Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/Green Dam Youth Escort

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Green Dam Youth Escort

It's somewhat lengthy, so: Feel free to take your time somewhat doing this one as I am posting it on Pee Review primarily to comply with the suggestion at the head of Requested Articles and ensure that it is an adequate parody of Chinese censorship and uneven machine translation, rather than to get a read on the state of my humor writing.

I chose to tackle this as a manner of principle: those Chinese bastards had it coming to them when they blocked Uncyclopedia!
Okay, not Uncyclopedia proper, but its Chinese-language Babel versions. Let's try for the whole enchilada with this one, shall we?KUN VFH POTM VFP(IMAGES⇔TALK) 21:01, August 3, 2010 (UTC)

Humour:	7.42	Youth Escort Service. Just the name sounds so wrong. TURN AWAY! Anyway, yeah, section-by-section. In this particular section, nothing's really radically funny at this stage, which is perfectly fine—the introduction should really consist mostly of set-up for the rest of the article and maybe a few one-liners. Here, the department names and all-caps EXCLUSIVE RIGHTS got a few chuckles—with the latter, I just know you're going for a Chekhov's gun. EASE OF USE The discussion about discovering dissent and subsequent inconsolability is a bit of a digression—somehow reminds me of "if your children get dirt on them, THEY'LL EXPLODE." It works because of the delicious dissonance on display, but still distracts a bit from the matter at hand. Optionally shorten into a few sentences, probably fine to leave it as is. The rest is a fantastic barrage of irony, understatement, link gags, and dark humour that overall gets pretty good points from me. REMINDERS "Internet anonymity is illegal" got a healthy chuckle out of me, which is well up there for me. The comment about MMORPG play requiring full names etc hit a bit close to reality *cough* *cough* Blizzard Real ID *cough* but that just makes it even better. I also like the government's apparent assumption/claim that sanitising content will actually reduce fatal germs or something (again, reminds me of "THEY'LL EXPLODE"). The list is kept at a reasonable size with decent one-liner jabs at Facebook, gold mining (or whatever they call it), Internet obsession over trivial information, etc etc. (BBC rocks!) Interesting irony with the last morally reprehensible violation, and most delicious irony with noting how the software would shield you from "reeducation through labour". (I'm reminded of the Rosetta Stone chop for whatever reason: "THE CONSUMER IS ENTITLED TO KNOW THE EXTENT OF HIS RIGHTS: YOU HAVE NO RIGHTS." Loved that line.) CONCERNINGS OF PRIVACY Understatement, feigned ignorance, link gags. Same drill, and same effect of wide grins to healthy chuckles. Dunno if I'd connect the Chinese authorities to the KGB or Chinese rural farmers to hillbillies (whatever those are—honestly, I watched this American children's show in which they had sketches called "Hillbilly Moments" and I was more confused than amused), and sometimes the irony does build up to a level where it just verges on overkill that even Chinese propaganda might dare not approach. Then again, it might be just the distorted impression I get from reading English rendered in an East Asian half-width font. TERMS AND CONDITIONS A bit puzzling. It seems like a minor one-liner that could easily be just under EASE OF USE, but somehow it has its own section. Personally I'd prefer it as a throwaway one-liner under EASE OF USE (keeping it in quotes as is) or as a more fleshed-out EULA mocking both government overzealousness and legal gobbledegook. UNINSTALL I don't believe this is true. Honestly, MD5 checksum?! So easy even schoolchildren could crack it?! I was actually laughing at how utterly inventive and ridiculous you were being until I read the Wikipedia article and saw that it was true. But I still can't believe it's true. The humour style is closer to cringe humour now with those final sentences, but the same drill otherwise. You might want that checksum to lead to MD5 in case people don't get it (took me a while). FAQ Question 1—I called it. Irony, feigned ignorance, stereotypical jabs—looks good. ("ween"?) Question 2—is that DYK supposed to be the answer? I'd suggest moving it down a bit—right next to the sender's name would perhaps work better. (relieved) also seems like such a perfect place for a link gag, but I suppose the reader's filling in the gaps by now. Question 3—heh, snooty elitism/racism got a healthy chuckle. Question 4—I guess this one just doesn't