TV Tropes meta thread

I mostly use the word to describe So Bad, It's Good works, i.e. "Samurai Cop is insane!"

It pretty much boils down to the word "insane" having gained a meaning besides "mentally dysfunctional".

edited 30th Mar '14 10:10:15 PM by KylerThatch

This "faculty lot" you speak of sounds like a place of great power...

So, I just spent the last hour or so reading old site drama from around mid-2012. I'm sure those shify-eyed dogs that were on the forums then probably remember what I'm talking about, but even if they don't, let's just say it was pretty huge storm of...something. Rereading it also made me realize that one of the reasons so much of the old guard here seems to have been replaced is due to bannings (either being banned themselves or leaving due to other people being banned).

It strikes me also as a bit curious that we don't seem to have had site drama quite of that caliber in a long time as well. I remember a point where the atmosphere here was like a ticking time bomb, where, possibly due to all the sweeping changes being made to the site then, people would become angry about things (often justified anger that would unfortunately lead to them going too far with their words that they chose in protest in anger), bans would happen, others would get mad as a result, the people who weren't involved would start wondering what kinds of innocuous things might get them banned. What I'm saying is that now it seems like no one really worries about this. Maybe too many of the people who frequent the site now haven't been here long enough to have been immersed in that atmosphere of paranoia at all, or maybe mod/member communication has improved dramatically since then to prevent the kinds of misunderstandings that would cause incidents like that, maybe even both.

I dunno. It's weird. On one hand, it's good for the climate of the forum to have cooled a bit. On the other hand, the calm is kind of unnerving. Part of me feels like part of the calm is due to decreased forum activity. Even as short back as a year or two ago, I feel like there were either a lot more people posting or a lot more posts being made in general. Several threads would be constantly active, yet while many of those threads now still are active, they fall victim now to quite a few lulls^note and not enough lulz. Many more threads used to be created, and rarely would any thread (at least, in Yack Fest) not at least reach a second page regardless of quality or purpose, whereas now, quite a few newly created threads get practically no attention. I don't want to say it seems like the forum is dying off, since that'd be overdramatic, but I can see at least a couple years down the line there being very little activity. I remember I used to frequent a rather popular Pokemon fan forum when I was but a child, one which would be constantly abuzz with activity all around. I checked back on the forum about a year or two ago (after not having been there for like half a decade), and it was a bit sobering to see how few people at all even use it. I even found one thread where people were arguing about what amounts to how the forums went totally downhill after the original site owner abandoned the forums and how much they just want to completely end the forum. It was a bit of a depressing read (and my summary of it doesn't exactly convey that well, I suppose, heh).

The total lack of incident makes me fear something else is going to happen soon, or if not "soon", then soon enough. Like I said, it's unnerving.

Insert witty 'n clever quip here.

While I agree that we're in the doldrums large-wiki-policy-change-wise, I am not sure if I agree that the forum activity has decreased.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Maybe I'm just focusing too much on the past couple months. Probably will flourish again once people start going on break/holiday/whatever you wanna call it from school, since, well, the majority of the users on this site are still in school/uni.

Insert witty 'n clever quip here.

I also just realized, come the end of September, it'll have been 5 years since I joined this site. And I'm still here.

Oh God, what has my life become.

Insert witty 'n clever quip here.

I've been here almost as long, since August 2010. And I think a lot of the slowness right now might be because of the time of year: everyone's busy as hell. The same thing is happening at a smaller scale in the RP I'm in.

I only created an account this winter, but I've been lurking for much longer. One of my only points of reference I have is that I started visiting the site before the release of Dragon Age: Origins. I just checked that page and was chocked to see that that game was released all the way back in 2009!. I'm also pretty sure I joined after Wrath of the Lich King (released in november 2008) and that it was in early summer break, so I've actually managed to narrow it down pretty well.

edited 6th Apr '14 12:28:25 PM by Druplesnubb

I've been here for around as long as 0dd, probably a bit longer.

I can't help but wonder what it'll be like if I manage to last a decade.

Eating a Vanilluxe will give you frostbite.

It says a lot about how long I've been here that I can remember Odd telling that story about the Pokemon forum at least once before. I joined in late '09. From what I'm told a lot of people joined around the same time. I think the difference between now at then is that while there are probably more people posting now, they post less frequently. Back then it was a handful who would post in a flurry. The mega threads were practically a chat room.

In fact, here's another factor Odd probably didn't take into account, when Mibbet chats started getting established, a lot of forum regulars just found themselves more comfortable with that than using the forum. Even without drama or anything a lot of people just left because they found an easier way to talk with their friends.

I actually don't know what that is.

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The IRC channels

Oh, right. See, I never quite knew how to access that, and even when I did figure it out, I couldn't really understand it. So I just never bothered to use it, since I figured it was too much effort for something I wasn't going to get anyway. Besides, I like forums better than chatrooms anyway—there's a definite record of everything that's been said on a forum, whereas IRC/chatrooms/whatever don't usually do that unless someone actually makes chatlogs. I like there being easily accessible records of things like that. Plus, just jumping into a chatroom you're already out of the loop of whatever everyone's talking about.

Insert witty 'n clever quip here.

I prefer XMPP, less of a hassle to figure out.

Eating a Vanilluxe will give you frostbite.

In my opinion, IRC hasn't really aged all that well. XMPP is built to be a lot more flexible and, as the name says, extensible, allowing it to be better adjusted for the needs of its userbase. Also since it's built primarily for instant messaging the decentralization and server-to-server communication makes it simpler for using chatrooms on different servers because you can connect to them all with a single account.

There's that sense of time pressure to reply to stuff people say in chatrooms that doesn't happen when I'm reading a forum thread. Which is why I rarely use chatrooms.

This "faculty lot" you speak of sounds like a place of great power...

You know where else has that sense of time pressure to reply to stuff people say? Real life

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Yeah, but you don't have an option to not use Real Life.

edited 7th Apr '14 2:49:07 AM by Parable

I mean, in a way, you do, but it's something kinda irreversible and highly discouraged, to say the least

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I lurked/joined in '09/'10 when I pretty much made the move from the SPP Pokemon forums (which I had been active on since '07) due to members on both forums like Cobalte and Electivirus introducing me here.

That's an observation. Electivirus just disappeared off the face of the Earth and TBH ...I really miss Electivirus. He was always a bunch a fun, Him and his pokemacros. I even crib my joking love of Ryan Reynolds from him ;-;.

edited 7th Apr '14 5:15:20 AM by PippingFool

I'm having to learn to pay the price

Yeah, I remember Electivirus. I wonder what happened to him...

I miss him too.

Eating a Vanilluxe will give you frostbite.

As do I. And his best avatar.

He's on tumblr, under the same name, I believe.

Read my stories!

That "And because tropers have troper's backs" thing in the "Webby for Tom" page seems oddly cultish.

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