Hey, look, a Website On The Internet. Nice. I was too busy playing Lord of the Rings Online and leading the least productive human life on the planet to notice.

Let me tell you a story, vector_black and piyonugget, AKA the two people that set this site as their homepage. Once upon a time I went to Fileplanet. I don’t know why. “Lord of the Rings Online beta?” I asked over The Official DORK Club Ventrillo server. Then I said something about penises.

“You can play lutes in that game,” said Mike “LeadPipe” Brust, because you can, in fact, play lutes in that game.

“Let’s play lutes in that game,” I suggested. And we did.

Now five of us are playing, mostly dwarves with annoyingly unloreful names (Girth Dumptruck, Father of Squirts; Squirts McGee, Son of Girth; Mrpeaches EaterOfPies, Pie-Eating Champion; Annoying Nagger, too nub to have a cool title). And thanks to the ability to create family trees and relationships we’re all related. Hobbits and mans breeding dwarves and elves. Playing lutes and flutes and horns and clarinets. In many respects, it’s still a joke that we play this game. A joke that will never get old.

And despite it’s extreme nerdiness, the likes of which even make me cringe, it’s so God-damned “casual-friendly” it’s almost definitely going to be The Next Big Thing. Not WoW big, but what can be? Aside from Blizzard’s next-gen MMO, of course. Ugh.

Imagine a World of Warcraft streamlined to the point of almost complete shallowness with build-in Xbox Live achievements and enough Renaissance Faire elements to wonder why only WoW players get a discounted ticket. It’s shockingly good, even if you get your quests from Tom Bombadil, who I’m told is “gay” and “wears yellow shoes.”