After 8 long months, Newgrounds has finally gotten upgraded, and immediately the only thing that comes to mind, is AWESOME.

I was worried that I may've been disappointed in the new appearance, as I imagine a lot of people may have been, but the graphical appearance is both pleasing and easy on the eyes, whilst very familiar.
From my initial look around, there's been some great improvements in many places, you no longer get re-directed to another page after voting, you can load SWFs in the same page, and your vote is shown in the same page as well.
I don't like however that tons of NG characters are basically whored out on the portal header however, we should be instilling the idea of a flash free-for-all, not "Make movies with these characters and earn brownie points"

Individually, I'm really pleased with my level 31 icon now, the butcher's knife kicks ass.
Looking at the new level icons, they're incredibly kick ass and all, even Pimp, who's level 50, has got to level up now!
What kicks even more ass is my new voting power.

Thanks for voting, RupeeClock! Vote on 4 more submissions and you can deposit your 10 experience points for today!

Your experience gave you a voting power of 10.05 votes. Your blam and protection points gave you an additional 55% of your experience power, meaning that your total vote power was worth 15.57 votes!

HOLY, SHIT, that's a lot of voting power!
That's even MORE than what the previous highest voting power was!!

Moving on, the bytesize player is a great and welcomed addition, a miniature showcase for authors who wish to submit to it is very nice, you may have even noticed my clip on there, it's possible you'll see more in the future as well.

As far as the secrets go, I can see that they haven't changed, yet at least, hopefully soon.

I can see on the portal frontpage that there's an interviews box, makes me wonder WHY since so few are made that Legendary Frog and Pikanjo are still on there. The best of past dates is pretty cool though.

One thing I love is the inclusion of NG elements for the public to download, this will make authentic looking NG flashes look even better, haha!

I like how you can simply glance at your portal submissions now, and see if you have new reviews, I appreciate this feature greatly because I take the effort to respond to every last review, even some of the especially shit ones.

For the time being, it seems that many options under my account settings are greyed out, so I guess that they will appear later.

So, this is my first post for now, I'll be updating this now and then sharing opinions and updating you on my flash movies as I make then now and then.
Until then, here's a screenshot of my upcoming Clockday movie, SleepEasy.
You'll be able to find more in the NG Mag alpha here.

Hopefully, this unexplainable slowdown will go with time, the server still needs a lot of tweaking in many places.
Now if you don't mind, I'm gonna go customise my nice little user page and get right on back to animating this thing!

EDIT: And also, a big hello to Sonucais.