Not a full-sized one – we just happen to have a significant number of entry revisions to pump online. Roll call:

• RUNAWAYS. This is the main one. Gareth has revisited, modernised, updated and reorganised his entries. This impact the following :
  • There’s now a general Runaways team entry covering the basics, so we don’t rehash material in every entry.
  • Chase Stein
  • Gertrudes Yorkes
  • Karolina Dean
  • Victor Mancha
  • Nico Minoru
  • Molly Hayes
  • There will be some more all-new Runaways-related entries over Q1 2012.
• SANDMAN. Our old entry for Dr. Garrett Sanford, the third Sandman, has been entirely redone. In order to correctly explain the (fairly complex) material, we have also written up his… colourful foes and allies. New and revised entries :
  • Sandman (Dr. Sanford)
  • General Electric aka Commander Video
  • The Tyrannical Count aka the Malignant Brain
  • Bizarre Alien-Dimensional Soldiers
  • Doctor Spider
  • Brute and Glob
• The full-text research engine — accessible from the “Parse” button in the left-hand column on every page — wasn’t catching all entries. Its province has been greatly expanded, though there’s still missing the most recent entries due to a server issue.
• We’ll also sneak in two entries from large current arcs :
  • THE ORDER. In this batch, Gareth presents Aralune.
  • SOUL CALIBUR. In this batch, Tom presents Kilik.
• The section about Lyta Hall‘s possible blood ties with the Kindly One has been rearranged for clarity.

4,805 entries. Look at that !

Our hosting provider had a rare filer issue on the 2nd of February, which resulted in the site being briefly down several times (and the search engine being out).

It should be fixed now.

There’s been some delay, mostly because the so-called “normal” pace of work at writeups.org is difficult to maintain. This is largely a result of our lack of manpower, so remember that we’re always interested in new persons joining the community, if only to comment and otherwise help with stuff.

Roll call:

