Talk:Beige

Lol i love how the page is called beige, yet the color is actually tan :P --Happymonkey39 Dah Meme Master 03:39, August 3, 2010 (UTC)

Ditto. I also love the choice of the famously monotone Ben Stein in Ferris Bueller's Day Off as the lead image. If you're chumming the waters with it on Pee Review, however, may I suggest a more standard title logo? This article deserves it. --KUN VFH POTM VFP(IMAGES⇔TALK) 20:01, August 8, 2010 (UTC)

Seems to work well as:

 {{nologo}}<span style="position:absolute;top:-30px;
left:-155px;z-index:1;">[[File:Beigeopedia.png|157px]]</span>

Wow, I totally didn't see this. Replaced with your image anyway, and trust me, the new positioning is the same as the above coding by pure coincidence. Not my page, but I agreed with you anyhow. Sir MacMania GUN—[20:54 8 Aug 2010]

From Pee Review

Beige

It's Mrthejazz... a case not yet solved. 14:04, August 8, 2010 (UTC)

I'll be starting this shortly, and will be done by tomorrow night. --Black Flamingo 17:54, August 10, 2010 (UTC)

Got a tad delayed coming home from work due to an exciting crash. Will have it done in the next few hours. Sorry. --Black Flamingo 17:09, August 11, 2010 (UTC)

Humour:	7	Hi Jazz, my lifelong nemesis, this is a pretty good article you have here. There really aren't many issues, but nevertheless I have a few suggestions that I hope will help. Generally your humour is really good. The way you make the article boring to the point of irritance is very effective, and also amusing, so good job there. I do have some concern that it might work too well, and that readers may actually find the article quite tiresome. This can probably be fixed quite easily however. One of the main reasons I feel this is because of your list: the really long list of "colours that aren't beige". To sit and read them all is quite a task, let me tell you. I'm pretty sure everyone who sees it will just quickly glance at it, hoping to catch a few funny ones. Could I suggest making it a little shorter? Perhaps getting rid of some of the silly (but not funny) colours like pigment green and venetian red? It's up to you of course, but it really is a very extensive list. Another problem here is that there seems to be an inbalance of funny colours to serious colours, tipped in favour of serious colours. There are two things you could do to counteract this. The first is to somehow highlight the funny colours (maybe not all of them, just the best), so they stand out and readers aren't straining to find them. An interesting way I thought you could do is by linking all the real colours to the pages we (presumably) have on them, leaving the non-real ones as regular text, and thus more noticeable. My second idea is to simply add more funny ones (which, if you also cut some of the serious ones as I suggest, would become a whole lot clearer). You could probably also work on some of the funny ones you already have. A lot of them, for instance, just add swear words to pre-existing colours. This didn't really work more than once. Try to add more context to your made up colours, rather than just swearing. For example, how about something like "James Brown brown" or "McDonalds cheese orange"? Not hilarious I know, but they're the kind of colours people can imagine, and that's exactly what I think you need more of. You already do this to some extent, of course, and some of the colours are hilarious so don't worry about it too much. As for other jokes, the section on the Beige Film seems a bit silly. Perhaps get rid of this, it's kind of seems like you're grabbing desperately for beige things to talk about (perhaps this is the joke, but if so, make it obvious). Otherwise, get rid of this part, because it's not a real film. Or is it? It's certainly not one most people have heard of. I did really like the idea of a beige Power Ranger however, perhaps you could come up with a section about this instead? Something else that puzzled me in your "list of things that are beige or have beige in them" section was the "language, linguistics and sign theory" part. This seemed like the wrong place for it. Also, the title is a bit misleading, you're not talking about "langage, linguistics and sign theory", you're talking about the etymology of the word beige. I recommend moving this to a section of its own, perhaps just called "etymology". Wikipedia tends to put this sort of thing as the first header, but it's up to you where it goes. Overall, your "beige things" section is a bit inconsistent. It starts off with very specific titles, ie. "aeroplane cockpits", "the beige book", then starts using more generic ones like "music" and "film". It would be better if you stuck to one format. I recommend the more specific titles, as I feel that would be a more boring list. This of course would help continue the boring tone. So that about wraps it up for humour. Mostly this article is full of really great jokes. The one about the New Zealand Cricket Team doing "alright" was great.
Concept:	8	Now like I said, the boring tone works pretty well, but to stop it from being a drag I would really recommend getting some more content in here. If we ignore the enormous lists of colours, what is remaining seems pretty listlike itself. The main body of the text - "things that are beige etc" - needs more depth to counteract the two massive lists either side of it. Your section on ethnography for instace just says "some people are beige". Really? Who? That sounds kind of interesting, please go on. You should also explain the Beige Book a bit more. Is it a real book? If so, it would be funnier if your header read "the Summary of Commentary on Current Economic Conditions", and then mentioned in the prose that it was coloured beige, as this would make it look humorously dull (the beige book, on the other hand, sounds mysterious and mildly interesting). So yeah, it's all a little brief. Again it's not a major problem, but if you could get a little bit more in there, I'd certainly be happier. Surely there's tons more stuff you could say about beige. Did you know, for example, that the average colour of the universe is actually beige? They call it "cosmic beige" or something to that effect. Tehcnically, this means everything is beige. Surely you could write a section on that? Perhaps along the lines of how the whole of reality is as bland and monotonous as all the other beige things you discuss. The only other thing I had a gripe with conceptually is in your "fashion" section. You say that the beige-ness of khaki pants "is a point of contention". This seems contrary to the rest of the article, which considers beige-ness to be very dull and incident-free. I'm not convinced that this could cause any contention in the world of your article. Maybe it would be funnier if it started a very neutral and boring argument, which actually ends without incident?
Prose and formatting:	8.5	Ok, spelling and grammar first. You're missing an "are" in the first sentence of "things that are either beige or have beige in them". The line should be: while there are things that are considered common knowledge Then you go on to say "then there are things that are beige". Perhaps you should stress the "are" in here, so people can really tell these things are beige. This would just make a deliberately awkward sentence a bit easier to read, in my opinion. Ok, you were probably expecting this next one - the beige coloured text does kind of add to the article, and I did like it, but I think it makes it way too hard to read. Perhaps it would be better if you made the background beige? And included more beige pictures to really hammer home the monotony of beige-ness? Seriously, it was near-impossible to read. I had to highlight the text. The really long list of colours in the first image also makes it look a bit scruffy. It's not a huge detriment to the article or anything, but I personally think this kind of joke would work better in the main body of the text. It would counteract the "colours that are not beige" section quite well. The caption was funny though so you should probably keep the rest of it intact, should you make this revision.
Images:	8	Images. They're good, but the top one should be moved down, maybe replacing the picture of the guy in the huge bowtie as that was probably the worst image. That one didn't really add anything as far as I'm concerned, plus it looked a little too exciting to be consistent. As predictable as it sounds, your top image should probably just be beige - all beige. I like how you put a lot of your opening images on the left, by the way. It's like you have a signature.
Miscellaneous:	7	Scored by my gut feeling.
Final Score:	38.5	So to sum up, the main problem here really is briefness. I hope my review helps. Don't take any of my criticisms to heart, this is a great article, my suggestions are just there to help you should you want to change anything. Good luck with this (and with WotM, damn you), and feel free to contact me if you need any clarification or want me to look at any changes.
Reviewer:	--Black Flamingo 18:08, August 11, 2010 (UTC)

