As a side note we have a tiny DeviantArt presence. That account was originally created to contact people to get authorisation to use their work, but I figured I might as well post some of the modelling and detouring we do. People who are on DA and like this stuff can thus find writeups.org, and though it’s tiny it has had surprisingly good feedback.

As always, and as with our small Pinterest board feel free to favourite, tag, repost, whatever the pieces you like — to spread the word. For convenience’s sake I’ve listed our social-media-thingies presence on the Links page of writeups.org. Generally folks on the Internet much prefer images to words, so pushing the illustrations a bit might help the site.

Furthermore, a fix was found for those sites that link to our entries with character encoding mistakes. I mean “found” in the litteral sense, since it was copy-paste coding at its finest using Jim’s solution. I can read his regexes… if you give me 20 minutes per line. More generally hundreds of 404s have been manually declared fixed to Google, and nearly all links you’ll find across the net to writeups.org now work – except for the really borked ones, or the pre-2004 ones.

Anyway. Few wholly new entries this time around, but a lot of entries getting overhauled as I run across them as part of my images embiggening work. Improving the pictures without improving the texts is often too hard to resist.

• CHARMED. More handy minor villains from Ethan’s coverage of the show – the three shapeshifter demons.
• The second and last part of our redone Peter Van Zante profile is up – after his career as the Water Wizard (a Ghost Rider villain), his time as Aqueduct (a New Warriors villain). Writeups.org is now one of the best Peter Van Zante reference sites in the world. Yeah, I’m impressed too.
• NEW RULES. The Foe Drawback has had one last-for-now round of polish and is now in the New Rules Files – Drawbacks.
• GREAT TEN. Small upgrade to Ghost Fox Killer‘s entry to add her ghost limousine and explain the Jade Lion and ghost army for all readers.
• VILLAINY INC. More entries had their illustrations rescanned and their texts redone for style/brevity:
  • Cyborgirl
  • Doctor Poison I
  • Giganta (Silver Age)
  • Giganta (Golden Age)
  • Which leads us to…
• The entry for Giganta (Dr. Doris Zeul) was fully rewritten for style (it was pretty bad), all the illustrations were rescanned, the history was extended to reach Flashpoint, and there are a few new illustrations. Since this entry is very popular it should have been done a long while ago but, well, stuff. It is now called Giganta (post-Crisis) to avoid confusion with other versions appearing post-Flashpoint or in the DC Legends continuity.
• I miss Human Defense Corps and it’s been ten years since that series. So the entry for Chaplain Charlie and its texts, stats and illustrations upgraded a bit.
• From time to time an entry pops up in the updates list without content change – usually it’s because I’ve change its name, and usually that’s because I forgot to list the actor for a TV/film character. The entry for the Greatest American Heroine is an example of such – though in this specific case I’m pretty happy of how the main shot now looks. It uses to be clearly low-res.
• The big entry for the Atomic Knights (1960 version) had its pictures processed per modern standards, but also had its texts revisited for style and brevity. Which might be the second such pass for this article, I’m not sure. Anyway, this is a cool entry and it has giant dalmatians.
• Lastly, the entry for the Creeper (1920s Parisian version) has been rewritten, upgraded and had its illustrations rescanned.

Headcount is now at 5,047.

More images work is ongoing. One thing is that, for variety’s sake, I am doing more rescans (starting with the big pile of hardcover Marvel handbooks behind my Macbook). This is also more efficient – rather than plough through images including the ones that will have to be rescanned, I get one rescan done right away. But though this is good for a change of pace, nothing occupies the ground like going through every entry in order.

Another image thing – all the banners and the full-size right-hand column images have been processed using a wonderful Photoshop™ plug-in — Noiseware, by Imagenomic (there’s a free trial). It’s a denoiser, which I use to erase and dampen most little artefacts from bad printing, bad ink, paper grain, bad scanning, and some image compression artefacts.

For those images where it has been used – it’s not suitable for *everything* – it makes it look as if the image had been printed using better machines on a better, glossier paper. Solid colours and regular gradients are no longer marred by little glitches and paper grain – you could call it a virtual reprint. Incidentally that makes images lighter (10%-ish), since the noise has been erased, so pages load faster. I’ve also recalibrated, upgraded and automated my Photoshop™ tools.

