November 2: Election 2004 Top 10 Lists
 

It's here! It's huge! Welcome to 5MV's Election 2004 Top 10 Lists event! With this event, our Top 10 subsite reaches and surpasses -- way surpasses -- the 50 mark.


The origin of this event is one of my first T10 lists, The Top 10 Election 2000 Votes From the Voyager Crew. I didn't know much at all about politics back then, so I just came up with reasons that sounded funny. This had some unexpected side effects (Jim Wright nearly had a seizure when he saw that his beloved Janeway's vote was for Gore), but I think the lack of canvassing for either side helped the list's popularity, and it remains one of my favourites. So, now that another election is upon us, I decided to follow up that list with some Election 2004 character votes -- but this time doing multiple lists to cover the many series that have been added to 5MV in the last four years (i.e. everything but VOY). So I called up my homies, and this was the result.


Here are the thirteen Top 10 lists that make up this event:
<ul>[*]First off, the true sequel, Election 2004 Votes From Voyager by me. Whose party affiliations have changed? Whose have not? Will Harry die? Will Jim have another seizure? You'll have to click to find out.[*]Next up, the #50 milestone: Election 2004 Votes From Enterprise, again by me.[*]Our three other Trek subsites are up next, with Votes From TOS by IJD, Votes From TNG by Marc, and Votes From DS9 by Derek.[*]On to a tour of the non-Trek series covered at 5MV. First at bat is Votes From Andromeda by Tarn-Vedra, a name new at the site but familiar at the forums. Vedra's also written a full Andromeda fiver which you'll be seeing before long.[*]Next is Votes From Babylon 5 by our B5 specialist, Sa'ar Chasm.[*]We have two Doctor Who specialists, SCMoll and Scooter, so they collaborated on Votes From Doctor Who.[*]Next, another prominent forumgoer and author of two fivers, PointyHairedJedi, contributes Votes From Firefly.[*]Votes From Lord of the Rings comes your way courtesy of Kira, Site Manager and Two Towers master (mistress?). Kira was also a great help behind the scenes for this event.[*]Finally, three more lists by me round the event out. The first is Votes From Farscape. The second, and undoubtedly the least accessible on this list, is Votes From VVS8/9 -- that's right, 5MV still covers the Virtual Voyager seasons, and I haven't forgotten the part they play here. And finally, I had a few individual entries I didn't want to miss out on, but couldn't get whole lists out of either, so I bundled them into a miscellaneous list, Votes From Other Characters.[/list]But wait, there's more! This event features 5MV's very first Easter egg. Those of you who are into DVDs, videogames, or Homestar Runner will know what that means -- essentially, an Easter egg is a hidden bonus that the reader/user/viewer has to search for. In a videogame, you might have to walk through a wall that looks solid, or use an item in an unusual place. Online Easter eggs are easier -- you pretty much always find them by clicking on something that's not obviously clickable.


The Easter egg for this election event (say that five times fast) shouldn't be too hard to find. It's easy if you're thinking the right way. All I'll tell you is that the hidden "entrance" is on one of those Top 10 list pages. If you try for a while and still can't find it, email me for the answer -- or just watch the comment thread, because someone is bound to post the location once it's found.


Tomorrow, when the results of the election are (hopefully) in, I'll post some election wrapup here, including some interesting links. On the off chance that no one finds the Easter egg, I'll also post a hint. Meanwhile, there's one more item for tonight's looooong update: IJD's hit a small snag with his plan for a fiver to celebrate the release of TOS S2 on DVD, and it won't be ready for a while yet (should be up in at most a week). To tide you over, here's a preview scene:


Spock: Jim, why did you have to fall asleep in the middle of the mission drawing?
Kirk: I was tired! I had a.... busy night.
Spock: (sigh) We could've been sent to figure out the mystery of the pyramids! Or the strange disappearance of the Roanoke colony!
Kirk: I'm sorry! All right?
Spock: Geez, we didn't even get picked for "Who was buried in Grant's Tomb?"!
Kirk: Look, can we just focus on the mission at hand?
Scotty: We're mysteriously intercepting a transporter signal.
Kirk: There! Is that mysterious enough for you?
(A mysterious man with a mysterious cat materializes on the platform)
Mysterious Cat: Yo.
Spock: Fine, fine....


See you tomorrow, and good hunting!

Additional note for forumgoers: if you find the Easter egg, by all means post that you've found it, but don't post the location till I say it's time. Let's give everyone a chance to find it themselves first.

Hee Hee *has found it*

Awards self with pie :mrgreen:

A DS9 list was made by someone other than me?

*is confused*

Still hasn't found Easter Egg...hmmm, computery...

Very funny Top 10 Lists! :D

*Ahem*
good one though.... :)

Are you implying that I should have counted you? I was talking about regular 5MV contributors, not just forumgoers.

Bwahahahaha.
Nice one, Marc.
Nice use of Firefly quotes, PHJ.
Heh.

Oh, and I found the easter egg, though I cheated.

fair enough.

Cheater.

