Recent content by Grygor

Why would you assume that a community composed primarily of nerdy young white men - a community, incidentally, in which several people write erotic fan-fic, including the occasional rape-fic, of characters aimed at little girls - would be all that "progressive"? That would require a level of...

Well the large population is a a result of relatively high birth rate and heavy immigration. (The US's population surpassed the UK's in the 1840s and France's and Germany's around 1870.) The economic might is primarily a consequence of World War II, the US being basically the only large...

And why is that strange? "America" was just a bunch of British colonies at the time - most "Americans" were themselves British. The American Revolution consisted mostly of British people (with French and Spanish allies) and other British people (with Native American allies) killing one...

Yes they're still trying to make it work. They're also charging subscription fees now, even though the fabled 2.0 patch and PS3 release are still at an unknown point in the future.

Not possible, for the same reason accurate weather forecasts more than about a week in advance are impossible - these are complex chaotic systems, wherein small changes in initial conditions can result in major changes in the eventual outcome. To say nothing of the fact that "psychohistory"...

I keep seeing people complain about this, but what I want to know is: when was the last time a subscription-based MMO didn't require people to pay full retail price for the game in addition to the subscription fee, at least while the game was still fairly new?

You think that's bad? In the Final Fantasy MMOs, extra character slots actually increase your subscription fee - in FF 14, each character slot (technically including the first one) costs $3 per month. (Or ?3, or ¥300.)

That would be Nikita, directed by Luc Besson (aka La Femme Nikita), remade as Point of No Return. The Hong Kong-made Black Cat was also intended to be a remake of it.

You would be totally correct. --- In this context, "person" is a term borrowed from grammar/linguistics by way of narrative theory, but it's an imperfect fit, because the grammatical and narrative definitions don't map perfectly onto the "camera perspective"/"viewpoint" domain...

Because "mongrel" is a term that refers to (non-human) animals and occasionally plants. Using it to refer to people is therefore inherently dehumanizing. And because it is a dehumanizing term applied to people specifically because of their racial background, calling people mongrels is also...

As business metrics go, the actual amount of profit generated is of only secondary importance. Far more important is return on investment. Businesses only have a finite amount of money to invest in their product, after all, and so as profit-maximizing entities it's in their best interests to...

Movie buffs? Please. Tropers' interests revolve around anime and crappy fanfiction. Like hell there is. The lunatics are running the asylum over there - almost everybody who has invested a significant amount of time cleaning the site up has either been banned from the site or simply given...

A major factor is the fact that a select group of outliers pushes up the average. In other words, there's a certain small population of hardcore serial monogamists who go through multiple divorces through the course of their life, artificially inflating the ratio of divorces to marriages...

Protip everyone: Achievement tracking and other gaming metrics show that the overwhelming majority of people who play a game fail to complete it, or even progress very far. Any game.

Pretty much this. The problem with TVTropes is that the user base is fundamentally broken, which is the direct cause of all the site's various dysfunctions. It purports to be a encyclopedia of narrative constructs and patterns, but it has devolved into a list of "things that happened"...