DCBLOG Look Ahead: No Ordinary Week in March...

A Word From The Editor
BY DC CUEVA                        

■ @DC408DXTR  @ IG/YT/SC/TB

We at DCBLOG hope that you are having a good Thursday - or if that's not the case, we hope that you are safe, sound and alright. Without making any one single mention of anything that has gone on in the past few days, it's safe to say that this has been such an eventful week. However, there are times that the overwhelming amount of news going on in this world stresses you out so much that it will give you reason to want to escape a bit from all the worries and negativity that's gone on lately.

It's with great hope, awareness and sensitivity that we here proceed as usual, and as we always do, with the business that is on our table with all of the great content planned for this weekend, for this month and the springtime coming up. And we hope you will find some something good to take the stress out with us going Inside MTV Reality on here, and everything else on both this site and on the DC YouTube channel as well. And we have such a busy time ahead of us ourselves here, too.

This week marks the conclusion of the winter 2019-20 cycle of our MTV coverage that began in -- what seems to be long ago now -- the month of November, which has seen us head down to New Zealand for the first winter-themed season of Ex On The Beach, and saw the global franchise's first-ever proposal. But aside from that, one region in the United States has been the center of our attention here and has no doubt kept us warm these last four months: West Central Florida.

In an ExtraTime post we did last year, we featured two groups from the same state attend last year's Video Music Awards together and this winter, they have shared center stage. The Tampa Bay suburb of St Pete Beach hosted Season 3 of Floribama Shore this winter as Mattie joined the group there, and up north outside of Sarasota, Siesta Key has also had its junior year there... and both has brought us plenty of fun and drama that has given us the chance to escape to the sunshine state all this winter.

Both last and this week has seen this guilty pleasure host two back-to-back episodes to cap off the winter half of a season 3 that will resume later this year. Last week saw fireworks in the air and around the dinner table on the 4th of July as well as the king crashing the queen's grand opening of her new job, and this week sees them travel up to Nashville and then come home to a big bombshell. We know that a lot of our readers have yet to catch up on watch Tuesday's double finale, and it's with those of you in mind that we'll defer our recap of that until this weekend... so join us for that then.

But after we take care of covering winter's last act at the Key, our attention will shift into getting ourselves set to cover the fifth major pro sport of The Challenge, and Season 35 of Total Madness that begins in twenty days from now. Of course, there will be extensive coverage all season long with our weekly SocialPulse of the episodes each weekend with the Twitter episode reaction, and we will hopefully have traditional episode reviews and analysis as well. Think of this site as a supplement to your favorite podcasts and websites that already cover this franchise just as well as us.

Every season of any major series we cover around here always begins with a standard of every site, and that would be the traditional season preview... and that will appear either next weekend or the early part of the full week before the Madness begins on April 1st, and we'll have the chance to look at the cast, the format and the twists that will await us. We also have our tradition of getting to introduce the rookie class of this Challenge season with "Who Are These Newbies?" which will be up after our season preview is posted, coming right before the season premiere.

Now, in the case of this Challenge season's Newbies post (and we've done this for every Challenge and Ex On The Beach season here since we started this), there are some interesting scenarios to all of this: among the class of seven rookies of Total Madness this year, a few of them have been featured in past DCBLOG posts on this site. That will make for an intriguing situation that will sort out on here in the introductory monologue that will open up the second of our preseason posts when it goes up on here before this already manic month of March finally concludes.

But along with all this episode coverage that you come for, we've also developed the habit to have you stick around for the stories. ExtraTime allows us to cover MTV Reality from this unique vantage point of ours with when pop culture and this world collide, whenever anything significant happens with the personalities of these shows, and flashbacks at memorable moments. We've done a lot of posts in those three categories alone so far this year, and there's more of the same in the weeks and months ahead -- especially now with the time we got until the new Challenge season begins and next Friday being "National Storytelling Day". But in the interest of keeping you glued to this site, all way have to say is "Stay Tuned." We know you'll love what we got coming, especially the one that will be up in just a few hours in time for the drive home.

And, there has been some traction made on this site in the past few days with me posting some recent content, including the look back at when the cast of Road Rules Campus Crawl danced in front of Outkast in 2002, two years before the hip-hop collective's breakthrough '04. Kendal and Sarah, who were featured there, liked my posts and it gave reason for the man who hosts THE definitive podcast for all of us who follow The Challenge, Derrick Kosinski, to give me a Twitter follow. Big D, if you're reading this thanks for the Twitter follow, it's always appreciated and we can't wait to hear you and Scott Yager talk Total Madness and all things Challenge with your guests this season. And thanks to him being able to retweet my Road Rules post, I've also been able to garner some new followers on social media as well... and to those of you who have joined Team DC in the past several days, thanks and welcome aboard.

Lastly, there's this: the panic that we have felt the past 24 hours has gripped the world and has affected everyone, whether it's a loved one in your family or someone who's had travel plans for anything from major sporting events to springtime concerts get altered in the midst of this chaos. You're not alone: I would usually be going to work three days a week and going out & about with my friends on those other days as well... but because of this unprecedented emergency, that has forced me to stay in at home for health & safety reasons (I am healthy, by the way). This is affording me much more time to do both DCBLOG and my YouTube channel at YouTube.com/dc408dxtr... and there will be more vlogs from my past travels to be posted in the coming days, possibly weeks as long as this all continues. That is probably the only plus-side to what has been a chaotic past week for all of us in general.

So, thank you for checking us out... be safe out there, and we'll catch you here with that new ExtraTime post coming up at 5PM ET and perhaps many more after that. Talk to you soon.


- I AM DC
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