Now, this is an idea for an addon!

It seems that researchers have developed software for identifying someone's gender by their word usage on Twitter.

Anyone fancy porting it to Lua? Oh, the fun we could have in Silvermoon...

P.S.

Free tip: Googling "Ladyboy Warcraft" will not produce blog-illustration-friendly images.

This message will self destruct in five seconds

Here we go again. A year ago, Blizzard decided it would be a terrific wheeze to force people to reveal their real names when posting on the WOW forums, despite the obvious problems of harassment that could lead to.

See your trainer

So, Erom has finally made it to the giddy heights of level 10 in my rusty man challenge. So far, there hasn't been a fight that Arcane Shot + an angry pig can't handle. It hasn't seemed particularly slow, either.

Aeeiiiih! It burns! It burns!

Blizzard have just posted an excerpt from the latest Warcraft novel, "Thrall: Twilight of the Aspects".

Seriously, is this thing intended to make buy the novel? The writing is unimaginably ponderous. Whatever happened to "show, don't tell"? Perhaps in Azeroth the commandment has been reversed. I can't think of a single blogger in my reading list (many of whom don't have English as a first language) who couldn't do a better job than this.

Scarily, Christie Golden is apparently one of the better Warcraft writers. If what I've read in other reviews is correct, Richard A. Knaak is even worse. I'm starting to see why some fantasy fans revere Tolkien so. I'd always thought of him as a rather mediocre plodder who couldn't write character. Compared to the lazy, unimaginative novel-a-month genre-fiction writers, though, he's like Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Ishiguro rolled into one! It's a sad state of affairs when game designers can write better dialogue than a "New York Times bestselling author".

The sad thing is, I'd quite like to read a well-written novel set in the Warcraft universe. Twilight of the Aspects isn't it.

Right, I'm off to read "The Comeback Girl". It's got five stars on Play.com,  so it must be good!

One button WOW

Want to know what's wrong with the WOW Ironman challenge?  Not silly enough, I say. All this "no talents, gear or glyphs" nonsense is just EZ-mode. If you're a real man orc like Erom (pictured above with his trusty boar Varian), you like a bit of a challenge.

Erom is on a mission. To get to max level with all the constraints of the ironman and one tiny extra one. No training - no abilities, no professions*. Erom doesn't need any of that sissy book learning - just Arcane Shot and an uncontrollable AI pet.

Let's see how far he can get. In his pants...

Edit: I've decided to call this the "Rusty man challenge".



* Apart from riding that is. Even Erom isn't that stupid.