User:Monika/pls11

I wanted to give writers a chance to respond before I actually assigned places, but this took longer than expected, so time's short. Anyway, if any authors do want to respond before I assign places, please start up the talk page.

These are in the order I reviewed them in. It means nothing.

User:HauntedUndies/UnBooks:Uecil, the "special" apple

I'm not sure what the joke is.

I see a fake children's book. It tells the classic Ugly Duckling story replacing ugly with “retarded”.

I don’t see the article’s raison d'être. What are you making fun of? Are you making fun of children’s books? People who use “retard” as a generic insult? Racists? Apples?

If you are making fun of children’s books, why? How? What’s the angle? You don’t rub the moral in even as much as real children’s books, so that’s not it. That would be the obvious thing, and something you could do, but there are plenty of ways you could approach this. But you do need to actually pick a way to approach this.

The story is badly written, but it’s not “badly written” in a way that is a well-written mockery of badly written stories – that is, it doesn’t seem deliberate; it seems accidental. You have accidentally written a story that sounds like a badly written children’s book. What you need to do is purposely write a story that sounds like a badly written children’s book.

The fine points

Images

The projection of the cover art onto the book cover is distractingly incorrect.

So is the projection of the images and page text onto the open book. The open book also looks nothing like the closed book. The open book is also very long and has loose sheets of paper stuck between pages, and is old and has staining on the cover - why did you make that choice?

Aliasing everywhere.

Why did you scale the images 84.6%? Why not make the images in the size you wanted, or at least choose some reasonable scale factor?

At least you made the images yourself, instead of, say, scanning the images from a book you found and hoped no one had heard of because it's foreign. So you have that going for you.

Text format

There's no reason to embed all your text in images.

Why do you switch between fully justified and flushed left? The answer should be "because I realized justified is horrible" but there's still the question of why anything was justified to begin with and why you didn't go back and fix it after you realized your mistake.

Your relationships between punctuation marks and quotation marks are all over the place. At first I was happy that you weren't blindly applying the rule that was first enacted because movable type printing presses broke easily, but then I realized that your decisions weren't actually principled, and that was annoying.

And sentence fragments. Quite a few and they don't feel artistic and deliberate enough to pass.

Page format

There's no reason why all of that couldn't be on one page. We're not a blog that makes money based on page hits and therefore make more money using the slideshow format. If you insist on spreading this out over several pages, there are better examples out there, but seriously, don't. One page. All you need.

User:RAHB/Timothy Leary's Psychedelic Bed And Breakfast

This is obviously incomplete. I’m going to try to give it a penalty for that and then separate that from other criticisms, but we’ll see how well that works.

The thing that stood out to me the most is "In 1968, fresh off his twenty-fourth prison sentence" – His prison sentence started in 1970. He had only started doing drugs in 1960. If the joke was that he’d been studying psychology 24 years prior (approximately correct) that needs to be a bit clearer. If that’s a sloppy mistake, it’s significant – I recommend working out a timeline for yourself.

I also recommend tying it in to as much true history as possible anyway, so that timeline’s a good idea anyway. Bring in real people and quote them saying things they almost actually said, things like that.

I like the implication that drug hallucinations can be used to explain reality, such as in the description of the escape. Commit to it hard.

I’d like to see a little more context switching between scientist mode and dirty hippy mode, but not at the cost of having it sound like it was written by someone with a non-neutral perspective. You’re doing a decent job at this so far, so keep it up.

Images

The first one seems needlessly filtered in photoshop, perhaps to hide the low resolution and bad jpegery of the source image. The change in saturation works well and so does the added chickenhat. The addition of the swing is difficult to see and easily overlooked. A carnival-style swing might be easier to see. The pamphlet holder looks suspiciously like the tail end of cartoon-version Alice in Wonderland, except her skirt is now too short to cover her ass when she’s in crawling position.

I couldn’t immediately find the source for the second image, but it has more resolution/jpeg issues than the first one and they aren’t hidden by filters this time. Anyway, not really a big deal unless you were being judged on the quality of the image (but filters wouldn’t be the solution, really). On the things you can fix side, it could use shadows and a well-done reflection of the blender on the table would be awesome.

User:Zombiebaron/wip/UnBooks:Zombiebaron's Adventure Home From Asia

Disqualified for lack of images. And to a lesser extent, content. I know the feeling... Best of luck in finishing it.

User:DrStrange/UnNews:Lingerie Football a big hit in America but draws the ire of PETA and NOW

This felt rushed and phoned in. You do better work all the time.

You set up a pussy and beaver joke, and then you make that same joke repeatedly. I’m usually a proponent of taking a concept and taking it as far as it can go, but this doesn’t seem to have the legs to pull it off. Furthermore, too many of the punny one-liners don’t even make sense, which drags the whole thing down.

There are plenty of things you could do or could do better. Many of them are in the article you cite. One thing that it looks like you started to do but then gave up on was having the NOW bitches bitch about things that aren’t actually sexist when there are plenty of sexist things to actually complain about. One thing you didn’t even touch on is the part in the cited article about the girls who are doing this complaining that this is the only venue where they can play football and if they had any other options, they’d choose something less sexist. That is a perfectly good excuse to get your misogyny on and write about that.

Images

The images are too big. That is, they are the perfect size to start editing, because having them that big allows you do do things like disguise disparities in native resolution, relative noise, and lighting, all of which are current problems. I’m assuming that you intend to fix them up at that size and then shrink them. If you’re were not planning to, well, now you can pretend that you were.

Details

The wording is a little strange in some places. Here are the ones that stuck out the most:

changing the familiar “red zone” near an opponents goal line to the “pink zone”. - What changed? If the only thing that changed is the name, there’s a word for that: rename.

balls round here – Even if you’re trying to make a joke about footballs not being round, it works as ’round since that, like, makes sense and all.

"Los Angeles Temptation" – Why is this in quotes? It’d be better in italics or bolded or both. Come up with some convention for player names and team names. Be consistent about it though. Also, why are all the things in quotes that are supposed to be in quotes also in italics? That’s just distracting

Players Responses - That’s just sloppy.