Back to the very beginning of me…

I never thought I’d be the sort of person to play video games regularly, let alone be running and writing a blog about them. I never thought I’d be making websites for a living. I never thought a lot of things. One of the things that I HAVE recently been thinking about though is how I got here. Yeah, yeah, you’ve all heard it, I started off as a no one with a gimmicky name and ended up being one of the faces of SPUF with a gimmicky name. But it goes back further than that. SPUF was the fourth forum I became a regular poster on. Before that, there was the GMG forum, which was basically one giant circlejerk, then there was my own forum, Budding Writers, which was more of a writing jerk than a circle jerk, then there was BZPower, a rated U for Universal circlejerk around Bionicle. Really, we owe a lot to BZPower, because if I had never created an email address and registered on BZPower as Phovos the Raptor, I’d be one of those annoying Facebook bimbos, posting selfies and sending everyone invites to Candy Crush.

Thankfully, though, I’m not. But let’s go deeper. What actually brought me to BZPower?

The first thing was a picture with all the Krana on it, and the fact that a solid silver Krana-Kal was a thing. I just wanted to know which Krana was which and whether I’d put the right one inside Pahrak-Kal’s head, because it didn’t look like the one in the instruction manual. It wasn’t, it was a Nuhvok-Kal coloured Krana that somehow came with my poor little Pahrak. Thankfully I found a Pahrak-Kal Krana inside a random Kanohi pack I bought at the same time.

The second thing that brought me to BZPower was an anecdote someone wrote, which I stumbled across during a Google image search for Lerahk, the green Rahkshi of poison. Apparently his family were on a picnic road trip, someone had brought some cheese and they had no knife to cut it. Luckily for them, Lerahk saves the day, as his little weapons are (somehow) used as a knife to cut said cheese. The only reason I clicked on the thread though was because the title was “Lerahk cuts the cheese!” and I assumed they’d written a fan fiction about a Rahkshi farting.

Neither of those threads exist any more. They, alongside a year’s worth of BZPower posts, part of the Bohrok-Kal’s Ramblings and the majority of my fan fiction Virus, were deleted during a giant database crash. But it’s worth sitting back and pondering how all of this happened.

Of course, I wouldn’t be writing this if my brother hadn’t received a Gahlok-Kal set for his birthday in 2003. A month later, I bought myself Tahnok-Kal and Gahlok-Kal, and had completed the set by Christmas 2003, not caring at all about the Rahkshi or the Toa Nuva.

It’s actually quite… weird thinking that I wouldn’t be here today if that hadn’t happened. Or maybe I would have. Thing is, my childhood was all about things catching my imagination, then my mind running with it. My Little Pony and Barbie were boring for me because they were just pretty things, my mind couldn’t really do much more with characters that weren’t customizable and had everything already. Robot Wars comes along on the BBC and somehow I’ve created a world where humans are all dead and battle bots have replaced them as the dominant species, with different tribes of robots all fighting one another. Bionicle and the Bohrok-Kal took that one step further by looking much closer to the animal-like beings I imagined in my head, allowing me to flesh out the world I had created and make it my own. Now I have an entire universe, the Phoviverse (which I update almost as regularly as the Daily SPUF), built off those silly, 8 to 10-year old musings and thoughts.

Really, this article is a thank you. Not just to Bionicle and the awesome guy who makes Bionicle mods for Garry’s Mod, or BZPower and Budding writers, but… I dunno where I’m going with this. But most importantly of all, thank you, my little Bohrok-Kal, for putting me on the path I’m on today. Everyone else may hate you, but I’ll always love you little bastards, in all your clone-iness.

Also, this was just an excuse to make Bohrok-Kal pictures.