(no subject)

THE HACK OF 2008
A NIFE AND ACCURATE ACCOUNT

This is an archival of the hack, from discovery through resolution, based on posts (now privatelocked) in sam_storyteller. The rest of this story -- recovering the posts and feeling my way through the gutting loss of five years of memories -- have and will be archived under the lj tag "picking up the pieces".

( OMG HAXXORZ D: )

So there it stands. In all these posts, my cafe has been amazingly understanding and helpful; everyone did everything they could to try and prevent others from clicking the spam, help me relocate as many posts as possible, provide comfort and advice, and suggest archival options for the future. I am grateful to each and every one of you.

And now we go forward. I'm going to be posting a How You Can Help post in a bit, and I'm hereby announcing a game of Mornington Crescent will be played at three CST this afternoon (four Eastern, nine GMT, etc).

(no subject)

shezan had the awesome idea of setting up a separate email account for rebuilding the posts, so that if you have something you've saved off from my journal, or comment notifications with posts in, there's one place to collect them all. The email address I've created is copperbits@gmail.com and you can feel free to send stuff there, anytime you like, as much or as little as you like. I am grateful for anything.

However, I don't need anything after April 2006. I have all those posts on googlereader's feed and/or the GJ/IJ mirrors, so don't waste your effort on those. Uh, except the polls, if you happen to come across any. I'm having luck finding some of them in google's cache.

I am likely going to get a reasonably high volume on this email address, so please don't take it personally if I don't reply to thank you. I am IMMENSELY GRATEFUL to anyone who emails in. If you have something in particular you want to discuss, that's perfectly fine; add that to the forward and I will get it and reply, but it may take some time. I probably won't be archiving any of the forwards until I'm done archiving at least 2006 and what I'm manually able to recover from earlier; I'm hoping I can use blog2blog (who suggested this? THANK YOU, let me know and I'll credit you here) to transfer 2007-2008 directly from the mirrors on GJ/IJ. In the meantime if you need to contact me the fastest way is still a comment or an email to copperbadge at gmail.

In particular I am looking for:

-- The "farewell Boston" post. It's just me saying "goodbye" to a bunch of things in Boston. Should be roundabout August 15th, 2003; possibly a little earlier or later.
-- The Rules to the card game Emperors. I have the fic, "Pilgrimage" on Storyteller, so I can reconstruct if necessary, but god what a pain in the ass. Someone must have this printed and can scan it, surely; I know it's done the rounds at some renfaires and SCA meetups. FOUND!
-- The "Cities" posts in the style of Calvino from "Invisible Cities"; I think there are about five, located generally in 2004. The URL of at least one is here: http://www.livejournal.com/users/copperbadge/470826.html though of course the post itself no longer exists.
-- The "Naughty Spoilers" from PoA -- I have the date for this entry, June 4 2004, but the spoilers themselves were behind a cut. It's my summary of PoA in a filthy manner. FOUND!
-- The "I am Thankful" post -- it was Thanksgiving, but I'm not sure if it was 05 or 06. It was a list of historical people, concepts, and artworks that I was (am!) thankful for.

In the interests of continuing documentation on Blog Archaeology:

Wayback Machine (www.archive.org) has a way to search for "all pages" on a given URL, which is bringing up quite a bit. For me, it's not proving supremely useful because Wayback started caching at the same time Google started the feed I'm using. It is, however, somewhat useful in that it caches the comments as well, so if I WANT comments from a particular post I can get them. For example, I had the April Fool's post from 2006, but not the comments; now at least I have the first page of them from Wayback.

I am preserving comments to posts, when necessary, by copypasting them into the post as Comment Conservation. :D Some comments I prefer not to preserve in the post, but just to save because they amuse me. Such as:

juniper200: Everything in Australia is poisonous. I hear even the children are before the age of 3.

and

milliardo929: Haggis is not suitable for readers under the age of Scottish.

I'll be sharing more as I find them. :D

(no subject)

Oh also -- thanks to those who sent Virtual Gifts, and Jo -- I didn't get an email address for you, but that was a lovely gift as well, thank you!

Found this in Chicago Magazine yesterday, seemed apt:

"A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kickboxing." -- Emo Phillips

They also had a neat article on the Daleys, the once and present mayors of Chicago. Both of them strike me as a bit Vetinari-esque; they tend to grab all the power they possibly can, but once they've got it they generally do good things with it. I love that Daley illegally bulldozed an airstrip to make way for a public park. :D

(no subject)

OKAY! *rubs hands*

I DECLARE MORNINGTON CRESCENT.

If you need a primer on the game, you can find it here; essentially it is a nonsense game, and there are no rules.

EXCEPT FOR THE RULES!

1. I am going to be in and out, cooking, so I can't reply to every thread. PLEASE check before you comment, and if someone else has started a round, jump on in. This game is all about confidence and playing off rather than against each other. HAVE FUN.

2. As we have some international players, we're going to be playing Standard Universal as set down in 2002 at the Kenya Consortium. Please note these are the 2002 rules because if I catch anyone playing by those 2094 rules that fell through the Rift last week you will be summarily executed. Time travel is nothing to sneeze at!

3. No snigging, no underhands, no borking (absolutely NO borking) and no gunslinging. Profanity is permitted but only regionally. Literature is encouraged.

4. Because the game is originating in Chicago, remember, laterals only on the bypass.

You will need the Classic Play map, the Futures Map, and of course your auxiliary one and auxiliary two. Expansion is permitted.

I'll start off, feel free to start a new round if you like.

BOND STREET.

*thousand yard stare at Dr. TwoHundred*

(no subject)

ROFL, I got a phone call from Mum that I had to take (OMG some peoples' parents call in the middle of the ballgame, mine calls in the middle of the imaginary radio-panel-show transportation game) and I came back after hanging up to find NINETY THREE NEW MESSAGES.

J'adore mon cafe. You guys are awesome.

(no subject)

An anonymous reader mentioned that their favourite poll I ever did was the Ears poll, which I dimly recalled and definitely know I enjoyed. So I am re-creating it here. Feel free to vote! You know you want to.

[Poll #1272532]

(no subject)

Naughty spoilers for PoA: FOUND!
Rules for Emperors: FOUND! (though not posted yet)

I also remembered the Good Superhero's List, which I wrote as a corollary to the Evil Overlord's list. Hope I can find that one too -- it had such gems as "If there is an emergency I will not leave the youngest or most emotionally vulnerable member of the team alone at our base to guard the villain" and "Before walking away or stopping to inspect the body of my slain nemesis, I will shoot him a few more times to be sure he is dead."

On the other hand, welcome to Sod's Law. Wayback WOULD archive my horrific Voyager fanfic in full. *headdesk*

Funny to see the ways I've changed...and the ways I haven't. Circa mid 2004: Someday I'm going to write a book called The Grownup's Tourbook: A Singular Guide for Singular Travelers and in it I am going to stash everything I've learned about solitary tourism (Chapter One: The Case for Hell Being Other People).

Going through old entries is interesting. I've emailed four people today about appearances they made in posts or things I remembered them saying in the journal, and had other emails and comments from people going through their old comment notifications.

And I made an icon for the recovery efforts. :D

One of the strangest things is that I can't really tell anyone IRL about it. Mum doesn't know I keep a journal and I'd like it to stay that way; I told R about it in very vague terms, but he doesn't really get the whole Online Journal concept. I obviously can't tell anyone at work, because that's the kind of indiscretion that leads to being fired. There's this enormous event happening in my life and nobody I see on a day-to-day basis knows. It's really weird.