TV Tropes, the all-devouring pop-culture wiki, catalogs and cross-references recurrent plot devices, archetypes, and tropes in all forms of media.
Cartoons & Cereal: How Adult Swim Has Held It Down For Hip-Hop On TV
The after-dark animation entity has done more than its fair share for hip-hop culture for over a decade.
Preparing for the Creator Economy Apocalypse (with Chris Gethard)
Television
Television is a visual interface for personal agents, a space for creating, arranging, and reusing artifacts.
Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology
A witty, often terrifying that chronicles our transform…
Leading the Herd Astray: An Experimental Study of Self-fulfilling Prophecies in an Artificial Cultural Market
Individuals influence each others' decisions about cultural products such as songs, books, and movies; but to what extent can the perception of success become a “self-fulfilling prophecy”? We have explored this question experimentally by artificially inverting the true popularity of songs in an online “music market,” in which 12,207 participants listened to and downloaded songs by unknown bands. We found that most songs experienced self-ful- filling prophecies, in which perceived—but initially false—popularity became real over time. We also found, however, that the inversion was not self-fulfilling for the market as a whole, in part because the very best songs recovered their popularity in the long run. Moreover, the distortion of market information reduced the correlation between appeal and popularity, and led to fewer overall downloads. These results, although partial and speculative, suggest a new approach to the study of cultural markets, and indicate the potential of web-based experiments to explore the social psychological origin of other macrosocio- logical phenomena.
Felicia Day Reveals Her Secret Geek Origins and Hollywood Adventures!
4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, Documentaries & More | Open Culture
Watch 4,000+ quality movies online. Includes classics, indies, film noir, documentaries showcasing the talent of our greatest actors, actresses and directors. Open Culture, openculture.com
Hype, financial narratives, and self-fulfilling prophecies in surveillance capitalism
The rise of platforms has transformed our understanding of contemporary capitalism, with the critical literature describing how these firms leverage unprecedented digital powers to extract monopoly rents – perhaps even heralding a new form of Feudalism. This paper draws on the literature on financial narratives to examine the role that such stories play within the form of capitalism that they describe, and what this suggests for the role of “hype” in contemporary capitalism. The same stories that for critical scholars appear as menacing threats of “technofeudalism” or “surveillance capitalism” for investors appear as optimistic stories of promising future returns. By driving financial investments, narratives afford platforms very real social and political powers, enabling them to function as a form of self-fulfilling prophecies. The paper argues for a cultural inflection to the political economy of Big Tech – viewing capitalism as neither mechanistic nor rational, but as an expression of a complex interplay between narrative, technology, and economic power. This suggests the need for a critical hype studies, geared at deconstructing the narratives undergirding the technological waves of capitalist pursuits, and examining the broader role of hype in coordinating and directing flows of capital within contemporary financialized capitalism.
Tropes - AI Writing Pattern Directory
The definitive reference for identifying AI writing patterns. Learn to spot the tropes that give away AI-generated text.
Too Much TV: Substack Is Going To Give Me A Stroke
And I take a look at the new Paramount, circa 2029.
Cory Doctorow: Stories Are a Fuggly Hack - Locus
I've mentioned before, stories are weird. I mean, really, really weird. Nothing that happens in a piece of fiction has any consequence in the real world. Romeo and Juliet did not live, did not die, and the ''tragedy'' they represent is objectively less important than the tragedy of the live yogurt culture I digested at the breakfast table this morning. My theory is that the parts of our brains that …Read More
Fanhackers – Your guide to research on fans.
Matt Hills is a fan studies and media scholar of really wide breadth, expertise, and versatility, author of the classic fan studies text Fan Cultures (2002) as well as a number of subsequent monographs: How To Do Things With Cultural Theory (2005),The Pleasures of Horror (2005), Triumph of a time lord (2010), Blade Runner (2011) Doctor Who: The Unfolding Event (2015) – he’s also one of the editors of Transatlantic Television Drama (2019), the Doctor Who reader Adventures Across Space and Time (2023), and Theatre Fandom (2025) as well as a prolific writer of essays and book chapters on a broad swath of fandoms, practices, and cult classics: Star Wars, Veronica Mars, Torchwood, Sherlock, Buffy, Lord of the Rings, and more.