Every so often I seem to stop back in here, take a look around, see what there is to see. I'm impressed by whats happening here in a lot of ways, and since I've still got this subscription (and will continue to renew it, for reasons I'll explain here) I'm going to go ahead and make a post discussing my appreciation of BYOND.

I created my first BYOND key in the summer of 2001, I believe it was just before I turned 12 years old (I am now 18) and I was like a lot of 12 year olds on the internet. Very immature, horribly illiterate, unappreciative of a lot of things but, I really liked the idea of making games.

So, I jumped into it, bought the Blue Book when it was still being published, tried to learn things, got into some projects. Eventually I got into Morte (known as Tara'ka now, discontinued) and did my very best to become part of their staff.

This got me into thinking about my use of language and my ability to act as a mature, respectable person in an online environment. That went so-so. The game went through a lot of stages and I think overall I learned a lot, matured a lot, tried to code a lot.

Same sort of thing happened with the original Dragon Ball Zeta (thats what it was called...right?). I wanted to impress the owner so I improved my grammar and spelling and all that jazz.

It was stupid at the time, doing all those things just to get a position of power. In the end, what matters is that those habits stuck with me and I was much better off because of it.

Most importantly though, BYOND opened up the door to programming. I had been interested in computer programming for years prior to BYOND but, where the heck does a 10-12 year old get a step into that kind of thing? Apparently by building dreams.

I am now an intern at Intel, coding tools for them in C++. I'm starting down the road for my B.A. in CS this Fall.

Anyhow, I'm incredibly grateful for all the hard work the staff has put into keeping this project alive, and I hope that other users can get even half as much out of this as I did.

Thanks BYOND.

(Pre-Emptive Strike: "lol u totaly say u r gret at grammar and stuf but u made " - I never said I was perfect, there are some habits I have that I can't seem to break. Such as terribly long run on sentences and a few other dumb syntax errors. I think I'm doing okay.)