March is (Always) Madness!

Throughout March, I have been made busy with several activities that put my blogging activity here on hiatus, aside from college assignments and stuffs. The first one is Fandom March Madness which is the March Madness-style tournament with television and movie characters, exclusive on LiveJournal (note the "Steel Cage" in its name), and the second one is the Fall/Winter 2015 Fashion Week. Okay, so I can sense your questions why I had to take a look at such a very seemingly-unimportant thing that is fashion week, to the point that I sweated myself only to count how many shows a model has done, but all I know is that the March Madness atmosphere was there all along, not just merely because the last weeks of the Fashion Week coincide with FMM, with so many close races in every moment as exciting as Bathurst 12 Hour! If you will, you can check both actions of the FMM and Fashion Week on my LiveJournal blog!

However, as much as I enjoy all these "March Madness" stuffs this month, I always remember that I still have this blog and that I still have a site to take care of, plus some contents for God-knows games I play. Looking back, all these activities cost me very much of my blogging activity as I spent my days updating things on Twitter and via Excel, especially those related to fashion week. As a result, my 2015 Bathurst 12 Hour blog post was really late, but it was also because I was at loss at what to post. Remember that I tried to write a Nissan-themed post in light of Nismo's Bathurst 12 Hour victory and its GT-R LM unveiling in the Superbowl, but at the last minute, I ditched it and go back to square one for the B12hr post. In the end, this post entails the updates I had throughout my AWOL due to the March Madness.

2015 BATHURST 12 HOUR - The Morals of the FCY-ridden Story

The hero car of this year's Bathurst 12 Hour (image: GT Academy on Twitter)

"Bathurst Delivers!" As endurance racing commentary regular slash my favorite commentator ever John Hindhaugh always said amidst the 12-hour endurance race at Mount Panorama Circuit. This year's crop gathered cars from different classes, with GT3 as, obviously, the highlight category though with a twist in a form of "Pro" and "Am" sub-categories with other category grids include Flat 6 cup cars, GT4s, production cars and invitationals. Even with the race itself clashed with V8 Supercars's super test at Sydney Motorsports Park, meaning that we didn't see Craig Lowndes, Shane Van Gisbergen and Rick Kelly, this year's race gave us top-flight GT drivers in return, including GT Academy graduates Florian Strauss and Wolfgang Reip and Blancpain GT Series champion Laurens Vanthoor, who turned out to be the next breed of the "mountain killer" after setting the fastest lap to an extent he brought Phoenix Racing "The Al" - The Allan Simonsen Memorial trophy awarded for the pole position in the qualifying.

Bathurst 12 Hour is anything but without a story, and this year's race once again proved why there's always a great story that lies in such a race. This post lists some of the author's choice memorable moments that has made you excited, nervous, cringe and delighted throughout the race's run.

(WARNING: This post contains lots of pics and GIFs. Not for the faint-hearted snails)

The Fault in My DLs - When Being Rushed Made Everything Went Wrong

It turns out that my zip files for Gran Canaria and Frappe Snowland (evidence not pictured) tracks contain corrupted files.

It has caught my attention that some certain files whose links I had provided in several places, including my site (granted it's still in construction) and my blog here contain faulty elements, including corrupted ZIPs, missing tiles et cetera. I just found out last night as I tried to drive my old tracks just for fun and it petrified me that two custom tracks were problematic as soon as I extract all the track ZIPs. They are Frappe Snowland and Gran Canaria, of which they each had one corrupted file, and the file in question is the custom track's image. Additionally, I also found out that I forgot to put additional custom tiles for Templedore as the underpass tile is missing. Despite it is not much a problem as Sliderpoint has the underpass tile, I can't condone such a behavior as the tileset is less than 1 MB and I just need to include it all along. Even my second version of Tsukuba and Snow Complex has the same missing tiles problem too.

It also turns out that this kind of "rushed" behavior also the same behavior that affected how my tracks were before my trackmaking skills matured, same with my writing in which I had vocabulary issues too, resulting in either Engrish-y writing, erroneous grammar structures and vocabularies or a hybrid of both. Yet, when I don't rush in trackmaking, I did rush in releasing the track, which is what I didn't do until recently. Those who have downloaded both corrupted tracks and those with missing tiles, my apologizes to you.

2015 24 HOURS OF DUBAI - A Special Kind of Dubai

#2 Black Falcon SLS AMG piloted by Arab Abdulaziz Al Faisal, German Hubert Haupt, Dutch Yelmer Buurman and English Oliver Webb that took this year's outright victory in the 2015-running 24 Hours of Dubai. (Image: Autocar India)

Finally the first legitimate post of my blog in 2015! I know, it's technically the second post of 2015, I just put that for the sake of randomness. Randomness aside, though, the first wave of events have passed. You have the Dakar rally that has recently finished hours ago at the time of this post, and then there were award shows like People's Choice Awards and Golden Globe Awards, yet there also was the 2015 24 Hours of Dubai, the tenth running 24-hour race event involving grand tourers, touring cars and endurance specials, battling it out for class victory. The race was won by the #2 Black Falcon SLS AMG driven by Arab Abdulaziz Al Faisal, German Hubert Haupt, Dutch Yelmer Buurman and English Oliver Webb, with the team's other success is the 1-2 in the 997 class, with the lady luck weren't on last year's winner Stadler Motorsport's favor due to an accident that eventually ended their run with 61 laps of mileage.

Yet, the more I think about the Dubai 24-hour race, I felt that there's more to the competitors and cars than in the race alone. I mean, they almost had everything in screaming colors; fireworks? Check. Competitors with interesting traits? You can check this post. A Corvette? Check. A big number of starters? Check. Rather than posting the race recap since I didn't stay up for full 24 hours, following the good 'ol Rendy's Blog tradition, this post will be dedicated to some of the unique things present in this year's race.

2015 - New Year, New Crusade

Happy New Year, Everyone!  (Image source: Orlando Local Guide)

2014 has been an awesome experience for yours truly. There have been lots of things that happened, including part of things that I have finally done in the previous year. From joining tournaments, both physically and submit-your-results-online-ly (cannot make up in a shorter word unfortunately lol), to doing and learning things like redesigning my blog, my site, and making stuffs, not to forget that I also made new friends both online and physically in that year.