I don’t expect people to spontaneously notice, since it makes bad images look less bad and good images look like they should. As a random example, here is a side-by-side of a common result using my current tools and settings. The difference won’t make you fall out of your chair, but it does make the site looks slicker, and helps with providing the best pictures you’ll find anywhere for some characters.

But it still means that a lot of images gotta be redone – an image that has been processed with a professional algorithm from the ground up looks cleaner than an image that has been de-noised using my amateur techniques, then processed through Noiseware.

Of course, these tools cost – so heh, feel free to donate to help pay for improvements.

Anyway, there’s a *lot* of stuff this time around. Most of us have been too busy to write lately, but some weeks back Bryan finalised a lot of his articles.

• G.I. JOE. Our Joe entries are a/ very old and b/ adapted from MSHRRPGAS work by Firebomb, so upgrading them is considered a good thing here in Worgistan. Bryan went ahead, and now we have a full profile for that 1980s boyhood idol, Snake Eyes.
• FALLOUT. Continuing with the Fallout 2 companions, we now have :
  • Sulik
  • Cassidy
• Ethan wrote up the version of Grendel that was in the 2007 motion capture/CGI film by Robert Zemeckis.
• Bryan wrote up Andrew Detmer, the rogue telekine in the movie Chronicle.
• UNDERWORLD. Peter recently saw the first (2003) movie, so that’s a good occasion to compare notes about Selene and upgrade this pretty old entry for a bit. All illustrations redone, text rewritten for style/brevity/clarity, started making stats tweaks based on Peter’s analysis.
• VILLAINY INCORPORATED. The following entries had their illustrations rescanned, and their texts rewritten for style and brevity :
  • Our general Villainy, Inc. notes
  • Queen Clea (post-Crisis)
  • Queen Clea (pre-Crisis)
  • Trinity
  • Dr. Poison II
• DRAGONBALL. Been a while, nu. Bryan now presents an extensive writeup of the future version of Vegeta’s son Trunks, from the Androids-dominated timeline.
• NEW RULES. I finally noticed that the old Catfall Bonus for the Jumping Power was somehow missing from the New Bonuses document, so it’s in. It’s probably not final though, as there’s some discussion of Jumping going on.
• INVINCIBLE. Bryan also has an article about Universa, a minor villain.
• MASS EFFECT. Two fan-favourites and two upgrades :
  • Quarian Marine Kal’Reegar now gets a minor entry on writeups.org.
  • Jack (Subject Zero) gets a much larger one, covering Mass Effect 2
  • Plus an update to Joker‘s first entry to integrate the events from the recent Free Comic Book Day story.
  • Plus additional polishing for the first Mandala Shepard entry (mostly rewriting the “illusive generic Shepard’ section)
• INUYASHA. And finally we have Bryan’s second InuYasha article about, well, InuYasha. It’s a very comprehensive article with lots of stuff and pretty kanji.

A great big chunk of the publication work remains embiggening images rather than doing something cool such as, say, researching early Red Sonja. But even at 20 entries a day – which isn’t possible to do regularly – there are months of work, so sticking to it and grinding through is the most reasonable approach.

Of course once it’s done, it’s not done – many pictures need to be redone as they are too old, went through too many .jpg encodings, were taken back when smaller lower-res pictures were the norm, etc. etc. And then I’ll need to sweep through texts and stats for quality control.

In miscellaneous news, our condolences to the writing staff at Margaret Weis Production, whose Marvel Heroic Role-Playing Game adventures ended abruptly.

Few entries since the last message, since I goofed off playing Torchlight 2 with mods instead of working.

• MASS EFFECT. Two big entries:
  • Lt. Jacob Taylor, Cdr. Shepard’s fellow marine and her steadiest lieutenant during the war against the Collectors.
  • The Justicar Samara. For great justice with pale eyes that burn !
• MILESTONE. Thanks to Bryan, we finally have an entry for Hardware (Curt Metcalf), the armoured anti-hero.
• TORCHLIGHT. Since the Teeming Millions lost several days of images embiggening to Torchlight, here’s an entry inspired by the game – Ursula Venom, a glaive outlander.
• INVINCIBLE. We now have, thanks to Bryan, a profile for Best Tiger, from the Guardians of the Globe. Not Fairly Good Tiger, not Rather Excellent Tiger – no, *Best* Tiger.
• FALLOUT. Two things :
  • Nerfed the generic radscorpion stats based on subsequent discussions about the durability of deathclaws (again, all of this is only for Fallout and Fallout 2).
  • And the generic deathclaw profile is up, too.

