Corrupted Blood Incident: A Good Name For A Screamo Band

Much of the new Neal Stephenson novel REAMDE takes place in a fictional Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG) named T'Rain-- which is similar but more developed than the infamous World of Warcraft (and T'Rain has supplanted World of Warcraft as the most popular MMORPG in the world of the novel)-- and the plot of REAMDE revolves around flesh and blood teenage Chinese hackers that have co-opted the gaming platform to disseminate a computer virus that encrypts the victim's real data on his computer, and the hackers are receiving "ransom" payments for a data encryption key from infected users in T'Rain currency inside the world of T'Rain, allowing them to launder the money, remain anonymous, and profoundly intertwine the reality of the game and the reality of reality; much of this MMORPG stuff is new to me, and so Stephenson made curious as to how accurate the T'Rain stuff actually is-- as I have never played World of Warcraft-- and I ended up reading about the "corrupted blood incident" of 2005, an incident which must have had some influence on the novel-- because (and this is a real incident . . . or it really happened in virtual reality) someone wrote a computer virus that spread through World of Warcraft just like a real virus, through proximity and transmission-- it actually spread through the game like a disease-- and made the people in the game behave as if there was a pandemic: people holed up in the country, avoided other people, died en masse in the cities, etc. and the reaction was so accurate that doctors and scientists studied the game-play in order to further our understanding of how people behave during an outbreak (and I wonder if I had a character in World of Warcraft, if I could have him write a one sentence blog inside that virtual world, detailing his life in there . . . Sentence of Thok?)