• The minor entry for the green, talking Marvel Universe harpies was upgraded (texts and illustrations). Ditto for their buddy Menœtius, and for their employer the Huntsman of Zeus.
• The illustrations, layouts and texts for Dr. Lansing have also been redone. If you’re starting to suspect we got ahold of the TPB reprint of early The Champions issues, thou are correct.
• In the same vein our entry for Rampage (Stuart Clarke) was entirely redone – new illustrations, rewritten texts, and stats slightly polished.
• More Marvel entries got upgraded a bit based on last year’s Captain America sourcebook (additional illustration, official height and weight, etc.) :
  • Adonis
  • Agron (texts also rewritten for style/clarity)
  • TESS-One (texts also rewritten for style/clarity)
  • Warrior Woman
• Our old entry for Synth (from Aztek) was curiously bad, and was rewritten.
• Gareth has a new arc of writeups about the well-regarded-but-low-selling series from 2007/2008, the Order. In this batch we have both the general entry for the team (as we do nowadays for clarity and brevity) and a full profile for team leader Anthem.
• The entry for Nemesis (Soseh Mykros) got a clearer title, some stats tweaks, reworked texts, a new lead illustration, etc.
• Tom has written up the famous Ivy, from Soul Calibur games. Furthermore, Yoshimitsu now has his full allotment of illustrations
• The first entry for Fury (Hippolyta Hall) was rewritten. Again. It’s a good training ground to sharpen’s one ability to write clearly about complex things. So now we have :
  • Fury (Lyta Hall) – first entry covering the Infinity, Inc. era. Texts rewritten, improved art.
  • Fury (Lyta Hall) – second entry covering the Sandman appearances. Texts rewritten.
  • Fury (Lyta Hall) – third entry covering the subsequent events. Texts rewritten.
• Beangle, a PC from one of Ethan’s very old campaigns
• New banner for Paula Brooks’ second entry (as the Huntress) albeit one depicting her with a more, uh, modern costume and physique.
• Very quick touchup to the Fang entry to better indicate that it’s benchmarking notes. I’m adding such notes to old entries when possible – I assumed the age of articles was obvious, but I guess it’s not the case when you’re not part of the process.
• WONDER WOMAN. This arc has slowed down, but there’s still material to cover. In this batch, the powerful space gladiatrix Theana.
• Another round of illustrations from the original OHOTMU A-Z Marvel handbooks. The fuller edition is now being reissued as softcover trade paperbacks, for those of you who couldn’t afford the very cool hardcover run. Buy ‘em ! Note that several of those are the shot we already had, but with modern colouring and printing. Roll call (and yes, some of these writeups.org entries are very old):
  • Gravity
  • High Evolutionary (with some recoulouring since the Marvel version apparently ran into a problem)
  • Hood
  • Hyperion
  • Jester
  • Kylun
  • Locust
  • Looter
  • Machine Man
  • Machinesmith
  • Mad Thinker
  • Magdalene
  • Midnight II
  • Mr. Sinister
• We’re also occasionally replacing some classic Marvel Handbook illustrations – the 1980 stuff – with high-res scans from TSR’s old Gamer’s Handbook to the Marvel Universe. These are just the same pictures in a much higher quality, though. One example is the Scarlet Scarab II, where the TSR picture (well-printed on good paper) also served as a guide to restore the original colour of the Scarab’s garb – which had shifted to hot pink since red inks didn’t age very well in comic books back then.
• Gwangi (the carnosaur from the 1969 movie Valley of Gwangi) has had its writeup upgraded by Ethan.
• Ethan’s Tangled entry for this batch is Maximus. Not the gladiator – that was another movie – but the horse.
• Years ago, the entry for Titanium Man was the first of a new generation of writeups, being very large and filled with tons of stuff – to a degree not matched by previous writeups. But now, we organise things differently.
  Thus, the texts have be rewritten, the illustrations improved, the layout and organisation clarified, and the entry was broken into smaller, more focused writeups : entry 1 (1960s and 1970s), entry 2 (1980s and 1990s) and – you’ll never guess ! – entry 3 (current).
• And as long as we’re discussing Cold War Soviet villains from the Marvel Universe, let’s have Gareth’s profile for the Red Ghost. And since we believe in primate rights, each of the famous Super-Apes (Peotor, Mikhlo and Igor) has his own entry.
• Polished the illustrations for our semi-old Tarantula (Alvarez) entry and our old Tarantula (Law) entry, for no discernible reason.
• The entry for Col. Kira Nerys (Star Trek) has been revisited and large chunks redone.

  4,797 entries as of now.

A quick activity report for the site for 2011 (using the Google definitions of terms):

- Close to a quarter-million unique visitors (230,400) over 2011

- The million pageviews that was hoped for was handily beaten at 1,255,400. Keep in mind that navigation pages (say, research results) count as pageviews, so it’s not one-and-a-quarter-million entries read.

- The core readership remains in the US, though the most dedicated readers remain on average the French and Spanish ones. Here’s the Top 20 of WORG readership by country :

- The entries for the Trunchbull and Iori Yagami were the most popular in 2011, followed by Giganta and Sheldon Cooper. The Trunchbull and Cooper seem to be the result of a link posted on some community sites, whereas Giganta and Yagami also seem to be doing well in search engines. Wonder Woman (Karate mod era) and Batwoman (Katherine Rebecca Kane) follow, after that the readership tends to disperse.

- A link on Cracked.com (about the aforementioned Wonder Woman article) and a link on movies.ign.com (about Blackout, the Ghost Rider villain) have been the – modest – highlights of our 2011 media presence, bringing in a few thousands readers.

- Presence on forum and social networks remains the more effective way to draw in more visitors (as are links in Wikipedia entries, though we don’t add those ourselves since some Wikipedia editors hate this with all-consuming hatred). Too few writeups.org fans do it, though – but even one person mentioning links on blogs, tweets, posts, status updates, etc. generally has a good impact. You know what to do !

And we’re back to our ordinary green selves.

The DC Adventures work continues, the main goal remaining to establish coherent standards and usages before there are hundreds of entries to revise for coherence (and we’re close to a hundred now).

