Websites I never expected to link to my stuff

[simont]

Every so often I trawl the most common entries in my website's referrer logs, just to see if anyone interesting is linking to me (and what they're saying about me if so).

I was quite surprised today to come across this page which links to my puzzle collection: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LuckBasedMission.

Makes sense in retrospect, of course; TVTropes touches on video games, so why shouldn't they link to a video game I wrote? But it surprised me at the time; it would never have occurred to me that a site I mostly associate with commenting on plot and characterisation and setting and so forth would be remotely relevant to anything I've done.

(Disclaimer: the link above goes to TVTropes, a website renowned for its almost irresistible power to make you follow links all afternoon until your browser runs out of tabs. It will ruin your life if you're not careful. If in any doubt, don't click through! You have been warned.)

Comments

[marnanel.livejournal.com]

Hurrah!

Unexpectedly, they also link to my stuff (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GeorgeBernardShaw).

[(Anonymous)]

Not that you'd want to be associated with a website that (among its other crimes) misuses the word 'trope' so terribly in its very title.

S.

[gareth-rees.livejournal.com]

OED says: "trope, n. ... A significant or recurrent theme; a motif."

[(Anonymous)]

Maybe... three of the pages on there are about anything that could reasonably be described as 'significant'?

A dozen more are arguably about motifs.

S.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Significance is surely in the eye of the beholder?

[(Anonymous)]

My, aren't we having a post-modern day.

S.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh, and almost none of them are themes, whether in the musical or any other sense.

S.

[ipslore.livejournal.com]

They've got a trope (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/YouKeepUsingThatWord) for that!

[gareth-rees.livejournal.com]

They discuss my stuff (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BonsaiBarber) too.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Aha! I am immune to tvtropes.org, having chronically overdosed on people talking about media I have never seen and never will see, during my university career as the token "physicist in a roomful of arts students". Take that!

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

(Not to mention conversations where somebody describes something using a word from one book that I have never read, I say I have never read the book they quite from and do they mean square/heavily ornamented/irritating like swallowing a tablet the wrong way round/a bit like a llama, and they say "sort of, but not quite, more like [the same damn word]". Yes but maybe relate it to something in REAL LIFE. Anyway. Pet peeve.)