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2.11
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Well, Mattfca, it looks like you've undertaken a project of ancient Greek proportions. I'm just not sure if those proportions are Herculean or Sisyphean. Black Metal has sat on Uncyclopedia for years as a pile of IPcruft. It's been the worst kind of article we have: collaboratively edited in ten-minute bursts, with no one providing any kind of oversight at all. Just a general feeling of "Hey, want to make a gay joke about your favorite band? Well, get out your ==section header== and have at it!"
So, you want to be the gatekeeper to this thing, now? You're a brave man. Nine times out of ten, when you come across IPcruft, it's better just to write your own article in userspace from scratch, nominate the IPcruft article at VFD, and ask if it's cool to move your page into that slot.
It looks like you're responsible for roughly 30% of the content on this page. But this is a Pee Review of the article, not of your work, so I'm not going to make any effort to distinguish between what you wrote and what others wrote.
All right. Let's take this section by section.
- The Introduction: 2
- Whoops templates: 1. Right away, we see one of the hallmarks of IPcruft: way too many fucking templates. Some IP puts up a "whoops" template, and another IP comes along and says "Hey, I think I can do better." So does he change the template to something funnier? Nope. He just adds his own right under it. "Shit" is uninspired, "Clowns" is worse, and "Bat Fuck Insane" is the worst kind of listcruft - whoring a popular article for no particular reason.
- Evil templates: 1. These things never, ever, ever, ever improve an article.
- Quotes: 4. The God and Lucifer quotes are fine. I see a bad Wilde quote was recently removed, which is good. Tufnel, Dr. Phil, and Marilyn Manson are stupid, worthless listcruft that does nothing but postpone the start of the article. Kill them.
- The actual lede: 2. Right off the bat, the first two sentences are missing articles, as though they were written by a Japanese foreign exchange student. Not a good sign. The first sentence is weak; the Hamlet joke is awful. The second paragraph starts off okay, but breaks out of mock-encyclopedic tone to express the personal opinion of probably some IP. Taking "black metal" literally and talking about metal is pointless, since that's not the concept of the article. The Swedes and Norwegians joke is something I don't understand; if it stays, it shouldn't get its own paragraph.
- Origins: 2. So the article has now told us that Black Metal was founded by both Hamlet and Countess Bathory. Neither are funny. The first sentence is otherwise okay, but pretty damn wordy. The stuff about Quorthon "rediscovering" it (centuries before Bathory lived or Hamlet was written) is absurd and not funny. Why - why?? - is there a chocolate chip cookie in here? The second paragraph is even worse; it's apparently just an exercise in making stuff up off the top of the head. It may as well say "Black metal was the drug taken by the high priestess Pookempi when she hadn't had her afternoon tea, which was really made up of biscuits and gravy." Funny? No. The Abba joke is okay and salvageable. Couldn't tell you why there's a picture dropped right smack into the middle of the section like an ugly brick. The sex joke is all right - it starts off as another "metalheads suck" screed, but the lyric is funny. And, okay. Now I have to put this in bold print and capital letters for emphasis:
- WHY THE FUCK ARE THE CARE BEARS BEING MENTIONED AS THOUGH THEY REALLY EXISTED???
- Yes, I can see that that existed before you touched the article, but that's exactly what your task is if you decide to salvage this article: get that kind of stuff out!! I say this often in Pee Reviews, but I just can't repeat it enough: every article must take place in a coherent alternate universe. Always. At least, almost always: Bat Fuck Insane may be the only exception. Really, that sentence is what about two thirds of HTBFANJS boils down to. What's the universe we're setting this in? Is it a place where black metal is actually an ancient religious movement? Is it a place where black metal is widely accepted by the public? Is it a place where metalheads are the most incredibly lame people in the world? Is it the real universe, but just from a very sarcastic person's point of view? That's up to you, as the author, to decide. But what it just can't be is a place where all pop culture icons are real and dates are meaningless. That alternate universe has proven to be the unfunniest place imaginable. In that alternative universe, we've learned, for example, that peanut butter is the sex lube that Mario and Luigi stole from Optimus Prime in 13,000,001 A.D. Funny? NO!
