TonyV

How about this. The Paragon Wiki has been busier than it has ever been. Ever. And not by a little, it's not even close. Here's a short rundown of the unique IP address stats, which is roughly a measure of how many unique people have visited the site, since 2009 when I converted over to a new stat-keeping software package.

Average Visitors Per Day:
2009-01: 6,579 (Mac Special Edition)
2009-02: 6,673
2009-03: 5,688
2009-04: 5,899 (Architect Edition/Issue 14: Architect)
2009-05: 5,660 (Going Rogue officially announced)
2009-06: 5,517 (Issue 15: Anniversary)
2009-07: 6,270 (Super Booster III: Superscience)
2009-08: 5,825
2009-09: 4,893 (Issue 16: Power Spectrum)
2009-10: 4,935
2009-11: 4,291 (Super Booster IV: Martial Arts)
2009-12: 4,095
2010-01: 4,256
2010-02: 4,369
2010-03: 4,912
2010-04: 5,189 (Issue 17: Dark Mirror)
2010-05: 5,560
2010-06: 5,703 (Super Booster V: Mutant)
2010-07: 5,680
2010-08: 6,614 (Going Rogue/Issue 18: Shades of Gray)

Past three days:
2010-08-17: 8,654
2010-08-18: 9,849
2010-08-19: 9,465

Here's a chart, just because I like them. It shows the number of visitors on a seven-day sliding window:



Keep in mind that August isn't done yet; I'd bet a large sum of money that it will break all records I've been keeping since the start of 2009. I have a feeling that that uptick at the end is going to stay that high at least through the weekend. And that doesn't even account for the fact that for a few hours the other night, the whole server was toast due to the load and no one was able to access the sites.

Or how about this. The past four days hold the first, second, third, and fourth spots on the all-time high number of visitors. The number five spot? June 30, 2009, the day after Issue 15: Anniversary hit the live servers. We had 7,299 visitors that day. Ponder that a second. The average number of visitors for the past three days is blowing away the previous high number of visitors by almost 28%. Page loads reflect similar numbers.

Even more generally, I really like how since December, the number of visitors has been climbing steadily, not declining. In spite of all of the DOOOM!-crying that has been going on, the game is not dying. Yes, it has a "down" cycle around the end of 2009, just like it's had before and probably will again. But Going Rogue really has re-energized everyone, and it sounds like they've got more plans in store to keep those numbers up. Maybe not as high as they are right this second, but high enough that I'm not too worried about the people who keep coming here hoping to pee on our parade.

I'm sure that some would argue that there's little or no direct correlation between Paragon Wiki visitors and subscribers, that the game is still going to hell in a handbasket. I contend that those people are, for whatever reason, deluding themselves, that the game is actually quite popular, that the reality of the situation isn't as bad as some people think it is, and that all in all, the game is going in a good direction, not bad.

That's good, as in, "Good news, indeed."

And just in case someone thinks I'm fudging the chart by using a sliding window trendline instead of the absolute number of visitors, Here's that chart. I was just trying to keep it from looking like a polygraph readout. Notice that the numbers for the past few days literally go off the chart. IT'S OVER NINE THOUSAND!!!

It's what happens when people don't use Taxibots.

Okay, I hit the FixIt button. Basically, you people blew up our server with all of the Going Rogue traffic.

I've tweaked some server-side settings to try to prevent it from happening again, and I'll check in on it often today to bounce the server just in case. The next few days--and this weekend!--are probably going to be a bit dicey, but I'll try my best to try to keep it up and in good health.

/inane chatter about an arcane topic

Way back in the day, I took a class on assembly language programming for RISC processors. The thing that blew just about everyone's mind is that the CPU would load in multiple instructions to optimize execution speed. The thing is, though, that if you load in a branch operation followed by something else, that something else would have essentially been loaded for nothing.

As a result, some clever engineer came up with the concept of a branch delay slot. The principle says that the op code following a branch or jump would always execute, regardless of whether or not the branch or jump was taken. Typically you would use the instruction after a branch or jump to do something like increment a counter, being mindful of the fact that the branch would test the pre-execution value, not the value after the op code in the branch delay slot was executed.

