Tropers / Uriel- 238

At some point this will be a more expanded profile of my silly self, but for now, it's a place where I catalogue my TV Tropes contributions.

I'm currently designing a cooperative card game Trek! ^note working title. Yes, it's really based on Star Trek, albeit a parody. I really want a better name that isn't litigation bait for Paramount. for which I have just added a page temporarily here rather than here ^note TV-Tropes is suffering from technical difficulties. please stand by... in Troper Works. It will, like this page, start as a reference index for tropes I've used, or want to use in the game, to aid in further development.

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Contributions By Related Interest

In 1984 Orwell's Newspeak lexicon was continuously reduced to help control thought of the masses. TV Tropes does for us the opposite, giving us a place to identify and name phenomena that we perceive, or even merely imagine, thus empowering us to think more freely. That, I believe, is awesomeness in perpetuity.

Note: This is not a comprehensive list. I've long since forgotten much of my more haphazard contributions. Part of my impetus to create an organized list has been the... decay of some of these segments^note not just modification but deterioration, possibly due to incompatibilities between standard character sets. , hence it's a means by which I can continue to track them.

Angels & Demons ( 2009 film)

Though expressed by someone else, I too was bothered by the less-than-severe effects of the aerial detonation of the antimatter, and hence needed to work out (compute) and express what should have happened.

• Angels & Demons, Main
• Disney Villain Death
• Slap-on-the-Wrist Nuke
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness

Relevant topics

• Angels & Demons, 2009 film (TOW)^note The Other Wiki, of course
• Angels & Demons, original novel by Dan Brown (TOW)
• Angels & Demons (IMDB)
• Energy orders of magnitude ~10¹² (TOW)
• Light Radiation from Nuclear Explosions (TOW)

Reviving the Classics

One of my backwater projects on TV Tropes is returning classical material to the collective conscience, ergo assuring they appear in any trope used in a given work, especially when tropes loaded with recent examples is Older Than They Think.

• Femme Fatale — how, for example, was Milady de Winter missed?

From Paris With Love

• From Paris With Love Main
• Gun Porn
• Surprise Checkmate

Relevant topics

• Establishing Character Moment
• Pastimes Prove Personality

Gaming

• Damn You, Muscle Memory! — standard controls never work for me, as a lefty, hence I tend to remap the controls for every game I play, which means this is not usually a problem.
• Harder Than Hard — After Doom released patches with its Nightmare! setting, it became a convention to include harder than hardest difficulty settings into games that were not fully playtested and not assured to be winnable. Indeed the Nightmare! setting on Doom was meant to be impossible, or nearly so, yet plenty of enthusiasts have beaten it.
• Unwinnable — Might include a middle category between by design and by mistake for incidents like Doom's Nightmare! difficulty, above, where the programmers were aiming for impossible (or near impossible) but have not playtested the game to be sure, nor is there a clear element that outright blocks success.
• Rage Quit
• Reviews Are the Gospel — Not for whatever reason, but the specific one of bulk entertainment rates: lots of hours are pre-purchased, making a high starting price for a product sight unseen, and a no-return policy. It's really a no-brainer why reviews are so important.

First and Third-Person Games

Mostly shooters, but I'm also a fan of less-shooty games such as the sneaker, Thief: The Dark Project

• Half Life
  • Death Ray — The sweet, sweet Egon Gluon Gun.
  • Technicolor Science — no-go zones are green and glowy in the first, dark green and sludgy in the second. Also, Borderlands
• Left4Dead
  • Black Dude Dies First — Poor Louis, so optimistic in a bad situation.
  • The Chick — Again, Louis. Yes, a male example. Rochelle, the chick in L4D2 is a typical female example, largely due to the developers' difficulty getting a grasp on the character. Notably, both are the everyman character, the one who is closet to being a normal person.
• Borderlands
  • Spaghetti Western — Borderlands features all the hallmarks.

Flight and Starfighter Sims

• Airstrike Impossible — I should add Dr. Strangelove.

