User talk:Zeke, the Mad Horrorist/sandbox/Archive 1

Archive 1

Intro

Hello.

Welcome to my sandbox. As of now, I am using this page to experimentally create a new article for the amazingly-awesome album Prior to the Fire. You should give that album a listen some time. It's an amazing record.

Anyway, I'll be using this talk page to leave myself notes. If you have any feedback, please leave it here for me, but I would like to kindly request that you do not edit my sandbox, if indeed it is possible for other users to do so. Again, I am not opposed to feedback, but I do not want others fiddling with my work. I do not own the article I am trying to create, but I am trying to do this on my own. If you have any improvements to make that you think should be effective immediately, just head straight to the actual article and implement them yourself.

Thank you for your time.

Now for my notes

• I need to go through and remove templates wherever they appear - they remind me that the information I wrote there is true, but needs to be verified. (I'm a super hardcore fan of this group, so I know these things.)
• I've left some rough citation tags for now, but obviously I'll need to convert them to proper cites later.

LazyBastardGuy 05:06, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Also, I'll only archive this talk page once I'm finished with the article. LazyBastardGuy 23:12, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

LazyBastardGuy 05:12, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Just a reminder that I can use siggies as talk page section titles. That way I don't have to waste time coming up with crap to summarize my posts!

LazyBastardGuy 07:23, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

I'm not quite sure I'm comfortable leaving the "Song information" section where it is. I feel as if it should be at least two sections higher.

Make that three. LazyBastardGuy 07:24, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

LazyBastardGuy 19:54, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

So I've shuffled the "Song information" section, now I'm wondering if I really need bullet points for each song. I do have another version of that section written, much more compact. I suppose I'll put it here for reference (the section would be titled, "Music and Lyrical Content"):

Lyrically, the band followed Heppner's suggestion to "write about things [they] like". Several songs pertain to film and television characters, for example. Heppner wrote "Murphy's Law" as an ode to his favorite film, RoboCop. "It Baffles the Mind" discusses the tournament in the manga/anime series Dragon Ball, while "Sideways Attack" features lyrics inspired by the seminal manga/anime series, Lone Wolf and Cub. The serial drama Twin Peaks served as the basis for an outtake from the album.

Other songs were written about general themes. "Lady Killer" is about avenging someone's death at the hands of a murderer (which started from the band trying to "write a theme song for Jack the Ripper), while "The Gem" looks at the apocalypse as a good thing because it wipes out humanity (which is seen as a plague upon the earth in the song). Whoever sets it in motion (Heppner explained as by "open[ing] Pandora's Box") is hailed as a hero for having done the right thing. "Communicating Via-Eyes" is about "a guy who becomes a werewolf", although it has been speculated that the song was inspired by the influential horror film An American Werewolf in London.

I should point out that part of what I'd written here I've already integrated into the article. LazyBastardGuy 02:06, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

LazyBastardGuy 02:11, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

I don't enjoy that I use the word "band" so much in this article. I will be replacing occurrences of that word with synonyms as appropriate.

LazyBastardGuy 02:20, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

I am largely trying to follow the format of this article, as it is a featured album article. To that end, I must rearrange the headings.

Sadly, the album has little in the way of liner notes, and what it does have does not include Personnel, so all I can do at this point is add the band members plus the producer. LazyBastardGuy 20:51, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

LazyBastardGuy 02:34, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

It seems there is still much to be done with regard to verifying information in the new "Dispute with RCA" section. I'll just insert citations as I see fit.

LazyBastardGuy 21:50, 3 October 2012 (UTC)

The album was also released on vinyl, and the two bonus tracks were issued on a 7" single packed-in with it. Strangely enough, no mention of that release has occurred in the press that I am aware of. Might I possibly use a MusicBrainz citation or something? I don't think that would be viable enough.

LazyBastardGuy 06:33, 4 October 2012 (UTC)

What I MEANT to say in my last edit summary was, "I know it's a redlink but redlinks aren't bad..." Just goes to show I shouldn't type in the dark, even if the screen is bright.

LazyBastardGuy 04:29, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

I merged the "Dispute with RCA" section with that of "Background and recording", as its own subsection. It's really not the same as this section on the featured article I'm trying to follow, and fits better as part of the section regarding the album's history. (I had thought the two sections, on this article and the In Utero article, were somewhat analogous, but I've gone back on that opinion.)

LazyBastardGuy 06:59, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

I notice we're using nothing but web pages to support this article. That makes it especially vulnerable to link rot, as I affirmed when two of my sources went down. (Fortunately, I've archived them on my own computer.) Makes me wonder if I would want to get a more diverse selection of sources...

Also, I'd rather have more citations than fewer, so the opening sentence to "Background and recording" as of this writing looks deadly on the Edit page. The way I see it, citations cover the whole sentence up until they appear, although I used the same cite twice because in the middle of the sentence there is a clause that that particular citation cannot substantiate. Oh well, what can you do, y'know?

