Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/West Timor (resubmit)

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West Timor [edit source]

I don't mean to imply that I didn't find Nameable's previous review helpful, in fact, I found it extremely helpful. I just need a second opinion so I know for sure what direction I should go with my article. Link to previous review. I did tweak a little bit of the article, but I can't drastically overhaul it until I get a second opinion. Please criticize constructively. This is my second article. M'su Carencro - Talk - Contributions - Blag 08:23, March 26, 2010 (UTC)

MsuCarencro has indicated that they would like for me to do this review, however I am unable to until Tuseday and they are aware. If people would hold off on this until then, that would be appreciated. --Sir Skinfan13 Talk {< CUN RotM FBotM VFH ΥΣΣ Maj. SK >} 02:35 EST 27 Mar, 2010
OK I'm good to go, starting this now.
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Humour: 9.5 The way I review, I generally put the majority of my comments and suggestions in the humor section. This allows me to be lazy keep all of my thoughts organized. I'll give you my first impressions after one read through and then go in for a more detailed look.

Initial Impressions

Holy crap! This was literally one of the funniest things I have had the pleasure to read on Uncyclopedia! me and my roommate here at VMI were literally reading this and busting out laughing! Very funny article, well done! I have a feeling this could be the highest score for any article I have ever reviewed.

More detail

I honestly don't have much to offer in the way of suggestions for improving the humor of this article, I honestly think it is near perfect. I will try my best to give you suggestions that in my mind would make this a full 10. I will definitely point out what I like best, and there is a ton of great material here.

First off, the introduction. Very intelligent mocking of totalitarianism, especially North Korea. Particularly, I loved the line, "West Timor's great glorious mission is to finally reunite East and West Timor by conquering the inferior people of East Timor, and victoriously destroying their infertile land" This is a wonderful use of sarcastic oxymoronic humor. This is one thing you do really well throughout the article, you are very skilled at crafting the language necessary for these sorts of jokes to take the step from being funny to being laugh-out-loud hilarious.

I could go on and really quote everything in the article and point out how great the lines are and why i liked them, but I feel that would be a waste of time since we both know what you have here is very funny.

Now, I will offer these points of criticism. First and foremost, the one thing that stood out to me while reading was your use of oxymoron blue links. You use this technique in multiple places in order to make sexual and other jokes. It was fairly the first time, maybe the second, but after that the jokes felt really forced. One of these is fine (I'm referring to all of these bluelinks, not just the sexual ones), however using as many as you do really disrupts the narration of the article, The reader either consciously or unconsciously realizes that the author realizes that the article is a piece of satire. The real humor in this article comes from the oxymoronic statements of propaganda. The reason it is so funny is because the article is written from the perspective of someone writing on behalf of the government of West Timor. If you have too many of these bluelinks, it breaks down this narrative. although it doesn't detract really very much from the overall humor of the article, these jokes fall completely flat. The one that really fell flat the most was the link to the Dali Lama. It is much more humorous if you make these jokes in the oxymoronic manner in which you did throughout the article. It should be fairly obvious to the reader that a totalitarian regime that says conquer could very well be inferencing genocide. For example: This: "was built by enslaved East Timorese who were in no way forced to work; they volunteered." is much funnier than say this: "was built by volunteers". I would use this blue link technique here: "victorious feelings" and no where else.

That is really the only criticism I have of the article as it is written. This 9.5 is the highest humor score I have given out on a pee review to date, very well done!

Concept: 9 Very, very good satire of totalitarianism! I really like what you've done here, especially the accuracy and underlying plausibility of the situation you've crafted. Instead of using say, North and South DirkaDirkastan which are completely fictional, you've done your research and found an area of the world the has real tensions; the real country of East Timor, the real province of Indonesia West Timor, and the dutch history of West Timor. I must say this extremely clever how you've created this as a critique of North Korea and other totalitarian states in a fictional, but plausible manner.

Now here are my suggestions for making this perfect. Make a section about the economy of the country. You touch on the subject a little in places, but a full section on it would really round out the piece in my opinion. Perhaps putting it between Proud Culture and East Timor.

Along these same lines, I really felt that an allegory for the United States was missing from the article, and I also felt like the extremely obvious way to appraoch this concept would be to use Indonesia as the "Western Imperial Power" per se, as Indonesia is indeed west of West Timor and you even refer to it as Imperialist in one or two places. I would definitely encourage you to include this in some way throughout the article. Remember, the North Koreans view South Korea and the US equally as their enemies.

I would caution you to be very careful with any editing you do: try and keep as much material that you currently have as possible.

Prose and formatting: 8.5 There a grammar errors throughout, but I believe these were mostly intentional and they really enhance the humor of the whole piece, so this does not detract from your score at all, however, I felt compelled to point it out.

OK, so basically my critique of your prose goes along the lines of what I addressed earlier in the humor section; your use of oxymoronic bluelinks as jokes actually detracts from the tone you've set throughout quite a bit. Rectifying this should be a number one priority for any edits you do to this piece.

Secondly, I feel as though the right, left, right, left alignment of your pictures is a little too predictable for the eye. I would encourage you to move just one of the images to the opposite side of the article. Another suggestion would be the addition of another image in addition to what you have here going along with any new sections you may add (such as "economy" and so forth) that does not follow this right, left, right, etc formula. To me this is sort of like a teacher who makes a multiple choice test and uses a pattern for selecting answers. That probably makes no sense, but at any rate I think doing this will make the article more visually stimulating.

Images: 9 Very nice use of images! I'll go through and give you comments about each one.
  • Map: lol, this looks like a map from the old Windows 95 Encarta. Not a bad thing, I just have memories of using that for homework in school. I would also load those maps into MS Paint and create my own countries, much in the fashion you've done here. Anyway, this is a quality image. I like the caption too.
  • Palace: the image is pretty average, but the caption is terrific! I think I quoted this earlier in the humor section. This caption personifies everything you did right with this article.
  • Pretty good photochop, don;t know if you made the image yourself, but nicely done. This image is great for illustrating the article too. Caption is average, but adequate.
  • Again, average image, very applicable. I feel the caption could be improved more, perhaps more oxymoronic humor?
  • This was actually really funny. Not sure if this is a picture of East Timor's president, but I assume it is based on your adherence to factual accuracy where necessary in the article. The caption is very funny too.

All in all I like what you've done with the images. Again, any new sections or lengthening of the article will require the addition of an image or two, but I have full faith that you will choose good images and supply funny captions.

Miscellaneous: 9.75 My level of enjoyment from reading the article (my highest miscellaneous score to date!)
Final Score: 45.75 Well, congratulations, you are now the official holder of the highest review score ever given out by Skinfan13! I thoroughly enjoyed this article and reviewing it was quite fun. Some article's are very hard to review and take me a long time to do so, but this took me a little under 3 hours to do with slight breaks. This may be one of the funniest articles I've read on Uncyc and I wish my writing was up to this level of humor. With that said, if you ignore any of the suggestions I've made but one, please, please, Please get rid of the oxymoron blue link jokes (besides the one I pointed out). This article would be absolutely brilliant without them. Adding the economics section and the US allegory through Indonesia would make me happy, but certainly aren't necessary to make this a VFH. Speaking of, please let me know when you are done editing this and are satisfied with a final product so I can nominate this for VFH! I would nominate it right now, but I respect the fact that you came to PEEING looking for suggestions to make the article better so I will alot you the time to do so before I nominate this. Again, well done! If you need anything at all, I'm just a message away.
Reviewer: --Sir Skinfan13 Talk {< CUN RotM FBotM VFH ΥΣΣ Maj. SK >} 21:26 EST 30 Mar, 2010