Significant progress has been made, with full explanations in the Usage Notes & New Rules for DCA page :

• Details and notation for Growth, specifically low Ranks of Permanent Growth various huge characters have.
• A new Advantage called Rapid Fire, to Multiattack with ordinary weapons. It’s a rare case, but presenting such characters in a clean and simple way was a thorn in our side.
• There is new material about the Second Chance Advantage, both in our discussion of usage for defensive powers and in the OMACS II document.
• We’ve formalised and improved our take on non-superhuman Powers – usually fighting techniques and other schticks. There’s full explanation with examples about this approach to emphases the cool signature actions of certain characters and organise the character sheet.

Within the entries themselves :

• The Powers are now much more heavily commented in all the DCA entries of the site, and look clearer and more structured. The idea is to make it clearer to the readers what the rationale for the various Effects, Advantages, Skills, etc. within a Power is even if they don’t read the Powers & Abilities section.
• As with most sweeps to upgrade DCA writeups as we learn, there were also numerous small improvements throughout the entries.
• Characters with a signature paired-weapons fighting style (Vicious, Black Lotus, Pistolera) have their techniques presented in a new left hand/right hand format. It’s cleaner and makes situations where they only have one weapon easier and more interesting to handle.
• Large characters now have Growth to help drive the point home, and some characters with an extraordinary body density now have that represented as a Feature.
• The description of the most interesting changes can be found at the Wonderful Writeups.Org Thread Over At The Atomic Think Tank, starting here.

Our Generic Gnoll Warrior from Everquest now has DCA stats since those guys were the catalyst for the Growth progress.

Small change of background colour for the day – except on this page – as part of the anti-SOPA awareness campaign.

Those not aware of the SOPA problems can simply go to any Wikipedia page today.

There’s been a lot of obscure, generic villains with short entries lately – since that’s what many Game Masters need. Of course that probably won’t interest people who only click on names they know, but we can’t do much on that front.

Roll call:

• Buddy, the strange hero from the gonzo post-apocalypse movie Six-String Samurai. A master of swordsmanship and rock ‘n’ roll.
• STOCK PROFILES. A series of improvements based on the discussion that took place in late November :
  • One new article with three profiles – stock bodyguards. The range of stock NPCs now look about complete. Well, at least when it comes to action-oriented stories – were the site about historical romance the stock NPC articles would be different.
  • The stock police article has been upgraded and enriched
  • A few minor changes here and there, mostly technical
• The old entry for Amanda Waller has been completely redone and is now way, way more extensive. Given the differences in interpretation of this landmark and complex character, the article is specifically about the character as written by John Ostrander and Kim Yale.
• As long as we’re in a Suicide Squad mood, Gareth completely overhauled the Count Vertigo entry, turning it into a full modern writeup.
• As a consequence of the latter, the Vertigo Power has been added to the writeups.org New Powers file for DC Heroes. We’ve also added two bits used in several entries (Fluid Form (Only to Squeeze Through)) and Kinetic Absorption (Structural Damage Only), though we continue to be quite deliberate – even plodding – with these pages for workflow reasons.
• Salwa of Bana-Mighdall, a sample DC Universe Online character because the worgmeister actually spent several hours playing silly video games instead of publishing stuff on the site !
• JIHAD. By Gareth and in this batch:
  • Badb
  • Jaculi II
• TANGLED. With Rapunzel finalised (more illustrations were added), Ethan continues describing the main characters in Disney’s Tangled, starting with Flynn Rider (not his real name).
• SOUL CALIBUR. And in another arc, Tom covers Yoshimitsu – also well-known to Tekken players.
• The entry for Ah Keung (Jackie Chan) has been slightly revised for style and clarity. The entry for Karlak of Mu was also slightly revised, mostly to include a link toward Marvunapp.com’s recent article about Mu.
• WAR THAT TIME FORGOT. One of the last entries from that arc – the Great White Ape, an albino King Kong who beats up dinosaurs as a familial career. It’s a living.
• Current research revealed that White Tiger – the uplifted tigress – was an Isotope E New Man, whereas our entry hypothesised she might be an Isotope C one. The mistaken hypothesis has been replaced by the correct information.
• UNIVERSE AZ. The entry for Fairchild/Marvel Girl II has been updated.
• Our entries for the Thing have been slightly modernised and have been more explicitely noted as being old (12+ years) benchmarking notes.

