Hi, I’m Adam and I’m here to effectively throw you into a black hole of time sunk productivity loss. I would like to introduce you to TV Tropes. It is basically a collection of all the tricks and ideas that keep cropping up in various forms of written and visual entertainment. The most well known example is called Hanging a Lampshade. It’s basically the calling out of an obvious plot hole or other inconsistency within the story. Once it’s been highlighted and commented on, the story moves on without much of even a nod to the passing.
It doesn’t sound like too much of a draw but once you start reading about one thing, you wind up opening five or six or twelve new tabs or windows with more things to read about. Most of the tropes have several screens worth of examples from books, movies, games and (unfortunately) anime. There seems to be an army of editors who do nothing but sit in their parents’ basement eating Cheetos, assembling Gundam models and watching Sailor Moon. With most of the newer pages, one can collapse down the examples lists and only expand the stuff that is interesting (read: not anime).
Some of the ones I’ve read recently that I found kind of cool are True Art is Incomprehensible (particularly the real life section), Mind Screw and Take That which explores media (particularly TV shows) taking shots at other TV Shows or media that are of similar genre. Beware: The rabbit hole is surprisingly deep, here.