Question

Would this article just be better without beige-colored text? It worked for yellow, so maybe I tried too hard here.

No, on the contrary, I think this is one of those precious few situations that the turn the page just one colour angle works indispensably. The repetition in the writing and the fact that the subject is the unassuming and chromatically monotonous color beige complements the format nicely. Rather, what I think would be the defining step is to somehow figure out how to make as much as is humanly possible of the regular Uncyclopedia elements (navbar, links, tabs) match. This could make Beige the proverbial King of Colour(themed pages). Being not so intimate with MediaWiki and its vagaries, I spent a few frustrating hours trying to make this happen for you, learning a tad about how wikis handle Cascading Style Sheets. In any sort of setup, the solution would be trivial, but since wikis are a morass of transcluded code snippets, it's a little difficult to tell how extensively this sort of thing has been attempted before. I think the sane way to go about it is to focus solely upon making the Table of Contents beige/tan to match. If you check out Red, you can see this has already been accomplished, but not with a template or font tag or something so fortunately simple as that: it exploits kludgey changes made to the master file that controls how everyone sees Uncyclopedia, MediaWiki:Common.css, originally hacked together for the purpose of "stealth red links". Wikipedia, and therefore most "wikis" in existence, construct content pages programmatically upon an HTML spewing PHP custom-backend. It's like MadLibs, but with a public database, and the result should be the same every time. Since MediaWiki therefore has created a standardized list of navigational and format elements and used them widely as "classes", and have been so kind as to give us [handy list of them], accessing them and inline-styling them with CSS should be the elegant and trivial solution. But Jimbo and Company, in their infinite wisdom, despite allowing users to change CSS (skins), and browsers to change CSS, and admins to change CSS (global), left out the ability for authors to use the same functionality to undermine their "look and feel" standards for the purposes of a page. You can use CSS in wikitext, but it needs to be right next to what you're styling (in the article), the antithesis of the spirit in which CSS was created. In other words, article creators are allowed no simple way to change generated or transcluded content, such as TOC's and cquotes and the navbar at the side of the page. It's easy to see why they thought to do that: the purpose of Wikipedia was to give people their own little sandbox while preserving the standardized appearance of the site. The same philosophy works poorly on wikis like ours, and that's why we have this neat little page called Uncyclopedia:Hacks.

