In case you were longing for some sort of post from me I took it upon myself to make a quick one.

Since we have so much of a huge following here (read no following and probably if I ask you all for something I will get the opposite) I figured I’d tell you all how I have already voted in my lovely swing state of Nevada.

OBAMA!!

Comments Galore!

P.S. I heard Wedge55 voted early in his opposite of a swing state California as well, and so did…your MOM!

For the first time in years, Bruce Woodcock has updated MMOGCHART.COM. The site tracks and charts the total number of active subscribers for a variety of different MMOs, and while popular games like MapleStory and Silkroad Online (or the subscriberless Guild Wars) are woefully absent, we can still draw some interesting analysis from the data.

Most notably, World of Warcraft has forever skewed the data in its favor, with 10 of the 16 million MMO subscribers the site tracks claiming allegiance to Blizzard’s market-dominating behemoth. More interesting, of course, are the games directly below World of Warcraft. RuneScape clocks in as the number two most-subscribed-to game with just over a million subscribers. While a playerbase one million strong is impressive enough for the ugly little Java-based UO-ripoff, as MMOGCHARTS.COM points out, it only tracks paying subscribers; free accounts are ignored entirely. As such, RuneScape’s position immediately below WoW is all the more impressive, as it doesn’t take into account the game’s legion of non-paying players. Additionally, the Flash-based Dofus sports nearly 400,000 subscriptions, second only to Lineage, Lineage II, and Final Fantasy XI in total players, and Tibia has 121,000 active subscribers.

This data proves that the MMO market is even more of a crapshoot than most people, including those developing them, realize. Or alternatively: People will pay for just about anything. There’s no clear indicators as to what makes a successful game, as the top titles include well known franchises, previously unknown properties, huge games with multimillion dollar budgets, and simple browser-based applets in equal numbers, if not quite equal subscribers. Perhaps the most important lesson here, given the number of decade-old games still being tracked and the confusing, overcrowded mess that is the 0-120,000 active subscriptions chart, is that regardless of its relative success, every MMO turns a profit.

Today was a busy day, kids. Or at least, it was as busy as a day can be when I only rarely get out of my chair. I implemented various changes and minor improvements across the sites, including fixing some long-standing display errors and correcting a few outstanding lapses in consistency. Plus, I even dealt with some years-old, depreciated HTML elements buried deep in the hidden regions of the site and converted all the pages to PHP files, taking advantage of all their new age wizardry. Ultimately, like most of the hours I waste on this site, the effects of my work are virtually invisible, but rest assured that I have, in fact, spent an entire day doing a great deal and accomplishing very little.

The real fruit of this labor is a rather unimpressive “video games,” page, which may or may not become something worthwhile at some point in the future. It really only exists for organizational purposes at this point, and differs very little from the preexisting Games, Games (Video), and Games (Also Video) categories. At least here I can be slightly more discerning with what’s displayed. And once I rewrite/heavily edit the Astro Boy, Baten Kaitos, Billy Hatcher, Defcon, and Gradius 5 reviews, I’ll actually be quite proud of everything linked to by that page. So, huzzah for that, I guess.

In an hour I’m going to watch Rise of the Video Game on the Discovery Channel, which promises to be the first part (of five) of something superbly awesome. After that, however, site maintenance continues as I attempt to upgrade our Wordpress backend. If you’re reading this anytime past four hours from now, assume I was successful.

I took matters into my own hands and fixed the MySQL database issues myself. The website works again and all we lost was my comment complaining about the 500 internal server errors. Huzzah, indeed.

For future reference, when getting MySQL and/or internal server errors (or just general Word Press buggery), visit Internet baron Geoff Frazier’s world wide webspace. Should you find both sites experiencing issues, the problem is not my fault. The DORK Club humbly shares the same host with Except Nothing. It’s like we’re separated from greatness by a single degree.

Trying to write about Law & Order is a daunting task. The original series has been on the air for 17 years; its 18th season starts this January (look forward to a Law & Order premiere liveblog!). With four other series falling under the Law & Order umbrella – two successes, two horrible, horrible failures – the entire franchise represents an incomparably massive crime drama mythology. There’s a lot to discuss, and simply choosing a starting point is an intimidating prospect. I want to quote Dick Wolf and tell you that Law & Order has done for New York what James Joyce did for Dublin. I want to quote Saturday Night Live and tell you all about the various components of The Sound. But I’m not going to do any of that yet. Instead, I’m going to start with Jack “Hang ‘Em High” McCoy (Sam Waterson), the reason I bothered watching an episode of the series beyond the first.

