Been a while since I made a formal report, those Independence Games were really better served in news posts than in weekly reports.

Nonetheless for those reading up here, I would like to summarize the games as well as last week's work:

• The Independence Games 2004 ran from April 12 to May 17. They incorporated 45 individual competitions run by summit and Dark Council members.

• Out of these 45 events, 43 finished successfully. Two events, both involving relatively complicated team play rules, had no entries and had thus been cancelled.

• Overall, 851 submissions were created by 152 different members. Events had anywhere between 4 and 97 submissions, most ranging a bit above 10.

• 162 Crescents were given to the event winners, as well as three medals for the overall finishers and 94 Clusters of Fire to the winners of the multiplayer events

• The Independence Games have been the first competition to use a web-based submission system allowing the competition manager to centrally view and administer all submissions. This system was extremely well accepted and proved worthwhile in not only a fast judging process but also allowed us to track timings on every entry and helped to avoid any problems with missing or inactive judges - a problem that had ultimately plagued the 2003 instance of the games.

• In spite of the many submissions, the entire judging process was completed in 12 days after the submissions closed. Half the results were in within 48 hours.

• Every Clan was given a new Force Artifact: A Banner of Independence to fly over their stronghold. The details of these banners have been worked out in the new roleplaying terminology and thus these items will easily transition into Project Rebirth

• All news and results will remain available at http://independence.starfleetacademy.net. A submission archive will be added to this site in the next days as quickly as the HTML files are coming in.

With the games having seen a successful close, I wish to especially thank KPN JaM3z Lucius Entar who has written the competition submission code for me - a coding endeavor that was not trivial but whose results will stay with us for a long time to come. And more - I wish to thank all competition hosts and participants without whom these games would not have been possible at all.

Apart from cleaning up some remaining Independence Games work - writing up the banners, counting and awarding CFs and the overall medals - I have checked into some piled up Shadow Academy stuff that was surprisingly little. In spite of having prioritized the IG for six weeks now, the whole SA held together incredibly well. The only real item on the agenda is a teacher replacement that was already announced. I have so far seen only two applications for this, so I'll give everyone else interested in grading Obelisk Core until Monday morning to apply.

I'm still waiting for Arania's contribution to the story writing course... Ara... would you get this my way please ? Vail's stuff really deserves going online.

There'll also be a minor revision to the Test of Lore this week, adding a short section about honesty, cheating and the consequences of the latter. Unfortunately it's necessary to remind new members of the Brotherhood ethos, so I'll do it in a place everyone will see it.

Fight well in the Jedi War and don't forget your education over your victories. Only the trained will succeed in the long run!