I still wonder why it was so successful. Perhaps it was a combination of good timing and good marketing that brought all of the goodies that PC FPS gamers had enjoyed for so many years to a wide audience of adolescent teenagers.* I won't deny that Halo was a good FPS....but it's certainly not everything it's been hyped up to be, and there are definitely good FPSes elsewhere.

IMO, it was an evolution of hype that carried forward after it had started to get a little past the expiration date.
When the first teasers and footage for Halo came out, that was still back around the Quake 2 / early Quake 3 time frame. And Halo was still supposed to be a PC game. The graphics looked great compared to the state of the market, and Bungie had a good reputation. "Vehicles" were still some groundbreaking novelty, and the teasers were slickly produced - again, relatively speaking.

So it generated a lot of interest from the gaming crowd that carried over when the change to Xbox-only was made. Playing armchair psychologist...PC gamers decided it was already going to be the next cool FPS, so they had to own it. That mindset managed to survive until it was eventually released on a console, at a time when it wasn't quite as exemplary any more.

It's not that judges and clerks can't "recognize bullshit," it's that it's not their job in an adversarial system to do so - it's up to the parties. Reading assertions of fact or law on a blog can be problematic. The judge might read a fact that was specifically excluded from evidence, on any number of grounds. The judge might read a fact that is disputed, wrong, or even untrue, without knowing that it's untrue. But again, in an adversarial system, the parties are entitled to know what evidence is presented to the trier of fact, and are obligated to make their own cases.

A judge might read an assertion of law on a blog, but not know that there was a subsequent case 3 years later calling the validity of the assertion into question, or overturning it. Judges do not, and should not be expected to, have the entire text of every opinion in their jurisdiction memorized verbatim, and cases often turn on who digs deeply enough to find the precedent closest on point. Again, blogging can help the process - but their use by anyone involved in a pending case should be harmonized with the existing rules of our adversarial system.

The major difference with amicus briefs is that those are filed on the record, by identified parties, with copies delivered to all the litigants. If something in the brief is false, inaccurate, or misleading - or even just arguable - it can be argued and/or reply-briefed by a party who disputes it.

It's the basic difference between adversarial and inquisitorial justice systems. Judges reading blogs about pending cases is blurring that line.
Of course, it doesn't follow that preventing blogging by lawyers is the solution.