Real Time Strategy

• Command & Conquer: Generals — This blessed game kept me sane during Operation Iraqi Freedom while my nation's administration was... well... behaving poorly in the international arena. ^note See the movie Rendition (below) for a story that's probably gut-wrenchingly true.
  • The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard — Generals cheated like fire in all the standard RTS ways ^{such as...} bonus units during production, gaining extra resources, sneaking peeks into the Fog of War., but went through great efforts to hide cheating efforts so that things looked normal.
  • Fog of War
  • My Rules Are Not Your Rules
• Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth — a very sleek, tightly designed and crazy-fun game. The sequel made for a less meticulous, more complex but still passable (and plenty-featuriffic) experience.
  • Arrows on Fire

Relevant topics

• X-Wing Series of Starfighter Games
• TIE Fighter (Technically one of the X-Wing series) — High-up on any best games evar list
• Secret Weapons Of The Luftwaffe
• Secret Weapons Over Normandy (TOW)^note The Other Wiki, of course
• Mig Alley, the place, not the game. (TOW)
• Video Game Culture

History Channel Education

I just have a thing for gun lore, spy lore, forbidden lore, war theory and things that go Ka-boom Chak-THOOM!. And I study like mad. I can't help it.

The Art of the Possible

• Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act — The Real Life section needs some cleanup. What was discussion got truncated to segments that miss the point. Also the section on the game Chrononauts needs polish.

Full Frontal Nerdity

My Dad really is a Rocket Scientist for NASA. I really did hang out with the guys at CalTech. No, I didn't make the grade to get in, myself.

• Agony Beam
• Chainsaw Good
• Disintegrator Ray — Goodness I have become such a trekkie.
• Even Nerds Have Standards
• Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better
• Laser Blade — I'm amongst the many who have thought too long and too hard about how such devices could actually work.
• Stun Guns — I have a particular interest in non-lethal warfare, which will change is changing how we wage war, for both good and ill.
• Rare Guns — Guns that appear in cinema and games more often than they do in reality, or guns that behave differently in same than in Real Life.

Relevant topics

• Energy Weapon
• Ray Gun
• The (original) Gatling Gun (TOW)^note The Other Wiki, of course
• The GAU-8 Avenger The big honkin' tank-slicing gun on the A-10 Thunderbolt
• The MG 08 and Vickers are sometimes confused for Gatlings (TOW).
• As is the Browning M1917 (TOW).

Literary Pedantry

• The Big List of Booboos and Blunders
• Have a Gay Old Time
• You Keep Using That Word
• You Make Me Sic

Relevant topics

• You Fail Logic Forever

Medieval Fantasy

King Arthur

• Holy Hand Grenade, TropeCo catalogue entry
• Excalibur in the Stone, previously Excaliburn — Confusion between Arthur's two swords (The one in the stone, and the reforged weapon presented by Nimue, the Lady of the Lake.) Audience-unfriendly similarities in names seems to be a common problem in mythology (e.g. Sauron and Sarumon). I grew up thinking the Sword in the Stone was named Galentine, since that's what Steve Jackson Games called it. Turns out they just wanted a less confusing name. In the meantime, I'm fond of the Narsil-Andúril solution offered in the 1981 movie Excalibur.

The Lord of the Rings

This one (lifelong) work of J. R. R. Tolkien is the basis for most modern-to-new-millenium fantasy fiction, even more so than King Arthur (above) or Robin Hood (below).

• Collapsing Lair — Barad-dûr. Can use a bit of cleanup.
• Dug Too Deep
• I Lied
• Load-Bearing Boss — Again, Barad-dûr. Also needs cleanup. Some edit effects don't like the Circumflex
• No Ontological Inertia — Again, with Barad-dûr. Again with needing cleanup.

Robin Hood

Relevant topics

• Barad-dûr (TOW)^note The Other Wiki, of course

Rendition ( 2007 film)

• Cold-Blooded Torture
• Interrogated for Nothing
• Torture Always Works
  • 2010.09.24 This one is lousy with grammar and spelling problems, let alone a bit too much focus on the morality of the issue^note never mind that the points are valid, we're talking fucking torture, here. The article needs to focus more on juxtaposition of fiction to reality, and not so much why.

Relevant topics

• Rendition (TOW)^note The Other Wiki, of course.
• Rendition (IMDB)
• Enhanced Interrogation Techniques
• Enhanced Interrogation (TOW)
• Ticking Bomb Scenario, link added to Torture Always Works above.
  • The hold-out aspect of this scenario^note I'm free and clear if I hold out until the timer runs out emerges from the Pacific Theater of WWII, in which captured American sailors would be tortured by the Imperial Navy. The common belief was all known data would be obsolete after a day's time, so they only had to hold out that long. Notably, most folks cannot endure waterboarding for minutes, let alone hours.

