Well, there goes my fifteenth BBC contest.

There was a time (notably, the last half-hour of the entry period) where I wondered 'is it gonna be a full 300?'. With each entry added to the list, this developed into what one might call a curious fear. You see, prelims for approximately 150 entries is madness enough. Polls for twice that?...

Then it capped out at 290, and there was relief. After the removal of DQed entries, entries without working entry pics at the time of pollmaking, and a doubled entry (honestly, I'm amazed I didn't make any more similar slipups given all the stuff there was to keep track of), the total was 284. This still worked out to 29 polls. Believe me, finding names for those last three polls was the least of my worries.

Somehow, I got all that done. It was a flurry of copy/paste copy/paste copy/paste wait wait wait go back undo/copy/paste, and yet there were still a couple comments of 'pffft, rigged polls'. If there was s way to make all contest entrants site-wide make a set of prelim-like polls before they could enter, oh, how quickly I would jump on that. That accusation is a glaring sign that you don't really comprehend the kind of work and how much work goes into prelims, folks. It really is.

Then semis. Then the final. Then the results topic. Then the unpinning of the entry-related topics. Then the blogging.

And yet, I still feel like I can keep up the impression of sanity. Amazing.