this was supposed to be another fluff entry

As most of you know, it's been a pretty turbulent week for us. We’re sorry for the trouble our negligence has caused. Our hope was to be as forthcoming we could be as quickly as possible – and I believe we were. There were some voices of understanding and forgiveness from the community, which we were grateful to see, but we know that we’ve got work to do.

Steve (spez), who built reddit, has been bearing the brunt of this in the comments pages, but this was a decision we’d both – wrongly – agreed to make back when we were holed up in our apartment last summer. This was our mistake; we fucked up and we’re learning from it.

Admittedly, I’m biased, but Steve’s the one who would cook Aaron breakfast in the morning, help Chris with revisions of the recommendation engine, and even let me win a few times at Blitz.

The fact is that Steve has been the guy from day one single-handedly keeping reddit online, even sleeping with his laptop for the first few months to do so. My contribution to the actual website you use starts and ends with the alien in the corner. When there are DNS troubles, I’m trying to figure out what to doodle, Steve’s on the phone with the tech folks.

Phew. OK, I’m done. None of that is an excuse for what happened, it just needed to be said.

Anyway, I was hoping to have spent this post talking about all the cartoon references from this past week’s logos, so here goes…

By the time I was able to figure out how to end last week's series (thanks, Mr. Watterson) it dawned on me that I could spend an entire week ripping off paying homage to my favorite cartoons.

Naturally, Calvin & Hobbes -- my all-time favorite -- would be first, despite how adamant Bill Watterson was about not commercializing his cartoons (sorry).

One of our users found a neat little hack to display backwards text and it seemed like a good enough reason to have an intermission from the cartoon theme.

Gary Larson's cartoons were so wonderfully dark, I don't think anyone would be surprised if that cow had something to do with the outage.

Tom Tomorrow has probably had a little bit too much material to use for the last six years, but his cartoons continue to be as pointed as ever. I also have a hunch he likes penguins, which makes him good people.

This was a reference to the first xkcd cartoon I'd read, which Steve had forwarded to me. Now I'm hooked; it's both entertaining and instructive.

Up next is Y Combinator appreciation week...