Talk:Rhombicuboctahedron

From Pee Review

Humour:	5	Lots of memes, not so many jokes.
Concept:	5	The idea of a geometric replacement for the American Pentagon building is OK, but in and of itself not intrinsically funny or satirical.
Prose and formatting:	8	Quite well-written.
Images:	8	Nice image. Original?
Miscellaneous:	4	Not much satirical connection to the real world, and the Oprah and Morder memes are no longer very interesting.
Final Score:	30
Reviewer:	----OEJ 22:38, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

Some of the sentences, though well-constructed, verge on the run-on: "President Jimmy Carter was able to instantly suffuse the Rhombicuboctahedron staff with a horrible malaise, who retreated in February of 1980 as an innumerable horde of orcs rushed the Rhombicuboctahedron and razed it to the ground."

At first the details appear randumb -- why the Morder attack? Why Oprah? But it appears that references to the Rhombicuboctahedron link to articles like the (rather bad) one on Alex Trebek, making a sort of linked fantasy-world. If one were patient -- and masochistic -- one could track down the references and sort some of the confusion out. However, linked fantasy-fiction composed of Uncyc articles is a bad idea. It has been tried before. You see, such articles are not funny on their own...and that is exactly what is required of good Uncyc articles (with the exception of a few like Zork).

But again, this is just the stinky opinion of a stinky, stinky man. ----OEJ 22:38, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

Yeah, that sentence was weird, so I fixed it. I think I added the Oprah/Mordor bit to Alex Trebek back during my first or second month, and possibly a few references to rhombicuboctahedra in other articles.

The image is original--modeled and rendered in Blender. The image was the main thing behind the article. I was playing around when I decided to make a rhombicuboctahedron. Only, to find out what such a shape looked like I had to go to Wikipedia, which naturally led me to think about an Uncyclopedia article.

I have always gotten the impression that Uncyclopedia leans toward coherent nonsense, as it is supposed to be readable while being loose with facts, so I tried to find a good middle between fact and complete lunacy. I thought referring to the rhombicuboctahedron as a literal polyhedron would be too dry and factual, and just dumb if I threw up a picture of some unrelated shape. Since the existing article on the Pentagon suggested that attempts were made at polyhedral war headquarters, and the Alex Trebek article mentioned a rhombicuboctahedron, I thought it would be better to work those "facts" in rather than ignore them. --George guy 23:42, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

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All this is just my opinion as a reader. Please disregard my comments at will. I hope others will respond with their opinions on your article also. Now, some thoughts on keeping things consistent.

Consistency with other articles is sometimes thought to be a good thing.

In my opinion it is very often a bad thing.

For example, let's say you want to write a Swiftian satire about George Bush's performance as president -- straight political satire. But according to someone else's article Tupac Shakur is the US president. If you want to be consistent with existing articles then you can't satirize Bush's presidency because he ain't the Prez.

Or you want to write an article about genocide in the Sudan, a classical satire on a tragic case of human folly. But someone else's article already said that the Sudan is a kind of car. So you can't do it.

Basically, bringing all Uncyc articles into consistency with each other would castrate Uncyc's satirical creativity. It would drastically limit what you can say about virtually anything: once The Official Self-Consistent Version had been created you could not write anything that contradicts OSCV unless you tracked down and revised everything else.

That would be a bad thing.

Now, to specifics. Oprah as world dictator and Chuck Norris as God-with-extra-face-kicks are fad figures -- Uncyc calls them memes. They were all the rage once upon a time for about two months in 2005. That's over now. I think the official guide to writing for Uncyc discourages the use of memes. They date rapidly and once past their expiration date they begin to smell bad.

On the article to hand: My personal opinion is that it's not very funny and is not really satire. It's more fantasy-nonsense. But I know only one objective rule about humor, and that is that humor is subjective. So other folks may think Rhombicuboctahedron is a real screamer. My opinion is the opinion of one slightly cockeyed, more-than-slightly odoriferous old stinker.

Personally, I think the idea of making an entry to fit the rhombicuboctahedron pic is just fine. But my advice would be to strip out all the sutff about Trebek and Oprah and Morder and write an original piece. If you want the Rhombicuboctahedron to be a replacement for the Pentagon then opportunities for satirizing US military spending or satirizing engineers or architects abound. It could also be a church or mosque or synagogue or temple, with opportunities to satirize the religion of your choice. Or it could be the Ultimate Walmart.

The sky's the limit.

But really, I would leave out the meme content. Just my opinion.----OEJ 13:00, 7 January 2007 (UTC)

Okeydokey, Alex Trebek is replaced with Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, and the Mordor/Sauron/Oprah crap is replaced with the events surrounding the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. You may be right about the interlinking of complete fantasy, but I still think referring to material in other articles is legitimate Uncyclopedia writing, even if complete consistency is unrealistic.--George guy 23:12, 7 January 2007 (UTC)