hello, bzp. and a warm hug to you, bzp.

This is going to be a fairly personal post. I've taken down all the other posts here for a variety of reasons, some haven't aged well and don't reflect how I currently feel on subjects, whereas a lot of it was me just being a silly teen.

You may not remember me.

I was never the most active person here, especially outside of my little circle of friends (mostly centered around CeeCee). I was probably most active in completely off-topic forum games, to be honest. For a while most of my actual chatting migrated to Skype, before kinda losing the thread of people I was close to when Discord became the platform of choice.

I've just been missing this site a lot, not just nostalgically, but for what it was. A little microcosm of forum culture mixed with an audience ranging from tweens to adults... all tiptoeing around language and content restrictions, weathering the trends and drama of the internet at large within a fansite for a children's toy line.

I'm a late joiner in terms of a lot of the real old guard, just one of those kids who lurked from around '08-09 to finally making a profile in '12 after G1s end.

-where I proceeded to do what a lot of silly kids do, post a bunch of nonsense and then rapidly attempt to seem older and more mature than I was, haha. Lots of comment begging (in retrospect, something I'm pretty ashamed of) and attempts at being provocative that were filled with angst. I'm still an angsty little ball of gloom and doom, but I think it's been tempered with a desire to just be a lot less acrid about everything. A few years back, I reached out to a few people affected by that contrarianism to just apologize. I pushed boundaries sometimes in ways that were really not appreciative of the space that I had or the people within it.

Recently I thought back on how important BZP and especially certain people on it were for the development of my art style, heck, even my views on some things to an extent. I already threw up a comment thanking probably the biggest influence on me actually continuing to make art (Taka Nuvia, thank you again!)

I wanted to make this post as a way of thanking those who may still be around (and maybe even remember this silly little ball of edge) for the hours of influence this place had on me. This post is for you. Thank you.