The previous seven days have chiefly seen consolidation, enrichment and improvement work – plus some progress on the ticky bits for writeups.org version 2012. I did have time to slip a few brand-new things in, though. Roll call :

• HEAVY METTLE.This convenient team of armoured goons had its brief shared texts polished and updated, and now share a group shot banner. Heavy Mettle members are :
  • Barracuda
  • Blackwing
  • Riot
  • Stronghold
  • Warbow
  • And Firestrike, who was rewritten and re-illustrated since unlike the others he’s an actual character.
• MASS EFFECT. Our second entry for Garrus Vakarian, corresponding to the Mass Effect 2 era, is now online for all your precision shooting needs.
  The entry for Kaidan and the second entry for Joker also received an additional banner each, using the character model sheets built from the game by Troodon80 at Deviantart.
• WORLD OF WARCRAFT. A quick profile for WoW’s kobolds – there isn’t much to say about these, but everybody knows and love ‘em. There might be further Wow short profiles from time to time, but no serious writeup arc is projected.
• YOUNG AVENGERS ASSEMBLE ! Gareth also went a-rewriting and a-updating, and the whole team’s roster has been upgraded. Remember that the shared history is now in our Young Avengers (main article) entry rather than repeated in every entry. Roll call :
  • Hawkeye (Kate Bishop)
  • Hulkling
  • Patriot
  • Iron Lad
  • Speed
  • Vision II
  • Stature
  • Wiccan
• Our entry for Icemaster – which was really old – has been fully modernised. You’ll flip for Hostess™ pies !
• FEMTASTIC FIVE. Another profile from Bryan Venable’s original team – Glow Gal.
• TIGRA. The fourth Greer Nelson writeup is now in, completing our reorganisation of the old article. Said old article has been removed since all its material – and more – is present in the new writeups.
• SHADE THE CHANGING MAN. Another Ditko villain by Gareth – in this batch, Khaos the lord of destruction.
• DC ADVENTURES/SQUADRON SUPREME. Pawsplay decided that Peter’s and Andrew’s old Squadron Supreme could use DC Adventures game stats. In this batch :
  • Hyperion
  • Power Princess
  • Black Archer
  • Whizzer
  • Shape
  • Mink
  • Blue Eagle
  • Arcanna
  • Skylark
  • Quagmire
  • Skrullian Skymaster

That’s 4,938 entries. Remember that the donations are open – http://www.writeups.org/donate.php – to help pay our server costs. All donations count !

The glorious struggle continues !

• MISC. REWRITES.
  • Curtis Carr (a.k.a. Chemistro and High-Tech) – rewritten for style and concision.
  • Brood Queen Hannah Connover – ditto plus some reorganisation
  • Zawadi, rewritten for style
  • Cougar (Curt Ranklin), renamed for clarity and rewritten for style
  • Mademoiselle Marie (Joséphine Tautin), various small improvements to layout and style
  • Cat People — big rewrite for style, concision, clarity, typos, etc.
  • Tabur – rewritten for style/concision. New art.
  • Chufru the Golden Pharaoh — various small improvements.
  • Brad Carter — shorter paragraphs, removed excess verbiage, some reorganisation
  • Warcry – edited for concision
• UNPUBLISHED ON WORG. The file has been through it first update on the 16th of August.
• SHADE. Continuing Gareth’s arc – Form, another old-school Ditko villain.
• FEMTASTIC FIVE. Third entry in Bryan Venable’s homemade arc – Fly Girl.
• TIGRA. Our Tigra (Early) writeup is too long and covers too much material, so we’re doing that thing where it gets turned into shorter, more focused and rewritten entries. These are named to make the continuity with Greer as the Cat clearer.
  The current Tigra (Early) entry will probably be turned into three or four writeups then disposed of. As of today two such writeups are online :
  • Greer Nelson (writeup 2 – Tigra the were-woman). Two new illustrations.
  • Greer Nelson (writeup 3 – Tigra 1976-1980). All the art shots were redone.
• MARVUNAPP. It’s been a while, so let’s replace one of the last few entries quoting Marvunap. This time it’s the Metalloid – and the art’s been redone too.
• For some reason Death Adder‘s illustration column was redone.
• DC ADVENTURES. A new pack of M&M stats, covering :
  • The Cat (Greer Nelson)
  • Staff Commander Mandala Shepard (writeup 1)
  • Razorblade aka Slasher
  • Falcon
  • Karla Romanova
  • Pink Pearl
  • Batroc the Leaper
  • Andromeda Attumasen
• Man-Slayer is an old Mad Thinker robot, and since we like old robots it finally gets its spot on writeups.org.
• YOUNG AVENGERS. Gareth is also revisiting older entries of his. We’ll start with the brand new Young Avengers “base camp” main article, which explains all the history so the revised individual writeups won’t have to.
• GEORGE PÉREZ. Everybody likes George Pérez, and the Tigra work led to cracking open Fantastic Four Visionaries TPB featuring his work. Thus, beyond Greer Nelson’s third writeup, the following entries have had art replaced by much better-printed versions from the TPB :
  • The Brute (Reed Richards of Counter-Earth) (new art, broke up the long paragraphes, renamed for clarity)
  • Eliminator of New Salem (all art redone, some slight text tweaks)
  • Salem’s Seven (new art about their human forms, added a note to explain the placeholder status of the article)
  • Thundra (one banner redone).
  • Impossible Man (new art)
  • Captain Ultra (one new banner)
  • Texas Twister (one new banner)
  • There was more, but it will only show up once we migrate

And lo, 4,934 entries. Remember that the donations are open – http://www.writeups.org/donate.php – to help pay our server costs. All donations count !

