaign is a little on the light side, and not really very fulfilling. There's clearly a lot more going on, Bungie has had a long history of hiding exposition and background for their games in spots throughout their games (terminals in Halo, etc.). I personally, find it quite fun to read into these little tidbits of information and try to deduce what's truly going on, and what's happened. So, before I begin, spoiler warning, for those who haven't finished the campaign etc.

[Destiny spoiler warning]

First and foremost, I think that the story of Destiny is about time. More specifically time travel, and extra dimensional creatures that exist outside of time. The first big clue to that seems to be the name of the game: Destiny. The word, means the "hidden power believed to control what will happen in the future; fate." I think that the name of the game is referring to a couple of things: firstly, to a time travelers point of view, the events played out by the Guardian(s) in the game's narrative are fated, or must happen in a certain way to allow for certain future events, to avoid some catastrophe (I will revisit this). Second thing I think the title is referring to, is the Traveler, a being that transcends time, and is manipulating humanity's fate, leading us to a destination in the future that it has chosen.

"It doesn't matter who you were, only what you will become." -The Exo Stranger

To that end, the Vex, and the Exo Stranger, play an important role in my time travel theory. We already know the Vex travel through time, and exist "outside of time" in some sense. Early on, the Vex were described as time traveling robots. Check out this quote from Zydron's grimoire card:

"Warlock scholars believe that Gate Lords regulate traffic between Vex gates, and that their minds contain codes that might open the way into forbidden realms. An enormous amount of hope and anger has been spent on a particular debate - could we find a Vex gate that opens onto a place and time before the Collapse, and somehow forestall it"

I suspect that the Exo Stranger is a time traveler, and that she's observing and manipulating the past to serve her interest in the future. It's interesting that she isn't a Guardian, and it suggests, to me, that in the future the Guardians (and Ghosts, which she seems to be disdainful of) have all but disappeared and or become obsolete, or otherwise somehow compromised [I suspect it's the later]. Her vanishing at will, and her presence during key, important, story moments, seems to suggest some knowledge of future events. One of my favourite quotes from the Exo Stranger, to me, implies her time traveling nature:

"I don't even have time to explain why I don't have time to explain."

I speculate that, being short on time isn't the issue that she's referring to, but rather, the nature of time travel itself doesn't permit her the ability to explain her advanced understanding of time, and time travel, to you, a Luddite, in her eyes. The question is: what is she trying to stop, or what events is she hoping to manipulate in her favour? We know she doesn't much care for the Vex, and whatever that thing in the Black Garden is/was, but she suggests that the 'victory in the Black Garden' (I'm paraphrasing here) is a small step in the right direction. So what is her end game, and why isn't she a Guardian? I think the answers lie in what the nature of the Traveler and The Darkness truly are.

So what is the Darkness? According to Rasputin it is a "hostile, acausal entity", that it is to say, it's not governed by the laws of cause and effect, for example: if you throw a stone into a pond, it creates ripples in the water. This is a "cause and effect" relationship, the stone being thrown into the water is the cause, and the ripples are the effect. If The Darkness wanted to make ripples in the water, it could simply will it so, no need for the stone. This would suggest The Darkness has almost "Godlike power". When the game talks about The Darkness "causing the collapse", but with no explanation of how it did so, we needn't look for a cause, the Collapse is simply the effect it desired for which no cause is necessary, or for which the cause may come later.

"If, as they say, the coming events cast their shadows ahead of time, then the past events cannot but leave their reflections behind them." -Translation of one of Rasputin's transmissions

How can The Darkness escape some of the most fundamental laws of space and time? I theorize that it exists outside of time, that it is an extra-dimensional being from a place where time is non-linear, and as such it can appear in our space-time when and where it desires, thus it can act in an acausal manner.

This is where I go from the wild theories, to the insane conspiracy theories. I'm going to incorporate a little of the "We Are The Darkness" theory here, which hinges a lot on a player overhearing a Fallen Dreg refer to the player as "The Darkness!" Now, I'm not verifying this fact, as to the best of my knowledge, no one has video of the Fallen actually saying the quote in question, but it does fit in nicely with my theory, which is: there is more than one "Darkness", they are a number of, discreet, extra dimensional beings, of which the Traveler is one. That's right, there's more than one Darkness, and The Traveler is "a Darkness". I suspect, at the heart of the giant sphere that we call The Traveler, is one of those throbbing, weird looking, things, like the Heart of the Black Garden.

