Okay, well, here goes. I'm Lee, a nerd-of-many-trades from Virginia who watches (or, at least, used to watch) too much TV. I found TV Tropes by way of 4chan, either /tv/ or /co/ (I can't remember which now), way back in 2008.
Stuff I've worked on
Most of what I've done over the years is in Useful Notes, where I added a bunch of information about old computers, mostly from memory:
And those are just the ones I remember!
Of the actual tropes I've launched, by far the most important one is Babies Ever After, but I also launched Long Form Promo (which I actually put on the TRS waiting list myself, since I feel like it's too inside-baseball even for us) and possibly a couple of others I can't remember anymore.
I also used to be very active in the forums, particularly Yack Fest, though that stopped after most of my friend group moved to other places. Nowadays I mainly read the cleanup threads.
Gushing About Shows I Like
Shows and games I unabashedly love:
Stuff I still like, but haven't paid much attention to recently:
Shows I'll watch if I see them on:
Shows and games I wasn't impressed with or have given up on:
- Animaniacs (the first Internet fandom I found my way into)
- Animaniacs (2020): While it's not as luminescently great as the original, it's still a good watch and has some catchy songs (I had "What If?" in particular stuck in my head for days).
- Homestar Runner: Let's just say I use Homsar as an avatar in a lot of places for a reason.
- MS Paint Adventures, specifically Homestuck and its follow-ons. I also quite enjoyed Problem Sleuth (it's also required reading if you want to get some of the jokes in Homestuck).
- The Simpsons (before about season 9)
- Atop the Fourth Wall (I've found I don't like the lore episodes as much as I once did, but the comic reviews are still solid)
- Phelous (I was first introduced to him through his horror reviews, but the shift to animation reviews he started after the Jacob's Ladder episode has been pretty good, too. I also really like his newer "Bootleg Zones" series.)
- Todd in the Shadows
- Tiny Toon Adventures (I understand HBO Max has commissioned a reboot of this, though with the latest Discovery-relatewd shenanigans, I wouldn't be surprised if it gets retooled or cancelled.)
- Freakazoid! (I haven't seen this in years, though, and I'm not sure where it's running, if anywhere.)
- Nintendo games, specifically the Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda and Kirby franchises. I also really liked the Wii pack-ins, and I got Splatoon back in 2015 after seeing people I follow on Twitter gushing over it. At various points, I also had Miitomo on my phone (which was better than Nintendo made it sound) as well as Pokémon GO (I wasn't walking around enough back in 2016 to get much out of it, though I loved the concept).
- I finally got a Nintendo Switch in 2020, and while I haven't been using it much recently, Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Super Mario Odyssey are excellent. (Somehow, I didn't know about "Jump Up, Super Star!" until a Siiva Gunner remix
of it clued me in.) I also finally got Splatoon 2, and I need to get Video Game/Splatoon 3.
- I finally got a Nintendo Switch in 2020, and while I haven't been using it much recently, Animal Crossing: New Horizons and Super Mario Odyssey are excellent. (Somehow, I didn't know about "Jump Up, Super Star!" until a Siiva Gunner remix
- "Deep dive" mini-documentaries on YouTube, particularly ones related to various frauds (multi-level marketing companies, accounting fraud, etc.) This is more-or-less replacing American Greed and the other true-crime shows i used to watch, as noted below.
- Repair videos, mainly related to old cars or just-as-old computers. (This is a bit of a minefield, though; at least a couple of people I was watching turned out to be hard-core right-wingers and I had to drop them. I wouldn't be surprised if there are more of them. It really is hard to tell unless they're openly displaying far-right symbols or Trump paraphernalia.)
Stuff I still like, but haven't paid much attention to recently:
- Azumanga Daioh: The manga and the series are both over, but I still find myself referencing it a lot.
- Excel♡Saga: Same here, particularly the "Her boobs are huge!" line from "Going Too Far".
- Anime and anime parodies in general, really; as you can see, I'm a few years behind the times. :P I have friends that are more up on the latest releases, though.
- Final Fantasy VI: It came out in 1994 and pretty much hasn't changed since, but I have an SNES Mini if I want to pick it up again.
