thing is, tropers often treated it like it was a serious reference
while a lot of the criticisms were admittedly elitist, there was definitely an anti-intellectual contingent on the site which left me more sympathetic towards said snobs
thing is, tropers often treated it like it was a serious reference
while a lot of the criticisms were admittedly elitist, there was definitely an anti-intellectual contingent on the site which left me more sympathetic towards said snobs
More seriously, yes I feel you, but I can't stand snobs by default so while I was more sympathetic... it was only by so much. If they actually cared, there would have been less naming-and-shaming bad amateur works, and more constructive criticism (which happened all too infrequently), alongside the other nonsense. So, meh.
i'm thinking here of the way you'd see people sneering at 'modern art' and 'literary criticism' and people putting forward the claim that tropes were the 'building blocks of fiction'
though now i mention it i'm not sure there was any overlap between those two groups, it just sort of added up to an overall impression for me, of a culture that was basically to art and literature what LessWrong is to philosophy and computer science
Now, see, that makes sense to me. The minimalist, overly reductive approach is easy enough to follow if you're completely ignorant of a philosophy (or know enough to be dangerous), but if there's anything that LW proved, it's that trying to reduce morality to a canned set of hard and fast Absolute Truths doesn't work all that well in the more nuanced real world.
The same goes for TVT; it seems like "troperiffic" works tend to be garish and soulless, like those cheap kids drinks that have more E numbers than anything else.
i'm thinking here of the way you'd see people sneering at 'modern art' and 'literary criticism' and people putting forward the claim that tropes were the 'building blocks of fiction'
the thing is that this is true in a way but also utterly meaningless. Lots of things can be said to be "the building blocks of fiction" including: words, ideas, pages, letters, characters, plots, settings, etc., etc., etc.
it's just one of those weird turns of phrase that doesn't actually mean very much.
the same goes for TVT; it seems like "troperiffic" works tend to be garish and soulless, like those cheap kids drinks that have more E numbers than anything else.
I feel like one of the few people who doesn't think that TVTropes has some big overarching capital-P Problem.
It has issues, most of which are attributable to the fact that it's mostly edited by your ISO standard nerd crowd, but it's not really markedly different from other nerdwank sites except in format (being a wiki as opposed to say, like, Cracked or something) so I dunno. I feel as though the ongoing discussion about "The Problem With TVTropes" is some kind of weird lingering influence of the whole SA/TVT "feud" that was going on in like 2011 even though most people on both sides that were actually involved (myself included, God help me) seem to have since moved on. Regardless of what anyone might want it to be, TVTropes is and always has been a great timewaster, but not much else.
I also think it's improved markedly since the new admins took over, at least from a reader's standpoint.
Couldn't tell you how it is from a user's standpoint since I am still IP-banned 5 years later. I'd like to talk to the new admins about that but I don't know how to get ahold of them.
how can something so about code be so annoying to code
fuck your side effects dammit. things don't actually happen. fuck you, fuck you. i'm going to beat you to death with a fucking leibniz joke you flayed son of a cunt. die die die die die. bleed out on me.
how can something so about code be so annoying to code
fuck your side effects dammit. things don't actually happen. fuck you, fuck you. i'm going to beat you to death with a fucking leibniz joke you flayed son of a cunt. die die die die die. bleed out on me.
Icona Pop plays in the elevator as I meticulometrically pull my skin out from inside my hepatic lololobules i just wanna see what it looks looks looks i mean if you see a million books in a library you don't assume they're all made out of paper or rather you do but there might be that one piece of shit book that's a pop-up or something and it's all wrong all the angles jut into each other all lobachevskially and you just want to burn down the whole building to free yourself of the fucking many angled dipshits singing soviet infantry songs in your stupid fucking head that can't even fucking get the noise out you see the the the the sic the the the the the the the control flow is impossible. that's what i'm telling you. it's just a stupid mess of nonlinear elements you goddamn smart person you can't even see the the fucking non fucking fucking the the the the the the fucking the fucking hair inside the body. pull it out. ding ding ding, music for trains. it's all a mess. we can't even understand computers if we don't put them in ridiculous badly generated boxes. what a joke. we can't understand me. i'm just a bunch of blood. what a joke. what a joke. the the the the, for good measure
the same goes for TVT; it seems like "troperiffic" works tend to be garish and soulless, like those cheap kids drinks that have more E numbers than anything else.
oh come on
Well, not all of them; I was thinking of those times when people in Writer's Block would essentially make a "suicide soda" of as many tropes they could think of. AAatFoVS and TVTtTVS (remember those?) had that problem. Stuff with a lot of tropes in it are typically a lot more organic, and less likely to taste like stale root beer.
i'm thinking here of the way you'd see people sneering at 'modern art' and 'literary criticism' and people putting forward the claim that tropes were the 'building blocks of fiction'
the thing is that this is true in a way but also utterly meaningless. Lots of things can be said to be "the building blocks of fiction" including: words, ideas, pages, letters, characters, plots, settings, etc., etc., etc.
it's just one of those weird turns of phrase that doesn't actually mean very much.
It appears to mean something, though. It appears to be an unsupportable metaphysical claim that treats 'tropes' as atomic.
i mean maybe i'm overthinking it and it really is just an empty phrase, but when i think back to the time Madrugada compared writing a story to carrying out a recipe with 'tropes' in place of ingredients, it really did seem like people thought that way and thought that was how you write a story.
Having said which i still feel like 'write a story containing tropes x, y and z' would be a pretty cool constrained writing exercise, it's just clearly not the only way to write a story, and probably won't make for the most original stories.
stop liking things. you must only hate. books: must hate. movies: must hate. music: triple plus must hate. strawberry cheesecake: must be scoured from the universe.
Comments
while a lot of the criticisms were admittedly elitist, there was definitely an anti-intellectual contingent on the site which left me more sympathetic towards said snobs
it's an exploratory nothingness
and it doesn't even matter to me really
i'm thinking here of the way you'd see people sneering at 'modern art' and 'literary criticism' and people putting forward the claim that tropes were the 'building blocks of fiction'
though now i mention it i'm not sure there was any overlap between those two groups, it just sort of added up to an overall impression for me, of a culture that was basically to art and literature what LessWrong is to philosophy and computer science
The same goes for TVT; it seems like "troperiffic" works tend to be garish and soulless, like those cheap kids drinks that have more E numbers than anything else.
these basic blocks, they drive me to drink
how can something so about code be so annoying to code
fuck your side effects dammit. things don't actually happen. fuck you, fuck you. i'm going to beat you to death with a fucking leibniz joke you flayed son of a cunt. die die die die die. bleed out on me.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
I think I have you all beat.
Assassin poems, Poems that shoot
guns. Poems that wrestle cops into alleys
and take their weapons leaving them dead
And the short version is road trips
He adds at least as much to the "feel" of the movies as John Williams's score.
the meme is, you ask someone about it, or casually mention it, and they ask what it is
it's like a more crude version of updog