Sometimes, you just plain couldn't do it. No matter how hard you tried (and I did try hard), how clever you thought you were (and I am clever), there was simply no op code you could put into the branch delay slot that was safe to execute. When you wound up in this situation, the NOP op code was what you ended up using. Normally, you'd avoid using it because hey, that's one CPU cycle wasted for nothing, but in a pinch, it was a lot better than just putting a dummy statement.

/more inane chatter about another arcane topic

Back in the heyday of the Commodore 64, I used to do some assembly language programming on the 6510 processor that come in it. I was a kid at the time, though, which meant that I was poor as dirt. It took me a year of scraping enough money together to buy the thing, and it was only $300 or so by the time I got one. As a result, I couldn't afford to go out and buy the machine language monitor with all of the fancy features like labels and such. No siree, I had to make do with a really, really basic MLM that I found in the back of a machine language programming book that I typed in using lots and lots of DATA statements with some READs and POKEs.

Anyway, I frequently found myself in the position of needing to add or modify some code. Unfortunately, I didn't have any memory-moving tools, and all of my machine language programs were literally programmed at literal addresses. If I wanted to branch ahead, I had to calculate the number of bytes the branch would skip and use that as the op code parameter. On many occasions, I would just guess. "I think it will be around 50 bytes, I'll add some padding and make it 0x40." Invariably, I'd find that it was off by a bit, it was only 48 bytes or so. I'd use NOPs to fill the space in between, just in case I needed to add any code. (Because otherwise, I'd have to retype the whole damn thing from that point forward or add a strategic JMP to get me in some free space in memory and a JMP to get back.)

Love 'em, hate 'em, or just don't care 'em, those are my NOP stories.

Like everyone else, I think that's crap. Let's be honest, City of Heroes probably isn't NCsoft's biggest game right now, but being just as honest, it probably has the most to gain in terms of subscribers and revenue from publicizing it at the specific time that this event is being held, and NCsoft should be focusing hot and heavy on it. Where's Black Pebble? Why isn't he raising holy hell at corporate HQ over this? I really feel like City of Heroes is the red-headed stepchild of NCsoft, and while I appreciate the development resources they've thrown at the game, they need a more holistic approach to making it not just very cool, but very popular as well.

I swear, sometimes I think that City of Heroes is designed to be an out-of-game exercise in frustration for its players. One arm of NCsoft (the developers and resources allocated to them) is spot on and doing all the right things, while the other arm (marketing and promotion) is practically sabotaging the game.

Great news! We're coming out with this really keen expansion that everyone who plays it will absolutely LOVE!!!*

* ...but we're not going to promote it, so hardly anyone will know about it.

You have a willing base of fans who will make videos, create merchandise, post on social networks, and who want to bend over backwards to help you, but we can't do it without your help. Frankly, it's extremely disheartening to us when we feel like we care more about the game than NCsoft's own marketing department.

At any rate, I'll toss this out, too. Not to rain on anyone's parade, but I really wish that you guys would consider coming down to Dragon*Con in Atlanta instead of to Pax at some point. I'm not asking that you come here every year instead, but you've done Pax for a few years in a row now, and next year, I really would like you to think about spreading the City love around. Yes, we have fewer people, but not that many less. Plus, the people at Dragon*Con are almost an entirely different group of people to reach, versus seeing a relatively large percentage of the same people who saw you last year and the year before.

I respectfully suggest that you avoid doing this.

STOP!

HAM-mertime!

Okay, as long as this is escalating this to snarky...

No matter how much you lecture and no matter how many times you state something that is just plain wrong, it doesn't change the dictionary definition of the word, it doesn't change virtually every literary textbook ever written, it doesn't change any of the innumerable resources that back me up on this. Your retort of "nuh-uh" just isn't convincing.

It reminds me of an argument I got in with a guy in college one time. He made some offhand comment about the dark side of the moon, the side that always faces away from the sun. I wasn't looking to get in an argument, I just mentioned in passing, "You mean the Earth. The 'dark side' of the moon is the side that always faces away from the Earth." He got all defensive and dug in, and no amount of logical explanation about its period of rotation versus revolution or about how the same features are always in the same places regardless of phase would convince him otherwise.

