#tropeboard

Note to self: Don't do a hackathon and then help a friend move the next day.

On Saturday and Sunday I went to the 4th AngelHack with my cofounder. Tony was going to focus on the startup while I would knock out a quick hack on saturday and then get back to work. As you can imagine, things didn't go quite to plan.

The hack I wanted to do was to build a site called Tropeboard. Tropes are storytelling ideas or patterns, character archetypes like "Action Genre Hero Guy", "Magnificent Bastard", or "The Trickster" are all tropes, but it also extends to ideas like "Red Herring", " Mysterious Past", and "Redemption Quest". (You can find thousands tropes at tvtropes.org but DO NOT GO THERE if you value your time). Anyways, Tropeboard would be a site where people can storyboard with tropes and would make it easy to browse existing tropeboards in addition to creating your own. The goal is to make it easy for people to remix tropes into new stories (FYI, "Alien" was originally pitched as "Jaws, in Space").

Long story short, what was supposed to take a few hours took about 24, I only got 2 hours of sleep and wound up needing a lot of help from the firebase guys since my front end development skills were pretty rusty. In the end, I got a prototype working up at tropeboard.com but my pitch was pretty bad since I didn't have time to practice so we didn't win anything.

Going forward, I plan to import all the tropes from tvtropes and convert things over to a graph database so I can recommend tropes. I think tropeboard has the potential to be a useful and addictive resource for anyone that cares about stories. I'm going to keep working on this as an opensource side project because this is a tool I want to use to build a story I've been working on for 3 years.

Anyways, back to work on TInj, gotta get that beta out.