The warrior alien who solves problems through brute force, and struggles to understand Earth customs in comedic ways.
Helios and Luna? You’re mixing Greek and Latin nomenclature! My immersion is ruined!
Broke: Memory units in optimistic numbers of megabytes and gigabytes.
Woke: Memory units in astronomically-high numbers of gigabytes and terabytes.
Bespoke: Memory units in totally incomprehensible units like kiloquads or exanodes.
Slaps the superships central computer “This here runs on 12 bits of memory! Our engineers really outdone themselves with optimisation this time.”
I mean, the word size — alone — on the Voyager space crafts seems to have gone further than anything today.
Or never specify. “That spacestation has massive computing power” “How big?” “Massive.”
“This baby has enough memory to make elephants look forgetful.” “…what’s an elephant?” “No clue.”
In real life, the sun is called “Sol” and we are in the “Solar system” as in, sol-ar. Others are called star systems, some are named; “Polaris” is usually just called that instead of the “Polaris system” or the like
Helios -> Helios system follows this same logic.
Farscape called currency… Currency…
It has been so funny to me reading Foundation by Isaac Asimov as it appears very tropy, but then you realize that those things are tropes because of the books.
Also see: Tolkien was a total hack.
TVTropes is a cancer site now. Can’t recommend anyone visit it.
Lesson: Never support a project unless it’s open source.
Why, what happened?
It got enshittified. The owners wanted to make money, so it’s crammed full of ads now. And apparently there’s censorship?
But it looks like there’s a fork here:
https://allthetropes.org/wiki/All_The_Tropes:Why_Fork_TV_Tropes
The owners wanted to make money, so it’s crammed full of ads now.
Ublock should take care of that…
And apparently there’s censorship?
…but that’s a bit of a no-no
But it looks like there’s a fork here:
Will check it out, thanks for linking <3
I did some more digging and came across a reddit post with more details: https://www.reddit.com/r/tvtropes/comments/4cpfrg/tv_tropes_and_censorship_they_changed_it_now_it/
TV Tropes and Censorship: They Changed it, Now it Sucks (YMMV)
spoiler
Now let me begin by saying I’m not looking for a fight here, but it’s been bugging me for a while now.
Famous last words, I know.
Today, I’d like to talk about censorship. Ponderous Background
I’ve been with TV Tropes for a while now, since around 2007 and I’ve been a fairly regular reader since then. When I first got linked to it, it took a few weeks for me to finally clean out all the damn tabs from my browser. Best time I wasted that year.
It was refreshing in its candor, everything was discussed, nothing was forbidden. Sick topics with sick examples gave me a better understanding of a lot of topics than a clinical explanation ever could.
It was also a gold mine for sick links I could troll my friends with. Good times.
But even the clean topics taught me a lot and entertained in equal measure, perhaps moreso. The site was fun because the discussions were fun. On Discussions
The discussions were fun because we were free.
Free in the sense that you can scream whatever the hell you want in the woods. Except your friends are with you, they’re hilarious, and so are you.
True, a lot of the replies to any example didn’t always add too much to the discussion, but they were fun, damn you. Taken as a whole, the entire block of discussion pretty much could sum up why a joke was funny by watching the fandom interact with it in a vacuum.
They also could contain moments of loss, sadness, or the kinds of things you only confess on your deathbed discussed with the kind of anonymity one can only dream of now. Admittedly, a whole bunch must have been fake, at least I hope so. Most of those, by the way, are in topics conveniently marked with “No Real Life Examples Please” now and are lost to us. Purge
One day, I visited and saw that the site seemed different. Doing my usual rounds, I noticed there was less talking, less content, less examples. I tried to go to a page and saw that it was gone entirely.
The great purge had begun.
One by one, whole articles disappeared. Eventually the truth came out, Google AdSense didn’t cater to sites with mature topics anymore so they rolled out new posting guidelines and culled all the offending content.
I can understand this decision, I know the cost of running a site. But there are alternatives out there, reddit is still plugging along mostly on the sales of reddit gold for example, and it seems like they didn’t really try very hard before changing the entire dynamic of the site.
At the time I wasn’t outraged about it, I’m still not, just somewhat put off.
We didn’t really need the mature articles, I said to myself at the time. Now I’m not so sure, if we hide discussion of a topic and call it taboo, progress halts on that front. How are we supposed to address anything if we don’t talk about it? This is why there are still people who think AIDS only affects gay people.
Regardless, things changed and we tried to make do with what we had. Unexpected Effects
Eventually though, the discussions petered out, comments were being deleted for being irrelevant so the jokes stopped too.
Unconsciously, I stopped visiting as often as I used to.
