Site work news

2^nd of September, 2023

The entirety of Ethan’s writeups arc about He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1980s cartoons series) is now published.

With 46 articles and profiles, it ended up being one of the largest arcs.

As always, you can see everything using the search page. In this case by selecting the “Cartoon and animé” category, then the “Masters of the Universe” subcategory.

But this arc also has a “base camp” article, which explains all the basics and properly lists all the articles.

Older bits of news

2^nd of July, 2023

Things have gone slower than I hoped – they always do. But :

So I can now finish updating the Agents of Atlas (which I keep forgetting), process a bunch of articles that were published in late 2018, then tackle the next big thing – the Black Widow.

There too I’d ideally have added a chapter to either Natalia or Yelena’s entries. But I’ll instead focus on adding the newer flashbacks into our existing articles, since I expect it won’t be easy.

The Ms. Marvel profiles, and the Natalia Romanova profiles, are some of the core entries for the site. So having all these spick and span will be nice.

22^nd of April, 2023

Aight, all the Batgirl rework and additions stuff is done. It took longer than I hoped, but then everything always does.

But the slowdown isn’t over. Continuing to go through the site in reverse chronological order, there’s a series of work-intensive challenges right ahead :

This means that there’ll be a long span with articles from these arcs popping up in the homepage after they’ve been reworked. As always, my suggestion is not to read ahead and wait a bit for me to finish improving the articles before reading them.

And as always, a slowdown means that the site is down to, *at most*, being updated just as often as it was before 2022.

28^th of March, 2023

So that’s one bit done. Our Batgirls material has progressed by three profiles – two closing the gap in our Stephanie Brown series, and one starting a chronological series for Barbara Gordon.

I still have to process and reformat three older profiles – Batgirl (Stephanie Brown) part 1 & 2, and Cassandra Cain’s. These are older, comprehensive profiles so there’s room for improvement on style, concision, pictures quality, etc..

At which point our main Batgirl material will be spick and span. Leaving me free to feel guilty over having lacked the time to write a Batgirl (B. Gordon) (The Bronze Age) profile.

16^th of March, 2023

I recently started upgrading profiles about Marvel’s Agents of Atlas to our 2022+ format. But I failed to notice in time how old these profiles were. Gareth wrote these all the way back in 2008 (which is also when I did many of the matching 1950s profiles).

So I’m pausing reformatting/upgrading work for a bit, in order to :

So, errr, excelsior! Or some such.

8^th of March, 2023

The Suicide Squad overhaul work is now done. So that covers all the core info for the early Silver Age to Zero Hour stories, corresponding to 1943-1994 in-universe events, organisations and characters.

I’m always a bit wary about user experience when a writeups arc has such a long list of chapters. But in order to a/ provide enough material for use in stories (primarily TTRPG sessions) while b/ remaining readable for most everyone even on a phone and c/ not repeating the same info over and again, as often happens in sourcebooks… well, a small compromise has to be made.

Redoing this material was nice. Back when this community was created during the mid-1990s, the Squad still was a major reference in the DC lore. And many of us were fans.

The next big team entry will be for Marvel Comics’ Invaders. Not right away though, there’s plenty in the publication queue before ’em.

As part of our monthly cache cycling, several OHOTMU ’89 update illustrations — those in profiles already to our 2022+ format — were redone. They’re on our Pinterest board  .

23^rd of February, 2023

We’re now starting another large project that should have been done years ago. It’s a comprehensive overhaul and extension of the core articles for the 1980s/1990s version of Amanda Waller’s Suicide Squad.

As with the recent JSA work, there’ll be a brief-ish time with a few discrepancies :

Then once everything has been deployed I’ll cycle the caches, and all these temporary discrepancies will disappear.

13^th of January, 2023

The second part of the team profile for the Justice Society of America, as published during the 1940s, is now up.

It relies in part on “spinning off” the description of plots into individual profiles for enemies and other encounters. So that the core article can stay relatively brief, rather than recap every storyline.