Of course, I would have too.

What's the point of not cheating? I couldn't find it...:(

Keep at it! It sounds like Alexia found it without cheating, and you can too. It's easier than you think it is -- you'll kick yourself when you find it.

Top 10 mania, I love it! And I found the easter egg!

But really all I'm posting for is to see if anyone worked out what the final vote tally was? And also if it could change the current result? :twisted:

Ooo, I forgot I was gonna do that! It'll be part of today's wrap-up post.

For Ohio?
Republicans:2,794,346 - 51%
Democrats: 2,658,125 - 48.5%

Now it's all up to Iowa and New Mexico's last precincts.......

I think he meant for the Top 10 lists in this event, together.

[EDIT: I just noticed I forgot to put a disclaimer on the Easter egg. It's there now.]

oh...okay...

:D :D


Heehee.


:mrgreen:


:D A very funny list.


Heheheheh :D


Hahahaha :mrgreen:


Heheheheh. Great list!


Heheh.


Heheheh.


:mrgreen:


Heh.


Yes. Ouch. ;)


:D Another great list to round it out!

That depends...what do you class as cheating :wink:

Oh and,
*groan* :mrgreen:

I meant what I'm almost sure Derek meant: looking at the HTML. That's how I would do it... after hunting for a while the non-cheap way, that is.

Btw, someone remind me later to thank Xeroc in today's update. He helped me with the CSS for hiding this egg.

I found it! and I didn't cheat! Well, I cheated a little.

Great lists! I have too much to quote. Imagine it all here with smilies under each one.

My htmling of these lists was definitely slowed down by snickering -- always a good sign. My favorites:
Good work, all. :)

Yeah, that's what I meant. :) And does 5MV count as a state? How many electoral votes do we get? After melting my brain watching so much damn coverage this morning, I feel like an expert in American politics! (As does probably everyone else this time round!) :shock:

All very funny, but one of my favorites is definitely

PS I love how the attribution text on our DW list has "Contact the authors...and SCMoll." Maybe he cloned himself? :)

I agree with Scooter with one addition:

My last name has been misspelled. TWO N's, BY'R LA'KIN! TWO N's!

I have to agree with Dylan there..... :D

Oops, looks like that slipped past Kira and me both. I'll fix it when I get home; post any others here if you find them.

Easter Egg was funny and delicious, thanks



Hmmm, looks like you're taking a few liberties with the plot of Amok Time, there... Looking forward to seeing where you go with it, though... (hums to himself)

Ah, well in that case, no I didn't cheat :mrgreen: And btw, remember to thank Xeroc :mrgreen:

Zaphod in 2008 :D *V for victory sign thingy* ;)


Great lists all around, i haven't found the easter egg yet though :-s


Edit: Ok i found it, but i cheated. ;) I had the right idea... but i don't think i would have found it on my own....

Yep. If you'd wanted to make that searching technique a little more obscure, you could've made a javascript onclick attribute to a span or something instead of an A element. Then it wouldn't have been quite as easy.

But for anyone who has Mozilla or Netscape or whatever and doesn't want to go through the source, hit Ctrl-I on each top ten list, then hit the links tab. It will list every link on the page.

Opera method: Just press A repeatedly. The cursor will move from the first link visible on the page (selecting it) to the second to the third, and so forth. (This is one of Opera's keyboard-browsing tricks -- I learned them all when working on lab computers with broken mice. Also handy: Z is back, X is forward.) I don't know how to do the JavaScript stuff Derek just mentioned, so the egg link is hidden by using style attributes inside the <a> tag to turn off underlining and such. Next Easter egg I'll do the research and this trick won't work.

I prefer Alt-Back Arrow for Back and Alt-Right Arrow for Forward since that works on Opera, IE, and Mozilla/Netscape.

Heheheheh....

I noticed that each list has a customized disclaimer, which is a nice touch.

Amok Time?

Who said I was doing Amok Time?

;)

Well, I used Derek's method to find them, but in retrospect, it's fairly obvious, isn't it?

Yeah, I've actually been doing that with the T10 lists for a while now. I think it started with the Zhaan girlfriend list, where the disclaimer explained a slightly hard-to-spot pun in #1.

Can't pin that one on me: I got SCMoll's information off his Doctor Who fivers, where apparently his name is also spelt wrong. It's fixed now.

^ It was? Oh, my! There will be blood...

::: points at Zeke :::

So, a quick tally shows me that 46 of the fictional characters represented on 5MV voted for Bush (41.1% of those voting), in contrast to 42 who voted for Kerry (37.5%). Nader had a decent showing at 10 votes (8.9%), while Cobb collected two (1.8%) and Buchanan and Peltier each collected one (0.9%).

The ten write-ins were very diverse, including Eisenhower, Tony Blair and Queen Elizabeth, Toby the Targ, Kerry Okie, and Gul Dukat. There were 18 respondents who did not vote, could not vote, refused to state their vote, or were otherwise not counted; these folks included Kosh, the First Doctor, Ford Prefect, Book, and Rygel.