A few years ago though, as I was the head writer for a large newsletter that discussed marketing tips and tricks, I decided to spin things up a bit and ran a popular segment that discussed overused marketing tropes and alternatives.
For research I used TV Tropes and I was saddened to notice that it didn’t really grip me anymore. I could look for what I wanted and go without a second thought, a far cry from my first visit. Why wouldn’t I? There’s nothing that would entice me to look deeper, the site is sterile. Formatting Issues
It’s not just the lack of discussion that kills it for me though, it’s the format.
More than 90% of the main content is still there, so why is the magic dead? Simple, streamlining.
Whoever streamlined the articles did it masterfully, there’s a place for everything and everything in it’s place. There’s a section for the Fridge, Analysis, etc so that no page ever goes on to be particularly long. The problem is, this ensures that the link clicking behavior is no longer organic.
The great part of the old format was that you discovered something new while reading and there’s suddenly a very enticing link to all the other things similar to that. It was like finding a dollar bill in a library book, that was the crack/heroin/drug of your choice.
Now, I can finish a page in 5 minutes. I am now at the bottom of the page, my job is done. There are no links to further sections of interest because they’re all at the top. This is a UI fail.
Even if the links were at the bottom though, what’s the point? They don’t have any interesting/funny context that would make you want to click them. So I’m free to leave, and this freedom saddens me because there is a mountain of content here and I have no interest in it.
Say goodbye to the rest of your day? Hardly. Final Thoughts, I swear
Admittedly, my nostagia glasses could just be covering my eyes. The site could have been shit and I’m just getting too old to enjoy the new and improved one. I can’t tell.
If so, then please ignore the ramblings of a crotchety Gen X-er who wants you to get the hell off his lawn.
Would actually be fun to have an android character that tries to be less human. Like it’s an unfortunate happenstance that someone designed him to be human-like, and its primary goal is to purge this aspect of itself. Like an Uncle Tom character with deep-rooted anxieties and a machine supremacy complex. Come to think of it, this has to exist already, it doesn’t feel all that original, but I can’t point to where I would’ve seen that.
Marvin the paranoid android from Hitchhikers Guide.
Literally the One’s from Battlestar Galactica.
Have never seen the show, but from a quick search, that seems pretty spot on for what I had in mind.
Especially the later assimov robot books have that theme somewhat; at least robots that think weather being more or less human in some regards is better.
Check out Automata (2024)
I won’t spoil anything, it’s a good movie.
You know Uncle Tom was basically the perfect human right?
That’s the point of the book. Pro-Slavery people use to argue that slavery wasn’t that bad so long as your slave master treated you well; so Uncle Toms cabin is a book about a flawless human who is also a slave named Uncle Tom that literally every single person who ever meets him deeply loves and respects but is powerless to stop anything bad from happening to him because he’s not legally a person
If Uncle Tom sucked in any way the reader could always justify the bad shit that happened to Tom not as a result of his legal status, but as a consequence to his shitty actions or personality.
It destroys in every way the argument that slavery can be fine if your slave masters treat you well and for this reason it’s rumored to be the book that broke the proverbial straw and kicked off the civil war.
Gunther Hermann
need skulgun for head
Eh, in my sci-fi universe the Sun is called “Sol-Centauri”, but still just referred to as “the Sun” by most people.
Sun is called Sol.
And moon is called Luna
That’s why an orbit around the sun is “solar” and an orbit around the moon is 'lunar"
It seems like earth is just called earth for most spaceflight purposes (e.g. low-earth orbit), although the word for it in some Latin languages comes from “terra”
I think it’d be fun to call earth “Humus”. We get words like posthumous, exhume, humility from it, and it’s theorized that it may share an origin with the word Homo, from which we get “Human”.
So if we called it Earth we’d be Earthlings, if we call it Terra we’d be Terrans, if we called it Tellus we’d be Tellurians, but if we called it Humus we could stay as Humans =D
deleted by creator
And Luna makes a ton of sense if you want to remove the ambiguity of a moon and the moon.
Moon-like natural satellite.
Let’s just settle on Moon™ as a compromise for our moon and just moon for all other moons.
Sol too, if you want to call the closest star the sun wherever you are.
Not if you are Spanish.
Right? I can’t think of any scifi that refers to the sun as helios?
Any sci-fi that takes place in antiquity, I suppose.
Aliens land in the US.
Soldiers open fire on the Aliens
Why is there no movie where they land somewhere else and we all go “well thank fuck they didn’t land in Texas”
District 9 was set in South Africa.
EDIT: Oh, should’a scrolled down. Consider this a mirror comment.
