Television Tropes & Idioms is a “a catalogue of the tricks of the trade for writing fiction” (in wiki format, of course).

Tropes are devices and conventions that a writer can reasonably rely on as being present in the audience members’ minds and expectations. On the whole, tropes are not clichés. The word clichéd means “stereotyped and trite.” In other words, dull and uninteresting. We are not looking for dull and uninteresting entries. We are here to play with tropes, not to make fun of them.

Examples include E equals MC Hammer (see above), better than it sounds (with the related I am not making this up), slap slap kiss, and the untwist.

TV Tropes is definitely worth bookmarking and looking around, but be careful. It will steal all your time and ruin your life.

(via the subversively troperific Ryan North)

In honor of this most holy of holy days:

First Ladies - A collection of motherhood-themed New Yorker covers, from the nineteen-twenties to today.

Mother’s Day Secrets - PostSecret collection of mothers, children, and the secrets they hide from each other.

The Daily Mail has a set of amazing photos of the Chaiten Volcano in southern Chile.

As clouds of toxic ash and dust tower into the sky, they ionise the air, generating an explosive electrical storm. Colossal forks of lightning spark around the noxious plume as it spews from the volcano’s crater, creating an image of raw, terrifying energy - as if the air itself were ablaze.

More than any damage the lava could do, most worrying is the possibility of pyroclastic flow, in which the enormous plume of ash collapses into a wave of hot gas and rock. The wave spreads across the ground at breakneck speeds with temperatures reaching up to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit.

The devastating consequences were seen after the eruption of Mount Pelée, which led to the destruction of Saint-Pierre and its roughly 30,000 population.

Green Porno - a feverishly hilarious look at sex in the natural world. I am especially partial toward the spider shenanigans; who knew I had sex the same way as in the insect kingdom?

Nature reports on two new studies showing that young children navigate the world using different information than adults:

Adults readily integrate sight, sound, smell, taste and touch in their everyday lives without a second thought. But research is revealing that this is not the case with children. Two new studies hint that children under the age of eight only use one sense at a time to judge the world around them.

Children over the age of eight showed results similar to adults on tasks in which information was available from various senses. In one study, sight and touch were used, and adults performed worse when only able to use sight or touch, and best when able to use both. However, children under the age of eight performed no differently.

“The results suggest that children don’t integrate, but instead ‘alternate’ between sources of information, [says developmental cognitive psychologist Virginia Slaughter.]”

Psychosocial and other cognitive development have been shown (billions of times) to continue much after birth, so these results are nothing shocking. But still, it is always interesting (and useful) to have experiments show behavioral correlates to the neural underpinnings.

Dear Hollywood: STOP TRYING TO KILL ROBERT DOWNEY JR.!

Downey has noted that his recreational drug use in the 1980s did not spiral into a full-blown debilitating addiction until he played an addict in Less Than Zero. As the star recently told Starpulse, “Until that movie I took my drugs after work and on the weekends. That changed on Less Than Zero. The role was like the ghost of Christmas Future. I became an exaggeration of the character.” Downey’s subsequent addiction resulted in arrests, incarceration, and the near-demise of his acting career. Nobody wants anything like that to happen again, right?

And yet Downey’s next roles included injured on a ton of painkillers in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Substance D abuser in A Scanner Darkly, drug and alcohol abuser in Zodiac, alcoholic in Charlie Bartlett, and finally alcoholic again in Iron Man.

Seriously, guys: Please cut it out. Downey is a terrific actor and seems to be a nice guy. Find him a role as a yoga instructor or the owner of a health food store. Let him play a vegan FBI agent or a Seventh Day Adventist shock jock. Make him Captain Frickin’ America. But this has got to stop.

(If only here was not so good at these roles, you know?)

Turn your point and shoot into a super camera:

If you’re using a consumer grade point-and-shoot Canon digital camera, you’ve got hardware in hand that can support advanced features way beyond what shipped in the box. With the help of a free, open source project called CHDK, you can get features like RAW shooting mode, live RGB histograms, motion-detection, time-lapse, and even games on your existing camera.

Other enhancements include “longer exposure times (up to 65 seconds), faster shutter speeds (1/25,000 sec or faster), automatic bracketing of your photos, and more.”

How cool is that?

Inspired by Helder Luis’s perfect iPhone ringtone, Eric Meyer gives us the really perfect ringtone. Lovely people may recognize it from a certain children’s show:

New Dark Knight trailer:

After Microsoft withdrew its Yahoo bid on Sunday, Yahoo’s stock price “plunged” 15 percent. But I doubt anyone at Yahoo is complaining about the current $24 stock price; that’s a $5 increase from the stock price before Microsoft’s bidding.