Larp Trek’s web host got nailed rather thoroughly to the wall today by a DDoS attack on some sort of WordPress vulnerability — whether or not it was even hitting this site directly or hammering on something else on the shared server, I don’t really know — and so you may have noticed a basically non-responsive site (or some nasty 500 service errors) if you visited during typical enjoying-the-webcomic-on-update-day hours. Sorry about that!

Things seem to be back now, so, yes. Enough of that!

For the folks conversant in unix, you may be amused to hear that the load average being reported by top during the attack was in four digits all afternoon. Peak value I saw was 2390, though the hourly average was riding right around 1700 for the bulk of the day. So that was pretty neat.

I haaaate to do this (and feel silly for not trying to just get something in the can yesterday to avoid this) but real life is intervening and it’s just an extraordinarily busy morning in I-have-a-job land. New comic Monday.

A thing that some folks know but not everyone does: generally speaking, when you go to a search engine, type something in, get some results, and click on one of those results, whoever runs that website can parse their web server logs to see what you were searching for that led you there. This is handy if you are a like search-engine-optimizing duder, or if you are like me and just easily entertained.

So, for example, someone just got here by searching for the phrase “how many riker centric episodes are there?”

Larp Trek is now apparently the top hit for that phrase (or rather that unquoted string of words). I find that quietly delightful. Though to be fair, I find a lot of things quietly delightful.

The answer, of course, is “not enough”, and in the future maybe such queries will land on this post rather than just the (auto-generated by WordPress) Riker character page and so helpfully provide actual content to the wayward searcher.

Other things people have gotten here by searching for include, for just a sampler:

- larp trek (well done!)
- larptrek (also jolly good!)
- larping (I apologize for almost certainly letting you down!)
- star trek webcomic larp (good enough!)
- larp treck (ahem!)
- geordiriker (slash fic?)
- how to stop hitting yourself (this just got a bit dark)
- 17 idiomatic expressions (this just got a little Buzzfeed)
- big book anal (this just got a lot Riker)
- counselor troi in her underwear (oh come on)
- dog fugue womens (I don’t even)
- i love brent spiners nose (don’t we all)
- is picard the superego (subject of future newspost)
- picard zip your bag (uh)
- riker erotica (but you repeat yourself)

And so on. Every day is an adventure.

Thought for the day: Star Trek: Enterprise gets a bit better when you intentionally mistake Matt Winston’s Temporal Agent Daniels character for Tony Hale’s Buster Bluth from Arrested Development.

Okay? Okay. I kept hoping that Daniels would show up in the next episode of Enterprise with a hook for a hand and explain it away as an injury sustained on a Time Ship when e.g. the plasma conduits exploded due to a loose seal.

(Maybe “Buster Bluth” was sent back in time to make sure the Bluth family didn’t disrupt the timeline? The question of who his real father is becomes all the more complicated. And throw’s Buster’s behavior into question. Somebody get Tommy Westphall on the phone!)

Look at this fine fella!

It’s an original drawing from one of all our favorite Riker panels, by my internet friend and fellow creative person John Leavitt, who, among his many other fine attributes, responds to non-sequitur demands to “draw a Riker” by saying “yes” and then following through.

Right now, if there were going to be a t-shirt, I think it would have this on it and the words “Question. I have a beard.” written in.