(no subject)

In the general way of news about the hack, apparently insafemode and dreamingjen, two perfectly nice-looking people from Boston, have been hit by the same bot.

I hesitate to email them at their listed LJ emails, because, ahaha, HACKED, but if anyone has contact info or a way of reaching them non-creepily I'd like to link them to some of the info I've been compiling here, on the off-chance they need it. Please just pass on their info -- I'd rather not have a jillion people send them links all at once.

It's possible that the bots are aiming at high-traffic communities rather than high-traffic personal journals -- neither of them have a readership comparable to mine (wow, does that make me sound like an asshole) but the community they maintain, bad_sex, has 13,000 members. It's notable that when my comms were hit, the two with the lowest readership weren't cleaned out and only the one with a high membership actually had a hack posted.

It just seems like such a waste to wipe out a person's entire journal in order to get one bizarre spam posted on a community where 99% of people know better than to click the shiny lyrics link. I mean, really. What the hell.

(no subject)

Numbers are dancing in front of my eyes...

I spent all morning, when I wasn't actively working, on reconstructing the LJ. I've downloaded everything Wayback has on 2004 and saved it to the flash drive; January through March is mostly uploaded, though there are a handful of hard-to-code posts, polls, and photo updates that I'm going to have to deal with.

One of the things I stumbled across was a meme I'd posted nearly five years ago, about my LJ activity. It turned out that the website for the meme was still active, so I did it again. Interesting to see what's changed and what hasn't.

( Sam's LJ Activity in January 2004 and October 2008: )

(no subject)

The air is crisp and cool; Canada geese are flying south in the sky above. I have a bowl of lasagne in my hands as I gaze out the kitchen window...

...at the fire trucks screaming down the street and squealing to a halt in front of my building.

Fortunately they were actually heading for the building next door -- I have no clue why, but they didn't bring anyone out on a stretcher so I can only assume either a false alarm or a teeny tiny fire.

Which is good, because it continues my record of nothing horrible happening to me in the last 29 hours. Touch wood.

Also, I never thought I'd be grateful for fandom_wank -- I read it and find it amusing, but gratitude wasn't really involved -- until I realised DRABBLEWANK 04 was one of the lost posts.

To make a long and actually pretty hilarious story short: I decided to do a charity drabblefest, exchanging short fics for charitable donations to the cause of the donor's choice. I'd got about 2/3 of the way through them when someone showed up and started posting precise word counts, and got indescribably pissed off that I casually ignored her definition of a drabble as 100 words precisely. It made fandom_wank, which thankfully has preserved some of the highlights of the insanity. Lots of interesting debate about linguistics, actually.

Anyway. In order to make everyone happy, we (and by "we" I mean ms_ntropy) invented the word "flopsy" to describe a fic between 80 and 500 words in length. We then used it sarcastically for ages.

My sole regret is that cat macros weren't in common use at that point. Oh god, the lulz we missed out on.

Speaking of lulz, your blast from the past this evening comes courtesy of wikdsushi, who related this story to me in a post about junebugs:

One of Nikola Tesla's first inventions was a May (June) Bug Engine. He discovered at about age eight that the bug flew faster the hotter the weather got. So, on the hottest day of the year, he glued as many as would fit onto a set of propellers, then watched them fly faster and faster until they exhausted themselves to death. When necessary, he replenished their numbers from a large jar of the things he'd collected.

A boy from up the road came to visit the day he performed his experiments. Little Niko showed off his invention, as proud as proud could be, and waited for the boy to say how wonderful it was. Instead, the kid spied the jar, grabbed it, and started shovelling June Bugs into his mouth by the handful.

Nikola was sick in the bushes.

And this, children, is why your friends don't trust your nummy-yummy crunchy-munchies.

(no subject)

More hack info via lazywriterbum, one of the maintainers of bad_sex. The full info is beneath the cut below, but the relevant part for most of you is:

A number of people found keyloggers on their computers after they clicked the russian poetry site link. A few people actually attempted to translate it (the poem is about eating shit, apparently) and are regretting it. We are advising people to go to pack.google.com and download the free Spyware Doctor and run a scan, also running a scan via Housecall if they don't have an installed antivirus program on your computer.

I am so, so sorry, you guys.

insafemode was hit worse than I was -- he lost access to his Gmail as well -- and dreamingjen has been suspended for a post she didn't make.

( Info from lazywriterbum )