My plan, such as it was, involved coming home and stuffing my face and hopping into City of Villains (sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t) to run some missions with my new Corruptor, Ragnaroq. I did, indeed, run enough ‘paper missions to open up the Steel Canyon mayhem mission (hello, “summon teammates” temporary power) and somewhere along the way I received a costume piece recipe.

For the uninitiated, let me explain. (I’m resisting the urge to go all Inigo Montoya on y’all right now. Who loves ya?)

City of Heroes and City of Villains could be thought of as “World of Warcraft but with superheroes.” It’s true after a fashion, but fashion is exactly what the City Of franchise has going for it over almost all other competing online worlds. One of its biggest draws is the ability to customize the look of your hero or villain. You can spend an hour just puttering around in the costume shop, and that’s before you start getting any of the “bonus” items!

Earlier this year, the game’s creators introduced the “invention” system, a sort of crude and silly economy designed to give those with too much money something to spend it on. The idea is that as you go around performing your acts of derring-do (or dastardliness) you’re picking up bits of “salvage” and, occasionally, a “recipe” which allows you to combine specific bits of salvage into new power enhancements, new temporary powers and… new costume pieces. You use the salvage and recipes that you want, and sell the ones you don’t at whatever rate the market will bear.

So. To make a long story somewhat shorter, my icy and dark little villain has dark and icy little wings on her back But that’s not where I wasted most of my in-game time tonight. Oh, no. Adding a single costume piece to an existing look doesn’t take very much time at all. No, my big mistake was in deciding to tidy up the base. (more…)

Well, this is amusing. And by “amusing” I mean “annoying and frustrating,” of course.

A while back I posted an entry containing a music selection. Several comments were made at the time, and then life moved on. This is all normal so far. This morning, however, I saw two new comment notifications in my mailbox for that entry… and one of them looked really familiar.

It should have, since it was Kyla’s comment exactly, repeated by someone claiming to be “GoDaddy” using GoDaddy’s support email address. The next comment from them was a few characters of gibberish… which got approved because the previous comment was approved, probably because it looked identical (from the spam filter’s perspective) to an existing comment.

So, yes, I deleted them both and marked the gibberish comment as spam. I just hope this isn’t the new trend. I have enjoyed a couple years’ worth of peace and quiet on the spam-fighting front and don’t want to go back to the bad old days of playing whack-a-mole.

Hell of a way to start my Friday, let me tell ya.