The end draws near. My 19+ year NG journey is now just 7 days from completion, and so I wanted to share some of my fondest moments...

Proudest NG moment:

I've been lucky enough to win some prizes over the years. A couple of my short stories won prizes back when literacy competitions were common place. I was especially pleased with my Halloween tale, Pico's school 2.

BBS link

I also managed to win a prize for my one and only art entry. Please go and vote on it if you see this- it needs just 2 more for me to see it's score!

Art

Favourite community:

I'll always have fond memories of the Elite Guard Barracks. Thanks to Eaglerock and the OG crew for some great years there. I also loved my short time in the NG Mafia,writing stories of murder and intrigue.

Life-changing moment:

This is an easy one. I was lucky enough to see my wife walk down the aisle to music composed right here on NG. The site has brought a lot of colour and community to my life over 19 years, but nothing on that level.

Song link <3

I also have a published story thanks to NG, as part of the first NG book Collab. I still roll out the tale of Kevin with my Biology students every now and again, and the book sits pride of place on my shelf.

...

So onto the final stats push. I never thought I would be here long enough to hit the fabled heights of level 60, but here we are. I'll try and make the rest of my numbers pretty with the final few votes...

COVID sucks. I had it in October, my kids have it now. I have lost almost all my time off this last few months stuck in quarantine unable to go out.

But there are some silver linings:

1) I don't have to travel on Christmas Day, which means I can start getting drunk earlier.

2) I get to enjoy my own Christmas dinner, which in my humble opinion is top notch.

3) I am bored enough stuck at home that I have come back to my old haunt of NG for a few days, to find it still as full of porn and shit posts as I remember.

Never change!

I went into the portal and voted on 5 UJ entries today.  The first time in over a year that I have deposited my daily experience.

It was a strange feeling.

For the best part of a decade I was addicted to gaining experience and climbing the ranks.  A year ago I entered the top 200 to go with my spot in the top 25 B/Pers.  And yet almost overnight that addiction finally disappeared.  I can't quite explain why, other than life was much much more interesting than anything NG had to offer.  Possibly for the first time in a decade.

I will always be grateful for the many years of entertainment this site gave me (not to mention the song my wife walked down the aisle to at our wedding!), but I will never be an active member here again.  I may pop in from time to time to post (this remains one of the few places I can discuss NFL with people who actually understand the game), but that is the best I can offer.

Thanks to all of you who made this such a great place to grow up and find my place in the world.  Maybe one day my son will be back to carry on the family legacy (I can't believe he is 2 now- 2 years since my last news post!)

~Sentio

Yeterday I became a Dad for the first time!  My wife gave birth to a beautiful little boy.  Who knows, maybe one day he will take over his Daddy's NG account :).

Holy shit where did the last (nearly) 8 months go...

Edit: Make that one week to go until due date!  Thank goodness it managed to hold off until after Christmas.

I made a news post a month ago that turned out to be a little premature (and I deleted it before anyone saw it). Fingers crossed that isn't true this time- the evidence suggests that this time I am right to make this post, and as I can't talk about this to any of my friends or family for a couple of months then this is going to be the outlet for my excitement and fear! It may be early. Things may go wrong. The future is a difficult thing to predict.

But if all goes well my life will change forever in January next year!

You do the maths.

UPDATE: Two weeks until the first scan now, and finally being able to tell people! Very exciting! And to top it off I've got my absolute dream job today in one of the best state schools in the South West, so everything is falling nicely into place.

Once upon a time I fit the Newgrounds demographic perfectly- a teenager with no luck with women and too much spare time on my laptop.

There is hope for us all...

Now I return a married man after the best two weeks of my life seeing an incredible country that I desperately want to help return to its former glory. As such I will be starting a small project with that in mind... hopefully news to follow in the coming months.

House.... check
Job..... check (though not quite what I want yet)
Wife.... check
Plymouth Argyle to win.... anything.... Still waiting on that one!

Bonus points if you can identify the country we went to from this picture!

Back it!

This is the first creative contribution I will ever have made to this site, and one I would love to see come to fruition after a lot of work from an awful lot of people, especially Ekublai. We've been working on this for 2 years now, and the talent involved is impressive indeed. Well worth a few dollars of your hard earned cash!

New house... new fiancee! Not a bad few weeks!

12 days and counting until we move into our beautiful new house in a beautiful town that is definitely not Swindon! Hurrah! We were out buying furniture yesterday, and I think for the first time I felt like I had properly grown up (despite now being a fully fledged teacher, I still feel like a kid at heart).

UPDATE: 4 days to go! We are getting really excited now, and for days all we have been doing is trawling shops for bargains on wooden furniture. Today- a 10 person dining table for just over 500 quid! It's weird to be actually owning furniture, and soon to be owning a house- all these years of renting and finally I will be able to do exactly what I please with the place.

But what does this mean? Is it time? Should I ask...? Only time will tell.... ;)