User blog:Bfoxius/Two Years on the Wiki!

It's been a bit longer than a week after my second birthday on the wiki, and I am about to commemerate it by writing a blog post detailing what I've done in those two years.

In The Beginning
Hello, my name is Bfoxius. You might call me the original flash player of map games. You'll see why in a second. I was introduced to this wiki after reading Harry Turtledove's Gunpowder Empire (great book) and looking up the sequel. I stumbled upon AH.com, made an account, didn't like the forum model (still dislike it, you'll see me gripe about it often), found althistory.wikia.com in the search results below it, clicked on it, said "wow", after briefly looking over the featured timeline at the moment (Viva California, if I can recall correctly). I then left the search results, and, forgetting my original goal of looking for a book, tried to look for other sites like this. For some reason, none struck me the way this one did, so I returned to it. I then made an account, with the intent on creating my own TL of Viva California's calibre. Little did I know that a time-wasting menace lurked right around the metaphorical corner. You can surely guess what it is.

Getting Started
I remember seeing the "Hot Spots" box, and all of the "hot spot" pages were map games. I wondered what a "map game" was. Clearly it had something to do with maps (which I loved) and games, so I clicked on Entente vs. Central Powers, which had the highest amount of unique editors over three days, at 15 (how times have changed). I was uninterested in it, as I cared little for modern history, so I then clicked on another map game, Principia Moderni. I was more interested in the "sandbox" nature of PM, the same thing that has probably made the series the most popular in map game history, and I was going through a Minecraft phase. I then looked at the map and the posts. We had a Hanthawaddy, Vietnam, Hungary, and Japanese (amongst others) dominated world. I had no intentions of reading giant walls of old posts to get acquainted with that game, but I was eager to play ANY map game. I decided to make my own.