User:SPIKE

From Uncyclopedia, the content-free encyclopedia.

Spike, originally with the Massachusetts Mad Dogs, was an uninvited, second mascot at baseball games in Nashua.

en-N	This user is a native speaker of English.

es-2	This user is able to contribute with an intermediate level of Español.

“Interned for a year on Wikipedia. That's why he's like that.”

~ Your favorite Uncyclopedia mentor, whispering, on Spike

User SPIKE since 3-Oct-09
(was SpikeFromNH from 30-Jul-09 through 3-Oct-09)
Signature: Spıke ¬
Location: New Hampshire (UTC+5, UTC+4 in summer)
Areas of interest: Northeast US, Latin America, American race relations, Baseball
Wikipedia: Spike-from-NH
E-mail: You can e-mail me, in English or Spanish. It will go to a DOS dial-up machine, so no multimedia nor broadcasts, please. I cannot mail you from here, but I can reply from there, once you've e-mailed me.

[edit] Major works

The articles listed below are of course not exclusively mine, but I once rewrote them (totally or as indicated). I continue to try to keep them in good shape (or else I'll take them off this list).

I started with New Hampshire during July, 2009 as an anonIP. When no one discarded my work with a snippy note against "original research," I got bolder, got a user name, and dug in on articles about places I've traveled to:

• Costa Rica
• Lima
• Peru
• Peruvian slang

[edit] Solicited editing

And I've performed gut-and-paste jobs requested by a tag in the article, on:

[edit] Unsolicited editing

To be done:

1. ↑ People want a longer article with photos
2. ↑ Point of view is inconsistent; half encyclopedic (mine), half angry black man

[edit] Unsolicited lip

In September, I stumbled on a high-school vanity page, wrote a section to pull it in the direction of general interest, and later deleted several personal biographies (which one of them claimed represented made-up people, hah!). For that, I got some vandalism, and they and their article got huffed.

On 13-Oct-09, I made my first nomination to the Votes For Deletion, and started opening discussion Forums, including:

• Forum: Climate-change articles, on the large number of related articles of varying quality--It induced a user to take one of the poorer ones on as a project, and brought out that multiple, inconsistent articles on a single theme is an accepted practice.
• Forum: Encyclopedia cliches, which got the Uncyclopedia policy page on being funny and not just stupid to point to a recommendation discouraging pompous, encyclopedia-like starts to sentences, such as "Most scientists believe that...."
• Forum: Articles written from a controversial voice asks about deviations from the usual, neutral narration, some of which made me wonder whether Uncyclopedia was being used for advocacy.

About then, it was gently suggested that I pay some freight and I did 4 requested reviews of articles. That was a disaster! for 2 of them, I didn't have sufficient context to laugh at the article, and didn't know it. Slightly later, someone lamented that Uncyclopedia was dying because no one was entering the semiannual competition, so I submitted two articles to that.

[edit] Saves off VFD

Lately I've been loitering at the Votes For Deletion (VFD) water-cooler, where bad articles go to die, looking for articles to save. It's more social than picking requests off a list, and it carries the satisfaction that every good job displaces one of Uncyclopedia's worst. I've thus taken custody of the following articles:

It's like being the local Simon Cowell (though I'm probably also the object of one unsatisfied customer's reference to "Uncyclopedia's Hitler Youth"). In addition, I may have induced other, more knowledgeable users to go for the Save on the following:

• Neon Genesis Evangelion
• Terrell Owens

[edit] Recommended articles by other people

There are pearls here, such as the marvelous article based on the premise that a baseball team owner could create the Birmingham Niggers without understanding the offensiveness. I am watching it, and other race-based articles listed above, to keep it subtle and keep the rants and name-calling out.

Expressing your anger is a distant second to being funny--except that someone's article on My ex-wife masterfully does both: It conveys anger authentically but is still as funny as the stand-up comedy Sam Kinison did. Can't improve it.

[edit] My style

I'm here because I enjoy using MediaWiki, enjoy writing precisely (am a technical editor in Real Life), and like to make people laugh. I mostly work on existing articles and hope to retain or adapt any excellence that existed previously.

My sense of humor is one of the drier ones here. I prefer to take familiar subjects and tell the truth in a funny way, or contribute facts that are funny by themselves, over goofy flights of fancy unless they have a double meaning or otherwise relate to reality. Most everything I write has the seeds of truth. But the stems and leaves are total crap and it's developed with the low standards of research appropriate to this site.

My bias is to distrust large corporations, but more greatly distrust the use of government force to remake them and us. I hope thus to be able to ridicule both sides, but mostly ridiculed one side in Global warming: Scientists making unmeasurable declarations of cause and effect, and recommending policy, are not practicing science; science is never "settled" and does not work on "consensus."

I wrote in British English in the 'nineties while a consultant to a computer consortium in Reading, England. I'm now back to American English (except for the word "judgement"). I write concisely in a style that resembles spoken American, overuse commas to indicate pauses in speech, and am happy to end sentences with prepositions.

[edit] Unsolicited opinion

This joint is more fun than Wikipedia, because there are fewer Small Minds pursuing consistency and Mandarins who exalt the style manual and reject work that is useful instead of merely formal. Both sites have their goal, but here it's end-result (making people laugh), whereas on Wikipedia it's preoccupied with process.

With the pearls mentioned above, however, is a lot of chaff, not involving subtlety, wryness, ridiculing the ridiculous, or pursuing an absurdity, but just clever gibberish. I hate unilaterally deleting other people's work, but make an exception for the history of the future, confrontations between colossal superheroes, explanations in terms of God-versus-Satan, and life as a brand-new, Matrix-like videogame. And after I've worked on an article for a couple weeks and changed it from those memes to a subtle poke at the real world, I tend to defend it against the insertion of Grue templates, quotes from Oscar Wilde, and comparable initiatives to demonstrate the contributor's cleverness, especially if he has no user name, and especially if he put no explanation in the change history.

The sections in many articles on "Fun facts" or "Little-known facts" or "Trivia" are invitations for people (none with a user name) who can't write but only Tweet, to contribute their most clever one-liner. This never develops the canon of the article and usually repeats a joke already told earlier.

Fortunately, many are getting at something. As every reader who misunderstands you does so for a reason and may identify a problem with your writing, every contributor, no matter how brief or misguided, alerts you to a new direction in which the article could go. I hope to be of good cheer and accept their help if it makes any sense at all.

[edit] Fun facts

• Spike is not morbidly obese (though perhaps that's only knowable in retrospect) nor orally fixated, as these animations might suggest.
• Spike often cooks at home, following his First Law of Kitchen Economics: If the sauce is curry or Szechuan, none of the ingredients has to be fresh.