‘Tis a productive morning!

So far today, I have created a new brochure for one of our distributors, found and fixed a very subtle and deeply-buried PHP bug in a commercial video sharing software package that a friend of mine bought, and discovered a massive Russian Business Network attack on the ISP softlayer.com in which thousands of Web sites hosted by them and their downstream customers have been compromised.

I also had a very tasty quesadilla for lunch. And it’s not even 1:00 yet.

Tonight, I think I’ll write some pr0n, track down another RBN hack attack I may have sniffed out against sites running phpBB, and try to level my warrior’s blacksmithing skill in World of Warcraft. Maybe I’ll document the security breach at Softlayer as well. Looks like a zero-day exploit against cPanel.

Teeth and sex, World of Warcraft and sex, math and sex, and other canoodling

I used to believe that nothing could quash my sex drive. Being too tired? Hell, Shelly takes advantage of me in my sleep. Being sick in bed with mono? Slows me down a bit, that’s about it.

But it appears there’s one thing, at least, that’s all but guaranteed to quash my sex drive: the pain of a broken tooth.

Last week, before it started hurting too badly, S and I had a date, and I discovered to my surprise and delight that she still has her genuine Catholic schoolgirl uniform from the days when she was a genuine Catholic schoolgirl, and so we played a variant of Naughty Schoolgirl and Stern Headmaster that might be called “The Naughty Schoolgirl Confesses Her Sins,” and much fun was had by all…

…but since then, nothing. Ow ow ow.

I got a referral to The Best Oral Surgeon in the World (seriously, this guy is really, really cool), and the tooth is now fixed and has almost completely stopped hurting. It was a messy procedure; I won’t disturb you with the details because they would…err, disturb you, but I now have stitches in my mouth and a new appreciation for the capabilities of a handheld drill and a good old-fashioned lever. At any rate, I’m almost back to normal, for some value of “normal.” Which means that Shelly and I may be able to try out the carrot-shaped vibrator feorlen gave me last week; it has digital controls and lights up at the end. 🙂


Being in pain, or jittery and hazy from pain meds, or both, doesn’t appear to affect my ability to play World of Warcraft, however–something I’ve been doing a great deal of over the past few days. I’ve virtually stopped playing my warrior since he’s reached Level 60 (the highest level the game currently permits), and have been playing my warlock instead; he just reached Level 59, and I may get him to 60 tonight if I play.

The warlock is the only high-level spellcaster I have. Spellcasters in World of Warcraft use mana as energy to fuel their spells; a character has a certain amount of mana, which goes down as he casts spells and then goes back up again over time. As a character rises in level, he gets greater amounts of mana, but he also begins using a wider variety of more powerful spells, which consume mana more quickly, so the amount of mana scales pretty closely with the mana requirements of his new spells.

However, I’ve noticed that at very high levels, the rate at which mana regenerates does not scale with the amount of mana a character has; above level 45 or so, it starts taking a very long time for mana to come back after a fight. (There are potions and drinks things you can buy that speed the rate of mana recovery, but they’re expensive and take up space in your inventory.) What that means is that by the time a spellcaster reaches level 55 or so, he’s spending a considerable amount of time–sometimes several minutes–after combats, waiting for his mana to regenerate.

I’ve also hit something of a brick wall in the book on polyamory I’m writing, and progress has slowed dramatically; I’ll add a few pages over the course of a week, then not work on it at all for three weeks or so. (Yes, this does relate to World of Warcraft; bear with me.)

Since I want to stay in the habit of writing, even if I’m not working directly on the book, I’ve started writing fiction–specifically, erotica. I haven’t ever tried writing fiction before, so it’s been an interesting experience. What I’ve started doing is writing while my character is regenerating mana; I keep the laptop next to the game computer, and switch back and forth, typing on the laptop while my character is regenerating mana, then switching back to the game when he’s ready. It seems to work pretty well; I’ve already got some stuff posted on Literotica.com and have so far accumulated an average reader rating of 4.93 out of 5.00 for quality, not bad for my first piece of fiction evar.

A strange side effect, though, is that I’m beginning to eroticise World of Warcraft, and playing is becoming an arousing experience. The human mind is a weird, weird thing.


And speaking of eroticising unusual activities, I just want to reiterate that having a girlfriend who is aroused by math is the hottest thing evar!