These, godlike, extra-dimensional beings, are at war, and have reached a stale-mate of some kind in their own dimension, and so, are co-opting races in our galaxy to wage war with one another. This is why the Vex, Cabal, Fallen, The Hive, and The Guardians, are all at war with one another. Each race is working as agents of an extra-dimensional being, and the war has just happened to migrate to our solar system. Part of the power of the beings is to cloud the minds of their soldiers, to use their godlike power to inspire worship, and instill in them, a godlike reverence and dependence on them. This is why the Vex worshiped the Heart, and the Black Garden itself, and this is what the Traveler is doing to humanity. It may mean nothing, but I think the Queen's Emisary gives us a hint to this fact:

"'They have no idea what surrounds them..." and "It's hard to see, this close to the light."

She could be referring to the hostile forces closing in around us, and being so close to the sun, but what I think she's really referring to is the distorting effect of the Traveler (for whom "The Light" seems to be a popular nick name), manipulating the minds of the people of The City and The Tower. To this end, I think this is why the Awoken are named as such. The Queen of the Reef, and her pals, clearly know more about the goings on of the solar system, and the forces in it, than The Guardians do. What really happened to the people trying to flee the solar system that made them the Awoken? I think they got far enough away from The Traveler that they realized it's manipulative powers, perhaps during some catastrophe. How they got funky hair and skin, I don't know, but I think they know the truth about The Darkness and The Traveler, and Awoken that have returned to Earth are subject to The Travelers influence, which is why they don't trust Earth-born Awoken.

That's it for now. By no means do I think this theory is flawless, I'm sure it's full of holes, and I don't know if we'll ever get all the answers to what The Darkness or The Traveler are, but I find it fun to speculate. I have some more "evidence", and I may add more to this blog, or a subsequent blog, especially if expansions reveal more story elements.

Waaaay back in 2012, I was bitten by the homebrew (beer making at home) bug. I picked up a book on the subject, that was on sale, as a lark, and it really grabbed me; but, what really got me going was @brewmaster_andy's awesome forum posts and videos on this site. In advance of PAX East 2012, Andy posted this terrific video that laid out the steps of making an all grain batch, and that got me really excited.

Note: I'm going to use a lot of words that are specific to brewing, and try to explain where I can.

Fast forward two years, and I'm finally brewing! I quickly learned that brewing is a lot of chemistry and plumbing, with a little math splashed in there. I jumped right into all grain brewing, as that's what really appealed to me. For those that don't know, home brewing beer falls into two categories, primarily: extract brewing, and all grain. There are variations on those two, but broadly they fall into one of those two categories. Brewing is basically getting sugar out of grains by soaking it in water, and then fermenting that sugar water (aka wort), with our friends, yeast. All grain brewing achieves this by soaking the grains in hot water until the starches come out, and enzymes that are inside the grains break the starches down into sugar (in this case the sugar we get is maltose). All the other stuff that also leaches into the water from the grains; the fats, and proteins, also ends up in the water and contributes flavour to the beer. Extract is very similar, except the first step, the part where starch is extracted from grain and converted to sugar, is done for you. All you have to do with extract is dissolve the sugar in hot water (it usually comes as a powder or a thick syrup). There are a couple more steps, and how much detail you pay attention to gives you more control over the different aspects of the final product.

I opted for all grain gear, specifically what's called an infusion mash setup. Below you can see basically what I've got. It's a 15 gallon brew kettle (aka the hot liquor tank, or HLT). This is where water for soaking the grains gets heated to the correct temperature, and where the wort (the sugar-water before it gets fermented) is boiled. It's sitting on top of a Costco propane burner, this thing gets really hot, really fast. Next to the HLT is an Igloo cooler modified with a filter screen, and a stainless steel ball valve. We call the cooler the mash lautner tun, or MLT, and it's where the grain and the hot water hang out, until all the straches have dissolved into the water and the enzymes have tunred them into sugar (sacchrification). The tool box that's barely visable at the bottom of the frame there, that's got a pump in it, which I need because I'm a fat old man and lifting heavy things sucks, and it also makes recirculating the wort, and sparging a lot easier. What's sparging and why recirculate? I'm glad you asked...

As it turns out, when making all grain beer, the husks of the grain play a really important role. In addition to containing important flavour compounds, the husks act as a filter, separating out the stuff you don't want, like excessive lipids (fats) that make your beer cloudy, and not look nice. So, after the water and the beer hang out for a while, we pump the liquid out of the valve on the side of the cooler (that you can't see) and put it right back in the top of the cooler so it can filter down through the grain, getting rid of the things we don't want. The pump makes this SUPER easy, especially if you're all by yourself.