- ...moving on. 50 Cent is gay. Bleah.
- Black Metal of Today: 5. Starting off by insulting the article's likely audience is a risky strategy. Yes, a good roast can be hilarious, but going to an article about something you like and learning that you suck often (as the talk page indicates) provokes a different response than laughter. The first sentences hint at a conflict between old metalheads and young metalheads; that might be a good concept to explore. The paragraph on the ethics of discussing black metal (if you like the genre, you are required to say that every band in the genre sucks) is actually pretty funny. The misspelling stuff is a solid concept but it's not utilized as well as it should be.
- Goats in Black Metal: 1. And... wow. Now we're in a completely different alternate universe, a completely different concept, a completely different article. More of the worst possible IP cruft. Maybe this is the time to remind you that it is in no way impolite to erase the contributions of people who have made shitty contributions. In fact, it may just be impolite not to.
- How to tell Black metal from Death metal: 2. Okay, well, the first paragraph is pure IPcruft crap. A "list of random things various people worship" is in no way funny. The second paragraph isn't much better: I can't tell if it's in-jokey or just incoherent. The third paragraph: maybe. I mean, at least now we're actually talking about the topic of the article. The fourth paragraph is also a little incoherent; the first sentence immediately contradicts itself, and not in a way with any comic timing. The randomness at the end works a little better, because the joke is that Black Metal lyrics are random and incoherent.
- National Socialist Black Metal: 1. I don't know if there really is Nazi Black Metal, but if there is, some pretty funny things could be said about it. This pile of listcruft includes none of those things. Also, it doesn't look like you finished formatting this list; it still has the "-" marks in it.
- Black Metal Ist Krap: 7. Wow. This is like a whole new article dropped into the middle of a pre-existing article. That's not good. It should be mentioned that if you use # to create your lists instead of *, the software will keep track of the numbering for you and it will look a lot better. Okay, for the first time, this stuff is fairly well-written and coherent. But no one is going to seriously read a list of 21 things. As a general rule, using lists in articles is risky, and should be avoided except where they clearly make things funnier. In this case, the list format adds nothing: this should be a narrative. This list is nearly article-length all on its own. Really, I think it should be moved to HowTo:Write Black Metal, taken out of list form and put into a narrative - and after that was done and it got a quick review, it would have the potential to become the article that Black Metal redirects to.
- Spelling and Diction in Black Metal: 5. Maybe. The list works a little better here, because it escalates: "Wait, why do that, when you can do that?" But the problem is that it tells one joke and it tells it for a very long time. Brevity is... wit.
- How to write Black lyrics: 2 Ugh. We already covered this!! Two sections above, item #9. Same joke, only briefer and told better. See, that's another problem with IPcruft: they don't read each others' work.
- Can I play Black Metal?: 3. It's almost pointless to review this paragraph, because no one will ever get this far into the article. If I hadn't been snorting cocaine and masturbating furiously this whole time, I know I couldn't have. Okay. So we have a run-on sentence and a repeated joke. Then we have something about symphony orchestras that's actually kind of funny. The "all the lyrics are actually nice things to say" contradicts the rest of the article and doesn't work in this context. Then we have a link to an enormous 101-item list. Seriously?? We haven't read enough listcruft already? Seriously?? And then we have a conclusion, which is absurd, because it is impossible to draw a conclusion from incoherence.
- References: whatever. I don't think anyone is going to be committed enough to this article to click on all the references and go back and forth reading them. The "gay" template has absolutely no place being here.
- See Also: bleah. Strip this down to the best five articles and it can stay.
Okay. So that's 2+2+5+1+1+7+5+2+3/9 = 3.11. Nope. Not a good score. And I'm taking off a point because the section that got a 7 is buried so deep that very few people will ever see it. Fact is, this article is just way too long.
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pillow talk 17:25, 11 July 2008 (UTC)