A while ago, I found an online sexual glossary that had a lot of definitions I found problems with (for example, it defined “polyamory” as something like “group sex between multiple people”). I dropped an email to the site owner, taking issue with the definitions in the glossary. He emailed me back immediately, and not only responded very positively, but also sent me a T-shirt.

We’ve emailed a few times since then, and he’s asked me if I’d be willing to write reviews of the various sex toys and stuff his company sells. That should be fun, I think. I’m considering adding a reviews section to the Symtoys site, y’know, because I don’t ever have enough to do.

And speaking of which, I’ve done yet another significant update to my own BDSM dictionary and polyamory glossary because, y’know, what else is there to do after oral surgery?


Tomorrow, hanging out with Shelly and S, and then camping with Shelly and smoocherie and her partner fritzcat66! Then next week, Front 242, and then the following week, Shelly’s other partner merovingian will be in town! *delighted*


And in the final piece of good news, alias_node isn’t going to die. 🙂 It’s not cancer, but rather an incredibly rare (and treatable) bacterial infection called Lemierre’s syndrome. They figured it out in time, and while he’s up for some misery that’s probably going to make a broken tooth look like a casual midafternoon stroll through the Golden City beyond the Elysium Fields, his prognosis is most excellent. Which is most excellent.

Life imitates computer games

So unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past year or so, you’ve at least heard of “World of Warcraft,” the Blizzard game where players create characters on a Blizzard server and play simultaneously with other people–LOTS of other people–in real-time. At any given moment in time, thee are over 200,000 people logged on to the World of Warcraft servers playing the game; Blizzard has over two million subscribers total, making WoW the most popular computergame…well, ever.

I play myself; I have five characters, including a level 60 warrior named Ragnarokkr on the Medivh server.

Recently, Blizzard released a new WoW patch. They do this from time to time, often to add new content–new quests, new areas to explore, new dungeons for groups of characters to adventure in. The last patch, which was released about a week ago, introduced a new elite dungeon designed to be played by groups of 20 high-level, powerful characters.

The main adversary in this new high-level dungeon has an ability to infect a player with a disease called “Corruption of Blood.” It kills the payer rather quickly and it can be spread to other, nearby players. Blizzard didn’t think a player infected with this disease would have the opportunity to leave the dungeon before dying of it. (Death in the game is a minor nuisance; if your character dies, you become a ghost, and you can reincarnate by returning to the place where you died or by having a priest or shaman player ressurect you.)

They were wrong.

Last Thursday, someone infected with this disease and playing on the Eonar server, where two of my characters live, managed to make it to one of the capital cities in the game world, a place called Ironforge. At any given time of the day or night, you can reasonably expect to see about a thousand players running around in Ironforge, meaning that this virtual non-existant city has a larger population than almost every real city in the world through three-quarters of human history.

Anyway, the capital cities have a very high population density, and the disease can be transmitted from character to character. You can tell where this is going, right?

My character died almost immediately when I entered the city. The entire place was littered with corpses. People would die, resurrect their characters, and then promptly die again–or worse yet, become infected just as they were leaving the city. It took hours before it was safe to move in Ironforge.

Well, it turns out that the problem has totally run away from Blizzard. On some servers, it’s impossible to go to ANY city without becoming “infected.” It’s bad enough that there’s an article about it on The Register:

It’s said that attempts have been made to quarantine the infected, but the efforts of what might be called the World of Warcraft Health Organisation (WWHO) appear to be ineffective. Plague-carrying players escape the curfew to lug the lurgey out into the wider WoW world.

The Corrupted Blood disease is, in short, out of control and rapidly taking on epidemic status.

Of some interest is the fact that when I read the article, Google Ads paced an ad for a site which sells online game currency for genuine real-world currency. There are many such sites, and they have become big business. How big? People make six figures a year doing nothing but generating online currency and then selling it for real money. That big.

It really is a World of Warcraft world.

World of Warcraft Madness!

World of Warcraft is actually quite a lovely game. Blizzard has done a good job with the “look” of the game, not trying for photorealism but not cartoony either. These images (rather old; my character is significantly higher level now) come from a low-end video card without advanced texture or shader support; on a higher-end system, the visuals are even better.

I love the atmospherics; the environments they’ve created are both exceptionally diverse and quite pleasing to look at.

More…

Merry Christmas, everyone!