Sex Positivism

The result of getting socialized in a pansexual community is that I can discuss these things frankly without the usual awkwardness anticipated in US society.^note 

As a warning and disclaimer, this section discusses exactly what one would expect for a section titled Sex Positivism^note as do the linking tropes. If you don't want to deal with topics of human sexuality, or risk being two-to-three links away from NSFW imagery, you might want to close this section. Only you can be responsible for your own awareness of these issues, or lack thereof.

• Biggus Dickus^note Now, sadly, genericized to Bigger Is Better in Bed — Most of my additions here are the specifics of Real Life proportions and abilities to accommodate. I also contributed from my strangely fruitful lore of the inner workings of the porn industry. I'm also tempted to add elements of a recent rant,^{which is...}  that porn viewers have no sense of scale. To a roughly six-foot-tall fellow with average endowment, ~6" of erection extends to not quite the navel. So when someone is advertised as more, yet whose proportions don't show it, either someone's using short inches, or we're talking giants with normal human proportions. Think of it when you get a look at the talent's full frame.
• Brother–Sister Incest — Westermarck Imprinting (see below) is why this is so squicky for some, ^{though (TMI)...}  My own fetishes with this particular kink have to do with growing up an only child and a latchkey kid. Who wouldn't, in such circumstances, wish for a hot sister / brother to take care of them?. It's also why this is so rare, and probably would not need policing were marriage laws relaxed to be more inclusive.
• Buxom Is Better — Even when it's not (e.g. during the Victorian era.) Generally, it's guys in the US and Japan^note rumors also suggest Australia that obsess over the boobage. I hypothesize it's because we wean our babies too early and otherwise freak out about being mammals.
• Compensating for Something — My additions to this actually belong in a section above; I was adding info about railguns and supersized artillery.
• Ethical Slut^note History.
• Free-Love Future^note History. Needs some certain revision. The alleged fridge-logic issues are only so from the perspective of the presently uptight US culture. I need to go in and revise this entry to a more anthropological tone.
• Gag Penis — Whatever I contributed to this trope has since been edited out. I could contribute to the legend of Priapus who was cursed by Hera with an oversized member. Priapus was a scholar and a tutor of many of the other gods, but true to the curse is known only for his massive manhood.
• Good Bad Girl — This trope is beginning to look like what happens when a woman with post-modern values (i.e. a non virgin-idealized woman) appears in a place where she isn't expected. This sort of thing happens in contemporary settings as much as it does period pieces, largely because we haven't gotten beyond our double standards.
• Good Girls Avoid Abortion^note History. — Apparently not so in '80s high-school flicks in which this happened more than once without incident. I blame the MPAA (which is far more conservative now, than it was then) for Hollywood's greater emphasis of this trope in later films. Abortion and Women's Reproductive Rights are among the most controversial issues of our era. For useful notes on medical procedures that are used to terminate pregnancies, go here for a comprehensive look at the controversy, go here. For my less than common opinions, ^{click here} Firstly, I wonder why neither side is interested in developing ectogenesis tanks which, alongside a cheap transfer system, might easily end the controversy (in exchange for a nearly certain, but temporary, population boom). Secondly, it is a common misunderstanding that pregnancy equates to forced responsibility, considering safe haven policies thoughout the US and Europe, considered a better option than abandonment. Thirdly, the abortion-obstructionist side has yet to accept the issue of personal sovereignty which remains critical to the pro-access side (and cannot be conceded any more than a one could allow for slavery or suspension of habeus corpus). Assuming we are all equal under law, forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy to term against her will is just as heinous as forcing sterilization upon an individual, or forcing someone living to donate an organ against his or her will.
• Lovable Sex Maniac — I added (and am quite fond of) the quote by Phil from Choke^note The movie. I don't remember Phil appearing in Palahniuk's novel. Guys like Phil are great for support groups that cover embarrassing issues by setting the bar. Anyone else who joins will realize well, at least I'm not as perverse as that guy. All such support groups need a guy like this as a leader.
• Polyamory^note History. — Been here and done this, and it's amazing how few people get that this is more than swinging. Someone wrote a swell useful notes page which needs some modification and revision the doing of which I've been really lazy / busy / distracted.
• You're Drinking Breast Milk — It's sweeter than cow or goat's milk.

