User:Bleu Ninja

From Homestar Runner Wiki

Current revision as of 17:32, 30 May 2024

Been a fan of H★R for years and years, and it has had a nigh-incalculable influence on my sense of humor and speech patterns. Mostly I do gnome work here around on the Wiki.

Also: I've made it onto yonder website twice times!

LEGO Cheat Commandos on the Weekly Fanstuff

Coach Z 'stume on the Fan Costumes

[edit] Might-Coulds

Various elements of wiki editorship that I feel vaguely strongly about.

[edit] Articles

Things that the wiki could potentially have an article about someday. Or not.

• Cosplay
  • Mentioned in 3 Times Halloween Funjob, Teen Girl Squad Issue 11, I Killed Pom Pom, Fan 'Stumes 2019. Not a particularly notable word choice, though, is it?
• Strong Bad being called "Strongbad" (b/w Strong Badia being called "Strongbadia")
  • Brought this in to Poorly Written Emails. Not super article-worthy outside of that.
  • Out-of-universe, "Strongbad" or "StrongBad" showed up in Run Devil Run, Penguin Brothers, Wonka Vision, The Brunswickan, the Alamo Drafthouse event page, and the 20th Anniversary Show event page.
• Multiple exclamation points!!
  • This is a minor but distinctive writing gag on par with Lowercase i's with how much it subtly shows up when one exclamation mark will do (see: Strong Bad Email Page Titles). Probably too hard to search for and document, and not that notable.
• The Far Side
  • Not quite enough instances (Sketchbook (video), Jibblies 2, Decemberweenvent Calendar) for notability. But if they make one more joke about it, it's go time!
• Interviews that mention South Park
  • Too trivial for an article or category but, especially in the early 00s, interviewers loved to make the comparison.
• Rename "Twitter" articles to "X"
  • Just kidding. That would be dumb.

[edit] Cleanups

Specific types of gnome work (and beyond) I like to do. Usually I hit "Random page" until I find something that has gone uncorrected since the Bush administration.

• Ledes
  • A lot of articles just have a giant lede, often a single rambling paragraph, caused by editors just appending a sentence when a new incidence occurs. I like to break those up with headers so articles aren't just a play-by-play of their filmography and can describe the subject more clearly.
• "Apparently"
  • Not to get all Giraffedata up in here but in the vast majority of cases such weasel-wordery can be avoided. It seems for years there was a trend to avoid being presumptuous, but it went too far to the point where articles are just short of "the Compy is presumably Strong Bad's computer, which he apparently uses to check emails". It's not a huge leap of logic to make the sort of assertions that are being elided; just drop the "apparently".
• Relying on in-universe rationale
  • Sort of related to the last one? It's fun to try and rationalize every inconsistency in a Marvel No-Prize sort of way, but a lot of times the answer is just "the Brothers Chaps changed their minds". Homestar didn't sell his old mushroom hut and move to a Peanuts-y house, they just decided to change where the fictional character lived. Sometimes DVD commentaries are improvised jokes, not hard-set canon. It's a neat thinking exercise to ponder how Homestar's eyes swivel around his skull to always face the viewer, but at the end of the day he's a two-dimensional cartoon and you should really just relax.
• "However"
  • A combo of the previous two. Overly rationalizing inconsistencies can lead to a "however, it could just be..." sentence appended to a statement - sometimes even right after another sentence starting with "however"! It's better to rewrite to say something like "There is inconsistency in [x]: in [y], [1]; in [z], [2]".

[edit] Disagreements

Things I disagree with Wiki consensus on but don't feel like fighting about. Don't feel obliged to make edits based on these on my behalf!

