Dear Everyone:

I see now that these picks have caused some controversy, and I understand why. Please let me explain.

During this weekend and last night in particular, I was not able to follow along with the entries like I normally do, due to being really sick... Even the layouts and formatting this weekend were not done well, and I take responsibility for it and apologise for the lapse in judgment here which does not live up to the usual standard of the SPC. However, I do like to give my judges as much autonomy as possible, because the main point of using guest judges is so that my biases don't win every week.

I'd like to maintain a high level of quality for the SPC, and I don't want my being sick to seem like an excuse for shoddiness. So I apologise to the entries that deserve to be up there, but aren't. It is also not the fault of Hive account@dek, because I wasn't in the frame of mind to debate on the picks this weekend.

I hope that you understand and accept the apology, as we move on from this one.

If the winners would like to forfeit their prize and choose other entries in light of all of this, I would be happy to facilitate at this point.

Let's see what we can do with the theme next weekend.

Thanks for reading, for the feedback, and thanks for submitting each week.