User talk:Coltonblue

Welcome!

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:

• Beginner's Guide
• How to be funny and not just stupid

If you read anything at all, make it the above two links. If you want to find out more about Uncyclopedia or need more help with something, try these:

• About Uncyclopedia and The five pliers of Uncyclopedia
• How to get started editing on uncyclopedia
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I hope you enjoy editing here and being an Uncyclopedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~) or use the "sign" button () above the edit box. This will automatically produce your name and the date.

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

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)