=============== 30 October 2010 -------------------------- One Year On: In Retrospect ------------------------------------------ A brief thought by P.D. "Dlakii" Anderson, former Forum Assistant of BZPower.com ========================================== Today marks one year since I was promoted to the BZPower staff. In retrospect, I can't help but consider it to be one of the best things to ever happen to me, though admittedly for reasons generally completely different to my original intent when I was promoted. :P No, really - the past year (that is to say 2010, not from October 2009 to now) has quite possibly been the best year of my life. The difference? A complete lack of BZPower. For the years beforehand, I was devoted to BZP and pretty much made it the centre of my life, and the result was the ongoing strangling of the rest of my life. With BZP gone from my life almost entirely (with a fair number of old friends from Artwork III essentially being the last link to it which I want to keep), things have improved very substantially. It's not just a matter of perception based on bias. The same semester I joined the staff, my grades took quite a nosedive; the following semester, the same semester in which I was banned, my grades climbed and did awesome stuff, and they're only going to get better. And then there's all the other stuff I've done this year - that ACT Mock Trial Competiton which I won*, my work on the school yearbook, and the fact that I'm going to attempt NaNoWriMo. Prior to all this, I'd never done any extracurricular stuff, and now that I am doing it, awesome is ensuing. Then there's the fact that, for the first time in god knows how, I actually have a large and consistent group of friends; sure, I wasn't a complete loner or anything before, but this is a massive improvement by any standard. Also, I feel that though I'd definitely been emotionally/mentally maturing by a substantial amount through 2009, the enormous paradigm shift caused by Operation: Continuityfall** sped up the process to like 88 mph, and to be honest, I feel like a really awesome person for it. The question is, though, is all this connected to my promotion to the BZP staff? If, say, I hadn't been promoted and Operation: Continuityfall had happened anyway (in which case I'd have met the same fate as everyone else), would my ongoing usage of BZP - and by extension my situation IRL - have changed in any way? Would I be the pretty okay person I am today, or would I still be a devout servant of BZP (which retrospectively is not a good thing)? But enough with the emo rant. In short, I'm actually very glad that Continuityfall happened; if it hadn't, my life would probably be quite different, and considering how awesome it is right now I REALLY wouldn't want that. ========================================= *http://www.canberra.edu.au/faculties/law/uc-national-capital-secondary-college-mock-trial-competition-2010 **A common nickname for an atrocity caused by former BZPower member Vezon the Piraka, who on March 1 2010 successfully tricked Black Six of BZPower into believing falsified evidence that nine members of BZPower including myself, collectively part of a group/project by the name of the International ComicContinuity, were conspiring against him; the end result was the unjust banning of myself, with lesser punishment dealt to the other members. Despite this, one victim of this atrocity - Ziko - now serves as a Forum Mentor on BZPower.