Davi Medrade

It's funny that apparently I quickly forgot that I wrote that. So much so that, not even a year after posting that comment, I found myself in a similar situation as Matt. Only, I didn't have a child whom I relied on him to care for, nor anything that important. Still, just his eyes getting shiny when I didn't respond right away, plus the fact that I was already slightly drunk (we were at the karaoke bar) were enough to make me say those words even though, deep down, I knew I didn't really mean them yet (I mean, we had been dating for barely a month).

It's working fine from my home connection now. Thank you.

Hello. A few weeks ago I noticed that I was unable to access the website from my home connection (500 Mbps fiber) as well as from my phone using cellular data over 5G or 4G. I live in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and my provider is Vivo (not the cell phone manufacturer; this one is one of the largest phone and internet providers in Brazil, owned by Spanish telecom provider Telefonica). From what I could ascertain, the packets just get lost somewhere along the way and never get to the server. One thing I notice is that it happens with both the authoritative DNS server for the gayauthors.org domain name (I tested with ns1.unyhosting.com, which is 72.52.196.5), as well as with the gayauthors.org web server directly, when I managed to find the IP address (173.199.153.186) and tested it directly. These are my results: The packet loss is not intermittent, it happens every single time, with every single packet sent to either of those IP addresses from my Vivo fiber connection (which has a dynamic IP address that is now 177.160.164.162 and shouldn't change for the next few days, unless something causes the router to reboot or something like that). The exact same thing happens from my phone on mobile data (my mobile provider is Vivo as well). Everyone I know also has Vivo as a provider so I can't even determine if it only affects traffic from Vivo. When I repeated the tests from a friend's fiber connection I got the same results. His provider is Vivo too, but it's a business plan with a static IP address (191.13.249.51). Here is where it gets weird: even when I used well-established DNS resolvers like 8.8.8.8 (from Google) and 1.1.1.1 (from Cloudflare), they aren't able to perform the query on the authoritative server either. I don't think both Google and Cloudflare also have Vivo/Telefonica as a provider, but they do route requests to servers geographically close to the user, so I can be quite sure based on the latency that the resolvers that got my request (and failed to connect to the authoritative DNS as well) were very close (not surprising since Sao Paulo is the largest city in the country and all the global internet-related companies have data centers in the area). Now, when I connect from either of the dedicated servers my company rents from OVH at their Beauharnois campus in Quebec, Canada, one (15.235.54.163) running Windows Server 2019 and the other (51.79.18.202) running Ubuntu 22.04, it works perfectly. No packet loss, no excessive or fluctuating latency, no problem at all. Attached are screenshots of identical tracepath commands to the gayauthors.org webserver, one from my connection at home and the other from the server in the datacenter in Canada. I'm not claiming that GayAuthors or your hosting provider caused this, but I don't know enough about big networks and public IP routing to say anything meaningful to Vivo about it so if I tried they would just say it's some misconfiguration either on your server on in my network and I wouldn't know how to argue otherwise. If you or your hosting provider could help pinpoint exactly what is wrong and where, it would help me a lot. Cheers.

Quite nice of Jerry to make sure Eric bought a quality GPS instead of the less powerful model he was about to buy.

I must've read this story a dozen times, but only this time I read that line and went, “Hey, wait a minute…”.

Oh, don't worry. I resisted, and I'm already on chapter 23. I usually only read completed stories (I know I'm too impatient to be able to wait for each chapter to come out and I wouldn't want to become one of those readers who keep bugging the authors to write faster), and I usually prefer longer stories (when I go to the stories index the first thing I do is set filters for status “Completed” and length “> 20,000 words”, though my favorites tend to be 150,000+ words). Problem is, every once in a while I'll spend a long time reading a story only for the ending to be a letdown (which is not to say that the ending is bad, only that it didn't fit my particular tastes or expectations at that time). That's why I feel this urge when I'm starting a story, specially a longer story that I'm finding particularly engaging, to make sure that I'll like how it ends before committing the time to read it in full. I've been trying to resist this urge to peek at the end though, because usually when I do that I'll learn that it suits my tastes just fine but then I just robbed myself of a good chunk of my enjoyment of the story, which is precisely the discovery and the surprise of the twists and turns. When it comes to this story in particular, I will admit that part of that urge was not that I thought it wouldn't be a gay story, but rather that I wanted to make sure it would be gay enough to fit the mood I was in when I found it and decided to read it, which was after the latest installment of updating my gay movies library (and if there is one recurring “problem” with gay movies is that they are often too subtle so as to avoid being censored or turning off a straight audience). So, at that time, it might be a bit disappointing to read 50+ chapters only for the story to end with the protagonist's first gay kiss, for example. I'm not saying that such a story couldn't possibly be good (I'm sure many of the great authors in this website, yourself included, could manage to make an interesting story with that sort of outline), but it's not the kind of story I'm in the mood for right now. I already know (or at least I strongly believe based in how it's going up until the point I've read so far) that that's not how this story goes, and I'm definitely hooked, so I'll certainly be reading it through to the end (without peeking, I promise).

