posted
Okay I was on vent the other day talking to the dev team for Necrosis (a neverwinter nights server) and they made a crack about putting randomly spawned demonic portals over campfires and apparantly my laugh following from that was so evil sounding that one of the people in vent was like "and that laugh... omg, that *hit will give people nightmares."
Okay, truth time. Blayne, I know I tease you about it, but seriously, I'm not teasing you anymore. Now I'm fully, honestly serious.
Stop it. You're acting like a little kid, and it's really gotten embarrassing.
You really should be embarrassed at the way you're acting, man. It isn't cool, it has to stop. It's time for an intervention or something.
Posts: 1577 | Registered: Sep 2005
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Blayne Bradley
unregistered
posted
Your reaction is pretty incomprehensible to my point of view. I don't quite frankly see the problem.
Its something I think is pretty cool, would the thread really have been improved, c'mon honestly now would it REALLY have been improved if i rewrote it as "My laugh inspires fear in all who hear it"?
C'mon really now, would Nightmare Fuel specifically have drawn a bead if I hadn't been Conversationally Troping so much so far?
I think personally that the ability to hold onto a certain degree of silliness should be encouraged in this informal context.
Also I redirect you to one of many valid ethical theories where frankly I am not harming you, so screw off.
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quote:Its something I think is pretty cool, would the thread really have been improved, c'mon honestly now would it REALLY have been improved if i rewrote it as "My laugh inspires fear in all who hear it"?
C'mon really now, would Nightmare Fuel specifically have drawn a bead if I hadn't been Conversationally Troping so much so far?
I think a link to a picture of a dish towel would have shown a noticeable improvement in the quality of this thread. This ranks like an 11 on the Inanity Scale, and what's especially troubling is that it seems you've fallen off the wagon. You were doing so well for so long at refraining from using Hatrack as your combined Twitter/Livejournal account. Of course I'm referring to your past tendency to start new threads with random three sentence anecdotes about something that happened to you on any given day that 99% of the time people couldn't possibly care less about. I apologize if that sounds particularly harsh, but you've been asked in the past by a lot of people to refrain from doing it, and now you've been asked by a lot of people to refrain from regurgitating things you've read on TVT into literally every post you make. You recognize that you're doing it a lot, perhaps excessively. A "certain degree of silliness" has never been discouraged on Hatrack. I've never seen anyone here get rebuked for being silly, unless they were also being insulting. But there's such a thing as going overboard.
Personally, I think you're straddling the divide between amusing and annoying, but either way that's not a compliment. The only reason I thought this thread was somewhat amusing was because it was so out of left field pointlessly inane that my initial reaction was to laugh, like when one of Lucy Ricardo's crazy schemes failed.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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posted
I'm in Lyrhawn's boat - for these particular types of posts you'd be better served getting a Facebook account.
As for excessive TV toping.... what's weird is that I CAN see that being funny. What follows is a lot of constructive criticism. Please don't take it TOO seriously, but also please listen earnestly and take it to heart.
What would make excessive toping funny is not the TV tropes themselves - that would only work if there were few enough of them that it took some effort to apply them cleverly to a situation. Because there is literally a TV trope for pretty much everything, applying them to everything isn't funny or clever, it just makes that comic Lisa always posts seem very accurate.
However, some things are funny explicitly BECAUSE they are running jokes. I spent a few minutes trying to figure out why the TV trope thing doesn't qualify as a running joke, and eventually concluded that for it work, you (or whoever's doing it) needs to RECOGNIZE that what they're doing is completely pointless.
The joke isn't that the TV trope is relevant (as I said, there's one for everything, so it's quickly stops being interesting that there happens to be a name for every conceivable action/idea on a particular website). The joke would have to be the absurdity that of the idea that TV tropes even matters in the real world. The humor would require a certain self awareness and tongue in cheek about how ridiculous it is.
It would still have to be used somewhat sparingly to avoid losing it's edge - running jokes oddly enough tend to be funny when they fall on a "Prime Numberth" time. (They're usually most funny on the third, fifth, seventh and eleventh time, I haven't really kept track past that point but the rate at which it stops being funny so often seems to coincide approximately with the rate at which prime numbers become less common. And the prime number rate only applies if the joke is used at appropriate times. You can't just say three it three times in a row to accelerate you to the next funny spot).
The difference between using TV tropes cleverly and the way you use them is pretty subtle, but it largely hinges on people believing you're using them to be intentionally absurd. You however have made it clear that you read TV tropes religiously and take them way more seriously than is healthy, and primarily use them with rather inane topics that aren't particularly funny on their own. You've saturated this board with them so much that I'm not sure it's possible for them to really be funny in a Hatrack context unless they aren't used at all for a long time.
What's really weird, though is that I actually DON'T have a problem with this thread title. What I have a problem with is the thread's content. "My laugh is Nightmare Fuel" would have been a perfectly good use of a TV trope if you then used it as a springboard to launch into a clever story that was interesting in its own right that ended with a twist wherein your laugh made somebody scared for funny reasons.
Instead, it's "I laughed. And they were scared." That's not particularly interesting nor funny, and stapling a trope to it doesn't make it better.
One particular problem that plagues this post (which a number of your posts share) is that whatever the joke/story actually IS is so laden with terminology that it puts people off who might have actually found it funny. Many people don't know what Neverwinter Nights or Vent or Demon Portals are and including those details tells those people "this story is not for you, go away." I do know what all those things are, but I still felt offput by them because they really weren't necessary for the story.
EDIT: The reason this thread fails is that the thread title is pretty much the entire joke. As a general rule of thumb, unless there is specific feedback you are looking for, if a thread can be completely summarized in the space of a thread title, it's something that's better to put on facebook. (If I read the facebook status "So apparently the Neverwinter Nights dev team thinks my laughter is Nightmare Fuel" I'd actually think it was funny and be kinda interested)
[ October 03, 2009, 12:16 PM: Message edited by: Raymond Arnold ]
Posts: 4136 | Registered: Aug 2008
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posted
I don't care about how obsessive blayne is about tvtropes and I do my best not to have his vapid overuse of the site dampen how much I enjoy that site.
My complaints predate his tvtropes phase and that's his currently perpetual "will continue to spam dumb useless threads, no matter how constructively I am advised not to or politely asked not to" phase.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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posted
Lyrhawn, Raymond Arnold, as much as I think your current efforts are doomed in the way that the Light Brigade was doomed, I greatly appreciate you both.
Posts: 7593 | Registered: Sep 2006
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posted
My boss has an evil laugh. It's more of a nasty little 'ooh I've placed a thumbtack on someone's chair' sort of evil than 'muah I will destroy the universe' evil, though. Not very nightmare inspiring.
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quote:Originally posted by Mucus: Lyrhawn, Raymond Arnold, as much as I think your current efforts are doomed in the way that the Light Brigade was doomed, I greatly appreciate you both.
I had actually thought it was an interesting experience trying to deconstruct what makes TV tropes and running jokes funny, and even if Blayne does not take my advice, I suspect the effort will somehow benefit me in the years to come.
Posts: 4136 | Registered: Aug 2008
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posted
Oh, if you took something away from the experience thats even better.
I was just thinking that I never have anything to add in those "grand old days of Hatrack" threads given that I wasn't actually here. But I do know that every time I see one of these multi-paragraph analysis, it makes me feel heartened about the effort* involved
*(and the amounts of effort people will invest here)
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