I don't go to bed before 2am anymore, y'all.

Seriously - I've been trapped in what at this point is probably a month-long cycle where I just can't being myself to hit the sack before the wee hours of the morning roll around. My roommate probably hates it, but he's a pretty sound sleeper and he's never complained about it so I'm not really motivated to stop. That's the thing about this cycle - nothing is motivating me to snap out of it, and because of that I'll do nothing during the day knowing full well I have a 2-hour-plus nook carved out just around midnight where I get the bulk of my work done without any kind of disturbance (except, well, writing this when I should be studying for an exam I have tomorrow). When I come to my senses, I think I'll miss those peaceful hours.

All that to say, I'm in college now and the last time I wrote a post on this website I was still in middle school. Oh, how time flies.

I don't really recognize anything about BZPower's current state - everything I did here was before the Dataclysm (that's what we called it, right?) and the archives don't seem to really actually work, so even though my profile claims that I have over 600 posts, only 2 of them actually exist anymore. Heck, even Maj is dead now, so even most of the comics I made for this place are gone forever now too. I haven't poked around to see what this place is like, although I feel like I should, because I'm afraid I'll look around and just straight up not recognize any names. I have lots of questions about what happened to this place, mostly just about who stayed, who left, and how many new people actually ended up coming here. BIONICLE did come back for a while, so was there a revival of sorts?

At this point the post's gotten a bit rambly, but let me give a bit of background for anyone who doesn't recognize my username (read: everyone). I joined BZPower in 2007, because I had just recently become enamored with the BIONICLE line and after moving to Colorado didn't have many friends at first so I found fun in reading about my favorite toys on the Internet. I guess. I think I mostly posted pictures of my subpar MOCs at first but it probably wasn't even a month after I joined that I released a really subpar comic series, Coleanuva's Comics. Despite my blatant lack of wit or artistic talent, I stubbornly made a home for myself in the Artwork III subforum, and for the next 2 years that was basically the only place I went on the website. I made several friends who also made comics - though I figure they probably looked at me as an annoying little kid who tried to tag along with them, which I wouldn't at ll blame them for because that would be spot-on accurate. Lol. Anyway, I complained my way into the International Comic Continuity, which was composed of thirteen (maybe? idfk, it grew as we went along and most people didn't end up actually releasing much after the group formed anyway) comic makers who, but for a few notable exceptions - okay, maybe just the one - were all pretty darn talented. Unfortunately, pretty soon after that group came to be, some stuff happened and we kinda lost momentum, and then the Dataclysm happened and we pretty much just died. I'm not quite sure where the rest of them are today - they were all older than me so I figure they're pretty much not even thinking about this place, which is probably natural at this point, lol. Kahi I think is still part of TTV, which is pretty cool; I look at Tavakai's Twitter every now and then, and he seems to be doing well; and I was actually in contact with Gavla semi-recently, and that was really nice.

So that's my history on BZPower, which was kind of a long blurb for what amounted to a whole lot of nothing. Which, I don't know, that was probably pretty self-indulgent of me to write but this is my blog and my parents paid 35 buckaroos for me to be able to have it so you're gonna have to deal with it. At this point I feel like I've just been begging for someone to say they remember me, and how vain is that? (Pretty vain.) So I'm just gonna move on.

Since leaving BZP I've had a pretty good life thus far. I got a lot better at talking to people and that led to at least a halfway-pleasurable experience for me in high school, which was nice. I also got better at sports and played baseball on my school's varsity team, which I would not have believed if you had told me that when I used to frequent this place. (speaking of that, if there's a decent baseball community around here, I might be interested in contributing to that - I could talk sports for days with anyone, lol) I began college and I'm here now studying computer engineering, which I'm thoroughly enjoying. I'm living a lot better than I was before, and I'm just generally pretty happy with life. When I used to go on here a lot, I guess I wasn't so sure of that - but I was pretty young, then, so it's not like I knew much anyway.

If you're still here with me, thanks for reading! This is both something I've wanted to do for a while and an excellent way of not studying differential equations because I am so bad at it. If y'all have anything you'd like to tell me about the state of the website, what's changed, or your favorite memories of old (pre-crash) BZP, I think that would be cool! If not, I think that's also cool! I was just thinking about this place and wanted to run by the neighborhood again to see what was going on. Hope you all are doing well, and have a great day!

(also, the sidebars on this blog may no longer be accurate, lol)

Cole