Cleanup help needed

I know this may not be the right place, but the Main.Administrivia page has a "natch" on it. This may need to be deleted, as it has become a Troper Tic, and people are using it when it is Word Cruft. (it's in the "Historical Pages" section, right at the bottom.)

The place to ask for edits on these pages is the Edit Requests thread.

ZergRush.Video Games is a mess of bad Example Indentation, Conversation in the Main Page, and all around bad formatting. I cleaned up a bit of it, but quickly ran out of a) knowledge of the games covered, and b) ambition. A bit of help in burning out the formatting blight on that page would be appreciated.

I fixed the indenting and deleted a bunch of pointless barely related details for maybe half of it before I got sick of it.

edited 24th Sep '14 8:57:08 AM by rexpensive

Damn You, Muscle Memory! has a lot of bad Example Indentation in the Video Games section.

^ Oh-kay, a lot of the examples there seem to violate the policy against general examples. I think I need someone else to take a look at it on confirm, but I am pretty sure

• An example that could prove slightly dangerous for your health is when you travel outside your home country to somewhere where people drive on a different side of the road. Which also puts the steering wheel on the other side of the vehicle. You might want to take a while to get used to this before driving in city traffic.
  • That's the easiest of things you need to unlearn and relearn when in a place where drivers use the opposite lane to where you're familiar: Want proof? Just wait until it's time to shift gears. Where'd the shifter-lever go?!
  • Your internal navigation senses will take some time getting adjusted. For example, say you're driving on the left and come from a country that drives on the right. You need to go somewhere that's left of you and it's on the right side of the road and think "I can turn left here and turn into the place." only to realize after that you can't.
• The rising popularity of semiautomatic transmissions has caused this trope to occur somewhat. With the center console shifter, some have you pulling back to shift up (like racecars) and others push forward (push up, gear up) and some even operate by moving the shifter sideways. The paddles may operate differently as well. On some, pulling one paddle shifts up and pulling the other shifts down. On others, pulling either paddle will shift up and pushing either paddle will shift down, or vice versa. Plus, on some cars the paddles are stationary and on others they rotate with the steering wheel.
• Most vehicles with automatic transmissions have a brake pedal that's one-third-again to twice as wide as that provided on manual versions, with the extra width going well into the zone where the clutch pedal would be. Result? If you're used to Driving Stick but occasionally drive automatics, you will clip the brake pedal while going down for the clutch that isn't there, at least once.
  • Similarly, some drivers will hit the parking brake when they instinctively go for the clutch.
• Going from "First on the upper left" to "Reverse on the upper left"◊ can take some time to get used to.
• Anyone who has a regular, daily commute will, at least occasionally, get in the car to go somewhere in the evening or on the weekend — and automatically start going to work.
• Most cars have the indicator stalk on the side of the steering wheel opposite the gear lever (theoretically to share out the work of changing gears and indicating, although that's less of a problem with automatics). This isn't normally swapped when a car is changed to right or left-hand drive - with the result that most English and Japanese cars have indicators on the right, and American and European cars have them on the left. Cue starting one's windscreen wipers before changing lanes... There is a joke by UK comedian Victoria Wood which goes "I was cut off in my new car yesterday, so I gave him a really long blast with my windscreen wipers".
• Some cars have windshield wiper switches laid out with "off" as the uppermost position, others have "off" as the lowest one, and some have it in the middle, with seemingly no rhyme or reason as to which is which.
• A lot of permutations exist in the reverse gear of manual gearboxes, as evidenced by the Driving Stick page image. Some cars require you to pull a catch up into the top of the gear-knob with your first two fingers, before sliding the gear-stick to the left (past First Gear). Others have the reverse gear underneath Fifth. Still others have it to the right of Fifth or even to the far left of first, with no catch. God help you if get that wrong.
• Most modern motorcycles have a sequential gearbox that has the (foot-operated) lever on the left, with 1-neutral-2-3-4-(5)-(6), moving the lever up to select a higher gear. The right foot operates the rear brake. Some not quite that modern ones have the lever on the left but the sequence reversed (down to select higher), and a fair number of older British bikes have the lever on the right (with either pattern), the rear brake on the left.
• Calling the car rescue company when a new car wouldn't start, after moving from a car with an an old-style ignition to one with keyless ignition.
• You move to a different part of town and you still drive to the old place.
• In countries that drive on the left hand side (if you're used to the right hand side) may get into the passenger seat of those cars. A fun trick in case you do happen to make this mistake to make it seem like you're not a total idiot is to "check the glove box"
• If you're visting a foreign country and decide to call a taxi, you may find yourself getting into the driver's seat instead of the passenger's if you have family sitting in the back.
• Either going from regular steering to the much softer hydraulic power steering (just pushing the wheel a little bit can make a car change lanes) or the inverse (the strength used with hydraulic steering isn't enough for an effective turn).
• As a crossover, spending too long playing driving games can be really bad for you behind the wheel, since there'll be a little voice in your head saying you get out of reverse by accelerating.
  • If you play Mario Kart right before driving, you might get the urge to throw a red shell at the slow guy in front of you.
• Many automatic transmission trucks and vans with automatic transmissions have the emergency/parking brake as a foot pedal, small and close to the outside of the car. Sometimes, there is a release lever above the pedal, under and to the left of the steering wheel. Sometimes, the "release" is achieved by pressing on the pedal a second time. In the latter case, car engineers still like to stick a lever in the same place as the "parking brake release lever", but instead of releasing the brake, it instead pops the hood.
• Someone who is used to driving a car with a six-speed manual gearbox is likely to hit the reverse gear lockout (or nothing at all, depending on the configuration) more than once when they get into a five-speed car, as they try to change into the non-existent sixth gear.
• When one get used to how much force should be applied to properly close a regularly used car, one might accidentally slam another car's door too hard or having the door stuck just before it closes. The former could accidentally damage the door while the latter requires opening the door again and close it harder.
• If you switch from a vehicle that has a gas tank on one side to one that has the gas tank on the other, expect to drive the wrong way into a gas station several times before you get used to it.

