I joined this forum on June 2014, the same weekend a local TV channel in my country (TV9) premiered the Nick TMNT cartoon. I signed up because I was so excited to share some clips that I recorded from our local airing, which was dubbed in Malay (my country's official main language). Therefore I created my first post to do just that.

My second post also happened to be the first time a mod edited my post! That was the week The Legend of Kuro Kabuto aired, though its digital release was already available the night before and I managed to watch it earlier than most people who would watch it live on TV. Apparently I posted information on the Bebob & Rocksteady speculation thread too early without using a spoiler tag. When I return to check the thread 2 hours later, well... I got scolded by Powder and my post was SPOILERed by Jester, of course.

That was around the same time several of the 2014 movie trailers were released and people in the Movie section were busy overanalyzing everything that was made available. I was one of those people looking into the Kanji character written on the turtles' shell/bandana and several of my following posts were speculating on those words used. I don't know Japanese, but knowing Chinese is good enough for me to get the characters right and look-up their literal meanings.

A little earlier, tinlunlau created a thread to announce that the Nick series has also premiered in Hong Kong and was dubbed in Cantonese. I was really excited about hearing the dub in another language I know, and he was kind enough to share some episodes with me. Later on, he also shared the Mandarin and Japanese dubs of the Nick series, which I truly appreciate. Eventually I went back to my first thread and added the same clips as my first post, except this time with Cantonese, Mandarin and Japanese versions as well.

I was pretty much only lurking in the Nick section at that time, and was actively posting after SDCC 2014 was over. I posted some stuffs at the season 2 official thread, including a speculation that turned out to be spot-on! I also posted in some other threads, and of course, the SDCC thread! I posted the official TMNT SDCC poster for 2014 and prior, Mondo Gecko's concept art, and Mirage TMNT #11 cover art.

August came and I went to Australia for a family vacation. I bought the complete season 1 DVD of the Nick series while I was there, and posted about it. I also bought the season 2 v1 "Mutation Mayhem" and Turtles Forever DVD during the same trip, though I didn't post about it.

After the vacation, I was back home and the last few episode titles for season 2 were listed without any description, so I was speculating the plot for A Chinatown Ghost Story and even made a dedicated thread for it. Eventually my speculation turned out to be completely wrong! But it was a nice try :trazz:

Next came my first try into making gifs, and then I was totally hooked! My first few gifs were member gif requests, but eventually I just made them anyway whenever there's a new ep with lots of eye candies to adore, sometimes dozens of gifs per ep!

The next thing I did was combining Roseangelo's Turtles Forever Pre-Screening Recording (which was a mixture of TF's complete audio and the live audience response) with the actual video footage I ripped from my Australian TF DVD, so I could see what were the audience cheering on the screen. It took me a lot of time to sync the audio to the video, so I thought I'd share what I made in the forum thread. Unfortunately Roseangelo responded to my post that I should take that video down, and so I did. It spurred quite some backlash from other forum members though.

There was a thread in the Nick section discussing who is the eldest/youngest turtle so I posted my opinion there, along with screenshots from the show.

Later on, I got an opportunity to buy stuffs from US because one of my friend was travelling there and he was able to transport some stuff back for me. I decided to buy as many 4Kids DVD as I can afford from Amazon! Some of the volumes have sold out or skyrocketed in price by that time but I was fortunate to get a mixture of new and used sets within my means, of all available releases, except Turtles Against H.A.T.E. which was long extinct (even used sets were insanely priced). Since I made my research on what to buy already, I shared my buying list/recommendation in the 4Kids DVD thread.

Admittedly I hadn't really posted a lot in Nick's episode discussion threads until The Invasion aired (actually, released online). Man, that episode left me speechless! The Mirage throwbacks were done so well, there was no way I could contain my excitement until I put all the side-by-side screenshots of the episode vs comic together and shared it, of course! Funny thing is, so many people were confused/annoyed that the Mirage Leo I posted had blue bandana, although my intention for posting the blue-Leo version was to prevent confusion in the first place. The Invasion thread itself kept me busy for some time as I've had over 20 posts in that thread alone. It also spawned a new thread from me, also my first polling thread!

Soon after, Nick began airing season 3 and I was naturally posting a lot in the season 3 official info thread. I also started to post more regularly in the episode discussion threads, although I'm sometimes late to the party as I couldn't watch the episodes live and Nick no longer put them on their site early.

Meanwhile, I was really proud of the moment my 4Kids DVDs arrived so I took a photo and shared it in the 4Kids DVD thread!

Then came... NYCC 2014! The TMNT panel was scheduled on 10 October 2014 2pm at New York, which was 3am for me! Fortunately it was a Saturday so I could pull an all-nighter to follow the NYCC live stream at Twitch.tv. I was fully prepared: my HTPC was live streaming it on my 47" HDTV, while my laptop was on my lap (duh) allowing me to post live information to the forum. There were 3 opened tabs on my laptop's browser: the NYCC 2014 forum thread, the Twitch.tv page, and imgur; anytime a concept art is shown live, I'd immediately print screen, save the image, upload it to imgur, and post the image link back to the forum thread.

