please don't go to my head please don't go to my head please don't go to my head

Wow, it's hard to describe quite how much this means to me.

Looking back on my time as BZPower, I've probably earned a reputation as "least likely to achieve any significant status," and I guess I was okay with that for my first few years. I looked up to the staff with awe and occasional abject terror.

A lot of stuff happened that first year, including assorted warnings for sig size violations, profile pic size violations, word filter violations and unintentionally annoying the moderators.

Oh, and a really lousy comedy, but who doesn't have that on their record?

I was so paranoid I swear I could see my proto level being dropped as I watched. I stayed awake some nights in fear that I might push it over the edge and get banned. It's a little absurd now, but at the time BZPower was simply what I did: chatting with other members, posting my creations in the BBC forum and subsequently entering contests, and generally enjoying the fact that I had a community where I actually fit in.

In other words I enjoyed myself, had an overly healthy respect for the mods, and life was great, even though I never ever thought I would do anything significant. Any following I had in the BBC, Artwork I, or Library was 99% my own ego.

I became a premier member a little over a year after I joined, began writing in dark green, and generally cleaned up my grammar with the exception of a few nuances I hope none of you remember.

Another year or two full of lame blog posts passed and I began to get depressed about my position on the site. Any following, real or imagined, had dwindled considerably and anyone who could still remember my name had either kept in contact off-site or had known me as the guy with that stupid comedy and vowed to never speak to me again. (This may be an exaggeration, but who knows?) I began to see people I had known or matured with on the site promoted, given commendations, proto-boosts and OBZPC-dom. I started to phase in and out of the forums, vowing to quit forever for months at a time before coming back in case someone had tried to contact me.

Then I went to BrickCon '09, where I learned that not only are the staff normal, friendly people scary and intimidating, but that people don't actually brag about their proto bar and status, and they don't have their title floating above their heads to remind you who they are. (They have brick badges to do that for them. )

I came back with a renewed sense of hope, began updating my blog, and got tangled up in the macadamia nut and Creed fads. Velox got promoted and my first thought besides congratulations was that I remember when he was still The Lost Toa. I remembered recommending Nathan to hire him, and we all saw the shop through to its depressingly anticlimactic end. That was sorta my fault but it's not important.

This is all really depressing. Let's focus on something positive through my almost-five year stay here.

I participated in the BBCCs, posted awful stories and comedies and even more awful drawings. Through the help of many, many members I improved in each area drastically and became far more mature, though it's an arguable claim to some.

Oh yeah, then there was BrickCon 2011.

Way too much happened there to describe (and some of it I can't describe, BZPower rules being what they are) so I'm not going to. The main thing was that I got to hang out with all my friends again, hit EW in the face with a Nerf sword (ask him about it sometime) and the biggest highlight IMHO was that I finally met Velox in person.

I had tried to get him to come to conventions in the past and I managed to get him here with the promise that I would stop quitting BZPower forever.

So here I am. I'm all but certain he was somehow involved in promoting me, thus guaranteeing my omnipotent presence on the site. No, that probably wasn't the reason, but it worked out suspiciously well. : /

Anyways, that was a long, convoluted post to express a very simple point: I never thought this would happen.

And it did.