Happy New Year from Galvanic Team, I guess.

And now that I have your attention, relax. We’re not going anywhere… technically. But clickbaity bulls–t like that is one of the exact reasons for this post. In part, anyway.

Let me be clear. I’m tired. Moreover, I’m tired of being tired. It’s not about the sheer volume of work I do or anything. I like to keep busy. It’s the pressure. The expectation. The anxiety. The less I have to say about that last part, the better. By now it’s well established that I – Voyager – have a history of issues in that regard. But I promised transparency so here’s transparency.

Retiring The Galvanic Team Blog

First up, what we’re retiring is this version of the Galvanic Team website. A while ago, we announced the new Geek Machine rebranding initiative and all that. Most of our plans are moving forward without a hitch. But the greater scheme of our strategy is changing. When we made our initial announcement, we said that we’d be converting this site to suit our new content plan. That is no longer the case.

The reasons for that are multiple. The biggest one is, frankly, that WordPress sucks and I’m kinda sick of pretending it doesn’t. At least for our purposes, it’s just not cutting it any longer. What’s more, so much of WordPress’s backend has been broken for so long that I’m just well and truly done fighting with it. So this place is going to remain as it is. I wouldn’t hold my breath on it remaining particularly active once we get all the new things set up. When we have the new Geek Machine site running, there’s a good chance this one will fall by the wayside.

The Galvanic Team’s Content Woes

Full Disclosure: We will likely end up trying more than one means of putting a site together over the coming years. Eventually, we’ll look to having a site made from scratch, but that’s a distant plan, at this point. One that’ll take far more disposable income than we currently have.

With that out of the way, let’s address the bigger thing. Content. When we started this, we launched a project. Homebrew Heroes, we called it. It was intended to be nothing more than a fun little romp. Something amusing that we throw together after playing some D&D. It’d be quick content that’d keep the site active while we worked on more pressing things.

It didn’t go over well. Fine. We’re thick-skinned people. We didn’t spend several years in a Creative Arts Degree program to be afraid of a little constructive criticism. But if the content ain’t satisfactory to people, then why bother? We sure ain’t puttin’ it up here for our benefit. Otherwise, it’d sit in a journal somewhere and never see the light of day. The broadly negative reception to it helped put things into perspective. Fast content just ain’t it, chief. Not for us.

We want Galvanic Team to produce content that’s of acceptable quality. That requires editing. I don’t know if you know this, but editors cost money. I should know. I’ve done freelance editing before. We don’t have the kind of disposable income it’d take to hire a regular one. And while conventional wisdom says you shouldn’t edit your own work, you can if you have the expertise. The problem? That requires time. Arguably more time than someone hired to do it because if you’re editing your own work, you need to be able to step away from it for decent periods.

Putting Most Content On Pause

So we’re done. No more “fast” content from us at Galvanic Team. But that also means basically no content from us. For a while. Months. That’s the tradeoff. Doesn’t mean no posts. Just no active, creative content. Pretty much everything you can expect to see for the next several months is going to be updates and promotional shiz (look forward to something neat in a week or two). There will be either no or very few reviews or editorials. Frankly, we’re truly and utterly bored with those, and we’d rather be spending our time making things than talking about things. There will be no episodes of Homebrew Heroes (though that’s also because of some foolishness with WotC that I won’t get into here).

The only thing that’ll likely see new updates over the coming months is Ghost Light Exorcist because of the nature of that project. Bulletoon maybe. EXTRA/NORMAL… we’ll see. Maybe slightly tweaked chapters will make it up here from Honeyfeed in the lead-up to the new site, but I honestly wouldn’t get my hopes up. There might be a few smaller things. We’re working on some new audiovisual content that should be pretty easy to put together, if a tad pricey. But that’s basically it.

The last thing I want is for this place to become like my gig work – obsessed with speed and clicks more than actual quality. Churning out easy/clickbaity bunk because it’s more volatile, rather than things that actually take some level of thought, time, and genuine passion for the subject. Which, by the way, is the other reason for the lack of commentary pieces on my part. I haven’t been genuinely passionate about a lot that’s been coming out in the past few years. I’ve been phoning it in a lot and it’s miserable.

The New Galvanic Team Site – The Geek Machine

Don’t hold me to any of this. I’m currently doing the bulk of this alone or with minimal help because of real-life circumstances beyond any of our control. And even that might become more difficult soon. But the aim is for the new site to launch in the Summer. When it does launch, the intent is for it to do so alongside the debut of Burning Sky and the first new chapters of EXTRA/NORMAL. We’ll probably also have the first full arc of Homebrew Heroes on there with some significant changes (Thanks WotC…).

In a perfect world, the new site will also have some sort of blog built into it, so we can finally just ditch this place completely. It’ll still be here, but it will no longer be updated. All of the content on here that we want to transfer will be transferred. Everything else will fade away. It’ll be a completely new thing and we’ll sing Free At Last, Free At Last, Thank God Almighty, We Are Free At Last.

Wrapping Up

So there you have it. This place is going away. The Geek Machine is nearly powered up and ready to go. How’s that for transparency? In the new year, you can expect to start seeing a ramp-up of Burning Sky content as we approach the release of the project on the new website. You may be able to expect re-edited chapters of EXTRA/NORMAL if I can manage the time. There might be some new audiovisual stuff around the bend. And that’ll be it if you don’t want to make the trek over to Voyce.me to read Ghost Light Exorcist… but please make the trek over to Voyce.me to read Ghost Light Exorcist.

That’s our little announcement. Life hit Voyager with Burnout! It’s Super Effective! So yeah. Here’s to a productive new year, everyone! …You thought I was gonna say “awesome,” didn’t you? Well, I am. But don’t think you know me or nothin’. Thanks for reading, as always. Happy New Year and…

Keep Up The Awesome!
Voyager