User talk:Coltonblue
Welcome![edit source]
Hello, Coltonblue, and welcome to Uncyclopedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. If not, the door's right over there... no, a little more to your left... yeah. Anyway, here are a few good links for nooblets:
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If you need help, ask me on my talk page, ask at the Dump, or add the following: {{help}}
to this page along with a message and someone will come along and help you if they can. Again, welcome! —Braydie 21:32, 5 January 2007 (UTC)
On the Pee Review of Nelly Furtado[edit source]
Coltonblue, I read your message on my talk page...I'll put some more thoughts specifically about the Furtado article on the review page in a sec. Here's a bit of cockeyed, highly personal analysis about Uncyclopedia articles in general. These are my cockeyed ideas, so take them with a grain or seven of salt.
In general I think your perception is accurate -- completely off-the-wall stuff comes off "randumb" if it is not supported by some kind of interior logic and structure. Saying that Furtado is a shape-shifting alien from Sirius IV who plans to eat the core of the Earth would be randumb.
There are several kinds of articles which seem to succeed.
- Outrageous but catchy nonsense sometime works: You have two cows and AAAAAAAAA! are examples. But there are many attempts at catchy nonsense that fail miserably, and there is generally no cure for such failures.
- Pleasantly silly concepts that are self-consistent and well-developed often succeed. Bouncy Castle is an excellent example. It's pure fantasy but it's logical, well-explained, and fun.
- Articles which play off puns on the subject or secondary meanings are very common but often not of the highest quality. (A punning definition of a Bald Eagle as a "Ball Deagle" is a thin thread on which to hang an article. I wrote that particular article so I can slam it...) However, Handgun is based on a pun and it succeeds nicely.
- Some articles are written in the style of the thing they describe. Articles on real-world authors who have distinctive styles are often done this way -- see Vladimir Nabokov. Another not-so-successful example is Anger.
- Many articles take a familiar concept and tweak it slightly...or a bit more than slightly. This is really the bread-and-butter of Uncyc, I think. The patron saints of this kind of writing are probably Douglas Adams and the Monty Python troupe. Well-known people, events, and objects are put in unfamiliar, comical contexts. Patrick Henry puts the American founding father in the context of a modern rock'n'roll celebrity. The basic details of his life are accurate -- his residence at Red Hill plantation, his 1765 "if this be treason" speech, his rabble-rousing at Saint John's church in Richmond in 1775 -- but they're squirked around in a silly way. (Nelly Furtado falls into this category, I think.)
- There are a bunch of minor species of articles too. Visual slapstick articles like Infinite recursion, deconstructionist articles like UnContent and Content-free, over-the-top incoherent articles like Bat Fuck Insane, and others I can't think of right now.
Of course, I suspect that very few writtars start out thinking "I am going to write an article in the "well-developed fantasy" style. Most of us write whatever grabs our interest. Later, during revision, we might realize that the article we're working on fits into a general or special category...or that it really doesn't, but borrows some elements from some categories...or that it's really outside categorization.
The only inspirational advice I might offer is to not put your eggs into one basket article. Uncyc lacks many articles on basic subjects one finds on our evil twin Wikipedia -- sandstone, Bela Bartok, ocotillo, brown dwarf, Yukon River -- so to my (tiny) mind one can write solid, pleasantly entertaining articles about many of them and, eventually, the Splendid Angel of Inspiration will strike and the writtar may come up with a really excellent article. The main thing is to keep writing as well as possible while waiting for the Angel.
Oh, and the Disclaimer: "This is all just some silly advice from a silly, silly man."----OEJ 17:58, 6 January 2007 (UTC)