The world's most dangerous wiki

For something that's taken up quite such a large part of my Internet existence in general recently, it's something of a surprise that I haven't got around to mentioning the TV Tropes wiki before. It seems now to be becoming more popular and well-known among the general Internet, especially if the way that some of its page titles are now being used by the Salmons as conversation starters is anything to go by. (One asked me if I'd ever experienced the Tetris Effect).

I only even thought to mention it here just now because it's finally made me realize what I thought seemed a little "off" about American TV. Well, there's a vast library of things to choose from in that regard, but more specifically, it's because of the difference in the use of what it calls the Eye Catch - I hadn't noticed this until it was pointed out, but most American shows disappear straight into adverts with no title slide (though you sometimes get a "Coming soon" montage, which doesn't ever happen in Britain), and I can't think of anything in Britain that doesn't have this buffer between the programme and adverts in place. Of course, I also seem to remember a time when ITV could actually get through an entire half-hour programme without having to break and come back anyway...

Still, back to the wiki. Wikipedia (referred to here as The Other Wiki) seems to have been taking itself more and more seriously recently with more emphasis on providing sources and using non-copyrighted images where at all possible, and while that's exactly the step that they needed to take a couple of years ago to start being taken seriously by people other than me, it's made them look slightly stuffy. In contrast to this, on TV Tropes absolutely nothing is rejected on grounds of notability and most of its contributors write very loosely (something no doubt helped by the wiki's actual subject matter). It's this entertaining approach that leads you to sort of get lost in it for hours at a time, and my usual approach is to middle click on any links that seem interesting as I read down a page, then move on to the next page that I've built up in my queue along the top of the screen and perform the same operation on that, in a sort of flexible depth-first search behaviour.

And what's really surprising is the sheer size of it - for something relatively specialist I would have thought that were would have been a few main categories and a multitude of smaller pages, but there are a massive number of common themes and storyline ideas that these people have identified and then taken it upon themselves to document. Two of the most comprehensive are Nightmare Fuel, for things that intentionally or unintentionally scarred people for life, and Fetish Fuel, for things that did much the opposite. I recently went to the wiki just to look up its list of "surprisingly improved sequels" that someone had mentioned, typed "sequel" into the search box and found myself instantly opening no fewer than six pages that caught my interest, which I would then have performed my usual iterative deepening on if I hadn't realized that it was one in the morning shortly afterwards. Even when I went back to get that link just now I opened up a further two, knowing full well that the decision was potentially disastrous. It's hopeless.

So don't click on any of the links above if you plan on getting too much work done for the next few hours.

PS. Sorry, I may have just destroyed your life.