The late August batch is nearing completion, and in the meanwhile we have a sneak preview of the art for the biggest writeup that’ll be in it.

Assembling the art for writeups.org entries can be very long, hard work. To gather morale support and help me finish this schlep, I posted individual prepared pieces on the ComicBookRessources forum. And will thus cross the finishing line for the illustrations of the writeup under the cheers of the crowd !

The “Like” Facebook buttons had been broken – the Open Graph content declaration rules had changed for no reason I can determine. It’s now fixed. Don’t hesitate to use it, we say.

As noted, the characters with DCA stats were being reviewed and adjusted – this is now done.

Most of the entries received small changes – point costs fixes, more standard descriptors, standard formatting, adding a Feature to people who carry several copies of a piece of equipment, etc.

Some did get more substantial reorganisation of the data to reflect the statting conventions that are emerging at writeups.org (since our stats tend to be more detailed than the official ones). The main trend is sharper delineation of what does what – to build cleaner objects when statting up. The changes to Battlestar (with the Shieldsman “power”) or to Black Lotus (with the Fangirl “power”) are typical of this, as they more crisply detail what stems from skill, what stems from equipment, and what stems from specialised skill in using this equipment. Standardising Thump to align with the approach that has emerged to describe large characters is also part of this. Standardising whether armoured costumes are Subtle or Noticeable, and why. This sort of things.

Reviewing a relatively small pool of characters over and again is not the best approach for those who’d like to see an explosion in the population of DCA writeups, but the idea remains to develop skill and system mastery over months of hard work – quality before quantity. Iterating over a pool of characters for a while is almost as good for experience as tackling many characters, and it avoids leaving us with a large set of poor writeups that then have to be upgraded as we realise what we were doing wrong as we learned. Given the amount of work that already goes into upgrading terrible things we wrote many years ago… that’s a big big plus.

The review has raised a few more points (Perception benchmarks, Enhanced Attributes notation, Limited Protection standards, etc.) that are getting discussed in our cool, welcoming Atomic Think Tank thread. Which means that the next step is probably going to be… a quick review to align the existing material with the conclusions. Again.

Early August batch. For the last 6+ months we’ve been around 1.5 upgrades/day – an upgrade being a wholly new entry or an entry receiving significant improvements/rewriting/new art/updates/etc. Given the huge amount of work that goes into each entry, that’s a… significant pace, despite our manpower shortage issues.

Amusingly, this batch was meant to be a clean-up batch lobbing online some things that should have been there for quite a while. As it turned out it got much bigger than planned since several large projects came to fruition at about the same time.

Roll call:

• WEAPONS LOCKER. There’s a lot of guns-related work going on lately — largely thanks to the IMFDB, which greatly accelerates research and provides ready-made illustrations — allowing us to concentrate on writing our texts and stats. As mentioned in the Weapons Locker : Modern Firearms article, folks interested by the subject should visit the IMFDB for more. Here’s all the guns-related stuff that’s been done :
  • The aforementioned Weapons Locker : Modern Firearms article continues to go through minor corrections, additions, typos elimination, new content, etc. since it’s pretty big. In fact it’s gotten so big that we’ve had to chainsaw it into several discrete articles. THESE ARTICLES ARE STILL EVOLVING because, err, it’s a lot of work. The new list of articles is :
    • Guide to Weapons Locker articles because there’s now a lot of them
    • Weapons locker – Modern firearms v2 (part 1 – Handguns)
    • Weapons locker – Modern firearms v2 (part 2 – Small arms)
    • Weapons locker – Modern firearms v2 (part 3 – Grenades and heavier weapons)
    • Weapons locker – Modern firearms v2 (part 4 – Less-than-lethal)
    • Weapons locker – Modern firearms v2 (part 5 – Accessories and ammunition)
  • Speaking of chainsaws… We now have an illustrated article covering the weapons in the classic, early 1990s DooM video games. Stats included for both DCH and DCA, and discusses various hypothesis as to how the stuff seen in the game actually works – and why.
  • Various changes and improvements have been made to the Star Trek Phasers Weapons Locker article, as mentioned in the previous batch message. We’ve also added the phasers from the rebooted 2009 continuity.
  • The Weapons Locker for Half-Life is being completely redone, is being dual-statted, now includes a first round of material from Half-Life 2, and has a lot more content and illustrations. It’s not quite done yet, so if you wanna help by commenting… well, you know where we live.
• As a consequence of the Weapons Locker work, our good old entry for the nameless marine (aka “Doomguy”) has been updated and has received plenty of new art – because, believe it or not, the History section has a lot of meat on it and banners were needed for the layout.
• Minor improvements to the Quake Marine while we were at it, fixed minor bugs in Quake monsters while we were at it.
• As a consequence of the Half-Life Weapons Locker work, the Black Mesa Incident entry has been cleaned up, enhanced, and received new illustrations.
• Likewise, a pair of Half-Life critters have been refreshed, received much better art, etc. These are :
  • Xen Controllers (formerly listed as Xen masters)
  • Tentacles
• The Coolest Guy Ever, a joke character by Ethan
• Jake Sully, the protagonist of the blockbuster Avatar, has been written up by Mike
• NEW BLOOD. By request, we’re starting an arc about the New Blood characters from the 1993 annuals over at DC Comics. We do not intent to review all of them – this arc might cover a half-dozen guys, if that. The first entrant is Layla, who was in the Lobo and L.E.G.I.O.N. annuals.
• Half the character entries with DCA stats have had the DCA stats re-read and adjusted as we develop experience with the system. The writeups are thus now even cleaner and more robust ; the other half will be done on Wednesday if – if – all goes well.
• KITTY PRYDE. Our big writeup about Kitty Pryde‘s early career just got longer, as it is now reinforced with a detailed DC Universe History section. With John as the lead writer, you can see in details how to insert Kitty in the universe of the Distinguished Competition. The rest of the writeup has also received a vigourous round of edits for style and clarity.
• REWORK. The following entries have received significant improvements :
  • Kolu M’Beya
  • Manhunter (Paul Kirk, writeup 2) - most improvements are to art
  • Blade (movie version). More illustrations, fixed layouts, and fixed a mistake about the ordnance, mostly.
  • Several DooM entries have received new art based on the sprites of the game, as rendered by one Elite Sniper 177 over at Deviantart. Namely :
    • Hell Knights / Barons of Hell
    • Zombie sergeants
    • Lost soul
    • Imp
    • Demon / Spectre
    • Cyberdemon
    • Spider Mastermind
    • Basic zombie
    • Cacodemon
• From the movie Virtuosity, Pur_See_i8 stats up SID 6.7, and android with the memories of the 200 most dangerous criminals on Earth.
• FORCE OF JULY. Small improvements from Roy :
  • Air Control with the appropriate Limitations was added to Sparkler‘s writeup.
  • Lady Liberty‘s Bonuses and Limitations and background sections were edited based on list comments, primarily for clarity and to provide additional information.
• THE ANIMALS FILE… IN SPAAACE ! Now that our Animals File has been redesigned, we can start covering alien animals. The Alien Animals File is about critters who appeared in Legion of Super-Heroes and related books, mostly pre-Crisis, so it’s a bit weird. In this batch – the Legion of Super-Monsters !
• Mike also added a variant over the character of Susanna Dean in Stephen King’s The Dark Tower, as she appears in his continuity.

All this work brings the coolest site ever to 4654 entries.