• The King of Town was made before Marshmallow's Last Stand
  • Its production style is much more rudimentary.
    • KOT makes heavy use of captions (like the kid's books, or Pom Pom, Too) and canned sound effects rather than narration. Apart from credits, MLS is fully voiced.
    • KOT has a noticeably slow pace, most of the cartoon is characters standing still while a sound effect plays. MLS is much more dynamic, with little "dead air" and characters moving and emoting even when not speaking.
    • KOT has a very simple art style, with next to no shading and very minimal broadly-colored backgrounds. MLS uses gradients, patterns, and much more detailed drawings and motion.
  • It makes more sense for the King and Poopsmith to have originated in KOT than MLS.
    • The Poopsmith's appearance in MLS includes his stained gloves and a poop pun. He is not identified as a "poopsmith" in MLS, his appearance and sign only make sense with the context of the KOT toon already existing.
    • "[The Poopsmith] originally was just going to be a one-off joke in the King of Town cartoon, [but then] we had him appear in a few other cartoons here and there."
    • The DVD commentary for KOT describes it as "the first cartoon that we ever put on the Homestar website" and "the cartoon that introduced the King of Town [and] the Poopsmith".
  • "But the disclaimer calls MLS 'the first cartoon we ever made'!" Sure, but elsewhere it'd been qualified as the "first full cartoon" or "the first cartoon we did for the site", both of which add ambiguity. "The first we ever made" obviously doesn't mean MLS predates First Flash, perhaps they didn't consider KOT as a full toon?
    • Both claims of KOT or MLS being a "first cartoon" come from the same DVD release. Maybe in the 6 years leading up to it, dozens (if not hundreds) of toons later, the production order of earliest things on the site got a bit fuzzy.
  • I suspect In Search of the Yello Dello predates MLS as well (in addition to the writing style again using a lot of captions and having that slow pace, it would make sense for Marzipan to debut here and then be a crowd-filler in MLS), but the Oldest Toons Menu implies that this isn't the case.
• Transcribing Diamonocle's pronunciation of "Dangeresque"
  • Writing his line from stunt double as "Danger-skew" may be phonetically correct but it does a poor job of illustrating the joke: that he's saying "Dangeres/que" instead of "Danger/esque", breaking the word into the wrong syllables. The subtitles for the game write it as "Danger-sque", and sometimes I've tried "Dangeres-queue", but neither of those are particularly good either.
  • With the introduction of Dagger Skew, it seems "Danger-skew" has been 'canonized', so to speak. Oh well!
• Sightings — especially user-generated subsections like "skins" or "web" — has outlived its usefulness and should be retired, locked as a historical archive.
  • In 2003, back in the days of webrings or banner links, learning that something referenced Homestar was novel and could lead to discovering a new time-wastin' site. Twenty years later, a vast majority of the sites have link-rotted away and a new sighting is, like, "a youtuber said jorb". I think it has value as a historical artifact, but... what's the point nowadays? Is anyone going to scroll through the 190+ Web Sightings, clicking all the way? When "Sightings" was created, sites like YouTube/Reddit/Twitter/Tumblr were a year or less old; nowadays if anyone's looking for H*R fan creations (or sightings!) they're gonna just search those platforms, which are also more conducive to sharing links or images!
  • Incidentally, School Sightings might could fall afoul of HRWiki:Youth protection... even if a lot of them are universities there's an "encourage kids to say what school they go to" thing goin' on there.
• Generally I favor fewer articles for one-off gags.
  • All of the "Decemberween Pageant" character articles could be deleted and merged into one of those tabled list pages.
  • I don't like a lot of the band articles where their only "appearance" is seeing an album cover in an easter egg but there's no musicians shown, songs named, or music heard. Why have an infobox if every field is "[unknown]"?
  • Get rid of the Tom Servo article, or at the very least merge it with MST3K. An unmoving silhouette sight gag does not a "character" make.
• "Pizza trolls" in pizza joint could be a reference to Logical Journey of the Zoombinis
  • I actually have greatly cooled on this over the years to the point where I think it's more unlikely than likely. When I first joined the wiki (!!) I remember being annoyed that it had already been discussed and rejected before I could contribute, plus I had not encountered the slang term "troll" before.
  • FOR: (1) the phrase "pizza troll" is very distinctive and seems to have exclusively been used by the game at that point (2) TBC have previously referenced Brøderbund's Carmen Sandiego games (3) both Zoombinis and Virtual Pizz are pixelated computer games
  • AGAINST: (1) the "trolls" look and act completely differently in VPdB and LJotZ (2) Zoombini's 1996 release date is a little late for TBC who primarily reference mid-80s/early-90s software; it's a children's game and by the time it came out in they were both in their twenties

[edit] Wiki features

Mostly a fantastical wishlist that I recognize won't be fulfilled. I don't see the wiki getting any serious backend updates, unless something seriously breaks.

• SVG image support
  • The vast majority of site elements are vector drawings. SVGs are often smaller file sizes and scale much better than raster images.
• Collapsible elements
• Multiple images in a single caption box
  • So I don't have to use the side-by-side span
• Ability to view filmographies in chronological order
  • It's very difficult tracking history or evolution of something when I have to either rely on my memory or open their entire filmography one tab at a time then manually sort.
• Wikipedia-style references, with automatic numbering of a reflist.
  • It'd be nice to avoid writing "In [toon]..." over and over again, and references could even include a relevant quote in a tooltip.
  • Even something as simple-ish as the Chapman articles, it quickly got annoying manually numbering refernces.