So, 5030 entries, ayup.

While I’m here – you can use Amazon-via-WORG to preorder the Universe book for DC Adventures by clicking on this link. The .pdf version was just released, and the hardcover is scheduled for July for $29, with a price guarantee.

If you liked the Atlas of the DC Universe by Mayfair and the section about the DC Universe in the DC Heroes Second Edition booklets you’ll love this book – 256 pages in a neat hardcover detailing a version of the DC Universe that is essentially the one between 52 and before Flashpoint, though there are some post-Flashpoint bits that leaked in (such as a younger Maggie Sawyer). Lots of stuff about the history, the fictional cities, other countries, other planets, other dimensions, time travellers, etc. and if you’re a DCH person writeups.org has extensive conversion tools for the stats.

The traffic is still depressed at 1,200-ish uniques per day instead of 1,600+. *If* I’m correct as to the cause of drop (links not formed like Google wants them, which is a common problem for sites not done by folks with SEO knowledge), we still have a few weeks to go before we bounce back to our normal Google presence. Of course, guessing about what is happening to one’s Google presence without being trained in SEO and/or sacrificing a goat is always a very haphazard pursuit. And I don’t have a goat.

We now have a small Pinterest presence. Nothing special, the intent is just that people who browse Pinterest for pictures like the ones we do can find the site. As always with social media, we can only encourage folks who like wirteups.org to spread the word – or, in this case, the picture.

We got a half-dozen new entries since the last message, since most of our key people have been very busy lately :

• ERROR 404 PAGE. You probably don’t care, but people requesting an URL that doesn’t exist (like, say, www.writeups.org/gloubiboulga) will now get a helpful message taking them to the homepage. Basic stuff, but there’s only so much time. I’m now trying to implement proper 301s (and my RewriteRule *should* work, dagnabit).
• X-MEN. Gareth has written up fan-favourite Dr. Nemesis. For science, of course.
• FALLOUT. Third and last entry for our example Vault Dweller, so you can read the end of the Fallout story and/or indulge in some cheap nostalgia about Fallout. Like the rest, it only covers the *first* game.
• MASS EFFECT. A lil’ entry for Gabby and Ken, the engineering/comedy duo in the second and third game. If you think it’s a very minor profile, wait until you see our stats for the Commander’s space hamster ! That was a joke.
• WEAPONS LOCKER. The first draft of our article covering small melee weapons is up. For now it only covers the basics – knives, nunchaku, batons, tonfa, brass knuckles, etc.
• UNIVERSE 3001. Now with Chris’ profile for the Wonderboy of the 26th Century – Wondergirl’s brother.
• INVINCIBLEVERSE. Bryan wrote up Darkwing II, a former boy wonder who suceeded a caped crusader gone bad.

So, 5,024 entries. Are we impressed yet ? Yeah, me neither.

For what it’s worth, here’s the current sculpt for our example Mass Effect 3 Shepard. Forced a much higher definition for shadows, finally remembered to kill depth of field (DOF is a terrible thing), various small adjustments to the orbits and eyelids to simulate epicanthic folds, new complexion map (though it’s not quite visible with the white lighting for these shots), a slew of SweetFX changes and a host of other adjustments to facial structure. Flattening the nose would take hours moving coordinates at random until I stumble on the nosetip, so let’s not get there – and I still have a lock of hair regularly clipping with the forehead, but same issue.

It looks more or less finalised, though I might darken the skin and hair a bit – compensating for the whiter lighting ain’t easy.

I got short on time again, but favoured putting new stuff online over doing ads. So here are… things. Things are good.

• X-MEN. The big name in this batch is presumably Pixie (Megan Gwynn) of the X-Men, who now has an entry thanks to Gareth.
• DCH RULES. Added to the Rules Clarification article an explanation about Power Loss by Eric Lengendorff.
• Gareth wrote up a team of minor but semi-recent X-Men foes, from the Sublime Corporation. This type is always useful for GMs. These are :
  • Lobe
  • Verre
  • Thug
  • Bouncing Betty
  • Burst
• SQUADRON SUPREME. Remnant and his magical fabric are now in, completing the trio of Silver Age Bat-villains homages in Squadron Supreme (along with Mink and Pinball).
• Erica of Venus is a super-obscure Golden Age villainess, in case we ever do coverage of Moon Girl and the Prince.
• MASS EFFECT. Staff Commander Mandala Shepard — the fourth entry is now online. It’s rather large, and also full of things.
• FALLOUT (1997).
  • The second entry for Jolene Hassan, our example Vault Dweller, is now online.
  • As is the information about generic radscorpions in classic Fallout.