- Final Fantasy VII. Still a good game, but not nearly as satisfying as VI was. Keep in mind that I haven't played it a while, and I also haven't played the remake at all.
Shows I'll watch if I see them on:
- True-crime investigation shows (Forensic Files, Cold Case Files, American Greed, etc.) I particularly miss the really old episodes of American Greed, but they were locked away in Hulu before Disney took it over. I understand they're on Peacock now, which I don't hate as much as pre-Disney Hulu but I still find annoying.)
- Most sports (I actually don't mind a good game now and then). I am very much a Washington, D.C. homer, though for a while, that wasn't going too well. note
Shows and games I wasn't impressed with or have given up on:
- Deadly Towers. Yes, I actually had this game when it was new, and it was the most infuriating game I ever played. I don't think either me or any of my brothers got past the first level. I didn't even know how the game ended until finding a Let's Play of it on YouTube many years later.
- Batman: The Animated Series: I could just never get into it, despite all the accolades. It didn't help that, when it first premiered in 1992, I was obsessing over someone whose name sounded a bit like "Warner", though for whatever reason this didn't stop me from liking WBA's other shows.
- Good Eats. This one actually hurts a bit, because I really liked Alton Brown at first (enough to read the show's fan site regularly) and watched all the other Food Network stuff he was in, but after the original show ended in 2012, it fell off my radar. Since then, the show has tried to make a comeback, but I gave up on The Return after all of one episode (!). On top of all this, the long gap between the original show's ending and the return made me just a bit more critical of the shows's quirks; basically it ran so long that a lot of the early episodes (most of which were shot in the late 1990s and early 2000s) needed updating (something that, to be fair, Alton covered in his Reloaded spinoff, which I actually mostly enjoyed), and Alton's mad scientist act can be just a bit grating, especially in later episodes of the original series (where he was clearly somewhat burned out and turning some of the episodes into rants about his pet projects, specifically the Diet Episode and the This Loser Is You episode).
- Law & Order: SVU of late. It's just plain gotten weird, and there seems to be some Flanderization going on (Stabler is more of a Jerkass than ever). I stopped watching it not long after I first wrote this page, actually. note
- That Guy with the Glasses/The Nostalgia Critic (I stopped watching the NC before To Boldly Flee and gave up on the site entirely not long after that, preferring to go to individual creators' Blip—may it rest in peace—or YouTube pages.)
- Bad Movie Beatdown: I just lost interest and forgot about BMB because I was already keeping track of too many reviewers.
- The Cinema Snob: Used to be a big fan, but his reaction to #ChangeTheChannel (and especially how he treated Allison Pregler over it) made me drop him (and Brad's other shows) like a hot potato.
Things that made me fall in love with TV Tropes:
- What Measure Is a Non-Human?. The Mouse and His Child. My favorite piece of obscure, ponderous 1970s Nightmare Fuel, and you guys knew about it without me mentioning it first. This made my day when I first saw it. (The movie is so obscure that for years, me and my next-younger brother seemed to be the only people who'd ever seen it; I actually created the IMDb entry for it back in 1997!)
- You love Watership Down, too, which also made me incredibly happy.
- Sugar Wiki. An entire namespace devoted to happy, cuddly stuff. Being a hopeless romantic and an unrepentant snugglebug, well, you can guess my reaction. XD
Tropes that apply to myself (or used to, anyway):
- Apologises a Lot (this has been a huge drag on my self-esteem over the years, it turns out)
- Big Eater (if I don't forget about it anyway; I particularly have a bad habit of skipping lunch and stuffing myself at dinner)
- Bunny-Ears Lawyer (I'm a software engineer, so this kind of comes with the territory)
- Cloudcuckoolander (Not as bad as I used to be, but I still have disturbing daydreams and nightmares at times.)
- Gentle Giant
- I Hate Past Me (but doesn't everyone)
- Moeblob (Often to nausea-inducing levels, though this was probably more true in 2010. Cuteness and kindness have to come naturally, I feel, and it's not like I don't get angry sometimes.)
