Hello to everyone in DJB-land! I hope everyone had a great holiday season and is rested for the bleak and dreary mess that awaits most of us till it warms up. I also hope everyone has gotten a viewing of Rise of Skywalker in. It wasn’t the best in the series IMO, but it was enjoyable. I managed to go to opening night with both me and Juna cosplaying as Jedi with my best friend wearing his ANH Vader costume. Pic is below, best part is while we were banned from the theater while armed and dressed in armor, the security guy said that was a damned fine piece of work.

([https://i.imgur.com/kQdzMVC.jpg])

A bit has happened with the Academy, as we will go over below.

It’s over 2000!

Biggest news first, and yea, that was a play on a DBZ quote.

So we have this CNS guy, Sanguinius Entar, he’s been on the SA staff since...well forever (Technically 11 years on and off). In that time, he has amassed over 2000 graded SA exams. Since becoming PROF this most recent time, he’s looking at almost 1200 graded. That is a lot of exams folks. To top it all off, he has an average grading time of 4 hours, my requirement is less than 24.

This is kind of a big deal, so go and stroke his ego and make him push to 3000.

Auditing the audit

While we have finished the audit, we, as usual, are still asking members to report inconsistencies in both the course notes and the exams themselves. You can find the troubleshooting form here. Alternatively, you can find it via a drop-down while in the Shadow Academy portion of the website. Ciara has this in her portion of the report below.

Bookworms!

I want to throw a shout out to the November, December, and overall winners of the SA Decathalon.

November

1st: Aru Law

2nd: Seraine “Erinyes”Tenama

3rd: Agate Gua’lara

December

1st: Telos

2nd: Trenkyp Zkig

3rd: Myrkal

Overall

And the winners for the year are:

1st: Appius Wight

2nd: Ahsik Warren

3rd: Takagari KogaRyu

These were a really easy set of competitions, and I believe they will continue into this year. Though it won’t be a year-long container, maybe quarterly. Congratulations on all Crescent winners, and thanks to everyone looking to learn through the SA!

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Praetor's Corner

The Great Shadow Academy Audit of 37 ABY: DONE!

More than 60 courses have been read, proofed, updated, canon-checked (where appropriate) and aesthetically improved. These audits primarily focused on the Fundamentals, Lore and Legends Departments. Other courses have been identified for more complete overhauls in the next phase of updates, with many exciting changes already in process.

Audits can seem dull if you don’t get excited about commas and sentence structure, so I wanted to highlight a few changes everyone might appreciate:

Corrected Timelines. Courses that utilized the old DJB timeline (or referenced dates differently in course notes, Wiki articles and exam questions) have been corrected or removed to eliminate confusion.

Exam Questions Contained to Course Notes. This was always meant to be how courses were designed, but we had a number of courses with mismatched questions that required students to scour Wookieepedia for answers. This should no longer be the case, and you should be able to answer any exam question from the course notes.

Headers You Can Read. Our courses were using H3s as H1s, which made deeper level headings disproportionately smaller than the text they … headed. This has been corrected and should make for a more natural visual hierarchy.

Image Padding. As part of our effort to improve the visual presentation of courses, we asked for a little breathing room around the images:

New Cults. Philosophy II: Cults of the Force has been updated with new content on the Guardians of the Whills and the Dagoyan Order. Thanks to Xantros for making this suggestion and creating the content!

Alchemy Meets DJBWiki.If you’ve taken Alchemy Studies, you know it’s a beast of a course with a wealth of information packed into a PDF. We’ve migrated this content to its own wiki page: SA Course: Alchemy Studies.

Our hope is that this will make the content easier to digest and the topics easier to explore. We’ve added images and links both to external sources and internal sources where the content overlaps for Force feats like Mechu-Deru, possessions like Dark Armor and Sith Swords and creatures like Tuk’ata and Terentateks.

A big thanks to our new Magistrates, Xantros and Aeternus, who stepped in to help complete the last of the course audits, and to our Professors and Docents who reviewed and approved their courses to see the audit through to completion.

Easier Feedback

Catch a mistake in a course or exam? It’s now easier than ever to let us know through the SA Feedback Form link that James has graciously added to the Shadow Academy menu:

Shadow Feast

The Shadow Academy Society is hosting a Shadow Feast to celebrate the arrival of 38 ABY. Take a break and enjoy a rap battle or a duel under the mistlefoe before the competition ends on January 20.

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New and upcoming changes

Our Combat Hall Professor, Celevon, is in the process of re-writing exams within his hall to remove major Legends changes as well as a few other surprises. He is also working to integrate some possessions in the courses so that students can quickly look over to items within the stores. This helps doubly as it gives them information about each piece and shows what they can use within fiction.

Grand Master Bounty Hunter Declan Roark is working on changes within his department as well. The current path has him working on Leadership courses for each level of leadership within the club. We are also looking at retiring our Crypto and Debate exams from the leadership hall, that will be down the line as we want to have exams available for members to earn their Leadership degrees.

Retiring Wiki Basics and Wiki Editing

As a heads up to all, we will be retiring the current Wiki courses and exams on February 14th at which time the new Wiki courses will be brought online. That said, this should be ample opportunity for everyone who has either exam saved but not submitted to get them in. If not, all answers are invalid or will not transfer over to the new course. No need to worry if you’ve already completed the course before, you’ll still have the exams listed. I would still encourage everyone to check out the notes as there may be some new information contained within.

That about sums everything up from the Office of the Headmaster. If anyone has questions don't hesitate to poke me in TG or via email.

DS