@KevinFreitas @sundogplanets Darkness Begins by Harley Tate. It's the first of a series of nine, and so far like most of these it's very pulpy so I doubt I'll read it all. But I tend to read to shut my brain off at night, and this sort of thing does the job.

I realize that doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement, but it's everything I thought it would be and I'm not complaining.

@sundogplanets The headline clearly implies the article is about an actual “recorded” solar storm, and this is not clarified until the end of the first paragraph.

Please forgive me for thinking you were talking about actual sunspots.

@CoastalCoasting

Another problem is that electronic devices talk to each other mostly over electrical signal cables. So if one of them is taken out by a power surge, the surge will probably propagate through those signal cables to every other connected device, even if the other device is otherwise protected from surges.

Entire networks have been taken out by a lightning strike on a run of Ethernet cable, for example.

Perhaps in the future we'll use optical cables for everything instead…

@noodle

Well, that's alarming.

I knew common surge protectors have a limited lifespan because the MOVs can only take so many surges before they permanently fail.

But I was not aware that the things would straight-up lie about whether their MOVs have failed.