Is ALL too general to count as examples. Certainly the bits about how people might accidentally drive towards work when they are not going to work is pretty useless. I tend towards being a bit cut-happy though, so it would be nice if someone else had a look at it.

^ I wouldn't object in the slightest to outright chainsawing those entries. Further carnage may be warranted, but at the moment I don't have the ambition to dig through the other entries on that page.

I will go ahead then. If people object we can talk about it more.

OK, I hacked a lot of it, but I am stumped by this Music section. Do we need any of this? It is basically just "playing one instrument and then another different instrument feels weird" over and over again. Correct me if I am wrong, but this trope is mostly about something like a game or a software might set their GUI or controls up in a way that is counter to a more common or earlier similar product and that messes people up? So if one designer of an instrument, like, moves a drum or a hole or something and it messes people up that could count, but if a bass is weird to play after playing guitar, I do not think that is the same thing.

Here are the examples:

• Often happens to pianists who switch between full sized pianos and small keyboards. Whilst the size of the keys may only differ slightly, it's enough to throw you off completely.
• Pianists also deal with the differences between individual pianos. Using one piano while practising at home and another for a performance is really hard without adapting to the new piano. Especially differences in resistance in the keys throws you off.
• Going from practising on a full piano (with very resistant keys) to playing a keyboard (with unweighed keys) is hard. The upside is that you can then play much faster on unweighed keys if you practice with weighted ones.
• There's a major difference in functionality between many electronic keyboards and traditional pianos: on traditional pianos, and electronic pianos made to emulate them, when you press a key the whole key goes down. On most electronic keyboards, however, only one end of the key moves down, in a swinging motion. It can easily result in skilled pianists whiffing notes if they start playing up in the black keys.
• Guitars. Sometimes you need to change the key based on your singer. Works simple, right? Just replace the chords. Until you remember the fact that you need to accommodate the open strings. This can result in you having to retune the guitar, because the new key is a lot harder.
• Capos brings the key up. A song that is in a low key, like E will lose most of it's bottom, since you are bringing the key up and sometimes thus "ruining" the sound. But this can create problems for other instruments. If playing a song that is normally with a capo, only the guitar has a capo. Say you want to bring it down, this can make the work hard for the bass player, if he's playing it in such a way that it's hard to move it (often the case if using open strings).
• Averting the trope is a key skill for jazz musicians. There are certain keys that sound best for certain instruments, and in a five piece jazz band, it's possible that every single instrument would like to play the song in a different key (except the drummer, obviously). Most often, it's the guitarists and pianists who will change to play with the singer or horns, so they have to be able to transpose complex chords on the fly.
• Playing guitars in different tunings. Some tunings, like Eb standard or D standard, will just put you in the wrong key. Then you get to tunings where the usual string intervals are removed, like Drop D, Open E, or DADGAD. All of your usual chord shapes and scale patterns no longer apply.
• Sometimes the resistance of the sustain pedal can throw piano players off. A pianist may be accustomed to a piano with a really firm pedal that allows the foot to rest on it even when it is not in use, only to do the same thing on a different piano and be accidentally applying the pedal for no reason!
• People who switch between similar instruments (for instance flute/recorder/tin whistle) have to perform really awesome mental acrobatics to remember to prod the right bits.
• Recorder players have to adjust to the very-slightly-different fingering of the Baroque and German recorders, which also happen to look and feel exactly the same.
• Switching between soprano and alto recorders. The notes are suddenly a fifth down/up from what they were (which screws with you especially when you're reading music), and the holes are a different distance apart. Expect to miss a lot. This is a real Mind Screw when switching between the tenor and alto saxophone, and the clarinet in Bb and A, despite that their fingering systems are identical to each other.