One downside of this approach is that said individual profiles aren’t there yet, though they have publication priority. So the links will gradually appear in the team profile as the individual profiles roll in.

Of course, for people who’ll check the article in a few weeks, everything will appear seamless. As all the individual profiles will have rolled out.

Once all this 1940 JSA material is up on the site, the next priority rollout will be articles about the earliest Fantastic Four stories. This two-parter is comparable to the recent Avengers two-parter.

24^th of December, 2022

As with every year, the site is taking a few days off.

In previous years it meant skipping the updates batch that straddled December and January. But since I’m changing my schedule, for 2023 activities will resume on 1/1/23 rather than a few days later.

18^th of December, 2022

Aight, all that work that could take place on the wartime and Silver Age Suicide Squad/Suicide Squadron is now done.

*Except* for the second Rick Flag profile (the Ostrander version, give or take). This profile, and the huge Amanda Waller profile, can only be cleanly overhauled once a “base camp” article has been created for the Yale/Ostrander version of the Suicide Squad.

Which will be a significant project. In part because it needs to incorporate all the good stuff in Mayfair’s little Belle Reve sourcebook.

14^th of December, 2022

I’m currently revising the Suicide Squad/Suicide Squadron articles, which are large and complicated articles.

So if you’re a regular on this site, I’d encourage you not to read the related articles that haven’t been revised and pushed back onto the homepage yet.

Since I’m moving a lot of information around, deleting redundant exposition, clarifying tangled parts, breaking up the overlong articles into shorter chapters, etc..

So reading the not-revised-yet articles would be an underwhelming and confusing experience.

31^th of August, 2022

Writeups.org is leaving Cloudflare, for reasons that may be obvious. It is possible that the switch in CDN will have some impact on site performance in some locations, but I don’t think it will.

If we ever suffer from another large DDOS attack, we likely will have to temporarily use Cloudflare again. But such attacks have only happened once in nearly 25 years.

Also, I’ve worked on two writeups in a row where I realised late in the process that I couldn’t push the article onto the homepage. Say, because I have to order some comics to do fresh scans as I can’t make the current pictures look good enough.

So there’s a bit of publication delay because of that.

15^th of August, 2022

I’m taking another break in publication, like last month. During that span I’ll again chip at the backlog of stuff I was supposed to write during the past months.

I also need a bit of time to recover from a lengthy-ish heatwave, a weeks-long drought and some blood acidity stuff.

The previous break didn’t go as far as I had hoped, but it did gouge a visible dent in the backlog. So that’s encouraging.

13^th of July, 2022

My backlog of articles-I-need-to-write-ASAP has grown too big.

So I’m suspending updates on the site for the next 10-to-15 days, to free up writing time. Exact length will chiefly depend on how severe the ongoing heatwave will be.

I’ll see how many articles I can get done during that span. Though as a disabled person in the middle of an unmanaged heat wave in the middle of an unmanaged inflation spurt in the middle of an unmanaged pandemic during a slow collapse of democracy, I’ll prolly not get as much done as I’d like.

14^th of February, 2022

The site has been inaccessible for several hours of the day due to denial-of-service attacks.

Such random, no-reason-lol attacks are increasingly common, I’m told.

There might be further incidents in the next few days, so the Cloudflare protection interstitial page will stay up just in case during that span.

25^th of December, 2021

Happy new year — if you’re on the Gregorian calendar, of course.

*And* if people wishing you a happy new years sparks more joy than annoyance.

As with every year, we are going to skip the updates that would normally take place over the end of December, and the beginning of January.

*This* year, we also largely skipped the around-the-20^th-of-the-month updates for December. Due to the workload and stress around the Worg 2022+ project, though by now the worst of the stress seems behind us.

However, there is a sort of mini-blog about WORG 2022+ going on, which is regularly getting new episodes. And the bulk of the FAQ articles have also had a review and upgrades.