Before I do anything else, let me say this: I defy you to find anyone else on LJ who actually has and uses a "fractured penis (not mine)" post tag.

I am the worst teacher ever, but that story will never not be funny.

ANYWAY. Onwards. FANFIC.

I wrote this in about an hour last night and polished it up in my few spare minutes this afternoon. I think it will be pretty obvious why the topic of solace was on my mind. Credit for the original idea goes to exuberantself and you may find more information about that in the header notes on the fic.

Title: The Quiet Room
Rating: R
Couplings: (please to note that not all of these are ships) Gwen/Owen, Ianto/Tosh, Ianto/Jack, Ianto/Gwen/Jack
Summary: "Inside this room, no one talks," Ianto said, his voice carefully neutral. "It isn't allowed. What goes on here stays here and, outside of it, never happened. Other than that there are no other rules, in a manner of speaking."

I talked to Dad Lucky this evening and got the fuller story -- while working out this morning he had a really bad arrhythmia, apparently. It's been going on for some time, not bad but present, and he didn't think anything of it despite his father having a pacemaker and his mother having heart surgery two years ago and his brother dying of a heart attack at age 45.

So he's on the monitor for 48 hours, but whatever it is apparently it's probably pretty minor. Nobody seems to be freaking out, so I plan to not freak out either.

I'm going to sleep, or something.

*wanders off*

And then my stepfather was diagnosed with a heart condition.

Actually, he's in the process of getting diagnosed. Apparently he's been having "flutters", which, you know, GREAT OF THEM TO TELL ME THIS, and this morning he had a serious enough whateveritis that they've put him on a mobile heart monitor for the next twenty-four hours. He's fine, but he'll, uh, be More Fine when they know what's causing it.

*rests head on desk*

I give up on this week.

Okay, just to clarify, I will not be using the toilet paper soaked in citrusy roach death. I am low-footprint enough that I am going to forgive myself for throwing it out.

In other news OMG WHAT TUESDAY FROM HELL. I've had three hours total of sleep, and that wasn't uninterrupted. There was a bin of mail to sort when I arrived, and then the phones started ringing and didn't stop.

And then BossBoss came out of the office and said to me, "You know hand-drafting, right?"

I said, VERY warily, "I used to..."

"Great!" he said. "Take this, and make it look nice."

He passed me two copies of a floorplan, one covered in his illegible ravings and one clean and new.

There's no actual drafting involved, just a lot of copying text, but fortunately I write well without lined paper and have very good script. And I've got used to reading his handwriting, which helps.

You know what would help more? Five more hours of sleep.

This morning I had to write an announcement for the companywide email list about our building having a pumpkin-carving contest.

I like to think I added a small smile to everyone's morning.

[Building] will be hosting a pumpkin-carving contest for Halloween this year. If anyone is interested in carving a pumpkin to further the honor and glory of [our Company], let me know so that I can requisition our pumpkin. If more than one person is interested, I suppose you could form a team. The bright world of competitive pumpkin carving awaits you!

I followed it up to BossBoss with a few appropriate links.

ARGH NO AND WRONG

I got up in the night to use the bathroom and noticed a bug crawling on the pack of toilet paper sitting in the corner. I reached out to squash it and realised it was inside the plastic packaging. Then I realised there were two.

THEN I REALISED THERE WERE DOZENS.

A single roach escaped the Epic Roachicide in my flat when I moved in, and got into the toilet paper (which I opened LAST WEEK) and had babies and now all the toilet paper is covered in tiny baby roaches.

ACTUALLY

Now all the toilet paper is covered in roaches and high-octane poison spray. BECAUSE ARGH.

*sprays it again for good measure, puts it outside on the porch*

WHY DO I NOT HAVE AN ARGH ROACHES ICON?

So I had work today, and wrote and read and uploaded some posts and generally did my thing. We're still feeling Coworker J's departure keenly, but I'm told he, or someone to replace him, will be back within the month. Good, because I need a desk sub on the 22nd (it's Company Bondage Bonding Day again) and, well, everyone kinda needs to go to it.

I'm slowly whittling down the lists of Posts I Really Want To Recover -- I found my account of Pops Goes The Fourth in Boston, which for some inexplicable reason was posted on the seventh. I'd forgotten my horrific sunburn. Totally worth it, though.

It's kind of funny, now when I go to post I automatically want to hit the "backdate entry" button, and then adjust the datestamp.

I actually am culling quite a few entries, just because they're unimportant or they're fic posts and the fic is already archived. And sometimes they're just random quotes, which I can stash just as easily elsewhere.

OR I COULD SHARE THEM WITH YOU!

