Rocking the Wordpress
So I have to blog for this class I’m taking. I am not so unfamiliar with The Blogosphere — I have a personal blog on Livejournal (you don’t want to see it unless you like memes or Spring Awakening — most of it is friends locked anyway). It’ll be good to broaden my horizons, though, and so I’m going to try and actually use this Wordpress blog I installed for Vicom-124. As a sidenote, I’m updating using the Firefox extension Deepest Sender, of which I am a fan.
I am, however, pretty bad about updating with actual content of value more than once in a blue moon. So I think I need some kind of theme for my posts here. I think that theme will be…
TV Tropes is a website I find totally awesome. It has a reputation for being a black hole of time wasting. Have you ever heard of a “wiki walk”? It’s a phrase to refer to going on a Wiki to look up one thing but ending up clicking links within that article and ending up in a totally different place than you began. For example, you go on Wikipedia to look up “hot dogs”, you see the link to “meat analogue” and you’re like I wonder what that is and an hour later you somehow ended up reading about the Chernobyl Disaster and you can’t quite remember how you got there. Well, TV Tropes is basically made for wiki walking.
What the hell is TV Tropes? Well, it’s a wiki about tropes — “tropes” being “devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members’ minds and expectations.” Basically, it’s certain kinds of characters, places, storylines etc. that appear commonly in media (despite the name, they now offer pages on tropes occurring in everything from movies to music videos to newspaper articles). On the pages for these tropes, people can add examples of where they’ve seen that trope at the bottom of the page — and there’s no rule about a work having to be notable to be included. That obscure movie you saw 10 years ago can go in examples as much as Avatar and there’s no need to credit your sources a la Wikipedia (but if you lie and someone knows better, don’t think they won’t call you on it). There are also pages for different works (and people who create them) where people try and list the tropes it contains.
Let me give you some funny/interesting Tropes to start you on your TV Tropes Wiki Walk:
Five Token Band
Homemade Sweater From Hell
Clarke’s Law For Girls’ Toys
Something Something Leonard Bernstein
Here are some popular works of fiction and lists of tropes they contain:
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
The Brady Bunch
Titanic
So what’s so awesome about TV Tropes? Well, for one, it’s a good time. It’s fun to go through tropes and go, “Oh! Ha! I’ve seen that!” and add your favorite movies, etc. to examples. Not to mention that most of the articles are cleverly written in a light tone. But on the other hand… the more time you spend there the more you start to look at media differently. You start to watch TV, etc. and recognize these tropes. This can be a good thing or a bad thing — and TV Tropes itself even has pages discussing these aspects of its own existence: TV Tropes Will Ruin Your Life and TV Tropes Will Enhance Your Life.
Now, something you should check out on YouTube: Truth or Fail. Truth or Fail is YouTube’s best and possibly only game show. How it works: The game puts up a video about a particular topic where you are given two facts and you click on the one you think is true. Depending on which you clicked, you’ll be lead to another video telling you if you picked the truth or you failed, and you’ll then be given another set of facts. There are five rounds in total, and at the end people like to comment with the number of rounds they got right. The games are posted weekly and hosted by famous people on YouTube, so it’s not only fun in and of itself, but it introduces you to some big names on YouTube whose channels you might want to check out if you find them a particularly charismatic host.
Here’s a few games on Truth or Fail you might want to check out:
Beard Trivia
Superbowl Trivia
Video Games Trivia
Why is Truth or Fail so awesome? It is one of the most consistently entertaining and well organized YouTube projects I’ve ever seen, so it’s a great example of how to make good videos on YouTube. It’s got a clever concept — a game show — that no one else on YouTube has really used at this level, and it’s constructed in a way that makes games quick and don’t really require you to be all that knowledgeable about the subject. After all, it’s a 50/50 chance of winning each round if you guess. It introduces you to cool people on YouTube and lots of fun trivia. It really is, to me, a representation of some of the really interesting things people are attempting on YouTube these days.