All in all, this be 5,018 entries now.

I’m still grinding through 175 entries a week, which now means that all images in the right-hand stack for these entries become larger and separated, plus the occasional redone shot (for instance because the enlargement deteriorated it), a handful of deletions (video game fan art that we thought was official art, usually) plus hand-placed adverts to keep the site alive. Once I’ve exhausted my stock of prepared images it will probably fall to 140/week.

On one hand it’s not much. On the other hand, I suppose that 175 full-featured, illustrated articles being a negligible quantity compared to the whole (3.5%, to be precise) is a good problem to have. On the gripping hand, it slows down publication of new content. On Shiva’s fourth hand, it has to be done at some point, and the sooner the better. On the fifth, Google doesn’t want us to have pages with plenty of large high-res images. Oh well, it wasn’t supposed to be simple.

Recent changes :

• JEM AND THE HOLOGRAMS. Feedback from Bedford led to changes in our game stats for Riot, our only JatH writeup so far.
• YOUNG JUSTICE. Bryan updated our Superboy entry for the cartoon version of Young Justice.
• ULTIMATE FANTASTIC FOUR. Gareth has updated and overhauled the texts and images for these entries. Here we go :
  • A brand-new “base camp” article about the ultimate FF to avoid repeating stuff between individual profiles.
  • Doctor Doom (Ultimate continuity)
  • Invisible Woman (Ultimate continuity)
  • Human Torch (Ultimate continuity)
  • Mister Fantastic (Ultimate continuity)
  • Thing (Ultimate continuity)
  • Namor (Ultimate continuity)
• GREAT TEN. A number of illustrations for the individual entries were redone – exact same shots but better visual quality.
• Chris wrote up a profile of elusive mutant villain the Vanisher, covering his classic appearances in X-Men books.
• Bryan wrote up Luther Strode, from Image’s vigilante/horror story The strange talent of Luther Strode
• TRESE. Adam revised and updated our entry for the Kambal, Trese’s invincible bodyguards. Not quite finished as we need to prepare new illustrations, but you can have a sneak peek.
• ALPHA FLIGHT. Redoing the entries is on hold for reasons pertaining to the presence of a maximum of 24 hours per day. However, it was possible for Capita_Senyera to write up early antagonist Jerry Jaxon, who was technically the first Box.
• IRREDEEMABLE. Another entry by Peter about this fan-favourite series, with none other than the Plutonian – a terribly failed Superman.
• MILESTONE. Continuing to reinforce our Milestone notes, Bryan wrote up Holocaust – formerly Pyre.

And this is how the little site reached 5,006 entries.

No update message this week, as much of the schedule was eaten by prep work – toil without immediately visible results.

One of the background tasks is preparing the headmorph that will illustrate the fifth Commander M. Shepard writeup. It takes a while – nothing is documented, and I often need two days or so between rounds of work so I can again look at the model with fresh eyes. Furthermore the in-game has changed, several of the features in the character creator have been modified, there are more facial animation points, there’s something that I still can’t narrow down that has changed in the body model near the back of the jawbone, etc.

Though obviously this has little in common with the work of actual 3D model artists, it is quite interesting to understand how the technology works, and how the holistic perception of a face depends on the tiniest adjustments – say, the exact height of the corners of the mouth, which can completely change the unconscious assumptions about the probable character of a person.

In practice, however, it is mostly a lot of gradual tweaks to colour vectors, minuscule gradual adjustments to point coordinates, trying out tiny changes in scalar intensities… and a lot swearing, of course. And wishing we had a dang map of the LOD vertices so I can eliminate some clipping. And wondering why so few video games will allow for a normal, flat nose (especially since so many NPCs have proper African-looking noses).

Also, Trogg is man. Trogg bad understanding girly makeup. Trogg want to club mammoths. Clubbing mammoths simpler than girly makeup. And the signature blue lensflare in Mass Effect lighting tends to make lip gloss really shiny.

Current work headmorph :

Next to experiment with the bone offsets. Lifting the corners of the mouth a bit to get rid of the frown is doable (all ME3 mouths have been frownish-ed), flattening the nose isn’t, adding more of an epicanthic fold to the eyes might be doable without clipping.