• Percussionists have a similar problem when switching sticks. The slightest difference in weight or shape can throw you off completely. When playing snare drum, this difference in dynamic or rhythm could make for a very embarassing entrance into the piece.
• A drumset player switching between various drumsets for self-practice, group rehearsal, and performance.
• This is why Ringo Starr plays such uniquely odd drum fills. He learned to play on a set laid out for a right handed drummer. Being a leftie, he couldn't really get the patterns right. By the time he tried switching to a leftie setup, his hands couldn't unlearn what they had learned. Whatever you might say about the technical correctness of his playing, it's hard to argue with success on that level.
• Try learning to play the viola and then trying to play a contrabass. To clarify, the contrabass is a viol, which is actually a different instrument family than the violin, viola and cello, and tunes in fourths instead of the fifths that the others do. This means that the entire fingering system of the instrument is different from that of the other three, which could be a Mind Screw to adjust to, aside from the physical difficulty of pressing down on those steel cables that the contrabass calls strings. And the bow alone probably weighs more than a violin.
• Handbells. Going from bass (F3-B3) to the bottom of the treble clef (D5-E5) mid-concert means that hand location for damping has moved about a foot backward, not to mention the care that must be taken to avoid tossing the bells across the room.
• Going from a bass trombone with dependent valves to one with independent valves can be tricky; there are techniques that you can use on one that will not work on the other.
• Going from a tenor trombone without an F attachment to one with an F attachment or a bass with just an F attachment or one with two attachments.
• It can feel very strange playing bass for awhile and then changing to a guitar.
• Switching between classical, steel-string acoustic, and electric guitar.
• When Yamaha introduced the DX7 synthesizer in the 1980s, it was a big seller due to being the first fully-digital synthesizer, with all the convenience of being able to save sounds for later use (as opposed to having to manually set them with knobs every time), and perfect tuning stability. The tradeoff? It was a completely different method of synthesis than that used in earlier synthesizers: it was much less intuitive, and the results were much less predictable. Additionally, the replacement of knob controls with a digital menu that was paged through with buttons made it impractical to adjust sounds during performance. Many musicians simply treated the DX7 as a "preset machine", and didn't even bother trying to learn to program the thing.
• Altering the sound of a subtractive-synthesis versus an FM-synthesis machine. Very different systems.
• Logic Pro plays with this by having the oscillators switch between subtractive-synthesis mode and FM mode on the oscillator knob in its included ES 2 plugin.
• Not technically muscle memory, but perhaps ordinary memory or pitch memory: going from an instrument written in one key to one that's written in another. For example, going from a sax (E-flat) to a clarinet (B-flat), or from trumpet (B-flat) to horn (F) has major Mind Screw potential. "Concert B-flat" (a common tuning note) is a B-flat on C instruments, an F on F instruments, a G on E-flat instruments, and a C on B-flat instruments, but they're all the same pitch.
• One of the most difficult skills to learn as a musician is to read an orchestral score while mentally transposing all the parts to concert pitch. Doubly so if you're not fluent in alto and tenor clefs. If you're a pianist trying to play a reduction of the score, you're guaranteed to get mixed up between transposed parts and concert pitch constantly.
• Young French Horn students going from single horn to double horn. Starting at C# and going up, the fingerings differ between the two. Then, a few years later, when the student reaches high school and has to switch to mellophone for marching band, the fingerings go back to single horn except for the notes below F, which were constant between single and double horns. It's manageable when you're playing the music your director gives you, but if you feel like learning something by ear it's more of a problem.
• Learning to play the piano (which uses both treble and bass clef) after playing an instrument which uses only one of those clefs, will have you be far more proficient in one hand than the other for quite some time.
• On guitar, learning scales. Players get struck in 'boxes', and allow them to improvise in a closed part of the fretboard.

