05/08/2008: "Late Nights and Early Mornings"

Cereal - Check
Toast - Check
OJ - Check
News entry for MKW - In progress

So I'm a little late this week because when I decided to do the update yesterday, my body also decided that it wanted to go to sleep. So let's all just pretend it's still Wednesday *readies delorean*

Movers and Shakers
Quite a bit has happened in the 3 days since the last update, so let's get straight to it.
The biggest news, is that Alvin van Asselt has become the new Site Champion. We're all used to Dutch dominance in other mariokart games, so it's great to see Alvin leading the way here too. So far no Site Champion has remained between news updates, so let's see how long he can maintain his lead.

The top 10 remained completely unchanged apart from that one move although Martin Rudmarker made some good progress in closing the gap between 8th and 7th. Jonathan Wheatley also closed the gap from 15th to 14th. Meanwhile Adrien Edet made the only proper move in the top 20, moving from 20th to 18th.

The real action over the last 3 days has been happening from 20-30, with several players making sizable cuts. Primarily the movement all comes from North America.
Dave Phaneuf climbs from 25th to 20th, cutting 7 points.
Erik Reynolds with the best move of the update, climbs from 29th to 21st, cutting 9 points.
Armdano Cobian climbs from 30th to 22nd, cutting 7 points.
All three will be looking to battle their way past each other into the top 20 by the time the next update comes.

Meanwhile myself and Robin Usher have been battling to stay within touching distance of the best cutting 4 points each this update.

Other News

Although Kevin Borne was a bit overshadowed by Alvin this update, he still managed to set some great times, and still holds the most amount of Site Records, along with our best showing on the Top10 lists. Kalle Videkull is our next strongest, with some great times in the official Top10s.
Our membership numbers are greatly up and we passed the 100 mark recently. Currently we're up to 134 players, 54 of whom have a full timeset. For those that don't, try to get at least crappy ones submitted. I generally don't mention movement from people who have just appeared on the Average Finish list.

Awards
There were alot of decisions to be made about when the awards would be done, and who would get them. The sites tend to work on a "4 week" per month system, so I had to reshuffle a few things to make everything in line with that. Also, a precedent was made with the MKDS site, which gave out a POM award for their first month, even though only two weeks had passed. So I decided to go with that too. smile