[blogs] ‘I Let Everyone Down’: A Blogger Apologizes For Not Posting In A While … ‘Tafferty had this to say: “I’ve just been really busy with work and family stuff,” he wrote. “That’s not an excuse. It’s just a reason. The truth is, I’m only human. I make mistakes. All I can do now is ask that you try to forgive me for failing to blog about what the family is getting up to these days for as long as I did, and I too will try to forgive myself.” Tafferty emphasized that in light of these recent events, he will be seeking help to deal with his problems, including having his brother Greg post every now and then when work piles up, as well as sharing more of his favorite Penny Arcade comics.’

[comics] Ditkoesque – Dan Clowes on Steve Ditko … an unpublished strip from the New Yorker.

[lovecraft] H.P. Lovecraft stories: an intro to Cthulhu, Necronomicon, Dagon & more … good overview of Lovecraft’s world … ‘My personal favorite Lovecraft story, “The Whisperer in Darkness” (read here) features evil crab-aliens, mind control, and disembodied brains in a tale so gross and weird I’m surprised it hasn’t been made into a hundred movies already.’

[cthulhu] I Am Part of the Resistance Inside Nyarlathotep’s Death Cult … An Op-Ed from the “trembling corridors of the West Wing”. ‘The root of this problem, we believe, is in Nyarlathotep’s very essence. It is a being incapable of viewing Its servants as anything other than playground toys or troublesome fleas. Many may argue that we should have known this to be the case for the Stalker Among the Stars. And that might well prove true, to a point. We summoned the God of a Thousand Forms assuming the weight of responsibility would rein It in slightly, remind It to adhere to the Necronomicon’s nightmare prophesies first and foremost. If it was foolish to assume the Outer God would care so little about this dimension that it wouldn’t even acknowledge the Tome’s existence, well, call us fools. We still believe utter ruin can be brought to the land through the proper rituals and unhallowed traditions, not by this fly-by-the-seat-of-your-tentacles kind of governing.’

[politics] BREAKING: Trump Is Under Spiritual Attack From Luciferian ‘Advanced Beings’ Who Control The World …

“These unprecedented attacks on Donald Trump are part of the greatest spiritual battle in the history of mankind.”

“The physical battles that we see in our world and nation right now are a direct manifestation of the spiritual battles going on in the invisible realm,” McGuire added. “There are people very high up in what is called the globalist occult or globalist Luciferian rulership system, and this rulership system consists of what used to be called the Pharaoh-God Kings, it’s what Aldous Huxley called ‘The Scientific Dictatorship,’ and these are advanced beings who know how to tap into supernatural multidimensional power and integrate it with science, technology, and economics.”

[tv] One Second From Every Scene in Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace …

[work] conferencecall.biz Amusing conference call ennui generator. ‘Sorry – I was on mute.’

[magic] The Limits of Reason … Philip Pullman on magic. ‘My attitude to magical things is very much like that attributed to the great physicist Niels Bohr. Asked about the horseshoe that used to hang over the door to his laboratory, he’s claimed to have said that he didn’t believe it worked but he’d been told that it worked whether he believed in it or not.’

[podcasts] 52 of the Best True-Crime Podcasts … exhaustive looking list focusing on American true-crime. Accused: ‘Reporter Amber Hunt digs into the murder of 23-year-old Elizabeth Andes, who was found dead in her Ohio apartment in December 1978. Incredibly well produced and researched, it’s Cincinnati’s Serial.’

[books] The ‘Must Read’ Pile of Books You Haven’t Actually Read … collected from Book Shambles listeners. ‘Dune by Frank Herbert (I’ll be honest, couldn’t get into it myself).’

[comics] From Bond to ITV’s Strangers: why is everyone ‘fridging’? … A Look at why the “Women in Refrigerators” trope went mainstream. ‘WiR has been prevalent in superhero narratives since The Amazing Spider-Man comic shockingly killed off Gwen Stacy in 1973, inaugurating an era of darker stories in which actions had serious consequences (although these consequences were disproportionately suffered by women). Since comics writer Gail Simone gave the trend its name in 1999, publishing a list of “superheroines who have been either depowered, raped, or cut up and stuck in the refrigerator”, the term “fridging” has been used mostly about superhero storytelling. But it has seeped into mainstream pop culture too, particularly in the past decade as comic-book adaptations have dominated blockbuster cinema.’

[money] Trillions – What is a trillion dollars? … from Information is Beautiful.

[comics] Tintin and the vanishing murals: Brussels races to save art … BBC News on saving murals painted by Hergé as a teenager. ‘In the early 1920s Hergé, then a 15-year-old Georges Remi, was a scout and student at Institut St Boniface, in the Ixelles area of Brussels. He adorned the walls of the old scout HQ with lovingly rendered art showing scouts and Native American Indians, as well as a map of Belgium. But now the small garage is in disuse, the walls are in a poor state and many of his drawings have crumbled away.’

[hacking] The Untold Story of NotPetya, the Most Devastating Cyberattack in History … Sobering, insider accounts on the worldwide impacts of the largest cyberattack so far.

Early in the operation, the IT staffers rebuilding Maersk’s network came to a sickening realization. They had located backups of almost all of Maersk’s individual servers, dating from between three and seven days prior to NotPetya’s onset. But no one could find a backup for one crucial layer of the company’s network: its domain controllers, the servers that function as a detailed map of Maersk’s network and set the basic rules that determine which users are allowed access to which systems.

Maersk’s 150 or so domain controllers were programmed to sync their data with one another, so that, in theory, any of them could function as a backup for all the others. But that decentralized backup strategy hadn’t accounted for one scenario: where every domain controller is wiped simultaneously. “If we can’t recover our domain controllers,” a Maersk IT staffer remembers thinking, “we can’t recover anything.”

[time] Your calendrical fallacy is… Everything you know about Calendars, Dates and Times is Wrong. ‘Days are 24 hours long – False. Many places around the world observe Daylight Saving Time, which means that people living in these locations will sometimes experience 23 hour days (when they “leap forward”) and 25 hour days (when they “leap back”).’