I've now been a member of BZPower for over eight years. That's a pretty significant number, so I figured I might as well take a look back at how I got here, and into the fandom in general. Feel free to read it or not.

I was eight years old when I first got into LEGO. I had just finished the second grade, and my parents took me to the to Toys R Us to celebrate. I picked out few Dino Attack sets, not thinking much of it at the time. Pretty soon, I had collected almost the entire line.

It wasn't too long after that that I had a conversation in Maryland with a boy named Alex. He explained to me how similar Dino Attack and Exo-Force were, and that if I liked one I should logically like the other. After helping him build an Uplink, I was sold. (As a side note, I still remember him saying that applying the stickers was his favorite part.) I read up on the Exo-Force comics that were available at that time, and then convinced my parents to get me a product collection that included the six main mechs of that year. Also included was a poster, advertising that Exo-Force shorts could be seen during all new episodes of Jimmy Newtron, starting January 23rd. The poster was a little outdated even by the time I got it, but it's still hanging in my room, behind me even now as I write this.

Well, one thing led to another, and I thought that I was old enough to handle whatever violence I thought was present in Bionicle, so I picked up two small sets, Balta and Kazi. These were probably two of the best sets I could have started with, simple, but more complex than later small sets, and giving both a set using the standard head piece and one that didn't.

I had a lot of fun with these two lines. I would check for a new Exo-Force comic everyday, sometimes even before school. By the end of the year, I had collected the years worth of both. This continued for a while into 2007, until I had the entire winter wave. Somewhere, probably the LMBs, I heard that they might be making a set of Karzahni. I thought "Well, Karzahni is a pretty cool character, and there's no set of him yet", so I decided to look a little more into the matter. That led me to a little news article on BZP. In fact, here is the very news story. Unfortunately, I cannot find the talkback thread to this story. A shame too, as that was the first topic I ever read. One of my memories is that every time I saw someone's signature with a link to their epic or something along that line, I opened it in a new tab. I never read any of them, but still, that's important.

That went for a while, until eventually I found the comedies forum. That was what really got me to join BZP. And yes, my first post was absolutely a dreadful comedy. After that I spread out a bit, but still only making a post here and there. And that's the story of how I got here, or at least the beginning of that story. Here's to another eight years.