Spastic Monkeys

I used to play World of Warcraft. It was a time-killer for about a year and then I stopped. I got my primary character up to level 40, which is about the point where you really need to dive into the online social aspects of the game full-time, join and be active in guilds, get Team Server and go on raids with large groups of other people with no lives. I liked playing WoW — casually. All the rest of it seemed like a poor substitute for real life and, since I had a real life, I decided I’d rather participate in that than pay $14.99 a month to participate in a fake, pixel-based one.

I stopped playing when the first expansion pack came out what, three years ago now. Recently, I started getting these WoW account notification emails claiming to be from Blizzard Entertainment, the developer of WoW. They are phishing emails, obviously. I have no idea how they got my email address or even if the idiots wasting my bandwidth sending me these things even know I did play the game. Most of the time, they’re pretty good examples of a quality phishing email, with all the telltale signs being pretty subtle. The one I got today, however, is just blatantly stupid. For your reading and mocking pleasure, I give you:

Dear World of Warcraft fans, because your server is there a large number of illegal transactions, and other server players were a large number complaints to your account. The To World of Warcraft, we conducted a detailed analysis and review. After this analysis, we draw preliminary conclusions: Your account has been participating too many the illegal transactions, we will permanently ban your account. At this moment we are to understand your feelings, if you have any questions please visit

[the evil phishing link]

Blizzard of fraud and abuse department

Usually, I’m annoyed at having to deal with these things, but after reading this one, I just had to share.

The site has been updated to the latest WordPress version and I’ve updated the theme, as you can see. It’s not all there yet, but I do like the clean, modern lines of this theme more than the last. It’s not quite there yet, but I suspect it will never be, I’m such a perfectionist in that regard.

Let me know what you think.

Update: yeah, not so much.

Gave Tucker Cat his medicine tonight. We know he’s not feeling well because he didn’t fight us much at all. Just sat there and let me pry open his mouth so Sally could shove a couple of pills down his throat. He’s moving pretty slowly and gingerly, from the blanket to the litter box and back again.

It’s so weird to see Tucker Cat like this because he’s still his alert self. I just know that if he could, he’d be chasing shadows and playing with his toy mouse, but he’s like Tom Hanks in The Green Mile. He gets the EXACT same expression on his face sitting in his litter box as Tom did when he tried to relieve himself.

Of course, this affliction of Tucker’s is really messing with the balance of energy in the house. We’re keeping him away from the other two animals. As a result, Daphne is staying close to mom and wagging her tail like crazy and Riley, well, he’s wondering where his wrestling buddy went. He gets as close to Tucker as he dares and cranes his neck to sniff him. He’s cautious because before the pain meds kicked in, this behavior was making Tucker angry and he would snap at Riley.

Poor guy.

What made writing the magnum opus that was my last post so incredibly tolerable? The fact that I live in the future, where I can use a machine that has more computing power than 100 computers from 1965 and is small enough to rest in my lap to run software that accesses servers that physically exist I don’t know where and serve up additional software that allows me to write this. And this. And this. All from my fraking porch! With no wires! Totally wireless, man! And…and I was drinking a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale while I typed (note to self: get more beer).

So what if we don’t have personal jet packs. I am still kind of pissed about the flying cars, though.