The thing I'm most thankful for this year has to be ponies. Seriously.

Back before the downtime, I didn't have many friends here. I mean, there were people that knew me, but not really that many people that I was that close to. On the chat rooms that we went on, I felt out of place; practically everyone there knew each other from the Comics forum, and I was there just because a couple people I knew were there. I was really only here on BZP for the Halo topic, and I was starting to lose interest in that too.

Then the forums went down. I was kind of apathetic towards that, since I hadn't been paying too much attention to BZP anyway. But I kept it as my home page anyway, so I could keep checking every day to see if the forums had come back up. Weeks passed, and I nearly forgot, but I didn't change my home page for some reason, either because of laziness () or some other reason I don't remember.

In May, literally the week after Best Night Ever aired, I discovered My Little Pony. I had known about bronies for a while, but I didn't really care; I liked Bionicle, they could like MLP. But it wasn't until that one night that I caught my brother watching the pilot, right when Twilight met Fluttershy and Fluttershy was just squeaking. In the next week we watched the whole season. Then I watched it a few more times. And over the summer, the first summer since before 8th grade that I didn't have summer school (I ran out of courses to take...>/)<), I immersed myself deeper and deeper in the fandom, reading practically every fanfic on that pony blog that wasn't [shipping] or [sad], and making cutie mark Forge art, but I never found any forums that I liked as much as BZP. So when it finally came back in October I immediately went to the forums, changed my av and sig to Fallout: Equestria, and when I found out there were other bronies here from the 10 or so pony avs I had seen in the first half hour, made a pony topic. In the next couple days there were already tons of posts and it had become official. And in the past month the topic's gotten over 3000 posts and way too many best pony and Cupcakes discussions.

I've met some of the best people ever from that topic, people who I could talk to about anything. I've made actual friends because of it, and I feel like I actually belong here, as opposed to being one of those people who's just there. So I guess what I'm trying to say is that ponies led me to become active on BZP again because I have... friends. So thank you all however-many-we-have-now-I-kinda-lost-track bronies on that list to the right, for making me feel like more of part of this site than I ever felt before.

now brb dinner