In the bottom left is a big bucket full of sanitizer, which is used to make things free from wild yeast, and bacteria. I cannot emphasize this enough: sanitizer is my best friend. There's nothing worse than making 5 gallons of beer and then having to toss it out because it got a bug. I sanitize everthing, even the stuff that gets boiled. I know, that seems silly, but it's a worthy precaution.

The last part of my setup, that you don't see, is a plate chiller. Cooling down the beer is important for two reasons: firstly, yeast (the living organisms that do the fermenting) like a very specific temperature range, and if the beer is too hot or cold they could die, or just go to sleep, the end result being NO BEER. The second reason why it's important is that after boiling the wort, there are these volatile compounds that will break down the longer that the water is within a certain range. The faster the wort is cooled, the less of these volatile compounds break down, which is good, because they can make beer taste weird.

The plate chller is basically like a car radiator, cold tap water is run through a series of chambers, and the hot wort is run through a series of adjacent chambers. The tap water and the wort never actually come into contact, but they're in copper chambers, side by side, and so the colder water cools down the wort very quickly and efficiently. This is also where the pump comes in handy.

From there, the cooled wort goes into a fermentation vessel. I use glass carboys, in various sizes, but I dream of a day that I have a fancy, stainless steel, conical fermenter. You can see one of my carboys to the right, there, fermenting away. This was a pretty high gravity (lots of maltose [grain sugar]) wort, so it's really going strong. I have a little heating belt on it, because I leave them in my basement, which, even in the summer, is a little cool, and yeast like very specific temperature ranges (what those ranges are varies with the strain of yest).

Thus far I've made four batches. The first one was this little 1 gallon kit, and it went great until I messed up when bottling. The other three are chugging along and I should be bottling soon. The first is a Belgian Dubbel, a style of strong, dark ale. The second is a Belgian Wit. The last is what's called a Graff, which is an invention of a gentlemen named Brandon O (as I understand it, anyway), and named for a fictional drink from Stephen King's the Dark Tower series. It's a mix of apple cider and wort that's fermented together. @brewmaster_andy has a great video of how to make a graff, and if you like cider I would really recommend trying that recipe, and watching Andy's video, as it's super easy to make, and pretty tasty stuff.

With 15 gallons of beer almost ready to bottle, comes a really fun part. Naming the beers and making labels. Some people get way into this stuff, and being a big nerd, I couldn't help but go a little over board. I have a particular love of Belgian styles, specifically Trappist style ales. Tappists are a particular French monastic order that's famous for their beer and cheese. They've been making this stuff, in a couple of styles, for hundred of years. Way back in the good old days, when the monks made beer, but had no concept of alcohol percentage, or ABV, other than "this stuff gets you drunk, fast", they instead warned their customers of how strong the beer was by giving names like "the devil" or "demon". The stronger the beer, the scarier the name.

I decided to give all my beers a scary monster names. I really like the works of H.P. Lovecraft, so I decided to name the beers after creatures, gods, and other monsters, from his work. Then I went about making the labels. At first I made them kind of colourful and a little garish. It wasn't evoking the "scary" feelings I was hoping for.

I decided, instead, I wanted the labels to look as though they were pages torn from some ancient book of demonology. I wanted it to look hand drawn, old, and spooky, as though something terrible may lurk inside. So this is what I ended up with:

So that's what I'm going with. It's not like I'm going to sell it, it's just to give away to friends and what not, so I figured, might as well have fun with it. I should mention that I stole the centre art, of the monster, from this awesome blog where artist Michael Bukowski has drawn all of the Lovecraft monsters (and some others) and included the passages of text that describe them.

That's it so far. When I've bottled everything, and added the labels, and waxed dipped the bottles ala the accompanying photo, I'll post and update. Again, huge thanks to @brewmaster_andy for the inspiration, answering all my silly questions, and being an all around awesome guy. I'll also try to upload some well edited video to Youtube of a brew day, but it's a little tough when you're all by yourself, and you're still learning.

My name is Sean, I'm 32 years old, and I hadn't cried in about 20 years, until April of this year.

Gavin was my friend, we met in high school in 1994, and became fast friends. He was a nerd, way too into Star Trek: The Next Generation than any one person should be, except maybe me, and so we clicked. It was natural that we got along so well. We grew closer, made films together, shared our dreams for the future, went through the awkward ups and downs of being teenagers, and supported each other throughout. Gav and I watched each other grow from teenage nerds into men with a passionate love of the arts.

I loved Gavin like a bother, which is why it shames me the most when he came out of the closet and I failed to support him completely. He came out to another friend first, casually, and with the confidence that I've come to admire.

