In Pursuit of Mysteries

Coincidence or Conspiracy?

I noticed something odd today while looking at the web.

I’m a former Microsoft employee but I’ve never gotten around to joining the Microsoft Alumni Network. That is kind of silly in a way since there are a number of benefits of being a member, not the least of which is cheap Microsoft software.

I’m also currently running Ubuntu Linux on my main PC at home so I’ve spent a bit of time on the Ubuntu website recently.

I noticed something odd today. Check out the logos for each site:

A little scary, isn’t it? Perhaps there is a plot!

Illness Addendum

As an addendum to my previous post about being sick, looks like, as a guess, that I have “Vestibular neuronitis.”

The causes for this are many but it is commonly reported in people who have been sick with the cold or flu in weeks previous to it. I had a rather bad cold a couple of weeks ago so this fits. Basically, a virus or something has probably inflamed a key nerve in my ears, upsetting my balance and giving me mild vertigo. Radical head motion seems to make this worse, which means it probably is in my ears and not my central nervous system.

The power of the Intarweb!

In any case, barring bad luck or more serious causes, this usually goes away within a few weeks and gets better to a great degree after the first few days.

I probably shouldn’t try climbing on my roof until then though.

A Lovecraftian Aside

And it was then that Nyarlathotep came out of Egypt. Who he was, none could tell, but he was of the old native blood and looked like a Pharaoh. The fellahin knelt when they saw him, yet could not say why. He said he had risen up out of the blackness of twenty-seven centuries, and that he had heard messages from places not on this planet. Into the lands of civilisation came Nyarlathotep, swarthy, slender, and sinister, always buying strange instruments of glass and metal and combining them into instruments yet stranger. He spoke much of the sciences - of electricity and psychology - and gave exhibitions of power which sent his spectators away speechless, yet which swelled his fame to exceeding magnitude. Men advised one another to see Nyarlathotep, and shuddered. And where Nyarlathotep went, rest vanished; for the small hours were rent with the screams of a nightmare.

—H.P. Lovecraft, “Nyarlathotep”

Nyalathotep has always been one of my favorite of the Lovecraftian menagerie of characters. One of the coolest things that I saw in the last few years was one of the stage productions of Chthulu stories done in Seattle that was a retelling of his tale…