Category Archives: Uncategorized

Writer’s Block: There Can Be Only One

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What a strange question.

Does monogamy exist? Of course it does. Am I monogamous? Absolutely not.

I believe that choices in life are most meaningful when they are choices, consciously made rather than accepted as defaults. I believe there are a great many people who have thought about it and decided that monogamy is what’s best for them, a great many other people who have thought about it and concluded that non-monogamy in one form or another works best for them, and some folks who don’t much think about it at all and are monogamous because they think that’s the only option available.

Life is one of those things that gets better when it’s lived consciously.

Tape and plaster, Part II

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In Part I of this tale, we wrapped joreth in layers of paper tape with water-soluble glue, for the purpose of creating a cast of her body from which she could make a dressmaker’s dummy.

That same day, we also created a plaster cast of her body, using plaster bandage strips.

The plaster was applied directly over skin, and was considerably messier than the paper tape. The process was a lot of fun, but absolutely in no way, shape, or form safe for work.

More computer security: Running online frauds for fun and profit

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A little while ago, I posted about a phish scam in which someone had placed multiple fake PayPal and bank sites on one server in order to trick people into handing over their bank account information. This particular type of scam is quite common, of course; I get a couple dozen a week in my email box these days.

It’s rare to see one computer hosting multiple different fake sites, and rarer still to see them hosted for an extended period of time. Usually, the way it works is that hackers break into a poorly secured Web server (for example, in today’s crop of phish emails there’s a fake PayPal page that’s on a Web site running an outdated, insecure WordPress install, and a fake Abbey Bank page running on a hacked Web site that’s using an old, unpatched copy of the Joomla content management software.)

The fake PayPal and bank sites I discovered a couple of weeks ago were running on a server belonging to an ISP called a2b2.com, which at the time I believed wasn’t actually a corrupt ISP, but rather a single clueless individual. The ISP a2b2.com is located in Great Britain and seems to be run by just one person.

A day after I posted about that site, I received an email from the guy who runs that ISP, telling me that the server had been taken offline and the fake bank and PayPal sites were gone.

I thought that was the end of it. I was wrong.

We’re about to get technical here!

Strange things this morning

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So David and I walked down to the car this morning to head in to the office, and David noticed a folded scrap of paper tucked in the window.

Now, my first thought when there’s a note stuck to my car is always “Oh, no, someone ran into my car in the parking lot.” I don’t know why that’s my first thought, since to date I’ve found a grand total of three notes on my car in my entire life and not one of them was about an accident, but there it is.

Anyway, this note was not, in fact, about someone ramming me in the parking lot. Or maybe it was; it’s hard to tell:

Though honestly, I think it’s more likely that it was aimed at David than at me.

I can’t give you any rational reason for it, but I have a feeling that this note was more likely written by a man than a woman. I could be wrong, but it feels that way…

This, apparently, has been an ongoing issue with David, as well–he tends to get hit on by a lot of guys. I might be being unreasonably modest in assuming that the note’s intended for him but not me, though in all honesty I have to say he’s most likely the “hot” one:

Tape and plaster, Part I

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A couple weekends ago, Shelly and I headed down to Tampa.

There were a few reasons for this. Shelly just graduated with her undergraduate degree (yay!) and has a few weeks free before going into grad school. It offered an opportunity to spend time with friends before the move. The new Star Trek opened on the IMAX theater in Tampa. And joreth needed to be covered in papier mache and plaster.

Each of these things could easily be a post in its own right, and likely may be. In fact, I am now in possession of a photograph of datan0de, my former archnemisis, which may put to rest once and for all the debate about whether or not capturing a person’s image also captures his soul; if that photograph doesn’t define datan0de quintessential essence, then nothing does.

But I digress.

The plaster and papier mache was actually pragmatic, not kinky. joreth is in the process, you see, of constructing some dress dummies of herself which are suitable for creating tight-fitting clothing, and so we needed to make a cast of her body.

Strictly practical, right? Not salacious at all, honest. Nevertheless, the rest of this entry, with pictures, is probably not safe for work

Never have I ever…

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The range of the human sexual condition is a whole lot wider than a lot of people realize. I’ve met folks who say things like ‘I don’t want to get too kinky too fast because I don’t want to have done everything there is to do by the time I’m 30″ and “I am open to anything,” which I think grossly underestimate the amount of things there are to do.

Whenever someone asks on (most) public forums for wild and kinky sex ideas1, inevitably it seems like the answers that person gets fall into three broad categories: Partners, Places, and Positions. Have sex with more partners, have sex in unusual places, have sex in unusual positions.

Which is fun and all, but it still misses entire huge categories of sex.

Recently, though, someone on another journal flipped the question on its head by asking “what haven’t you done.” And again that’s a way to show how narrow the common perception of sex is, because the majority of responses were perhaps two or three lines long–“I haven’t had a threesome, I haven’t had sex outdoors, I haven’t had sex with the woman on top.” That sort of thing.

I thought about it for a few minutes. The following list is what I came up with in ten minutes; I bet that another ten minutes would probably make it about twice as long.

Never have I ever…

Turtle!

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When my roommate David and I went to work this morning, we found this guy stranded next to the stairs leading down from the apartment. He’s a yellow-bellied slider, and somehow managed to travel about a quarter of a mile from the nearest source of water and strand himself.

I have a soft spot for turtles, so we rescued him and brought him back to the pond he most likely came from. He was none too happy about it, and spent a great deal of time and energy trying to remove David’s fingers. Not from the turtle’s shell; from David’s hands.

You see this?

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You see what I have to put up with, when I’m just trying to answer some email? This kind of cute violates the Geneva Convention, I’m pretty sure.

Postscript to the phishing scam

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Many weeks, six emails, one complaint lidged in the ISP’s automated ticketing software, and the phish sites I talked about here remained active and functioning.

But two hours after I make a LiveJournal post about it, the site is knocked offline and I get the following email in my mailbox:

HI
We are aware of this but can’t comment further at this time however please be assured that it is being handeled inline with the local police
—
Rus

It’s possible the timing was a coincidence, of course, and the site being knocked offline had nothing to do with talking about the phish fraud openly. It’s possible, but it seems pretty weird to me.