I’d always eyed the Animorphs books in the library… intrigued by the cover pictures. Of course, I never actually picked one up and read it, but I would occasionally pull the books half-way off the little rotating rack and gaze at the covers. That was back when I was… what, eight or nine?

Anyway, one day about a year ago, I was day-dreaming about animals, and the morphing thereof. From somewhere, the memory of those shiny, appealing book-covers came bubbling up into the forefront of my mind. Now, at this point I had an exponentially more substantial set of resources, (namely Google), with which to locate information, so I turned those resources towards finding more about the Animorphs.

I of course spent a considerable amount of time poking around on the Scholastics Animorphs sight, and when that resource was exhausted, I turned to Wikipedia. I read every last plot synopsis for every single Animorphs book. But that wasn’t enough. By that point I was hooked; I needed to read the real books.

Of course, being a sixteen year old and going down to the kid’s section of the library to check out books can be just slightly embarrassing, and it was quite some time before I plucked up the courage to do it. When I finally did check out the first ten books, I told the librarian that it was in my sister’s name. (I still feel guilty about that…)

I read the first ten books about five times each, till I had them practically memorized. By the time the three weeks were over, I was sincerely in love with Jake, Rachel, Ax, Marco and Tobias. (Even back then I hated Cassie…). I had to read the rest of the books; that much I knew. But I also was unable to bring myself to go to the library and check out the next books. So, I did what I should have done all along.

Of course, the Google search for “Animorphs” “Ebooks” “free download” lead my on quite a long and drawn out chase, leading most often to a free download of some new book by K.A.A., not the Animorphs. Finally, Google lead me to RAF. I registered there, but since I gave a dummy email address, I was unable to validate my account. Thus, I continued searching until I found it: The Animorphs Fan Forum.

I registered, and immediately downloaded all the ebooks. (We didn’t have the five post requirement back then.) As I was reading them, however, I came up with more and more nitpicks, (or KASUs), that I simply had to find out if anyone else had ever thought of them before. So, I returned to AFF, and, after posting my favorite character, I went right to work with my list of nitpicks.

I remember well those early days, when it was just me, Ellimist, and Darkflame posting in the Coffee Lounge and the discussion area. (Believe it or not, when I first joined, there were only four games in the Coffee Lounge: Choices Game, Count to 1,000,000, Ban the Person Above You and Guess Who Will Post Next.) At that time, we had just over 1000 posts, with some 200 members.

Well, a lot has changed in a year. Today, we have the number of members that we did posts when I first joined: 1275 members total. We now have nearly 26,000 posts, along with some 800 topics. And I myself, the Animorphs fan of less than a year, am an Admin on the Animorphs Fan Forum. (Yeah, go figure).

Anyway, we all owe a lot to Ellimist, Darkflame, and the other founding members of this forum, who started out as a Orkut group with a vision. And the one year anniversary of AFF is certainly a huge reason to celebrate.

So, now that the boring speech is out of the way…

LET’S PARTY!!!