This is it! The twentieth entry in my BZPower blog! Why is that significant? Probably because I just decided it would be!

Blog-like writing has been a theme of my internet presence from near the beginning of my teenage experience. I got my first blog on Blogspot.com (now just blogger.com) in January 2004. My English teacher wanted us to create personal blogs for writing exercises outside of class, a new concept to 15 year-old me, but apparently, some of my peers had discovered Xanga (remember that!?) by then. Anyway, it was pretty simple. I wrote in it weekly based on whatever prompt my teacher assigned the class, but occasionally, we got the chance to do free-writes and write about whatever was on our minds. This was something I re-discovered joy in, for originally, I had to keep a journal (with paper! The primitivity!) back in the sixth grade. I actually had fun writing in it daily, but I was naive and thought my expressions within were private. Unfortunately, some imp pulled my journal out of the class stack one day and revealed some things I had written about another person. It wasn't nice , but the exposure was cruel, and I was humiliated in front of the class for it. After that, I became very wary and anxious about doing any kind of personal writing.

Therefore, my lesson learned, I was able to outgrow my anxiety and thrived in blogging years later in my English class. Even after school ended for summer vacation, I still posted a few times over the summer. By now, commenting was enabled, and some of my peers could read and comment on my thoughts. But most gave up their blogs permanently after the school year, so I was alone. In time, I abandoned the blog as well.

A year later, in 2005, new friends introduced me to Myspace. I was hesitant initially, but since a lot of these friends I wanted to keep in contact with over long distances, I decided to embrace it. And of course, once I found out that you could write your own blogs on your page, I was hooked. I wrote regularly on that thing from 2005 to 2008, usually juvenile, smart-aleck kind of stuff that only a cocky high school kid would write. Other times, I'd get a bit introspective or remark on local events in my town and high school. Eventually, I started adding more friends from high school, so there often lively comments and bulletins exchanged between us. Several friends actually complimented me on my writing, and that encouraged me to write more.

In 2007, with the end of high school nigh, I joined another social media site: Facebook. Once again, I found Facebook (it was a lot simpler back then!) had a blogging function (of sorts) called Notes. It was a lot cleaner-looking than the Myspace blog, so I started writing some thoughts down there, too, often copying and pasting them into my Myspace page later. As my friend count on Facebook increased steadily into college, I started to give Facebook more precedence with blogging. Eventually, spam bots, glitches, and general lack of activity on Myspace forced me to give it up in late 2008. The future would be with Facebook, and as of this writing, I have almost 90 Notes written on Facebook. It would be more, but my output seriously started to lag after college, as did my readership. I think Facebook encouraged this, as they sidelined the Notes function more and more until it was almost invisible to the casual user. Plus, I think most people don't like reading too much anymore.

Where does the BZPower Blog fit in all this? Well, if you scroll back through my 20 entries, you'll see my first post was in 2006, during a renewed Premier membership in the summertime. So, that was back in the Myspace heyday. It was kind of a "secret" or "joke" blog, since I made no connections in it to my "real" identity on Myspace. I wanted to keep my BZPower and BIONICLE fandom separate from the "real me" in high school, which, looking back, was kind of dumb. I was already a nerd, BIONICLE fan notwithstanding!

Speaking of secret blogs, I also kept a Livejournal from 2005 to 2007. I mainly did it to get in touch with an old crush from my middle school days. That sort of didn't work out like I had hoped, but there is definitely some interesting writing on there that was not on Facebook or Myspace.

With this twentieth entry, I have been more prolific on BZPower's blog than anywhere else in the past two years, if not more. I guess I like the fact that this blog is still a bit removed from my non-BIONICLE identity, and part of me is fine with the reduced traffic on this site now that BIONICLE is dead and buried. I feel like I am contributing to an archive for one of the internet's lost tribes--a dwindling folk who still remember their past and customs even as time and society pass them by. Someday, there may be nothing left of BZPower but these forums and the blogs. In that way, it pleases me to be doing my part in ensuring some memorial to my presence here, a veritable "BIONICLE Guru was here" epitaph on the gravestone in the cemetery of the Internet's never-quite dead.