Dreadknux's Diaries: The Race Against Time... and UCAS is not helping!

God dammit! This month is being SO stressful to me, both for the website, and in Real Life. The irony is, is that the stress I'm getting in RL is completely unnecessary! Take my college. I'm trying to get into University for next year, and therefore must fill in an admission form and have it sent to an organisation called 'UCAS'. The College I am at now has a Student Support section, a part of which specialises in helping students with their UCAS forms... Hah. Hah hah bloody ha ha.

That's a laugh and a half.

In the case of myself, my college friends, and basically everyone in my second year of A Levels, it seems our college's Student Support doesn't really want us to go to Uni at all. Sure, they work very hard to see everyone and they have a small staff (and about 10-15 people queuing to see them about one aspect of their UCAS form every hour or two), but they really should get themselves organised more, eh?

I mean, the Student Support team has only three people that specialises in UCAS. The other 10-12 in the same room seem to do absolutely nothing but try to fob you off with excuses like, "come back tomorrow, we're all busy today". It was only because of my personal tutor that I actually had a chance to complete the entire form in one day... but that day was delayed for about four days. Bloody... just bloody.

And hell. I'm just glad that part's all over for me. I think I've been emotionally traumatised by the whole "UCAS Experience"... o.o

When I'm not stressing in RL unnecessarily, I'm trying to get all the Sonic Stadium pages ready for the 24th (the site's 2nd Birthday...) - that would be an ideal landmark day to re-launch, and I'm going through at a fair pace, however I'm not sure if I can do it in time...

I re-named the MB to The Sonic Stadium Message Board (as opposed to the Sega Sonic Message Board) - I wanted the board to feel more related to The Sonic Stadium, and plus people can still call it by its cult abbreviation - SSMB.

This month saw a lot of change there too - I finally decided to use the hosting space (as it came through this month) to host a new SSMB. It's now a YaBB board, and to be honest I had reservations, as I was planning to use a phpBB, but now I've never looked back. YaBB kicks ass, once you get the hang of it.

The move seemed to do us good too - everyone is more happier, there are less flamewars (during the last few weeks, many a flamewar between each other has happened, mostly due to one certain individual...) and the SSMB has generated more interest! One new member of note is a guy called 'Mystery Man of Images', who posts no text in response to topics... just pictures. Pictures related to the topic of course. It's great fun there now, if you haven't registered, do so now.

It's currently a week before the 24th, and Zifei has been having problems finishing his own site (which is part of the whole new hosting space situation for the 'Stadium - we're being hosted on the same space as Zifei's new site). So we decided to get a new account just for The Sonic Stadium, rather than having space shared with Zifei. Now that we have our own space we won't get 'done in', as it were.

The good news is, we now get a fancy domain name out of it! It's www.sonicstadium.org, as you're all so well aware of now. ^_^ The YaBB's had to move to the .org domain, but hopefully the members will still stick around...

Oh, and the Sonic Site Awards - remember when I said I'd thought it'd never be as popular as the 2001 event? Well boy, was I proven wrong! Phase 2's gonna end this month, and I've received well over 500 votes!!! That's well over twice the amount of last year! Thanks guys!

This month I have been contemplating... myself, Roareye and another friend I know in RL (goes by the names Doku, Anarchy Rat etc) have decided to form a Sonic Media 'Company'... we've called it Shadow Team, and once the Sonic Stadium is ready and launched, I'll be doing the website to that one, too.

I have so many ideas in my head right now. One is an Online Comic, another is a full blown Sonic the Hedgehog Series... I have a feeling it'll be pretty popular, as it mixes the SatAM kinda story but all the elements are SegaSonic. I can't say anything about it yet though, you know how crafty people are about sneaking and altering basic ideas.... ^_^