It reminds me a bit of an argument I got in with a guy from work one time. He said something about his cousin's child, his second cousin. Again, I offhandedly said, "that's your first cousin once removed, not your second cousin," and explained that your second cousin is someone who is the same generation as you who shares the same great grandparents (whereas a first cousin shares the same grandparents), and that the "once removed" designation stands for "one generation removed." Again, that guy got all defensive and dug in, and no amount of documentation from reputable sources I showed him would convince him that having studied my own genealogy pretty heavily, I knew what I was talking about.

I learned a while back that some people, no matter how much proof you offer them that they're wrong, will still refuse to admit it. Some people, for some weird reason, think that they look smarter clinging to something wrong, something that everyone else knows is wrong, that to simply say, "Oops, I was mistaken."

One more anecdote for the road. I had two good friends who used to date each other. I had known both of them for years before they met each other, and I knew them both better than they knew each other. I told them up front, "You're not compatible. You really have conflicting personalities, and at best, you're going to drive each other nuts." They were both nice people, but one was classic type A, very picky, always early, very neat, etc. The other was laid back, happy-go-lucky, a bona fide slob, hours late to everything, etc. No, they insisted, they complement each other, and became bound and determined to make it work. They'd show ol' Tony that he was wrong. It ended very badly. One literally ran away to Chile, met a girl down there who was more like him, and is happily married with three kids. I introduced the other to another friend of mine who was compatible with her, was the best man at their wedding, and they have one girl and another on the way today. Both are still good friends of mine, and to this day, they hate each other.

The point is, there are things I'm not an expert in. Automobiles, as I mentioned above. Sports. Outdoor activities. Poetry. Heavy metal, rap, and opera. War history. Cooking. Impressionist art. New York City. These are some subjects that, if you argue with me about something pertaining to the topic, you'll have a decent chance of convincing me I'm wrong.

This isn't one.

Okay, one more true story to convey my impression of this argument. I once took a class in which a lady insisted that there are 52 states in the United States. She swore up and down that she knew this for a fact. Of course, I insisted that no, there are only 50 states in the United States. Unfortunately, and to this day I don't exactly know how, she somehow managed to be a lot more convincing than I was and had the other 12 or so students and the teacher waffling on who was right. Before long, some were actually defending her. One classmate actually said, "I remember them adding two more states a few years ago, like back in the 1980s." I swear, I thought my head was going to pop. The next week, I brought a book of everything imaginable. Maps, history texts, lists of U.S. Senators and Representatives, printouts of government statistics, the whole nine yards. Before I could make my case, she admitted that when she got home, her nine-year-old daughter told her, "Mama, you know there are only 50 states!" Thank god someone in the family had a lick of sense. No matter how many strangers who think they know better tell me that there are 52 states, I know for an absolute fact that there are not. It's one of those things that I'm in my element talking about, I know I'm right, and it really is that simple.

If you continue to choose to believe something that is provably untrue, well, go right ahead. I have a saying about that, but I'll keep it to myself to avoid unnecessarily escalating this argument any further.

See, that's just it, what you're referring to isn't irony. Really, it's not. Look it up. At least, it's not in the "pure" sense of the word, certainly not in the historical sense of the word. The Wikipedia probably nails it best in the section titled, Situational irony: "This is a relatively modern use of the term, and describes a discrepancy between the expected result and actual results when enlivened by perverse appropriateness." It also notes, "By some definitions, situational irony and cosmic irony are not irony at all."

Now, normally I just let it go, because the fact is that there are a lot of people out there who think irony has to involve some clever play on words or other cosmic pun. Again, there is overlap; there can be both. But what gets under my skin is when people who don't understand what irony is start lecturing others who clearly do have a grasp on it on what it means. It's a little bit like if I, with my limited knowledge of cars, started lecturing a mechanic on the best choice of engine for a car.

