The 600th Daily SPUF Article

It seems like five minutes ago that we published the 500th Daily SPUF Article. I actually lost track of time. Plus other awful things happened, which meant that the 600th article came quicker than I thought. The last 100 articles have been yet another wild ride. If you can call it that. So yeah. This is the 600th article. Woo.

For the previous hundred post milestones, I’ve done contests. I was going to do a contest this time round, but contests are, well, kinda lame when you don’t have any time to prepare prizes or a theme for said contest. In the end, I’ve decided to write something equally lame, but also containing some sort of emotion.

My join date on SPUF is the end of 2010, but I wasn’t consistent back then. I was looking for a fix to a problem, saw some amusing posts and registered. I had just started maining Medic, trying to get over my newbie Engineer/Pyro days, and I was only slightly obsessive with the healing class at the time. Normally,  I would have used my more unique name, Phovos (or Phovos the Raptor if that was unavailable) but in the midst of my obsessions, I decided to call myself The Medic. I was flabbergasted that the name was available, especially since SPUF was at a high point when I registered.

The sad truth is twofold. Firstly, I don’t remember anything really, pre-2012. I wasn’t a regular poster, more of a lurker, popping in to make Medic-related comments. I did post, and it didn’t take me long to start gathering stars, but I wasn’t everywhere. Just some guy with a gimmicky name, almost as embarrassingly fresh as I was when I joined BZPower. Secondly, I didn’t think I’d stick around on SPUF. Granted, it was a better place to be back then, but I was running my own community. Things quietened down though and I found myself spending more and more time on SPUF.

I was a younger person back then. Even as I became more popular, I still wasn’t part of the in-crowd. I generally just watched on, being restricted by time zones and early bed times. I was there, and that was it.

Then suddenly, I’m one of the faces of SPUF. I have no idea how or when it happened. It seems less gradual than it actually was, but I have never been the sort of person who is almost, well, a face of a community. There I was though, on SPUF, no longer just a gimmick account but a genuine person, beloved by a lot of people, all of whom should stop liking me right now.

Seriously, it’s insane. I started off a bystander, then I became some guy with an amusing name, then someone well known who makes Medic-based jokes, to a 5 star guy, right up to now, where I run a blog based off our deranged but somewhat likable community. Who would have thought that would happen?

So here I am, at the 600th article, being all happy and misty-eyed. I’ll defend SPUF forever. You’re my home, despite all your flaws. And the Daily SPUF is my second home, where we write up and article-ize all of SPUF’s opinions. Without SPUF and without the people who have helped with this blog, I’d be a poorer person. Well, monetarily, I’d be richer, having not wasted my money on TF2, but inside, I’d be poorer. You know what I mean.

People have come and gone, some have come and gone and come back again, some we’ll never see again. But SPUF, no matter who you are, I love you all, and I hope you can all love each other, despite the random crit and Gunslinger arguments.

Thank you, SPUF.

Thank you.

Oh wait, there WAS a surprise. It’s Conga related.