Jack McCoy isn’t an asshole, exactly. He is a man who believes in justice, and he doesn’t care whose toes he needs to step on, or whose skulls he needs to crush, to see justice done. He is a ruthless executive assistant district attorney. At one point, McCoy has all gay marriages in the state of New York annulled so that a murderer’s confession no longer falls under the protection of spousal privilege, much to the annoyance of his lesbian ADA. In another instance, he stages a fake trial to extract information from a dirty DEA agent, ultimately failing and getting the agent killed. Having been found in contempt more than any other lawyer in New York (and once in a California court!), for Jack McCoy the ends are more important than the means. He’s an unconventional prosecutor that plays by nobody’s rules but his own. Basically, Jack McCoy is the Jack Bauer of the legal world. He even has an estranged daughter.

Additionally, Jack McCoy has taught me more about the American legal system than any other source. Thanks to him, I know what a grand jury is and understand the power of an indictment. I know to always object to hearsay, that most cases end in a plea, and that a prosecutor can get a witness to give the most prejudicial testimony in the world as long as the defense opens the door for it. He’s taught me to shake my head when I yell at people.

He’s also taught me that Law & Order is awesome. You see, McCoy isn’t an anomaly. Law & Order’s entire cast is surprisingly well developed. I expected flat non-characters acting as siphons between viewers and the case of the week. Each character is defined by his or her actions, the actors playing their parts with an almost extreme minimalism, making each morsel of personal information all the sweeter. The main cast, subtle performance building on subtle performance, outshines the often cartoonish guest stars. Though the focus of each episode is unquestionably the case itself, the reoccurring characters – their personal motivations and beliefs – primarily drive the action. A case’s affect on the characters is frequently more interesting than the case itself.

Law & Order is the police procedural that knows it’s a police procedural. Its seemingly rigid format – 22 minutes of detectives working a case, an arrest, 22 minutes of the DA’s office prosecuting the suspect – isn’t quite so rigid. The series often plays with its own format, playing against viewer expectations and easily manipulating the audience. Additionally, episodes rarely end with sterile conclusions. Everything comes with a price, and often the price is too high for the justice system to pay. The district attorney’s office loses many of the cases it prosecutes. Often times, an episode ends with no conclusion at all. The only true constant in the series’ format comes from the “slice of life” segment in the first 30 seconds of each episode, often leading to a crime or the discovery of a crime scene.

The series is also far smarter than it has a right to be. As a mainstream police procedural/courtroom drama with nearly 400 episodes under its belt, Law & Order is a show that uses big words and doesn’t stop to explain them. And just like Jack McCoy, it doesn’t pull any punches, attacking issues “ripped from the headlines” head on and rarely taking the easy approach by choosing sides. It moves at breakneck speed, with no establishing shots or transitional scenes – only white-on-black title cards accompanied by The Sound – and dares the viewer to keep up. This isn’t flashy, substanceless fluff like CSI or banal garbage like CSI: Miami (the #1 show in the world!). The rotating cast of genuinely interesting characters keeps things fresh, and some exceptional writing doesn’t hurt either. Law & Order is an excellent TV series that is taken for granted by most television viewers, but is just as good now as it was 393 episodes ago. Better, even.

Oh, and that Dick Wolf quote? “Crime is a constantly renewable resource. That’s why we have newspapers.” That’s also why we have Law & Order.

I promised myself I’d never write a “watch this embedded YouTube video” update. We can all agree that YouTube and its Web 2.0 ilk are all mostly terrible. Still, for all the boring webcam bloggers, AMVs, and “this video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by ________s,” YouTube serves nicely as a dumping ground and archive for the bandwidth and webspace-challenged. And it’s the only place you can find a solid hour of cartoon theme songs. Web 2.0 is redeemed.

Here we have a solid thirty minutes of ’90s cartoon themes:

Noticeable omissions: Mummies Alive, The Why Why Family (French version, English version is Web 2.0 immune)

Here another thirty minutes of ’80s cartoon openings:

Noticeable omissions: Muppet Babies

I’ve always had a special place in my cynical heart for the cartoon theme song. More so than television themes in general, the cartoon theme song effectively condenses the content of an entire series into a catchy, easily-memorizable jingle. And memorize them I did. There’s something uniquely appealing about being able to express your unwarranted love for a piece of stupid syndicated children’s programing through song. So watch, sing along, and enjoy a nostalgia overload (even more so if you’ve already seen these videos in the year they’ve been online).

Later today: more YouTube fun. It’ll be video game related.

“But it’s impossible to lose a game of SimTower,” I replied. And like always, I was right.

