OMG.  I have been totally sucked into wiki-surfing on the TV Tropes Wiki (The title of this post is a riff on the They Plotted A Perfectly Good Waste trope). I started at about 10pm last night and was still surfing at 3:30am when Ron got up and made me go to bed. :P

What's that?  Did I hear some of you saying, "Excuse me, what is a trope?"  Well, from the home page:

Tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members' minds and expectations. On the whole, tropes are not clichés. The word clichéd means "stereotyped and trite". In other words, dull and uninteresting. We are not looking for dull and uninteresting entries. We are here to recognize tropes and play with them, not to make fun of them.

The wiki is called TV Tropes because that's where they started but over the years it has expanded to include all types of tropes - "Tropes transcend television. They exist in life, as we will be quick to tell you. Art in any form does its best to reflect life, so tropes show up everywhere. We want 'em all."

How did I end up at TV Tropes?  Well, we were watching Galaxy Quest, where one of the character's - Guy Fleeman, a fan-geek who played a "red shirt" in a single episode of the in-movie Trek-alike TV-Show "Galaxy Quest" - spends much of his time adventuring in space freaking out because he thinks that's all he is going to be in this case too:

I'm Crewman Number 6! I get killed to prove the seriousness of a situation!
— Guy Fleegman on playing a Red Shirt, Galaxy Quest

I knew that there was a specific trope about characters who are aware of the tropes of the genre they're presently in and wanted to find out what it was.  So, I used Google to find TVTropes.org and then did a search there to try and locate the trope I was thinking of. 

That was my first mistake - the search terms I used brought up, among others, the TV Tropes page dedicated to Galaxy Quest, which I checked out first and then I made my second mistake - following a link to something other than the trope I was looking for (I think I started with the Cannot Tell A Lie trope, though I'm not sure anymore....  Oh, and the trope I was looking for is Genre Savvy.) and then, as they say, my fate was sealed.

Anyway, if you can afford to waste a bit of time, I highly recommend checking this site out, if for no other reason than it will give you some serious insight into some of what can makes some writing so good, so bad, or so bad it's good, regardless of whether it is found in literature, comics, TV, film, anime or elsewhere.

:-j(enni)

I've just added a new web comic to my list called The Adventures of Ellie Connelly, which is set in 1890 about a young Victorian era woman who is an expert on the paranormal.  It was started a few months ago so the archive isn't too long - you can start reading from the beginning at http://www.ellieconnelly.com/comics/

It's been six and a half months since I was let go from CGTV Games and I've honestly had enough of it. I apply and get almost no answers and when I do get an answer they interview me and then pick someone else.

I'm good at what I do, I know it, I believe it. I've done a lot of good work over the last 11 or so years. I've gotten lots of praise for jobs well done. Yes, I've made a few mistakes and had a few bad reviews - who hasn't - but on the whole, there's been more positive than negative. I have a lot of skills that are transferable to any number of other fields - Web Design/Development, Game Design, Technical Writing, to name a few.

I'm capable and I'm smart. Hell, I have a fraking Computer Engineering degree!  One does not complete a program like the one at SFU without having a certain level of technical acumen. Yet no one seems to be willing to accept that I could easily get back into the developer groove or that I could pick up the skills I haven't needed to acquire along my previous career path (like Flash and AJAX) with very little effort.

At least there's some hope for a change on the horizon. Services Canada has a program that will provide a grant to anyone who is or has been on Employment Insurance in the last 36 months to help them with skills upgrading and/or acquisition. I'm in the process of filling out the paperwork for the government and have already been accepted at Vancouver Career College / CDI College (VCC recently acquired CDI) to take a subset of their Programmer Analyst: Web Development program. I'm only taking two "units" out of the four required for the full certificate as I don't really need to get a certificate given I've already got my BASc - I really just need to renew my dev skills (which I'll be doing with courses on database programming and design which was not something I studied much at SFU) and pick up skills with the most common web design tools (especially Flash).

One nice thing about the program is that there's a practicum component at the end.  It's normally an eight week practicum but as I'm only taking half the courses mine will only be for four weeks. That should be more than sufficient though - chances are quite high that I'll simply land a job as a web developer wherever the practicum is held, and if that's not somewhere I want to work long term I can always start looking for something else around the same time.

Due to the need to have the paperwork for the grant in the government's hands 4 to 5 weeks before classes start, VCC/CDI has me starting Oct 14th (day after Canadian Thanksgiving).  So, if I don't land a job before then (which would obviously be preferable), we'll be living the student life (and, unfortunately, living on a student budget) from mid-October 2008 to mid-May 2009.  But at least I won't be stuck at home not getting phone calls from companies who don't want to hire me. :P

:-j(enni)