Relevant topics

• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, 1931 a Free Love Dystopia, where participation in the public Orgy Porgy is mandatory.
• Brave New World (TOW)^note The Other Wiki, of course
• Church of All Worlds (CAW) (TOW) a good model for polygamous or polyfidelous relationships.
• Ectogenesis (TOW)
• The Ethical Slut by Janet Hardy and Dossie Easton (TOW)
• Friends with Benefits is a trope with a euphemistic name cooler than it deserves, usually reserved for sexually active partners who are otherwise only casual friends (with the subtext that both participants are ultimately looking for a more solid, and exclusionary, love relationship). The term would be better if it also included good friends who are also sexually active with each other, though this seems to be a less common phenomenon in contemporary western culture.
• Friendzone (TOW) is a trope awaiting its own entry, but for a matter of time. A concept within mainstream culture that friend relationships are intrinsically different than lover relationships (exempli gratia, a confidant is unlikely the same person as a paramour). ^since...  intimacy can be scary, as it risks disapproval. Also, love relationships in contemporary western culture tend to involve more issues of possessiveness, hence the desire to control and contain a partner. This is typically less of an issue within the sex-positive community. ^given...  in open relationships one doesn't have to shield a primary partner from awareness of secondaries. Or, if your partner already knows your furversion and still loves and adores you it might be easier to be more relaxed about outing your other predilections.
• Gattaca Babies, produced by ectogenesis (see above)
• The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, 1985, A dystopia on the other side of the spectrum to Brave New World where sex is allowed only for reproduction, as per the world variants of Christian Fundamentalism.
• The Handmaid's Tale (TOW)
• Polygyny (TOW), the most common form of polygamy practiced in the real world, given it is advocated by some sects of Islam and Mormonism.
• Post Scarcity Economy (TOW)
• The Westermarck Effect (TOW), why super-hot siblings tend not to have sexual interest in each other.^note ...and why state-recognized gay marriage will not lead to an epidemic of incestuous weddings in the US, even if it does serve as a gateway law to open the community to alternative (non-traditional) family models.

They Called Me Mad

They still do, too. Diagnosed. Seen the inside of a wacky ward.

Relevant topics

• Hoarders — The A&E reality show on real folk who compulsively hoard and clutter. This fine reality show (and its subsequent knockoffs) does a fine job of portraying us for truly gone fishing, habitat-destroying, world-cluttering psychos we are. That is to say depicting us whack jobs in a fair and unbiased manner.
• I have issues and can't help myself when someone is wrong on the internet.
• Oh, and I'm one of the quiet ones.
• Trash of the Titans — I'm a clutterer in recovery, though these days, my obsessive hoarding spells are confined to collecting online things. For example, I have a strange^note  (that is, strange even to me) affinity for desktop wallpaper art. Fortunately, dightal storage is rather cheap nowadays.

Star Trek

This deserves its own special folder, since my research on Star Trek lore (mostly TOS) qualifies me for Trekkie status. Still, I'm less interested in Internal Consistency than I am in the process by which this diegesis grew.

• Handsome Lech — Captain Kirk qualifies from the perspective of our era and values, but notably not from his.

Relevant topics

• The Federation — aka The United Federation of Planets

Tricks of the Trades

Devices of storytelling as they vary from medium to medium. As one in the biz, I like to keep an eye on this stuff.

• Rule of Perception
• Space Is Noisy — Ron Howard's Apollo13 demonstrated well the necessity of sound to indicate silence, even though his use of quiet wind to indicate the vast emptiness of space was criticized by many in the field, it served as a better emotional marker than, say The Blue Danube.

Relevant topics

• Rule of Perception
• Reality Is Unrealistic

Troper Resources

• Text-Formatting Rules
• My most recent edits
• Sign in to TV Tropes.Org

Troper Tales

• My grandparents were cousins in an arranged marriage. More importantly, this was commonplace for the era.
• Yes, I've drunken [human] breastmilk [as an adult]. It's very sweet (literally; less-so figuratively).