Those are all generic examples, save maybe the DX7 and Logic Pro entries.

And whoever put in the "Not technically muscle memory" example should be flogged for the word crufty shoehorning.

The Baroness seems to have a massive amount of shoehorning going on. I can buy the original two "types" in the description, but once you start mixing them or loosening the qualifications - as many of the examples do - then it seems like you can list almost every female villain. The trope itself doesn't seem to need fundamental help, but the examples definitely need review and trimming.

FanFic.Through The Looking Glass is a mess of Zero Context Examples, bad Example Indentation, Spoiler Policy violations, and other formatting issues. Not being familiar with the work (or having any interest in becoming so), I can't really provide much context to fix the ZCEs, and don't really have the free time to clean up the mess.

Cynicism Catalyst doesn't seem to have ever undergone a cleanup from when it was called Dead Little Sister, meaning that there are a number of examples of literal dead siblings that don't actually match the trope. Anyone willing to get rid of them would be much appreciated, as I don't currently have the time myself.

(Also, bump).

Film.Two Thousand One A Space Odyssey has natter, improper indentation, ZC Es, Artistic License Physics as a trope (as I understand it, the entries should each be under the proper subtrope), incomplete examples ("Distant Prologue: "The Dawn Of Man"." means diddly to me, not having seen the movie), lots of references to the novelization, which has its own page so that needs to be sorted, references to examples 'above' (an example should stand on its own), Sliding Scale ZC Es, at least two shoehorned tropes from what their text says vs what the trope's about (meaning a rewrite or removal is needed)...

...oh, sheesh, a "Practically the Trope Codifier" example. Urk

And Wham Shot's example is completely spoilered out. I have spoilers set to show, and spoilering that particular text like that, forcing someone to highlight it anyway, defeats the point. More detail and a partial spoiler would work better.

I haven't seen the movie, and what I've read here and on Cracked is my some total knowledge. So help, please, from those with more knowledge then me.

Inferred Holocaust has a buttload of very lengthy Square Peg Round Trope examples that are explicitly stated by canon/are otherwise not "inferred", and I do not have the energy to sift through them.

Fat Idiot is loaded with Zero Context Examples, to the point where entire media folders disappear if you comment out the ZCE entries in them, and has a whole lot of aversions where at least from the context in the entries I skimmed it doesn't sound like the trope was ever expected to be used in the first place, making me wonder if FI could stand a trip through TRS instead of just cleaning up the crap.

Convection, Schmonvection. Hoo boy. The video game section needed, and probably still needs, a pruning of Word Cruft and complaining. I had to remove a lot of "partially averted," "somewhat averted," and similar phrases. Also, it's an Acceptable Breaks from Reality trope, so I have no idea why so many tropers think it's automatically bad and always indicates poor research when it may be that the writers are getting it wrong intentionally for the sake of storytelling or gameplay convenience.

digimon has some serious writing issues that need cleanup.

The Psych funny page is a MESS. I just started watching the show, and I can tell all eight seasons of comedy has just been vomited all over the page. Occasionally, I have seen the same example twice or even three times. Maybe we could make folders? If someone saw the entire show, (I am only on the eleventh episode) we could kickstart this.

Specific entry needing help: the last example on DorkAge.Live Action TV is a gigantic brick of text about 80s sitcoms in general. It clearly needs to be either trimmed or cut, but it's genuinely unreadable. Anyone willing to take a look at it and figure out what to do?

Zap it wholesale. General example and that tropoid is about specific works.

Nicki Minaj has tropes about her life interspersed with tropes about her work and some Zero Context Examples. I am not familiar with any of her music so I'd appreciate if someone could go over the page.

edited 26th May '15 6:31:32 PM by Karxrida

The Nineteen Kids And Counting YMMV page has a lot of stuff about the recent news about Josh Duggar's past molestation of young girls...None of that was ever mentioned on the show so I don't think it should be mentioned on the page but I'm not sure.

Stuff that doesn't appear in the work is always deletionworthy.

Also, I've just noticed that the Deader Than Disco subpages are full of natter-y Walls of Text. I'm trying to edit the ones I'm knowledgeable about but I don't want to accidentally delete something relevant.