LazyBastardGuy 22:38, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

I'm going to see if I can merge "Dispute with RCA" further into "Background and recording". I think we need to get rid of that subsection, because that battle was only part of the trouble Priestess endured trying to get the record off the ground. It fits together perfectly as one long history section, rather than isolating the label issues as if they were any more important than any other reason that the band had trouble making this record.

Addendum - At the moment I'll be working to merge the subsection throughout the bigger section it's a part of, so in the meantime there will be heavily-duplicated information on the page. Oh well. LazyBastardGuy 22:39, 6 October 2012 (UTC)

LazyBastardGuy 01:24, 8 October 2012 (UTC)

Probably the two hardest sections to write will be the Tours and Reception sections, in order of increasing difficulty. Here's what I wrote for the Tours section that I'll be working with to hopefully improve and reinsert back into the article:

Priestess undertook a rigorous concert schedule as part of their ambitious promotion of the album. They went with Early Man and Trigger Effect on a late-2009 tour that took place mostly in Canada (as it almost immediately followed the album's Canadian release) but also made a few stops in the US. After the album released worldwide, the band supported Bigelf in the UK and Europe, and made two more North American tours with High on Fire - one immediately following the European tour in the US, and the other in July 2010 through Canada. That November, the band went on the road again with new labelmates Naam.

LazyBastardGuy 03:10, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

I just remembered I dug up a French-language article which can substantiate the inspiration for "Dweller" (which currently stands with a tag), although it does not seem to say anything about the circumstances under which it was released. As I am currently studying French, I anticipate that by this December I will be able to make at least a basic assessment of what the article is saying, and then hopefully we will be able to use it.

For the moment, though, "Dweller" has been added to my list of things that will probably get removed if this sandbox's contents get merged with that of the real article so that it can present as whole and unbiased a truth as possible. I plan to remove all the tags eventually; that will happen either by finding sources to substantiate the claims or by removing them entirely. Only time will tell which course of action is most appropriate.

LazyBastardGuy 08:50, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

I removed the Reception section. To be honest, writing one is not my forté. I'd much rather dig up facts about the album itself - that is, pure, unbiased information pertaining to the album itself, rather than accumulate varying opinions of it. As a fan, I do not believe I can be trusted to acquire and present all those different points of view in a fair way and I just don't find that sort of thing interesting anyways. But I'll put the review score template here for future reference:

Professional ratings

Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic
BLARE Magazine
CHARTattack
Rock Sound
SPIN

Just for the record, that CHARTattack link is dead. Dunno why so many of their links are. LazyBastardGuy 08:51, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

Oh, and one of the reviews I was using seemed unusable by Wikipedia standards anyways. LazyBastardGuy 08:53, 9 October 2012 (UTC)

LazyBastardGuy 20:18, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Apparently having low-resolution album covers on sandboxes is not kosher for Wikipedia. Thank you for that very abrupt and rude reminder, WP. Absolutely brilliant. /sarcasm

LazyBastardGuy 17:21, 23 November 2012 (UTC)

So it turns out that ChartAttack merely reworked their website and moved the two articles of theirs that I was still using. All I had to do was relocate them under the right URLs. Jolly good for us!

LazyBastardGuy 19:17, 23 November 2012 (UTC)

I'm trying to minimize the number of citations. I want to cluster them onto one sentence as much as possible so that way I don't have to reiterate them every freakin' clause that they support. I think the lordsofmetal cite might also support the first sentence under "Background and Recording", but that sentence already has two cites and my computer just about crashed as I was trying to access that site. I'm going to assume that site is off-limits until further notice, and that the two cites I have for that one sentence ought to be enough anyhow. I did use it to cite a few more names that the band toured with, but that's about it at this point.

Actually I'd saved that webpage elsewhere and can verify it does not support that first sentence in so many words. I did some more tweaking and now the two sentences are something I'm more pleased with. LazyBastardGuy 16:26, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

LazyBastardGuy 18:26, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

I put a citation needed tag on the actual listing of the two bonus tracks. Plenty of sources say there were bonus tracks; as yet, I do not know of any that say what they are.

LazyBastardGuy 20:24, 1 December 2012 (UTC)

I'll just leave this here...

http://www.allmusic.com/album/prior-to-the-fire-mw0001796438/credits

LazyBastardGuy 19:34, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Link repository time!

http://www2.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/artslife/story.html?id=002a2594-52b0-4890-8acb-67b391355a70&p=1

LazyBastardGuy 11:38, 27 January 2013 (UTC)

Well, it is time. I'm not sure how much more I'd be able to accomplish with this stuck in my sandbox. Besides, even after I consider it 'perfect' or 'complete' there's ALWAYS going to be some way to make it better, so it's a little nonsensical for me to think it's over yet. It's nowhere near done; but I've done most of the work here, so I really hope I can get the ball rolling and solicit more help. I'll archive this talk page as soon as I'm done.