There's three ways I see one being able to get around this.

1. This way is the most likely: we put in NOTOC, a "magic word" that suppresses the generation of a section table of contents for the article, and just put in an HTML table that looks like the normal Table of Contents. This is the most sane option, although it feels like kind of a cop-out somehow.
2. We get somebody really knowledgeable about this stuff, who also happens to be an admin, to make a little hacky class for making all text beige, just like "new" for Red. Since that functionality probably wouldn't see much use outside of this article, it would be more than a little silly to change the master file just for that.
3. The admins choose to find and successfully install something that works akin to [this extension], which will seem equally silly now, but might help out a half-dozen Featured Article writers a few years down the line.
4. Some really smart and benevolent power user swoops down from the heavens with an answer to our needs, in the form of a magical template that lets you replace navigation elements at will, or change all text on the page one color. Or, alternatively, informs me of my stupidity and offers you some one-liner solution.

In any event, I actually think this quandary might be of some interest to the right people, and so advise you to extend your Call for Experts to the Help, or even the main section of the Village Dump, where it is most likely for those sorts of miraculous folks to reside. --KUN VFH POTM VFP(IMAGES⇔TALK) 05:01, August 17, 2010 (UTC)

Or hey, you could just kill that mean nasty TOC, which is what it looks like you did while I was typing all of that nonsense anyway. *facepalm* --KUN VFH POTM VFP(IMAGES⇔TALK) 05:04, August 17, 2010 (UTC)

Oh, and perhaps it's just me, but there's a bit of a formatting disaster around "The Summary of Commentary on Current Economic Conditions" on my 1020x768 screen, due to the "Did You Know?" box, and the three [edit] headings, which sometimes I like to remove en masse with the similarly applied NOEDITSECTION.--KUN VFH POTM VFP(IMAGES⇔TALK) 05:20, August 17, 2010 (UTC)

Well Done

Very Funny. Well Done. Even if reading it does make one bilious and,well, a bit Beige and Cyndi Lauper Green about the Gills . Two possible areas worthy of mention : 1/ Burberry and fake Burberry, the Yuppies who wear the former and Chavs who wear the latter. 2/ Billy Connolly on the subject of Beige. Perhaps you mentioned both when I was out puking my ring up and I missed it.-- ⦿⨦⨀ Phrage (talk) 04:25, August 28, 2010 (UTC)

Thank you. I really sincerely appreciate your compliment. I also have no idea what that other stuff is that you are talking about. But yes. Thank you. It's Mrthejazz... a case not yet solved. 04:30, August 28, 2010 (UTC)

Burberry Clothing is expensive Beige fashion clothing, particularly a vile Beige Tartan and often worn by crass people. Originally a marker for the rich it is now a symbol of the lower middle class gormless social climber. Lots of cheap illegal copies are made and sold as a result.

Billy Connolly is a famous comedian who has several routines about the colour Beige

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmpRQLaxF60 this is an early one but he developed the theme in later performances.

Here is another Beige mention by him http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2-WJO0YQLOs&feature=related

Google Billy Connolly and you might find the new one about Beige people.

There is even a facebook page for the Anti Beige

You are right -the wikipedia beige page is scarily funny

Keep the funnies coming.-- ⦿⨦⨀ Phrage (talk) 06:43, August 28, 2010 (UTC)

Figured It Out

Also, I put together the code you would need to "paint the town beige" and change most of links and the Uncyclopedia links to one color. It'd be something like:

<css>
#content {color:tan;} a:link {color:tan; text-decoration: underline; }
#p-logo, .generated-sidebar,
#p-lang  a:link,a:active,a:visited,a:hover{left: .1em;color:tan;}
#p-tb link,a:active,a:visited,a:hover{left: .1em;color:tan;}
#p-personal a:link{color:tan;}
#firstHeading {color:tan;}
#p-cactions a:link,a:active,a:visited,a:hover{left: .1em;color:tan;}
#p-search {color:blue}a:link,a:active,a:visited,a:hover{left: .1em;color:tan;}
#footer {display:none;}a:link,a:active,a:visited,a:hover{left: .1em;color:tan;}
#toc {color:tan} a:lin{color:tan};
a:active {color:tan; text-decoration: tan; }
{color:tan; text-decoration: none; }
</css>

But you'd have to ask User:Sannse very nicely to install an update to the Wiki in the form of the mw:Extension:PageCSS extension. I also fixed the featured article badge to blend in with the overall chromatic theme, as you asked on my talk page. Cheers!--KUN VFH POTM VFP(IMAGES⇔TALK) 21:56, August 29, 2010 (UTC)