A little movie called Star Wars opened on this day 44 years ago. While May the 4th has become the defacto date to celebrate the universe we love, May 25th has always been my personal Star Wars day. So it seemed right that it should be the day I formally announced that The Crow's Nest is once again operational.

There's not much new here aside from the look of things, yet. More reviews will come in time (I'm still trying to recalibrate my expectations for what a vintage Dark Forces mission could be) and the Storage area will hopefully continue to fill up. I still want to get full resolution screen captures of the custom missions to replace the old scaled and cropped versions, improve the layout of a few sections that feel slapdash, and try some fancier elements throughout the site.

But at some point you just have to start. You can't wait for perfection because it'll never come. The reviews and downloads are working, the foundation is ready for expansion, and feedback from visitors can only help point me to the things they'd really like to see me work on.

My plan is to start reviewing missions chronologically. It's never going to quite be fair to compare a mission built just after the release of DFUSE to what I expect out of a game in 2021, or even just the missions that still occupy my head like Mt. Kurek. I hope that by enmeshing myself in the type of mission that was being created at the time I can have a more balanced viewpoint. But we'll see. Maybe I'll bounce around just to sample what I've missed. What's really exciting to me is that I've still got so much Dark Forces that I never played, and now I get to.

Many filmmakers (including George Lucas) have uttered a variance on the phrase "A film is never finished, only released." I've found it to be the same with software, theatre, and any other creative effort; you can keep tinkering but at some point you just have to put it out there. So in that spirit, it's time to pull the levers back and hold on.

Punch it!