Did I mention my HTPC was also recording the video live? As soon as the panel was over, I was busy making gifs from the video I recorded and posting them to the forum. I also uploaded the entire video to youtube and shared it in the forum!

At the end of the day, I also posted a really useful summary of all the concept arts shown at both SDCC/NYCC into one convenient post within the season 3 official info thread. It served well as a one-stop reference for the rest of the season, as the concept arts slowly came to fruition in new episodes.

By the way, A Foot Too Big aired on the same day as the NYCC panel, and I just want to say that this episode meant A LOT to me. Donatello reminded me so much of myself! That opening scene where Donnie gave April the music box... I totally had that same experience before! I was acting exactly like Donnie did and the girl I was after reacted exactly like April did! It was just like watching my own past event from a third-person's view... so, while I notice there were many haters of this ep, it was one of my personal favorite. I posted a lot in its discussion thread and even made 60 gifs out of it!

Meanwhile I was actively participating in a few other threads too, such as those discussing Kraang Prime's gender and 4Kids characters' age, the infamous Apritello thread of course, the Usagi thread, the favorite Nick turtle thread, the 2014 movie OST thread and almost all of the Nick Season 2 Best Episode Tournament threads. I also created a new Behind The Scenes Video thread.

Towards the end of October, I was collabrating with TheSkeletonMan939 to make the first unofficial Nick TMNT soundtrack album. I helped extract the raw audio files from the DVD I owned and sent to him, while he did all the audio processing to filter and trim the music clips from each episode. By early November, the first 4 episodes were ready and an early preview was posted to the forum. The response from other members were excellent! While the thread derailed a little when Gunpowder was commenting about Shark_Blade's signature pic, an idea came to my mind - it was perfect for the album art! So I began drafting it, starting with Shark_Blade's signature pic as the foreground and a honeycomb pattern I found from the internet as the background, and then adding the Nick TMNT logo etc. As soon as I'm done I posted it back to the thread, and progressively improved it based on feedbacks I got from the thread, as well as new ideas from myself. The finished design was stunning and I'm glad people liked it!

Soon I was back to making gifs again, this time for the CG improvement thread. Also, this one deserves an honorary mention because it's too funny!

I created my second poll to find out which Nick character would be prefered to be made recurring/regular. Unfortunately I forgot to include Kraang sub-prime, I would have voted it myself if I did! Shortly after that, I created my third poll to find out the most and least favorite 2014 movie turtle among the Dromers.

This thread needs to be brought up simply because someone on Tumblr was talented enough to photoshop away Nick Raphael's bandana and it still looked realistic (it even looked quite official to me)! My best attempt at image manipulation was this, well... not bad for a nobody :trazz:

December was such a slow month for many of us due to the Nick series taking a long break right after Race With The Demon aired. Well, fortunately we got two unexpected gifts on Christmas eve: first was a dedicated page on Nick's website streaming 20 episodes from the 2003 series for free, and second was a new trailer for Vision Quest/Return to New York, which spawned this thread. Everyone (me included) was super excited for those oncoming episodes!

Unfortunately, while people were cheering in the Nick section, the Movie section seems to be on fire, and the Everything Else section also had some controversial threads going on, which resulted in two relatively regular members (Coola Yagami and Davetello) being banned and the entire Movie section being frozen. I posted in the Everything Else section because of this, and since then I actually started to take notice of the section more regularly. Eventually the Movie section was reopened with a separate sub-section for the PD reboot, but the two banned members are still MIA as of this writing.

Another section that I newly posted at the time was the Comic section because I finally bought my fist TMNT book (The Works Volume 3)! Soon I was starting to follow the Archie (TMNT Adventures) comics as well and upon finding a very useful resource on an old Mirage website, I decided to start a new thread with 10 posts in a row to link every Archie issue to the respective page on the Mirage website. I'm glad it helped some people (including myself) keep up with the Archie story arcs, but the funniest thing that happened to that thread was... well this, it even triggered me to make a new gif for my very first signature!

Alright I thought I could avoid bringing this up, but for the record I did post in this thread started by Irmafan. As people started assuming he was just trolling, he responded back that he was dead serious... well, if he really was...

http://i.imgur.com/WLs7QlQ.gif

Finally, the Nick series has returned from a 7-week break and resumed airing with Eyes of the Chimera, and thanks to Vicky82 I was able to watch it live via an online stream! I prepared like how I did for the NYCC panel again, with my eyes on the TV and fingers on my laptop and the episode discussion thread opened. For once I was posting about the latest episode as soon as it aired, or sometimes even while it was still halfway through or during commercials.

Ciro incident?