Not a long report, as there hasn’t been a lot going on as of late. But we are making progress every day.

HM Hosted Competitions

Since becoming Headmaster, I’ve ran a few competitions for the entire DB. Some of these do ok, like Summer School and the X000th course passed events, but others have not done so well. The two run-on events didn’t work out and, the murder mystery league didn’t go as planned, either. The trivia events seem to do well, especially when we get the time zone issues fixed. So, with the exception of the “pass a course” events and trivia, I’m not going to offer any more competitions to the whole membership. The SA still plans to host new member competitions, but those will be restricted by rank, and thus not open to the entire DB.

Degrees

We will begin implementing the new degrees in the near future. I will, however, go ahead and give you advance notice. There will be a grandfather period for those who have met the requirements already, but it will be very short. You will only get one chance when that time comes. Jac has added automation to his projects list, but it isn’t a major priority, since it can be done manually by Dacien and me. So, just watch for my news posts concerning this issue. To make certain it gets said: you’ll only have one chance to be grandfathered.

*That training tab . . . *

Some have noted that every SA course and degree is listed under the training tab. Now it only states whether it is complete or incomplete. A few people have apparently set the goal of having no incompletes on that list. While I applaud the effort, you’re wasting your time. There are several courses that are no longer offered at the Shadow Academy, but they have been left in the database for those that did pass them. You can find that list here. .

Course Changes

Speaking of courses no longer being offered, the Marksmanship course is going to join the list of no longer offered courses. Back when we did the SA audit, marksmanship was tagged as being a course in need of some revisions or to go away. It wasn’t that the course was bad, but we could never make it challenging enough. And, while I don’t ever anticipate the SA being as hard as a real college (except for Oberst’s writing course, and other future courses like it), there does need to be some more challenge to it. Key parts of the marksmanship course have been merged with the General Weapons course.

History of the Sith Empire II now has images in the course notes.

Conclusion

We’re still moving along just fine at the SA, though we still have a lot of work to do to catch completely up with the fictional developments of the recent GJW. And that’s all for now. Oh, and as of this writing, 4,720 courses have been passed since I took over as Headmaster. Just a number for reference.