ArmchairGM 1 year on (including messages from some old friends)
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By user Alex Holowczak
Today is the first anniversary of Roblefko spamming the Detroit Red Wings forum, advertising this site. Luck should have it, I read it, and shortly after I was on here – making a Steve Yzerman biography in the old Community Portal section.
I imagine I was the last thing that Roblefko was looking for. Hoping perhaps for a user that would contribute to the wiki for the Red Wings, and maybe branch out. But I had to spoil his plan, opting for the more tropical sports like Snooker, Cricket and Formula One!
Within the first month, I had set up a lot of the snooker stuff, and by June I was very happy with my contributions, and I’d began the Formula One part. Snooker then sort of maintained itself from then on.
Last summer was a good one for me, as due to the English education system, I was allowed to spend a lot of time on random musings for three months in the summer after exams. I lost about two weeks to an overheating computer, that was subsequently upgraded. I soon completed the schedule for all 57 Formula One seasons to this year, and began the nightmare that is – race reports. I soon got very bored, and went into the old Grand Prix results, like the 1939 Grand Prix de la Marne, for example.
I also suggested a Hall of Fame idea – where ArmchairGM has a section to vote sportsmen into their very own Hall of Fame. Which I am promised is coming soon…
Soon though, September dawned, and so did school again, restricting time I spent here.
As December came, Armchair looked different, sounded different, and the site disposed of its most hated user so far.
I ran the 2006 ArmchairGM Sports Awards, more about which you’ll hear later in the article.
Into March, and the site was no longer independent, and into the realms of wikia we dived. The old user rankings were stored, with me at Number 1, and a new system was adopted. In April, I began the first of what I think will be three "charges" for the Number 1 spot, i.e. at Summer, October half-term, and Christmas – all to be Number 1 come midnight on December 31 (in my time zone, at least!)
So in my time here, what have I done? Here are some of my achievements.
- A Formula One Encyclopedia – 100% done by me (bar the few who have lost challenges, or helped with the format).
- Helped with the Sports Dictionary.
- Set up the Snooker section.
- Got overawed by the Cricket section.
- Made the completely random World's Strongest Man page.
- Let you all know about Cricket and Snooker.
- Wrote a lot of Formula One race reports, not just in the modern era, but from way back when it started too.
- Ran some popular interactions and some less popular.
And now, 1 year on, here I am. The World Snooker Championship is over, and the second year of my ArmchairGM career begins.
But as you may know, I am a big fan of historical sports stories, or just tales from the past in general. So I thought in this article, I’d post some more.
A month ago I emailed several users of this site that have left the site, to find out where they are, and what they’ve been doing in their time away.
I contacted:
I tried to contact:
- Steaksammich – He didn’t confirm an email address or blocked emails from being sent – so there was no way for me to send him a message.
The replies
I simply copied and pasted what people said, as you’ll be able to tell by the suspect grammar used in their replies!
Xinoph
I'm still swinging by the site and reading articles, I just don't have the time with my current jobs to worry much about posting anymore. I haven't really "stopped using the site", I've just transitioned to lurker mode for a little while - as I have on Wikipedia and a few forums on which I was active. Having two high-intensity jobs (teaching middle-schoolers and working as an EMT) is hard enough; I just don't have as much time for the internet as I once did.
Ufgators
To start, I began ACGM over the summer, just for fun, and it soon became an obsession for me. I guess you can say it was my first step in the journalism world, as that is what I aspire to be. I am still in high school, and am now the top writer for the school newspaper. I've covered the Green Valley Gators (in henderson, nevada) mens varisty basketball championship game in the Orleans Arena..which was the biggest story of my life. I was afforded the opportunity to travel with the team and go with them in the locker room, and everything!
In all honesty, I would not be where I am, and have as much talent as I do, without ACGM and the writers on there giving me tips, advice, critiques, and most of all, the praise and confidence to pursue my dream. I definitely miss the chair, and will continue to write for it in the summer. The reason I am no longer writing for ACGM is because I am buried in highschool work and am really learning life's lessons right now. I had a lot of relationship problems the past 5 months that really sent me spiraling downward, but it helped me realize one thing: that I am most happy when I'm writing, and the one place that allows me to do that is armchair. I definitely underestimated my workload, so I haven't been on the computer as much as during the summer. But, now that my life is back in order, I will make a huge effort to restart the weekly Thursday Rant before this summer.
Madproof9
The main thing I've been doing since AGM is going to school. When I started with AGM last summer, it was the middle of the summer, and my job was from 4 a.m. - 10 a.m., so the rest of the day, I really didn't have much to do, so I found AGM and spent alot of time on it. Once school started, I just got really busy with all my school work and internships, I didn't have alot of time to be on the site. I currently have an internship at a hockey magazine, so I'm still writing 6-7 articles a month that get published. When I put something up on the site, I tried to make it as in-depth and correct (factwise) that I could, and I just haven't had the time to be in-depth enough to use the site. I still check in every once in a while, and read what people are saying. I like the new design, I like how it all works. It's a good site, and hopefully if I have time, I'll be able to use it more often again.
ASwaff
First of all, let me say that I love the new format of the website. I remember when I first came on, and it has come a very long way. It looks more and more professional all the time. I am very impressed with the changes that have been made in the last year.
As for an update on myself, I have been increasingly involved in my school work, which has been the biggest reason for my dropoff in Armchair activity, as well as my reason for leaving my old blog, Baseball Time in Arlington, at MVN. I was accepted this semester into the School of Communication at the University of Texas, so I am getting closer and closer to achieving my goal of being a journalist. I have also been writing for the school paper, The Daily Texan (if you're interested in checking it out, you can at dailytexanonline.com).
When I showed up to try out for a spot with the sports section, all of the beats were already filled. That worked out very much to my advantage, however, because instead of getting placed on a rookie beat like women's track, I had the opportunity to cover Big 12 basketball doing weekly previews and recaps of Big 12 games that did not involve UT. Because of that role, they asked me to cover the NCAA Tournament. Sadly, I was not able to go to San Antonio to cover the Sweet 16 down here, but it was still a very exciting experience to be so new to a newspaper and covering the NCAA championship.
With the college basketball season over, I might shift over to cover the Texas Rangers, because the newspaper is looking for someone to do a weekly column on them. That's still up in the air.
Hopefully that's enough, because that's pretty much everything that's been going on with me. If you have any other questions to ask, I'd be more than happy to respond. Hope everything continues to go well over at AGM. I'm sure when things calm down during the summer, you'll see me back covering baseball. Something to look forward to, I guess.
Therefore...
ArmchairGM is going on to bigger and better things! Not only has the site improved, but it has founded some young journalistic talent, which is excellent rep really.
My Choice for Comment of the year
From WTF of the Week in an article posted on July 11, 2006, referring to the NHL Flowers website comes my favourite from DNL:
The NHL: A Bunch of Pansies.
The fact that I remember this even today (okay, I had to research the exact date and name of the article, but I remembered the comment) is a shock to me.
To the next year
Get involved with the ArmchairGM 100 project! It could give us a load more users, so perhaps ought to be a priority.
