This week’s lack of a substantial post brought to you by an untimely tumble down a tvtropes wormhole.

This happens to me from time to time. (TV Tropes, for the uninitiated, is a treasure trove of all the things your favorite media do that has been done before, lovingly compiled and enumerated by legions of internet geeks and cross-referenced in such a way as to ensure that once you start to slide in, much like the Sarlacc pit, you will not easily (if at all) escape.) I watch a movie, I really enjoy it, and I want to deconstruct it a little bit, so I head over to tvtropes.org. This is a thing that, if I stop myself at all in the act, I call research, and it is — kind of. The site really is fascinating as a consideration of all the ways these movies and shows crib from one another and follow paths carved out ages ago, even if they feel fresh and new.

And it certainly can be inspiring and enlightening to see that all the ways that fresh and innovative film took the tropes we’ve seen before and tweaked them or inverted them or straight-up embraced them to such effective … um … effect. Invariably I get new ideas for my own story while browsing the site. Or I get new insights on things already happening in my story, that I can then flesh out and play up as I go back to work.

But as aforementioned, every page links to dozens if not hundreds of others, and they’re a bit like Pringles — you can’t click just one.

All of which is to say that while I should have been writing a pseudo-intellectual, slightly grumpy take on some thing or other, possibly writing related, possibly otherwise, I was spelunking in the page on Thor: Ragnarok instead.

Oh, also I re-watched Thor: Ragnarok for the more-than-enough-th time, because, why not?

Anyway. Amends will be made.