I’m done coding all that I could, so there’s more time for publication :

• REWRITES.
  • Renee Montoya. The third writeup was rewritten for clarity, style and concision.
  • Our first writeup for the Peacemaker (Christopher Smith) was reorganised for clarity and a few bits were rewritten for style.
  • Ditto for our first Elsa Bloodstone entry.
  • Our Madam Fatal entry has received two rounds of rewriting for style and concision, and now has a better explanation about pre-Crisis Quality Comics in the DCU (minus the Freedom Fighters complications).
  • The article about No-Name of the Brood was fully rewritten to be more accessible and logical, because No-Name is cool.
  • The very minor entry for Samantha Eden was reviewed for style.
  • Lionfang‘s entry was completely reorganised and mostly rewritten, then the texts, stats and illustrations were updated to cover is 2010 return.
• We’ve long wanted to create a dump file with the old unpublished stuff. A new entry presents the first version of this .txt document, with notable but unpublishable material from late 1998 and early 1999. As noted in the article, it will be updated very infrequently.
• Our benchmarking notes for Daredevil were adjusted with the INT and WIL swapped — see the DC Heroes technical FAQ for more about INT/WIL inversion. Keep in mind that our main benchmarking notes are 15+ years old, as we needed generally-agreed upon numbers for some key Marvel characters early on.
  The Intellect of the DCA stats was also adjusted, and some detail about an obscure vulnerability of his added to the writeups in both systems.
• DC ADVENTURES. Some new material and some fixes:
  • Lowered the Limited to Golden Eagle‘s Stealth
  • Adjusted Spider-Man based on our new Intellect benhmarks.
  • The rest ofthe Cadre members now have their DCA stats in their entries, namely :
    • Devastator
    • Brute
    • Cloudburst
    • Death Angel
    • Gunshot
    • Meanstreak
• FEMTASTIC FIVE. Continuing Bryan Venable’s arc with the team leader, Mistress Math.
• IRREDEEMABLE. We’re starting Peter’s arc about Mark Waid’s book with Qubit.
• SHADE THE CHANGING MAN. Continuing Gareth’s arc through the classic Ditko stuff with the Cloak.
• DIABLO II. The second (and last) Diablo II PC profile – Nika the Chain, a slightly fleshed out take on the assassin from Lord of Destruction.
• LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES. Last but certainly not least — Chris’ second entry for Imra in his popular series of pre-Crisis LSH profiles is now live. The Saturn Girl (Classic) article starts right where the Saturn Girl (Silver Age) one stopped, and the Silver Age was renamed to make that clearer.

And thus we have 4,928 entries since half this stuff was rework. Remember that the donations are open – http://www.writeups.org/donate.php – to help pay our server costs. All donations count !

Not much’s happening since nearly all the work goes into revising the site. Still :

• Minor villain Slyfox was rewritten for style and concision.
• THE RED STAR. Sorceress-Major Maya Antares received a big round of rewriting for style and clarity.
• The illustration for Chizuru Kagura was redone for graphic quality (though one cannot do much with .jpg files for the late 1990s web). The fan art that was missing its credits was located and is now credited.
• FEMTASTIC FIVE. This arc of homemade characters by Bryan Venable starts with Metal Mistress.
• Our entry for the Iron Maiden – the Marvel one, Melina Vostokovna – was also rewritten, updated and reillustrated.

In terms of headcount it’s thus just +1 — 4,922 entries.

Much of the time is still spent on layouts and code. Things are looking pretty nice… which in turn makes unappealing to work on publishing entries. I’ll have to redo most of the publication work when we switch to the new layout, so it’d be something of a waste of time.

Hopefully I’ll get the support I need to code what I can’t soon, so we can migrate.

• SHADE THE CHANGING MAN. Continuing this arc by Gareth, we have :
  • Shade himself, during the Ditko era. He should have been in the previous batch since it’s the entry where stuff is explained, but there was a delay.
  • Mellu Loron, negation agent.
• MASS EFFECT. Our profile for Doctor Chakwas during ME and ME2 is now up.
• SUPER-MALÓN. The (admitedly simple) quest to find an Argentine commenter is over. The article on Salamanca now has additional details and explanations about the references to Argentine folklore and traditions.
• DALLAS. One of the Teeming Millions of WORG readers noted that the name of one of JR’s sons was a bit of fan disinformation we hadn’t spotted. It was promptly fixed in both JR‘s and Bobby‘s entries.

And that’s it, really. 4,921 entries now.