Gav and I wrote as a hobby. Fiction largely, not especially good either. We shared everything we wrote with a very close group of people, and it's how we stayed connected. When Gavin moved across the country, we maintained our friendship online, through emails, message boards, and Facebook. He was thousands of kilometers away, but it never felt that way. I watched him fall in love through Facebook. I read about his career taking off through emails. I saw his social life blossom through message boards. Gavin became a whole person, and I got to be a fly on the wall from my desk on the other side of the continent.

I woke up March 24th to the strangest Facebook wall post I've ever seen. "It was great to know you for the short while I did" wrote a name I didn't recognize "you will be missed Gavin." I didn't understand the meaning of the post. Gavin was fine, we were going to play Diablo III when he got back from his road trip during the week. A few minutes passed and I refreshed his wall. Another post: "I can't believe you're gone." read a family member I hadn't met. My God, was this some sick joke? I reached out to our mutual friend who lived close by.

"Sean, I'm sorry, Gavin died yesterday." Charles, my friend, wrote. I was floored. He had just posted that he was with friends and family, happy and safe. It didn't make any sense. I began calling and messaging my friends, letting them know if I could, trying to find out what had happened. This is the part that confuses some people, why did I have to know how he died, what good would that do?

When someone dies suddenly, without warning, the first thing you feel is a loss of control. Your world is spinning madly and no matter how hard you hang on, it's just going to buck you off. I wanted to know what happened because I wanted to know what I could have done to stop it. I couldn't. I found out in the days after Gavin's death that he had died of a brain aneurysm while playing his favourite sport. He was with a student nurse and a paramedic. Later they told me, they watched as he died, they could see the life leave his eyes before he hit the ground. Gavin was 32, in good health, smart, eat well, and received great medical care. Nothing could have been done. Even if, through some insane fluke, doctors detected the fault in his brain that led to his death, likely there would have been nothing they could have done to repair it.

Over the next few months I learned more and more about how many people Gavin really affected in his life. Pictures, written tributes, and letters popped up on his Facebook wall. It was eerie to see his feed so active, knowing he was gone. Then his husband began using his acount to organize memorials across the country. Gavin died so suddenly, and away from his home, that he was quickly cremated and memorials were organized in the parts of the country where he lived.

The first memorial I missed. I had planned a family vacation many, many months prior to his death and it was far too late to change plans. I found myself in Disney World with my family, the spectre of my friends death still hanging over me. I planned one day where I would have some time alone, to unwind, away from the kids, in-laws, and other distractions. My feet and legs sore from the miles walked at the Disney parks, I filled up the tub, turned on the jets, and got in. It wasn't more than thirty minutes alone before I began to sob uncontroably. It had been two weeks since my friend had died, and just now, alone, in the quietness of my solitude, did I finally accept that this was it: Gavin was not coming back. I would never hear his voice again, or read his writing, or shake his hand. His absence was like a whole in my heart that could never be filled. I realized there would be no email from him, his acounton Battle.net would forever be "Offline". One day he was there, the next he was gone. Forever.

This was a tiny part of acceptance. I like the seven stages of grief, not because its completely accurate, but because it lets you rationalize and understand your grief. It puts you back in control, after it has been stolen from you. The biggest two misunderstanding about the seven stages of grief are that a) they never happen in a predictable order, and b) you will experience them multiple times, some times at the same time. You may be dealing with denial and acceptance at the same time, or bargain with anger. It confusing and shitty, and having a tool to understand what and why this is happening to you is always worthwhile.

Enter the tragic loss of Ryan Davis. I was just getting past the "extreme emotions" phase of dealing with my friends death. I accept that he has died, and I manage not to get too angry or sad about it. Those feelings came flooding back very quickly when I read Matt Rorie's piece about Ryan.

Within minutes the community both on Giant Bomb and elsewhere mobilized. The outpouring for Ryan was similar to the torrent of Facebook posts for my friend. I realized what a force for good this was. It was cathartic to read all the great tributes and kind words people had to say about Ryan. I'm sure his friends and family had a harder time, but for me, it was reassuring, and empowering to read about how Ryan's legacy would be felt.

I'm not over Ryan's death, or Gavin's, but I had this to say about the subject on twitter in response to Brad Muir's comment "Having a time today."

"It doesn't get easier, but you learn to live with it."

And that's become my happy medium. I can't deny the pain I feel by the loss of my friend, or Ryan, but I've learned to live with it. I've learned to use that pain. It's become a part of me, and as I continue to grow I can only hope that I never forget the parts they played in my life.