Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[NewSheoth]

There's a lot of unnecessary hostility in this thread.

Agreed.

[Johnny Madhouse]

Hostility towards TVtropes and stale metaphors, yes. I make a point of not applying value judgements to human beings. It's the difference between saying 'x is a stupid thing to do' and saying 'you're stupid for doing x'.

Although rereading my first post, I did come off as a bit caustic.

EDIT: There's nothing wrong with 'overthinking'. Dissecting memes is good to do once in a while. It's fun to trace the rise of a meme from a legitimately funny and insightful joke (i.e., demons packed like clowns in a tiny car) to a habit to an unnecessary tradition.

A man has a habit of trimming the ends off of ham before placing it in the oven. A friend asks him why he does so. The man says 'because that's what my mother did before she put the ham in the oven'. The friend is still curious, and asks the ham man's mother why she trimmed the ham before putting it in the oven. ' Because that's what my mother always did!' Still curious, the friend eventually has an oppourtunity to ask the mother's mother why she trimmed the ham in such a manner. She says 'Because that was the only way I could get it to fit in the pan.'


Habits that are useful and make sense at their beginning can rapidly become meaningless after time.

[NSQuote]

Doesn't the little opening cinematic show adamantium and demons in it anyways?

[Urist Imiknorris]

I've heard it said that it shows the miner breaching the magma river in 2D, but it works equally well for HFS.

[Internet Kraken]

I just don't get where this sudden hatred for clown came from. It's like it popped up over night, and it all seems rather pointless. It's not like we're trying to be funny when we call HFS clowns. It's just a way of avoiding spoilers that's been going on for a long time. Don't see what the problem is.

[NewSheoth]

And again, as Urist Imiknorris said and Ungulateman sigged: That's the great thing about this forum. We can derail any discussion into any other topic. It started off as an epic tale of the magma sea freakin' flooding hell, and ended up as hostility to TVTropes and demon nickname discussions.
Here at Bay12 forums we're all having strange moods and building very unlikely discussions out of completely clean topics.

[KillerClowns]

A useful but non-spoilery phrase for the HFS is handy to have because spoiler tags draw unnecessary attention and break the flow of a topic.  Clowns is a common choice due to being grandfathered in, not because it's considered funny or witty.  Tradition is weighty.  Still, for those who are bothered, I've heard and used variants of "Slade Plains" on occasion, and I've seen its inhabitants referred to with sobriquets that are both suitably ominous and suitably mysterious, things like "Those Below."  Also, plain ol' "HFS" always works.

[Oglokoog]

I'm going to freaking kill you for that Weeping Angel avatar. Now I'm once again afraid to blink.

[Rexfelum]

Anyone object if I copy and paste entries from across three pages to reply to all of them at once?  No?

I'm all for not calling them clowns. Clown made me want to see how a circus worked, spartans would make me think of fighting type stuff and I'd ignore it unless I was trying to figure out the military.

Well, you're saying "euphemisms" have to communicate some specific sort of domain information.  "Clowns," "Spartans," "Cheeseheads" . . . it doesn't matter what it is, you'd know pretty quickly that the people using these words were hiding something.  If you looked at "clowns," noticed people were talking funny about them, and nonetheless said "Whee!  This has nothing to do with secrets that will kill me!" then you must not have played too many games that had secrets.

(By the way: in light of ambient concerns of hostility, one might conclude I am being aggressive with that last line.  I do not intend so.)

You're overthinking this.

Perhaps.  But isn't this the depth of thinking needed to address underlying assumptions?

TVTropes just describes literary, well, tropes. It's not even a joke site.

I'd feel a lot better if it really were a site about tropes.  Just look at the descriptive text when that site shows up in Google search results: "The 'Main Dwarf Fortress' trope as used in popular culture, with a list of examples from all media."  That sentence setup only makes sense for actual tropes, like the "Five Man Band" or suchlike.  As it is, the site serves as a wiki for anything related to books, movies, shows, and games whatsoever, where the entry content itself is a discussion page complete with fan debates.  It could be downright educational if only it ran as intended.

By the way, if someone didn't want to be spoiled, wouldn't they avoid the forum in the first place?

Good advice.  Unfortunately, you know how much help new players need.  Fortunately, the wiki has spoiler warnings (without potentially-confusing euphemisms).

There's a lot of unnecessary hostility in this thread.