A half-mile wide lobby, a single subterranean Japanese restaurant, and a $100 million dream. Sure, it took two millennia and the discovery that the in-game clock resets every 1000 years, but my honor was upheld. You can try to lose as poorly as me at SimTower, but you will fail. Still won’t lose though.

In other equally exciting news, I spent all of today recoding a great deal of the site. Sure, it doesn’t look any different aside from the new font, but it’s considerably more futureproof now. And I made actual headway into converting all of the Memoirs of an English Major essays into the new (and now newer!) format like I should have done six months ago.

And… that’s it. Feels like an Olde Timey update, doesn’t it?

Ultimatley, the dream team of Green, Van Buren, Fontana, McCoy, Branch, and Southerlyn beat all comers.

Five years worth of dorkclub.com Wordpress content has found its way back online, boys. How historical for us. Content resurrection is almost as fun as content nuking, except without any sense of forward progress. Still, regression is change all the same.

Now get to it: find as many dead links, formatting errors, and examples of bloated self-indulgance as you can!

Next up: Newspro posts and DORK Club Episodes! Seriously. (Not seriously.)

I’ve started playing World of Warcraft again against my better judgment. The endgame is one big waste of time, designed specifically to string players along with the smallest possibility of reward lying in wait at the end of each massive time investment as they continue to pay their monthly fees. Leveling alts only leads to the endgame again, an endgame in which the honor system, which greatly reduces the effectiveness of alts, plays a prominent role. Yet here I am, LFGing, farming, pking, and fighting with mages and priests over the fattest of the l00tz.

When you’re spending between five and eight hours a day in Azeroth (I wish that wasn’t a conservative figure), it doesn’t leave all that much time for, well, anything. Except for dinging, gratsing, and pointing out that Blizzard’s design staff is, like, totally inept and stuff.

I’ve graduated from college now with a nice and shiny English degree. As a proud member of the “real” world, so far I have spent a week and a half with my parents and spent an unhealthy amount of time flipping 1s and 0s in some server farm in Florida. The beta servers were in Florida. I’ll just assume the retail servers are in Florida rather than Irvine too. They’re probably not though. The point, however, remains the same.

The point: I suck; World of Warcraft sucks.

Other things that suck: too many to list. So I won’t bother.

That new crunchwrap surpreme at Taco Bell, though. That’s about as far from sucking as one can get. For those of you not in the know, and God bless you for that, and for those of you too lazy and/or unable to click the link above and find the pertinent information therein (future generations, this is you), the CWS is a tostada – corn tostada shell, ground beef, lettuce, tomatoes, and nacho cheese, of all things – stuffed into a tortilla which is then grilled on the Grilled Stuft grilling machine. I know, settle down. It’s as awesome as it sounds. It is the perfect representation of the cheap white Americanized commaless Mexican food that goes just great with some Del Scorcho hot sauce and a Mexican pizza on the side. It is a symbol. It is Gatsby’s green light across the water. It is perfect. God willing, our children will never know a day when the CWS does not exist. And the future, that magical world of tomorrow, will look back on these simple days as good. Better than what had come before, but not as good as what was to come. Crunchwrap supreme. It has nacho cheese.

I ate one of these.

Then I came home and I five-maned Stratholme. LFG 5-man Strath, I typed. And Vaalt and Shirfan, noble defenders of all things right, were quick to heed my call. We picked up some crap warrior and a brilliant mage, the kind of mage who makes you forget your own mother, and five-maned the hell out of that instance. We died on the MASSIVE WAVE OF DEATH following Ramstein. But we killed that ugly sucker, and Vaalt/PopcornChicken/Geoff Frazier and I got our new ring.

I out-rolled a druid for my new cloak earlier in the week. The Beast in URBS dropped it. Shirfan and Vaalt were there then too.

At some point between these two doings, I watched The Great Escape on AMC. The Wizard of Oz was on TMC at the time. I watched it because Major Zero/Tom mentions it in Metal Gear Solid 3, and I thought that by watching it I would somehow accrue (I just used that word) a greater understanding of the game. I didn’t, but the movie was pretty good. The teevee told me that if I liked the Great Escape I should watch some movie on Friday, but I won’t. I refuse.

I also refuse to stop playing Meteos, which arrived and which I play. It’s fun, and I don’t believe the game-destroying ‘crazy scratching’ method actually destroys the game. In fact, I don’t believe it does much of anything. I haven’t played Lumines (someday, he tells himself), so I can’t chime in on which one is better and thus confirm or condemn my own console purchases, as well as the console purchases of others, based on a single game. Such is life. Meteos is a hell of a lot of fun though. Wish I knew someone else with a DS and the game to compete against.

I’m a lonely boy in a lonely world.

But I have you, Internet, don’t I?