have an answer in any form, and this one could have done with a snappy, annoyed one-sentence answer or editor's note, but it's still nice to see that even firing squad support staff have their issues with bureaucracy and Office. Question 5—"for the time being" got a laugh. Excellent use of veiled contempt/evil laughter. ANTIVIRUS 2010 Wha—? I don't get this. It's just spam completely unrelated to government censorship. I understand it's practically spyware and by comparing it to "Antivirus 2010" you're making this parallel, but you already sort of did that with a spyware link gag somewhere up there ... maybe you don't need this? Overall, the humour in this is definitely above Uncyc's usual, if a bit repetitive with its devices.
Concept:	7.42	Come on, it's yet another addition to the Great Firewall. Somebody's going to have to point at and laugh and satirise it, so why not Uncyc? I think your choice to write this from the perspective of the Chinese government with a layer of subtle satire over it enhances the article greatly just by the virtue of the concept, and your execution of it—particularly with the formatting and the writing style—affirms the article's goodness.
Prose and formatting:	9.06	Your attention to detail is impeccable—your use of the half-width East Asian font and the awfully slanted quotation marks they have (don't know why it suddenly stopped being used at the FAQ and at that one blurb about every citizen being one of China's children), the pleasurably mixed layout of DYK's and images and lists, and so on. Not quite completely impeccable, however, which you may have guessed from the forty-seven-fiftieths of a point off. However, I'm not sure if they're meant to show the ineptness of government coders, so I'll just note them here. There seem to be line breaks at abnormal points in the Abridged List: one in the Tibet bullet between "Administrative Region, or," and "more particularly", and one between "of a mentally" and "or socially." You have a numbered list with the uninstallation procedure, but it shows up after the bullets. You know that you can just use # instead of * to get a numbered list without the bullets, right? Occasional breaks in the bombastic, nationalistic tone occur—"that would cost extra" or "But really" stick out a bit amongst the other choice words.
Images:	9.14	Well, they're okay, I guess. Screening notice: Attention to detail shines here. There's that mention of the clouds, the bloodied paintbrush, the beautifully tailored fonts—exquisite. Desktop: From Big Brother to Big Butterfly—it's like CIngsoccies (get it? Ingsoc? CBeebies? oh, never mind). Just the name "Hu the Friendly Monitoring Hare" got a good chuckle, and good details, although I'm not sure why the government-approved desktop would give you the option to "subvert" settings ... Party/Safety: Well, if Chinese censorship'll get shock images off the Internet ... Good work on incorporating the English text into the image. But why do the first three images not have the captions visible sans need for tooltip, while the other ones do? Might want to fix that inconsistency. Uninstall: I'm not sure ... the irony's there, but not quite enough for a chuckle. May have to improve the caption. Pigs: Yeah, same thing. The best-case scenario is that both image and caption are hilarious, and if the image lacks humour value by itself, then the caption compensates for that. Not exactly the case here—probably best to work more on it. Firing Squad?: I like the caption (got a chuckle), but you should probably make it a thumbnail so that the caption is visible sans need for tooltip. Bananas: Yes! Prime example of a scenario where the caption lends substantial comedic value to an already mildly humorous image. Nicely done. Ideally, every image on this article should be at this level. Popup: Well, it's a popup. I refer you to my humour comments on this section.
Miscellaneous:	8.96	Overall, the article has a very polished feel—always gets bonus points and a great first impression from me—and pretty good humour that still needs some tweaks humour-wise and otherwise to be superb and feature-worthy, but nonetheless is quite close to it. Excellent, excellent work.
Final Score:	42	Obviously, you don't have to follow this review—it's all just recommendations and non-professional advice and whatnot, and only stuff I'd like to see changed/improved about this article. Apparently a score of 42 means it might be ready for VFH—personally, I'd recommend holding that off until this has reached its absolute apex—again, still not quite there, but very close to it.
Reviewer:	Sir MacMania GUN—[03:05 25 Aug 2010]