Agreed.

I think it is pretty tame compared to what the internet has to offer.  Some strong opinions, yes, but this forum continues to be amazing in terms of self-control.  The conversation is going places.

Doesn't the little opening cinematic show adamantium and demons in it anyways?

Sure, something like that.  But are you saying that spoilers have been given away in the video, and therefore there's no concern?  If so, go back to when you first watched it, and ask yourself what you saw.  "Hmm, greyish rock.  Hmm, bluish rock.  Hmm, the dwarf saw something scary.  I wonder what it was.  Alright, let's play this thing."

A useful but non-spoilery phrase for the HFS is handy to have because spoiler tags draw unnecessary attention and break the flow of a topic.  Clowns is a common choice due to being grandfathered in, not because it's considered funny or witty.  Tradition is weighty.  Still, for those who are bothered, I've heard and used variants of "Slade Plains" on occasion, and I've seen its inhabitants referred to with sobriquets that are both suitably ominous and suitably mysterious, things like "Those Below."  Also, plain ol' "HFS" always works.

I agree: people can come up with creative ways to write, and readers who know about the spoilers will understand.

--Rexfelum

[Nyxalinth]

There's a lot of unnecessary hostility in this thread.

I hope I didnt come off that way. I wasn't trying to!

[treguard of dunshelm]

I'd feel a lot better if it really were a site about tropes.  Just look at the descriptive text when that site shows up in Google search results: "The 'Main Dwarf Fortress' trope as used in popular culture, with a list of examples from all media."  That sentence setup only makes sense for actual tropes, like the "Five Man Band" or suchlike.  As it is, the site serves as a wiki for anything related to books, movies, shows, and games whatsoever, where the entry content itself is a discussion page complete with fan debates.  It could be downright educational if only it ran as intended.

This isn't meant to be confrontational, but have you actually looked at the site? The google result is misleading - there is no Dwarf Fortress trope, the Dwarf Fortress entry is a brief description of the game followed by the tropes it contains. "[T]he entry content itself is a discussion page complete with fan debates" is just plain wrong. Seems to be running as intended to me...

[Rexfelum]

I'd feel a lot better if it really were a site about tropes.  Just look at the descriptive text when that site shows up in Google search results: "The 'Main Dwarf Fortress' trope as used in popular culture, with a list of examples from all media."  That sentence setup only makes sense for actual tropes, like the "Five Man Band" or suchlike.  As it is, the site serves as a wiki for anything related to books, movies, shows, and games whatsoever, where the entry content itself is a discussion page complete with fan debates.  It could be downright educational if only it ran as intended.

This isn't meant to be confrontational, but have you actually looked at the site? The google result is misleading - there is no Dwarf Fortress trope, the Dwarf Fortress entry is a brief description of the game followed by the tropes it contains. "[T]he entry content itself is a discussion page complete with fan debates" is just plain wrong. Seems to be running as intended to me...

No problem, I'm glad to answer you.

Yes, I have been to the site, as you and I have now said the same thing about the Google result.  This keeps happening: the tropes website has set it up so that searches for their pages return a description in that format or a few other similar ones.  And mind you, it must be them that chose this format, not Google, because that's how search descriptors work.  It would appear that they intended the site to actually be about "tropes," in the sense of "And now we will discuss the 'Five Man Band' trope as used in popular culture, with a list of examples from all media."  Instead, exactly as you point out, this is an encyclopedia-ish entry about the game.  The site contains "anything related to books, movies, shows, and games whatsoever," down to the companies that make them, in a function more like . . . well . . . wikipedia instead of a literary analysis.

And I object that I'm just plain wrong about the discussion content.  Scroll down to the "It provides examples of:" section on any page (or "Examples:" when it is actually a trope).  Some entries are explanatory and to the point, while the rest are used as an internet forum, complete with "I think" and "no, it's actually."  Now, after the complaint I just wrote about "encyclopedia-ish entries," one could easily argue these pages belong on the site precisely because of these "example tropes" sections.  But when they're used in this manner, it is dismaying.

And this thread is so derailed we might as well invest in hovercraft.

--Rexfelum

[Eugenitor]

It should be possible to learn how to speak without using prepackaged cleverness compiled by autists.

I'd sig this if I had room.

Now, to return to the OP, how much happy juice spilled on the aspies in their hugbox, and were they able to crawl out?