When the initial allegations came out I was shocked. A week later I was having breakfast with a good friend of mine and his wife. The wife worked in the comic book industry and we’d talked about Gaiman before. I brought up the allegations and she told me that no one who rubbed elbowed with his circle were shocked. Apparently he already had something of a reputation.

Victor Earhart. Unfortunately it looks like he was killed in a motorcycle accident in 2016.

Cool video I found of him while looking around.

https://youtu.be/ijLqo7hETPk

This was going to be my answer. Glad I checked before posting.

What’s the second dish pictured? The one that looks like Bell peppers are being simmered in a pot.

I’ve been seriously considering picking up a trumpet and starting a ska band with some of my other middle aged friends just for shits and giggles. Seems like a lot of fun.

That was the beginning of the end for me. I think by the time I got to that part the series had already been going downhill but I remember that being a really sharp turning point.

I tried to press on a little further. The introduction of the straw man nation with the innocent child king who’s only existence was to be blown the fuck out by the brilliance of objectivism is when I finally decided I just couldn’t go on.

Ooo, I was trying to think of what to answer in this thread and you just reminded me of another Orson Scott Card book, Empire.

Absolute trash. Prior to that I had read all of the Ender and Bean series and loved them. Didn’t know much about Card personally, but picked up this book because it was supposed to be tied in with a video game I was looking forward too.

Reading this book is how I found out what a shitty person he really is. It was basically all him hitting you over the head with his shitty fascist ideology while jerking off to a bunch of military porn like a dollar store version of Tom Clancy. I never did play the game.

Lately I google for someone that should give me a direct, exact result. First five links are fucking paid ads.

For anyone that hasn’t read it, the book Surely You’re Joking Mr Feynman is a delightful read. Especially the bits about him fucking with security during the Manhattan project.

You’re thinking of American Samoa which is different from the Independent State of Samoa, formerly known as Western Samoa and a sovereign nation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samoa https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Samoa

Well that just solved the question of “what should I watch tonight?”

I always made sure I had Thomas guide book for any areas I went through in my car.

For anyone unfamiliar with the source.

https://archive.org/stream/i-have-no-mouth-and-i-must-scream_202202/I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream_djvu.txt

Until you find out those were also built by a junior using an llm to help 🙃

What you want is NIST 800-63b https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-3/sp800-63b.html#memsecret

Specifically sections 5.1.1.1 and 5.1.1.2.

Excerpt from 5.1.1.2 pertaining to complexity and rotation requirements:

Verifiers SHOULD NOT impose other composition rules (e.g., requiring mixtures of different character types or prohibiting consecutively repeated characters) for memorized secrets. Verifiers SHOULD NOT require memorized secrets to be changed arbitrarily (e.g., periodically). However, verifiers SHALL force a change if there is evidence of compromise of the authenticator.

Appendix A of the document contains their reasoning for changing from the previous common wisdom.

The tl;dr of their changes boil down to length is more important than any other factor when it comes to password security.

Edit to add:

In my personal opinion, organizations should be trying to move away from passwords as much as possible. If your IT team seems to think this system is so important that they need to rotate passwords every month, they should probably be transitioning to hardware security tokens, passkeys, or worst case, password with non-sms MFA.

Now I know nothing about the actual circumstances and I know there are plenty of reasons why that may not be possible in this specific case, but I’d feel remiss if I didn’t mention it.

Any organization still doing this is a decade behind best practices. NIST published new recommendations years ago that specified getting rid of the practice of regular forced password resets specifically because they encourage bad practices that make passwords weaker.

Of course it doesn’t help that there are some industry compliance standards that have refused to update their requirements, but I don’t know of any that would require monthly password changes.

They actually have a fairly comprehensive training program setup through their “University.” They also mix in foreign contractors, usually from China.

My dad cracked three ribs while surfing in his 20s. He caught a wave much larger than normal, fell off his board near the top and landed flat on his back.

Real answer for anyone curious, he’s using one of these.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strigil

I almost did before the outage. Their pay was pretty low compared to similar positions at other companies though.