Again, key to the concept of irony is a disparity between perception and reality. In the example you gave, I wouldn't expect the name of a festival to have any bearing on the weather. It could be classic verbal irony if someone named an event "Clearskies Festival" that is held in Seattle, which averages only 58 days of sunshine each year. On the other hand, most normal people expect their wedding day to be pleasant, happy occasions, and rain almost certainly causes to some degree a disparity between that expectation and the reality of the situation. Of the two examples, Alanis Morissette's is clearly more illustrative of irony.

Incidentally, the story I referred to was The Gift of the Magi, by O. Henry. And you get extra credit if you recognized the deeper irony in that although the expectation of giving each other gifts that had been rendered useless through their actions for the other would be sadness or disappointment, the reality is that the couple ended up with the best gift of all, a stronger love for each other. Irony doesn't have to always have a negative connotation to it.

How people criticize Alanis Morissette for getting irony wrong is beyond me. I honestly think that most people who criticize others for not knowing what "irony" is doesn't understand it themselves, which is ironic in itself for reasons that hopefully will become apparent in this post.

Key to the concept of irony is some divergence between what is expected or stated and what is reality. The simplest example of this is verbal irony, often called sarcasm, such as when you say something like, "Yeah, he's really happy about that," when in fact it is understood and known that whoever you're taking about is outraged. However, this isn't the only kind.

There is also situational irony, in which people in a situation believe one thing to be true when in fact something quite different is the case. The classic example of this is the tale of the girl who sold her hair for a watch fob to give to her husband for his watch that was missing one, while the husband was selling his watch to buy a ribbon for his wife's beautiful hair. Each believed that the other was still in possession of the thing that was required for their gift and that the gift would be very useful to the other. The reality was that in doing their respective actions, they were completely invalidating the actions of the other. (At least from a utilitarian perspective; I'm sure each dearly loved the other for the thoughtful gesture.)

Going back to the song, most of the examples she gives are indeed ironic. Here are some examples:

"An old man turned ninety-eight / He won the lottery and died the next day." The expectation is that someone winning the lottery will have a rich, full life after doing so. The reality is that the old man gained practically nothing from winning, and in fact, if he died of a heart attack from the excitement or something, the lottery winning could have actually kept him from having more life than he did. Thus irony.

"It's a black fly in your Chardonnay." The expectation is that Chardonnay is fancy and expensive, but the reality is that a fly in it makes it quite disgusting. Thus irony.

"It's like rain on your wedding day." The expectation is that your wedding day will be a bright, happy occasion that your family and friends will enjoy. The reality is it is dingy, wet, and miserable, and that your family and friends will probably want to get away and home as soon as possible. Thus irony.

"It's a free ride when you've already paid." The expectation is that a free ride is a good thing, but in this case, it is useless because you're already out the money that you paid. If anything, it will make you feel stupid for forking over your hard-earned pay. Thus irony.

"It's the good advice that you just didn't take." Hopefully, this one is obvious. The expectation is that good advice will be valuable and benefit the advisee. The reality is that the good advice was worthless because you didn't take it. Thus irony.

Irony doesn't have to be blatantly obvious to be irony, and I will agree that some of them are subtle. But a lot of people confuse irony with coincidence. They are very similar, and yes, sometimes there is overlap in that an event can be both coincidental and ironic. Yesterday on my way to work while I was pondering the lyric, "It's a traffic jam when you're already late," I got stuck in a traffic jam when I was really already running a bit late to work. Some would have said, "Huh, that's really ironic," but I don't really think there's anything particularly ironic other than the irony conveyed by the lyric itself, which is that when you're running late, the expectation is that you will probably be rushing to make up time and get there quicker, when the reality is that it will take you even longer than normal to get to your destination.

What's also ironic is that I don't particularly even like that song. (Expectation given that I've been defending it is that I'm a fan, reality is that I detested Alanis Morissette when she was popular, and have only recently come to a grudging respect for her music.) Nevertheless, if anything, she has educated millions of Americans and Canadians about the meaning of ironic in discussions just like these, many of which probably happened in real classrooms with teachers who use current events and popular culture to make their lessons more relevant and meaningful to their students.

I would expect someone who criticizes others for not knowing what irony is to understand it themselves. When the reality is that they do not... Isn't it ironic? Don't you think?