Comments Pages

• Angels & Demons
• "Real Genius'' (1985 Film)

Indices

• This Trope Is X
• Weirdness Isolation Tropes
• Wiki Tropes

Trope Development

New Tropes In Development

• First Word Shooter — Early FPSes were often given a brief one-, maybe two-sylable name to identify them as this kind of game. One-syllable examples include Doom, Blood, Quake and Strife (Recent ones include F.E.A.R. and the upcoming RAGE). Two-syllable examples include Half-Life, Hexen, Unreal, Halo and Far Cry. This is a sometimes-used naming convention akin to the Magic Ampersand and The Noun and the Noun.
• Apocalyptic Montage turns out to be what I was calling a Nuke Moment or Nuke Moment Montage, (though it's not always a montage.) A dramatic device in visual media to denote the severity, and the casualty count, of a cataclysmic event, usually a nuclear air-burst over a populated area. A montage of everyday living events (adults and kids, working and playing) rolls, depicting all that was going on the exact moment of before the cataclysm (implying that those activities, and the people doing them, ceased an instant later). Notable examples appear in the 1964 film, Fail Safe and The Day After and is parodied in the Simpsons episode Sideshow Bobs Last Gleaming. This is a case of Yes We DO Have This One.

How In Hell are these not already tropes

• To Take The Throne — Classic ambition of The Evil Prince, the Evil Chancellor, any ambitious duke and any other noble with a mean streak, precursor ambition to World Domination.
• Monster Classic — It's alive (or sentient, or both). It lurks in the shadows. It eats people (or kills them gruesomely), but for most of the story, it singles out its victims when alone. Most monsters are literal, whether creatures of folklore (Vampires, Werewolves, Sasquaches), creatures of dreams (Eldrich Horrors, Chest-bursting Facehuggers, Killer Robots), or creatures of the real world (Lions, Tigers, Bears). Monsters plague our nightmares when not infesting our organs and cause attrition problems in our community. These are not (yet) the creatures who rampage through Tokyo, but the authorities are unresponsive if not ineffectual. It comes to our protagonist to save the day. This is the Monster story, and it is told time and time again.

Unadded Edits

• Crazy Cat Lady: Add a hottip disclaiming that not all Real Life crazy cat ladies are animal hoarders, the difference being the latter are unable to take proper care of their animals. Not all fictional CCLs are either. Some are, rather, Witches with a lot of familiars.
• Deadly Disc — Fix the Back To The Future entry (The Frisbie pie plate actually was the origin of the Frisbee Flying Disc). Also add a Real Life section featuring the Chakram and the (non-flying) Wind And Fire Wheel. Add, also, Xena's Chakram. Noted that a lot of this parallels Rings of Death.
• Enhance Button — Add enhancements than can be done on high-resolution images. Distorted images reflected in shiny surfaces is small time CIA stuff, but common sharpening algorithms (that remove noise and specific kinds of blur) can, at very least, detect 'shopping, and sometimes even detect fingerprints or residual writing. Of course the key element here is high resolution.
  Sherlock Holmes: Data data data, I cannot make bricks without clay!

  — The Adventure of the Copper Beeches

  — Sherlock Holmes (2010)
• Even Nerds Have Standards — Fix the PvP, PvE wikiwords. Add the Lightsaber Kid and the annual frequently recurring Lightsaber Choreography Competition acknowledging fat jedi can be badass.
• Scary Shiny Glasses — The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the early seasons of The West Wing had this ability when commanding direct action from the situation room.
• Masquerade — I'll need to decide which masquerades, historical or contemporary are worth mention and exposition.
• Mailer Daemon — The trope is about monsters (literal or figurative) stalking folks online. An actual Mailer Daemon should be better explained, and some disambiguation should be created between this, those and seductive chatbots.
• Gone Horribly Right — The Manhattan Project and Castle Bravo should be joined in the Real Life section. The Manhattan Project did what we expected it to do with the Trinity test. It just happened to be a really big history-shaking kaboom. The Bikini Island detonation of the first hydrogen bomb exceeded our expectations to a gross degree, requiring the evacuation of nearby islands of their native populations, and served as the true dawn of the nuclear age.

Uncategorized Edits

• At the Crossroads
• Everyone Has Lots of Sex
• Evil Laugh — I'm determined to keep the Sideshow Bob Roberts quote as the trope header.
• Horny Devils
• Rooting for the Empire
• Sheathe Your Sword
• Spider-Sense — added Blue Sense, Red Sense^note which I derived from blue sense. If there's a traditional fire-department term for it, please change it. and intuition in Combat Situational Awareness, all under Real Life.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial
• Tron Lines
• Violence is the Only Option
• Extra-Strength Masquerade — Added Real Life
• Muggles Do It Better — Nattered in the Harry Potter section regarding some niggling issues about the interactions between technology and magic, which raises an issue for me (which I'll address later).