The amount of effort I'm having to put into not taking a peek at the ending… I don't want to spoil it for myself; I want to enjoy the ride the way the author wanted… But I'm just *so* curious…

This whole giving Matty a key thing reminded me of the words of great philosopher Shaggy. 🎵 “How you can give your woman access to your villa? Trespass and a-witness while you cling to your pillow You better watch your back before she turn into a killer Let's review the situation that you caught up in a” 🎵 I'm not saying Rusty would actually do something (though I can't 100% rule it out), but it's certainly an opportunity for misunderstandings.

I was about to post an outraged response, but then I remembered that I'm actually thirty-four.

Good. To be honest I was getting a bit tired of that particular misunderstanding.

All I can think is, “poor Milo!”

“Should I read this story?”, you might be wondering. If you like stories with protagonists in the late teens/early 20s range, if you like detailed, well-researched action sequences, if you like a dash of gay romance, and some comedy to break the tension every once in a while, then yes. Do it. Start right now. If you're like me, you'll have a hard time putting it down before the end, though. Google tells me that the average novel has about 300 words per page, which would put this story at almost a thousand pages. Still, I've lost count of how many times I've read it (and its sequel). Actually, sometimes throughout my day some of the general's more colorful quotes pop in my mind. I can't even imagine the sheer amount of research—in all sorts of areas—that must have gone into making this story, but it comes through in all the details. The word count is definitely not quantity over quality.

I just hope his twin doesn't take after their parents.

I think this raises an interesting question. Because Penn seems pissed, and I can see where he is coming from… But although Nash may have been wrong, his assessment of the situation was not unreasonable and reaction is completely understandable. So I wonder if Penn will see it this way, or if he'll make Nash walk through hot coals to get back together—which is not something I think Nash would deserve. Yes, Penn was hurt by Nash's reaction, but Nash was pretty hurt by what he thought the situation was. And the evidence was really overwhelming, misleading as it may have been. And Penn knew what sort of situation Nash was coming out of, so he should have known that any hint of something amiss would be too much for Nash to deal with at that point in time. I think the most compelling part of this knot in the plot is the fact that it's not really straightforward. In my opinion neither of them is totally right, nor totally wrong, so it's a bit hard to choose a side, like deciding who should be the first to apologize, for example. Like, yes, Nash should apologize for jumping to conclusions and not letting Penn explain, but Penn should be understanding of Nash's reaction after what he went through. I've read this story before, but I don't really remember how this part goes, so it's interesting to read it again.

I really wanted to see Shane bottom for the first time, not necessarily for the sex but because I thought it would be an important moment for his character. At first I was a bit disappointed, because I thought there wasn't enough time to get that far. I was glad to be wrong about that. The most impactful moment for me was when Donovan overheard that fateful conversation. My heart was literally pounding. After years of consuming fiction and watching other people's relationships, I made this rule for myself: always let them explain themselves (like, don't be naive or a pushover, but let them say their piece), because even when something looks really bad, it may not be. That conversation, though, I thought was the exception to that rule, because I couldn't think of a way this could possibly be explained away. Just another thing I was wrong about. Then I remembered my thinking when I first thought of that rule so many years ago: my creativity is limited, so the fact that I can't see how something can have a good explanation doesn't mean that it's impossible. In fact that line of thinking, “I can't see how it could be true, therefore it must be false”, is a logical fallacy fittingly called an “argument from ignorance”. Apparently I forgot about that part over the years.