A trope is a device or convention – usually found in writing, but appears elsewhere – that provides a kind of short-cut to an idea.<\/p>\n
A few good examples are TVtropes<\/a>\u00a0and Feminist Frequency<\/a><\/p>\n The writer presents an idea and based on the audience’s shared culture, they fill in the rest. So, you say “knight in shining armor” and the audience fills in things like Hero, Quest, and Damsel in Distress. Because they are so easy, they get over-used. And they can perpetuate cultural or gender stereotypes.<\/p>\n And this week, I think I got troped.<\/p>\n Jim and I went to Rockne’s for dinner and we stood at the entrance waiting for the greeter to seat us. When she asked us how many, we told her two. She grabbed two menus – and headed us right for the bar before we could say anything. She set down the menus at a table in the bar area and headed off – thinking, I guess “two guys, no women = beer and giant TVs with loud sports”<\/p>\n I don’t drink at all and Jim rarely has any – and when he does, it’s never beer. Neither of us were interested in freaking<\/strong> golf<\/strong><\/em> on any of the 6 giant TVs and conversation was difficult in the loud area.<\/p>\n I suppose we could have gotten moved to the restaurant section, but it didn’t seem worth it. We ate our meals quietly and left when we were done.<\/p>\n Now, the “two guys, no women = beer and giant TVs with sports” is not a terrible assumption. Probably pretty reasonable, I guess – and far less damaging than “all girls like pink and can’t be engineers”. Still, it was a little weird to be set on a particular path based on an assumption. Which I guess means I must have things pretty good if people do it so infrequently that I suddenly notice it.<\/p>\n ——————<\/p>\n I had a pretty good swim today – though my arm was hurting a bit. I was looking forward to a hot shower afterwards to loosen it up, but there was a problem. Only one shower-head could have hot water at a time. When the second was turned on, both went down to a dribble. 17 shower heads, but only one gets hot water.<\/p>\n We experimented for a couple of minutes to try and work around it, but I finally just mentally shrugged, thought “polar bear jump”, and switched mine to all cold. I took a quick shower and got dried off and dressed, then headed back to work. And yeah, once you jump in an icy lake, you really don’t have any ground to stand on in terms of cold water.<\/p>\n Don’t know what caused it, but it was weird enough to note and put in the blog. So, yeah.<\/p>\n —————-<\/p>\n After work, I suggested that Jim and I take his puppies for a walk in the park. And let me tell you – those were the happiest dogs in the park. Perhaps even the happiest mammals in world. And when Talbot pooped and kicked the grass behind him when he was done – you would have thought it was his birthday. He was so excited to just be a dog.<\/p>\n I think we can learn from happy Talbot.<\/p>\n He’s happy to go outside, he’s happy to go inside. He’s happy to get food, he’s happy to get a treat. He’s happy to ride in a car, get a belly rub, or go for a walk. He’s just… happy. A happy little dog that loves everyone and wants to be everyone’s new best friend forever.<\/p>\n And I was happy to walk with him today in the park and share a little bit in some simple joy – from the world’s happiest dog.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A trope is a device or convention – usually found in writing, but appears elsewhere – that provides a kind of short-cut to an idea. A few good examples are TVtropes\u00a0and Feminist Frequency The writer presents an idea and based on the audience’s shared culture, they fill in the rest. So, you say “knight in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_bluesky_dont_syndicate":"","_bluesky_syndication_accounts":"","_bluesky_syndication_text":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1829","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1829"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1829\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1830,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1829\/revisions\/1830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1829"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderofwade.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}