ɒɔiɿʇA ʜƚuoƧ ni ƚɘƨ ƨɒw 9 ƚɔiɿƚƨiᗡ
District 9 did this really well.
District 9 was excellent, but those were also refugee aliens.
You know how that’d play out over there…
…the same way it played out in the movie?
That was kinda the point of the film, yes.
I’d imagine more agent orange.
In Doctor Who the aliens are mostly concerned with Great Britain.
Yes, it was an experience watching Torchwood and thinking it so hilarious all this stuff was happening in Wales. Made me reflect on how I never gave a second thought to how aliens only ever landed in the United States in all the time I’ve been watching shows about aliens.
Though, to be fair, every once in a while, the (usually movie) wants us to know that the United States liberated THE ENTIRE WORLD so we’ll see a montage of racially diverse people celebrating around recognizable global landmarks. Thank you America! Please continue to bomb us to spread your freedom!
Regional childrens tv show doesn’t count.
But I did forget about Dr Who.
Just a little regional kids show that is also one of the most famous TV shows of all time lol
I’m from Britain. Its an export show for Americans.
In my opinion as neither Brit nor Murican I would say it becoming an export show started with Matt Smith as Eleventh Doctor and especially with series 6 in 2011.
I’m (unfortunately) American and can assure you it’s a well-known export. Not really my thing either but it has more reach than you’re giving it credit it for
I come from the island and the Hambly Pambly franchise has outperformed it in mindshare, at-least before I became an immigrant and escaped.
Very true and so has James Bond! I’d even say Taskmaster is giving a run for its money now that they’re uploading it. Even my brother in law asked me if I’ve seen it and he’s all-in on American entertainment
Aliens are humanoid and sexually attractive.
Takes off space helmet on alien planet, “the air is fine!”
“Woah! Don’t open that! It’s an alien planet! Is there air?! You don’t know!”
“Oh no! Some of the black liquid got on me. Better get back to the ship.”
“Oh no! Something bit me while taking swamp samples from the jungle planet with 0 PPE!”
Bonus: “We’re not allowed to treat them, because they’re sentient naturalised swamp people now.”
“Let me back on to the ship!”
Tropes exist because they work and who cares what the money is called
The money can’t be any real earth currency, and making up something like florbs would also make people roll their eyes. Credits is fine
I think in Rick and Morty one of the fake currencies is called a schmeckle, which is Yiddish for penis (diminutive).
No, they won’t.
Oh, okay
Exactly. You’ve got limited time to tell your story in a movie, so establishing a fake currency that nobody except hardcore numistatics nerds will care about is kinda pointless when everyone already understands that credits = future money.
And as you say using a real currency doesn’t make sense in most future movie contexts, and using the “wrong” one may even offend some people who may then boycott your movie - which is obviously not desirable when you’re a studio trying to make money.
I image its the same reason for the Gold/Silver currency in many fantasy settings.
“I need a length of rope!”
[Puts down a gold coin worth a month’s wages.]
And for everything else, there is multipass.
I image its the same reason for the Gold/Silver currency in many fantasy settings.
I think that’s also because a couple hundred years ago practically every currency was just a certain weight of gold, silver or copper. Different coins were just an easy way to recognize the weight.
I think that’s also because a couple hundred years ago practically every currency was just a certain weight of gold, silver or copper. Different coins were just an easy way to recognize the weight.
Maybe we need to get some numismatics to weigh in here, but I think currency could be extremely tricky depending on where and when you were. I remember reading about medieval Italy and it seemed every city issued its own currency with different denominations, names, and weights. And even then, people would be scraping them to get some precious metals off of them, and with all those different currencies, counterfeiting must have been a real issue.
To apply this Tolkien, the Shire would probably have a different currency than even Bree, though Butterman would even take your coins from Gondor out of politeness to travelers.
They would all have different coins, but the actual value of those coins was determined by their weight, so as long as you could verify that it didn’t matter much. Scraping worked because not every salesperson would check the weight of the coins.
Are you spitballing like me or is this your field? Because you’d need to know the percentage of the metal present in the coin to weigh it; gold and silver are too soft be pure. That introduces problems of debasement, a coin from an earlier minting might have a higher content than a later printing, and multiply that by all the different city-states, and you have a potential headache.
Yeah, I like being thrown into a new world and still somehow understanding the basics of it so it’s familiar. No need to name everything differently if that’s not the focus of the game.
Credits will do fine
Watto, lul!
Credits are for future and guns, it’s coins/pieces of gold/silver when swords.
Somehow I understand completely & agree.
2 strips of gold-pressed latinum for you
an uncredible scifi where billionaires gain empathy
Government is the UN.
