I am here, or rather, was when I started the post yesterday morning. I know I’ve been neglecting the site for too long, having moved most all my Awesome Links to my infinitely-easier-to-update and more community-oriented makeshift tumblr for now, but as you’ve no doubt sussed out (or heard me talk about ad nauseum for the past few weeks), there are major changes afoot, and so it’s probably best to get The Last Word down here.

So, first, the big news: as you will have heard, with Boing Boing’s relaunch, I will no longer be working on Offworld, and will instead be doing weekly columns on the Mother Boing (the first of which should be going up soon): round-ups of the indie/iPhone/retail games you need to be paying attention to, galleries of amazing things to lay your eyes on, and wider-ranging features that reveal something of the shape games are taking, still shining a sharp light on the stuff at the periphery and the people who make it, as was Offworld’s wont, but for a bit more generalized readership. In a sense, it’ll be quite a good thing, putting Boing Boing’s obviously sizable audience in more direct touch with indies and the rest.

But, a site like Offworld needs to exist, and I’d always approached it since its launch last November as the site I’ve been waiting ages for someone to do, so there should be no doubt in anyone’s mind that I’m cooking up Something New basically like as I write this, and that there are a lot of exciting things that will go hand-in-hand with it.

Whether it’ll still be called Offworld or something new is irrelevant, I think: the site itself has been subsumed by the network and community of wildly intelligent, passionate game makers and game lovers that have grown around it and congregated through it (even if the commenting was too wonky to talk easily on it), and I’m not worried that we’ll find each other again quickly wherever we land.

As for the more personal rest: as of last Wednesday, I have left Austin for a bit, first to head to LA for Indiecade (which turned out to be proof positive of the collective wonder of the makers/lovers above: you should see my flickr [or Tiff's or Greg's or Felix's or Eric Nakamura's Giant Robot post] for some of the wicked times), and following that, to here — here being San Francisco — where I’ll be spending upward of a month. Or so. I haven’t exactly bought a return ticket yet, we’ll just see how that works out. The plan? Good time spent with good friends, particularly Ginger Anyhow, Steph, and Tiff, to say nothing of the billion other people I want to see while I’m here.

Don’t hesitate to contact me about anything at all on the past/present/future of my games coverage and involvement (brandon@tiger-town.com works fine!), and it’s probably easiest to see what’s happening when via twitter (@brandonnn, which probably everyone who reads this will be well acquainted with anyway). Let’s all talk more soon!