And 4,784 entries. As a number, it looks kinda random.

Another small set of DC Adventures stats as the discussion continues about usage, conventions and certain complex characters. Roll call:

• Puck (Eugene Judd)
• Colossus (Piotr Rasputin)
• Beast (Henry McCoy) (Early)
• Beast (Doctor Henry McCoy) (Classic)
• Angel (Warren Worthington III) (Early)
• Cyclops (Scott Summers) (Early)
• The Word
• His daughter Ultima
• The first three writeups for Jack Monroe have been dual-statted, whereas only the third one was previously done. 1950s Bucky, 1970s Bucky, early Nomad.

Another short round of mostly new small things that fill out existing writeups arcs. Meanwhile, the search engine occasionally conks out for a few hours – usually it runs fine for five or six days, but it once collapsed after six hours. Still looking for a permanent fix.

• Big Daddy Dawson is baaack – this obscure character had a very bad writeups.org entry, so we’ve just radically overhauled the body, the engine, the suspension. Everything.
• JIHAD. Two more handy profiles by Gareth :
  • Rustam, the team leader
  • Agni, the firestarter
• Swift Otter is a terribly obscure WWII soldier from the Silver Age but heh, why not.
• HAYOTH. It’s now Golem‘s turn in the spotlight, thanks to Gareth.
• Improvements to the illustrations for Christine St. Clair, because we care a lot. Also added a good Chuck Norris shot to the Scott James entry.
• DC ADVENTURES Slight revision to our standard groups of Descriptors (“penetrating” already means something else in the game system), entries edited to now have Advantages and Skills from Powers and Devices in italics in the main list (as per official notation), some few bits of polishing to a dozen entries.
• SOUL CALIBUR. This time its Xianghua‘s turn on Tom’s workbench.
• SUICIDE SQUAD. Yet another Rick Flag entry – but this time it’s Rick Flag Sr., the wartime Captain, as a companion entry to our Suicide Squadron entry.
• YOUNG JUSTICE. Bryan’s entry for the animated Young Justice arc in this batch is Amazo.

So, 4,775 entries.

A small one – there’s been a lot of output on the community space lately (about two entries a day) so it’s best to get stuff published before I fall behind. Roll call:

• Connor MacLeod, as played by Christophe Lambert in the first Highlander movie and as written up by Pur_See_i8 and Caliburn.
• OMACS II. The equivalencies system between M&M and DCH continues to be enhanced and polished as our Atomic Think Tank work goes on.
• One last round of edits to our Zen writeup (Yanin “Jeeja” Vismistananda in Chocolate).
• WAR THAT TIME FORGOT. This batch has two more minor entries from our early Dinosaur Island arc :
  • The second G.I. Robot prototype, “Mac”
  • Dino the pink baby pterosaur
• HAYOTH. Gareth continues his guided tour of the super-groups in DC’s Middle-East with Hayoth’s field leader, Ramban.
• Roy redid some of the illustrations for our alternate version of Isaiah Bradley.
• MAN-BEAST. Another servant of the Man-Beast as we slooooowwwly advance this one – Rhodan, the Master of the Hounds of Helios !
• One last new banner for the post-resurrection Paul Kirk entry.
• One new bit of concept art for Grace from the CGW. These Dark Horse entries are still scheduled for a rewriting… within a few years.
• SOUL CALIBUR. Our very old entry for Voldo has finally been completely redone, thanks to Tom.
• Another v2 – the post-Crisis version of Colonel Rick Flag, Jr. This is now a full entry covering everything up to the destruction of Jotunheim rather than quick notes.
• YOUNG JUSTICE (TV). We continue Bryan’s arc :
  • Sportsmaster now has his full contingent of illustrations (my bad)
  • The Genomorphs, artificial life created at Cadmus Labs.
• Our entry for Yasemin Soze has been modified a bit after some discussion.
• The Universe AZ version of the Superman-like Kaleb of Hydros is no longer confined to a sidebar at the end of the entry for the DC version – he now has his own entry.

4,768 entries. I put a comma in so it looks bigger.