On the first day of Warcraft, Blizzard gave to me
Some Night Elves with a cursed tree

On the 2nd day of Warcraft, Blizzard gave to me
Two lockjaw turtles
and some Night Elves with a cursed tree

On the 3rd day of Warcraft, Blizzard gave to me
Three [Ruffled Feather]s
Two lockjaw turtles
and some Night Elves with a cursed tree

On the 4th day of Warcraft, Blizzard gave to me
Four goblin shredders
Three [Ruffled Feather]s
Two lockjaw turtles
and some Night Elves with a cursed tree

On the 5th day of Warcraft, Blizzard gave to me
Five [Glimmering Shard]s
Four goblin shredders
Three [Ruffled Feather]s
Two lockjaw turtles
and some Night Elves with a cursed tree

On the 6th day of Warcraft, Blizzard gave to me
Six Alliance raiding
Five [Glimmering Shard]s
Four goblin shredders
Three [Ruffled Feather]s
Two lockjaw turtles
and some Night Elves with a cursed tree

On the 7th day of Warcraft, Blizzard gave to me
Seven scorpids stingin’
Six Alliance raiding
Five [Glimmering Shard]s
Four goblin shredders
Three [Ruffled Feather]s
Two lockjaw turtles
and some Night Elves with a cursed tree

On the 8th day of Warcraft, Blizzard gave to me
Eight Windriders ridin’
Seven scorpids stingin’
Six Alliance raiding
Five [Glimmering Shard]s
Four goblin shredders
Three [Ruffled Feather]s
Two lockjaw turtles
and some Night Elves with a cursed tree

On the 9th day of Warcraft, Blizzard gave to me
Nine trolls a dancin’
Eight Windriders ridin’
Seven scorpids stingin’
Six Alliance raiding
Five [Glimmering Shard]s
Four goblin shredders
Three [Ruffled Feather]s
Two lockjaw turtles
and some Night Elves with a cursed tree

On the 10th day of Warcraft, Blizzard gave to me
Ten Voidwalkers walkin’
Nine trolls a dancin’
Eight Windriders ridin’
Seven scorpids stingin’
Six Alliance raiding
Five [Glimmering Shard]s
Four goblin shredders
Three [Ruffled Feather]s
Two lockjaw turtles
and some Night Elves with a cursed tree

On the 11th day of Warcraft, Blizzard gave to me
Eleven harpies screeching
Ten Voidwalkers walkin’
Nine trolls a dancin’
Eight Windriders ridin’
Seven scorpids stingin’
Six Alliance raiding
Five [Glimmering Shard]s
Four goblin shredders
Three [Ruffled Feather]s
Two lockjaw turtles
and some Night Elves with a cursed tree

On the 12th day of Warcraft, Blizzard gave to me
Twelve caverns wailing
Eleven harpies screeching
Ten Voidwalkers walkin’
Nine trolls a dancin’
Eight Windriders ridin’
Seven scorpids stingin’
Six Alliance raiding
Five [Glimmering Shard]s
Four goblin shredders
Three [Ruffled Feather]s
Two lockjaw turtles
and some Night Elves with a cursed tree

…yes, I have problems.

Addiction and stuff

For quite some time now, Shelly has rather like playing MMORPGs…massively multiplayer online role-playing games, such as Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot. The idea, for the two or three people who haven’t heard of those games yet, is you create a character, then introduce that character into an online world where there are tens or hundreds of thousands of other players, all playing other characters simultaneously. You can interact with the other characters, buy and sell weapons and equipment, team up to fight monsters, even fight with other characters. It’s all kind of silly, and given the server stress involved in hosting 100,000 simultaneous users, there are inevitable server glitches and whatnot.

I’ve never played MMORPGs, and I sometimes tease Shelly about them. Well, there’s this new MMORPG, see, and it’s called World of Warcraft, see, and Shelly convinced me to try it, see, and…

…my name is Franklin, and I’m an MMORPG addict.

In case anyone cares, I’m on the Midevh server, and my character is a troll fighter named Ragnarokkr. Those of you who play can usually find me at Crossroads or Orgrimmar, the rest of you can take pity, snicker, or both, depending on your inclinations.


I’m not a complete junkie, however. We’ve been spending time with S and her boyfriend lately, and it’s been a lot of fun. We wen to Tampa Fetish Party with them last Friday; it was their first exposure to a BDSM play party, and it’s always fun to break in play party virgins. Sunday after PolyTampa the four of us went to the beach on a kinda-sorta date-type thing, and we looked upon the Kinda-Sorta Date Type Thing, and It Was Good. Shelly and S‘s boyfriend seem to be getting close, which is also Good.


And now for something completely different: