I'm pretty sure if I didn't find Newgrounds I'd have a more interesting life.
I think 4 years ago a friendf showed me some Xiao Xiao movies at school and I thought they were pretty good so I checked it out at home. Looked around the site and thought I'd try this whole 'animating' thing out myself, except I sucked at drawing. So after about 10 of my movies got blammed I saw some sprite movies which seemed a lot more fun to make, and VGDC was the first site I saw, followed by the Mario Babies series (who's animator goes to my school funnily enough) and I've been animating since.
I think I first got 'noticed' was my PoS movie Thwomps that I made in a day and featured the only two guys on MSN at the time that had mics. It got front page and my first daily award. I lold.
Then I got fairly noticed with a couple more front page movies like World 2-4 Retaliation and Mario Bros. Arcade, and then I tried actionscript with games such as Bullet Bill and Excitebike. Then I made Bullet Bill 2 which got me my first daily 1st, my first weekly award, and even monthly 3rd and a spot in the flash history 2006.
I can't imagine my life without flash or this site, all I know if I didn't find this site I wouldn't be wasting 7+ months on this epic movie that's for sure.