geekosystem

A pair of microbes that help termites digest wood have been identified by researchers at the University of British Columbia. While finding new forms of life is always cool, this one probably wouldn't have caught our eyes if not for one thing -- the researchers who discovered the symbiotic microbes have named them after dread Cthulhu, and therefore earned our undying respect.

Storied horror writer and really quite mentally ill person H.P. Lovecraft would have been 122 years old today. Yes, much of his catalog may seem verbose, florid, and archaic by today's standards. Lest we forget, yes, he was a racist xenophobe of pretty much the highest conceivable order, but he's also the man who gave us not only the oft-used horror trope of the Necronomicon and the burgeoning cottage industry that is Cthulhu. He's also the man behind the very concept of cosmic horror, because for Lovecraft, the thing in the closet or under the bed wasn't scary enough. The characters in Lovecraft's fiction are under seige by the entire universe. Whole alien species and races of humanoid underdwellers are out to get them, and no one else will buy it until it's too late.

DeviantART user Rob Roberts made this fairly detailed mask to show us what it would look like if Frankenstein and Cthulhu were able to mate and then produce some sort of offspring that sported the features of its parents. Presenting Frankenthulhu, an even more difficult word to type than just plain "Cthulhu."

Wanna see something really cool? So do I. Here's a video of 53-year-old Liu Fei shoving poisonous snakes up his nose and looking kind of like Cthulhu. That's close enough, right?

Lux Mentis' Ian J. Kahn received this most eldritch piece of knitwear as a gift from his mother. Not just an awesome idea, but it looks pretty warm too! (via Boing Boing)

The Bible MMO Will Have Arena PvP in Sodom and Gomorrah ಠ_ಠ (Ars Marginal) This Is What Flash Paper Looks Like Inside A Balloon (WorldScott) Marvel's Third Announced TV Series is Jessica Jones (io9) How to Make Cthulhu Pot Pie (Creative Noms) Regretsy Selling Awesome Star Trek Christmas Dioramas (Regretsy) All the Edits of the First Six Weeks of Wikipedia (Joseph Reagle) Beautiful Alternate Thor Poster (Blastr) (pic by Demiurgic, via Kotaku.)

If you're looking for humorous Amazon reviews, the best place to start is on the pages of high-end audio cables, like those pictured above, which cost $850 a foot (marked down from more than $1k a foot). The pages of such items are regularly trolled by commenters leaving tiny works of satire aimed at the rich, the foolish, and the snooty audiophile. But hidden among the usual troll comment fare on the page for AudioQuest K2 terminated speaker cables is one work in a different genre:

We live underground. We speak with our hands. We wear the earplugs all our lives. PLEASE! You must listen! We cannot maintain the link for long... I will type as fast as I can. DO NOT USE THE CABLES!

Spain Holds National Siesta Championship (CNN) Keith Richards Will Be in Pirates of the Caribbean 4 (ScreenRant) Together At Last: Scooby-Doo and Cthulhu (Nerdvana) 5 Times The US Almost Nuked Itself (io9) Pres. Obama Endorses American Comic Series Re: Islamic Superheroes. Right Wing Flips Out (Bleeding Cool) Old Video Game TV Shows (GameInformer) Awesome Pac-Man Halloween Decoration (Joystiq) (pic via Reddit, rebuttal pic below.)

Do you have something that you have to get done? Anything? Then stop reading right now. Go on. Scroll down. There's a funny Cthulhu video down there. Just leave this post alone. Go on, get. Okay. If you're still here, we are now absolved of all responsibility for telling you that Notch, the developer of Minecraft, the latest incredibly addictive game sweeping the internets, is offering the game free until he gets some new servers set up, probably on Monday.

When tales fly thick in the grottoes of tritons, and conches in seaweed cities blow wild tunes learned from the Elder Ones, then great eager vapours flock to heaven laden with carnation, citrus, and cedar. And Great Cthulhu emerges from the shower.

Yup, that sounds about right.

Click to see Robert Cadena's Cthulhu/Twitter homage fully sized.

(via Super Punch)