About Captious

Veve had a dream... She wanted a review site with "no rubric, no marking scheme, no silly rules, [nothing but] a collaboration of insightful feedback" (2005).

Twenty-five years later, Captious Pedants was born. We aim to tear apart your site and shower you with comments about its presentation, efficiency and content. Comments that will, hopefully, help you view your site from a stranger's perspective. It is our goal to provide you with genuine criticism, not sentimental sugarcoating.

Or so to speak. What we really do is insult you. From our "experience," we conclude that compliments are useless. Furthermore, they are boring, generic and meaningless. It is much easier to get to the point if we do not have to waste our time trying not to offend you. We will most likely offend you, though we assure you that we do that with "the best of your interest" in mind.

A Confusing Name

cap·tious
adj.
Marked by a disposition to find and point out trivial faults.

ped·ant
n.
1. One who pays undue attention to book learning and formal rules.
2. One who exhibits one's learning or scholarship ostentatiously.

Captious Pedants was chosen by Elysa, whose sarcastic (and weird) sense of humor ususally managed to get the better of her. Is it a clever pun or a fool's mistake? Elysa refuses to tell. But until enough people object to this name, Captious Pedants remains as the site's identity.

A Mindless Timeline

Since Veve refused to write this section, and I do not like to write anything history-related, we proudly present you... a timeline. Aren't we clever? (The date is written in international format, yyyy-mm-dd.)

2005-01-07 21:17 EST, Veve conceded, and Captious Pedants became the official name.
2005-01-07 21:21 EST, sub-domain was created.
2005-02-19 Elysa moved to abolish Operation "First Layout." Veve seconded the motion, and the team was back to square one (or zero).
2005-02-28 Through some clever manipulation (brainwashing, in other words), Veve managed to convince Rilla to join our evil force. Under the guise of an "equal member of the team," Rilla was assigned to do most of the work, starting with designing the new layout.
2005-03-21 After three days of PHP coding, debugging and just-kill-me-now torture, Captious was officially database-driven.
2005-03-25 The site made was officially launched. "Hidden Leaf" was the name of the first version; the layout was designed by Veve.
2005-07-03 Captious's second version, also designed by Veve, was put online.
2005-07-04 Tyler was accepted as the fourth member of the Captious team.
2005-09-12 Completion of Elysa's summer-long project to revamp Captious. All reviews were checked for errors; all pages were revised or rewritten, and many features were added to help aid navigation.
2006-07-13 Captious was back with a new layout, designed by Tyler, after a 9-month hiatus. EEP the Porcupine became the new mascot for the site.