User blog:Gideoncrawle/2nd Anniversary Special, featuring my first userboxes

Random Quote
"My mother and father invented one-joke characters. Before that, bit players just stood around and didn't actually do anything."
 * --Staci, "Bigger, Badder, Brutal-er" deleted scene

Where has the time gone? When I first joined the wiki two years ago, I had no idea that I would be spending so much time here, much less that I would become one of the wiki's big names.

Milestones
In addition to racking up another 3,000 edits, give or take, I’ve had several notable achievements over the past year:


 * 1) I had two more Featured Story wins: Courtney and the Violin of Despair was Featured in March, and my magnum opus, Total Drama Island, by Gilbert and Sullivan was Featured in June. TDI-G&S’ win was my fondest ambition from the day I came to the wiki, but I’ll admit that I never truly expected CatVoD to win, partly because of its controversial subject matter but mainly because it’s something of a lightweight compared to my other standalone works.
 * 2) I officially launched my long-awaited competition story, The Legend of Total Drama Island (LTDI). Reader response has been truly gratifying. With an estimated final length of 250-300K words, LTDI figures to be one of the wiki’s longest stories by the time it’s finished. At the moment, it looks like LTDI will ultimately duke it out with Lilac’s story, Total Drama Island: For Your Entertainment and Rhonda’s story, Total Drama What The Heck? for the title of “Longest Story”. (I recommend both of those stories highly, and you can find them on the Current Favorites listing in the library menu.)
 * 3) When my name came up (for the second time) for an adminship, I consented to be semi-drafted for the job. I like to think that people are pleased with my performance in that role, or at least have no real complaints.
 * 4) One of the first things I did as an newly-minted admin was to propose revival of Featured Quote, and in due course Sprink appointed me to oversee the FQ ballot. At one point, I had a direct hand in five straight FQ winners: two came from my own stories, two were passages that I nominated from other people’s stories, and one (the passage from my DW’s collection of animal shorts) I suggested but didn’t actually nominate.

At this point, I’ll put in a plug for Featured Quote. It still seems to have decent voting interest, but people haven’t been nominating much of late, even when the themes have been fairly broad. The most recent cycle was especially disappointing, with only a handful of passages nominated despite there being no restricting theme.

Granted, Featured Quote is a much lesser award than the other Features—rather akin to winning “Best Song” at the Oscars—but it’s good publicity for your work, so I encourage you to nominate appropriate passages when you can. Like Featured Character, FQ usually has themes, with the current theme being “Love and Romance” for Valentine’s Day.

A New Heavyweight Champion
I doubt many people noticed it, but as of mid-January, TDI-G&S is no longer the wiki’s longest page by word count, after holding that distinction for well over a year. The new heavyweight champion is Fedora Kid’s import from fanfiction.net, Total Drama Island: Second Season, whose final chapter pushed it past TDI-G&S’ word count by less than 1,000 word (116K to 115K). TDI-G&S is still the wiki’s largest page by byte count, because it’s full of hyperlinks.

TDI:SS’ reign is likely to be brief, though, because Lilac’s story already has 96K words in 14 chapters. At the rate she’s going, TDI:FYE will need only three or four more chapters to pass Kid’s mark, and will probably pass TDI-G&S’ byte count in not too many chapters more. Indeed, unless somebody imports another long story from elsewhere in the next few months, Total Drama Island: For Your Entertainment appears poised to become the wiki’s first megabyte-class page, since it’s further along than either LTDI or Rhonda’s story. (Total Drama What The Heck? has about 80K words in only 8 chapters, but Rhonda doesn’t update as frequently as Lilac does.)

New Tricks for this Old Dog
Over the past year, I’ve made two major policy changes regarding how I conduct myself on the wiki:


 * 1) I started reading a significant number of OC competition stories, which is something I hadn’t done before. This is the biggest reason for my disappointing progress on LTDI, but when I conducted a poll I found that most of you are OK with that tradeoff. I made this policy change because, with the generally improving quality of writing on the wiki, I found that I don't have as many problems keeping the characters straight with the better stories.
 * 2) Because I was running out of good preview scenes for LTDI, “good” meaning having standalone appeal and little spoiler potential, I broke with my policy of finishing stories before I started posting them. As a result, I officially launched LTDI when the writing of it was probably 40 percent or less complete. As I noted on my prelaunch blog back in August, I’ll be posting the chapters at long intervals until I’m finished writing the story, since I’m not necessarily writing scenes in sequence, and I’ll ramp up the posting schedule.

Poll
Have you been reading LTDI? Of course! I haven't had the chance yet, but I plan to I'm waiting until you start updating more often I started it, but it was too hard to read I started it, but I didn't like it I only read competition stories with original characters Why would I read your stories?

My First Userboxes
I’ve never made a userbox before, and I don’t display them myself, but I’m unveiling two for this occasion. Both were inspired by specific users, but are of course available for anyone to display.

The first was inspired by something that Sunshine likes to say about herself. I was originally going to present this to her as part of my First Wikiversary blog, but it somehow got lost in the shuffle during my last-minute preparations, and Sunshine went on a long hiatus not long after (hmm, what could distract a girl for nine months?) so the idea languished. Well, I’m finally correcting that oversight:

To use, type  

The second userbox was inspired by, ahem, highly vocal skepticism in some quarters regarding LTDI’s first big plot twist. (Yes, TBTDIF, I’m looking at you.) I don’t know whether TBTDIF even cares to display userboxes, but it seems likely that other people might share his sentiments, so here is LTDI’s first userbox.

SPOILER ALERT: If you’re reading or plan to read LTDI, and haven’t gotten at least partway through the Third Night chapter yet, you might want to do so before you proceed.

You have been warned. Scroll down to see.

To use, type   (This one could become a wiki meme)

The Year Ahead
So, there you have it: two years in the books. I’m not going anywhere, so I’m sure my third wikiversary will be here before we know it. My only real wiki-related goal for Year 3 is to finish writing LTDI so you guys won’t have to wait two months between chapters anymore.