"Where are you my little object d'art? I am going to collect you!" -- Pepe le Pew

"The Southern Baptist Convention has issued Sunday school lessons on how gays and lesbians can change. We can change. I've been much happier since I stopped being a Baptist." --Letter to the editor of the Des Moines Register from reader Fran Bailey, Feb 8th 1999

And as a bonus, James Marsters in 1980.

Oh, Jimmy. That hair.

I FOUND THE BRAVE SUPERHERO'S LIST.

I thought I'd repost it here. BECAUSE I FOUND IT. My day just got a tiny bit brighter.

(Incidentally, Jack Harkness scores big time for following #4 during Greeks bearing Gifts.)

( The Brave Superhero's List )

*dies laughing*

As a side effect of losing all my posts-with-comments, LJ now thinks I have made nearly 50,000 comments and received 1400.

I'm on the positive side of the comments-posted-versus-received ledger for the first time in years! This makes me look like a way better person than I am.

(Uh. Please don't take this as encouragement to get me up past that fifty-k mark. My poor inbox couldn't take it.)

I'm slowly getting the hang of this thing!

Some of this is repetition and not much of it is of all that relevant interest. Except to people who find internet archival interesting, I suppose. I just feel like I should document the process.

( Further notes on LJ archaeology )

People have remarked that I've been calm and collected about this, and I truly thought I was, but looking back over the week since Thursday I have been a wreck. Of course, because it's me, I've been a very specific kind of wreck, a clockwork wreck if you will. I went to work, I did my thing, I hung out with R, I cooked and cleaned, but there wasn't really room in my head for anything other than the loss. I didn't get anything on my to-do list done, but starting work on this just seemed more important than catching up on House MD or getting a haircut.

Every morning I wake up and wonder why I feel so unhappy, and then I remember. It's a little less awful each time, but it's a terrible way to start the day. Every few hours I'll think of something that's gone. Boston I think is the worst hit, because I loved Boston and I was euphorically happy there, but there are a hundred little pinpricks as well -- a fic I wrote for Junie, a handful of fics I wrote for Selkie, the way Cathy and I became friends over my atrocious French, story ideas, polls, posts to say I'd started or completed major fanfics.

And then I say to myself, well, dumbass, if this was so vital to you why didn't you fuckin' back up your journal?

And then I laugh because I'm talking to myself, and go on with my day.

Some highlights from today's resurrection work:

I had totally forgotten about theyfightcrime.org. YOU WILL NEVER LACK FOR PLOT IDEAS AGAIN!

I managed to get hold of both the Three Things about the stupid Forbes Magazine richest-fictional-people list from 2005 and also the comments that were made on it. It's a good example of how I'm preserving coments, and also really really funny. "Santa isn't fictional, y0."

And two quotes from my time in the box office:

Patron: So has [dead playwright] written anything new?
Coworker M: Not lately, sir.
Sam: I hear he's more into gardening now.
Patron: *wanders off*
Coworker C: *unable to contain herself any longer* He makes the best compost.

Sam: Thank you for calling the theatre box office, my name is Sam, how can I help you?
Patron: *long silence*
Sam: Hello?
Patron: I'm so sorry! I thought you were a recording, but you're real!

jack_and_ellis is up and running again; fully restocked, with a new index and news post as well as an art post. If you de-friended to avoid your f-list being flooded by the chapter posts, feel free to come on back.

I split up chapter thirty into two chapters, because the average chapter-length is around 4k words and that chapter was almost 9k. There are about seven hundred new words on the end of Chapter 32 (what once was Chapter 31), just to complete the conversation Ellis was having with the excreble MP Bell. Otherwise nothing new, just some redecorating.

I feel a bit guilty about Jack & Ellis these days, only because I don't actually believe Australia is a country of horrific nationalist bigots bordering on slaveownership. I quite like Australia actually. I've decided I just have to push through the guilt, because it's only going to get worse before it gets better and half the climax of the book is based on the race relations between the Aboriginal tribes and the White settlers. I am confident that the book in total won't give the impression that I despise the country and all white people in it, but at the moment it does tend to cant that way a bit.

So. All the communities are now taken care of. I'm going through old archived posts slowly, uploading where I can. If you happen to see a "new" post from me that looks like it doesn't belong or is dated funny, just drop a comment so I'll notice and backdate it properly. I have slipped up a couple of times but I usually catch it pretty fast.

One very interesting thing I've noticed is that I started doing "Three things" way before I actually started doing Three Things. Back as far as my entries go I've found lists in threes, often with a "3a" as well. I have no idea what it means, other than three is a tidy number when you have several random thoughts to tie together.

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.

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.

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

Okay. *rubs hands*

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.
-- 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. The URL is http://copperbadge.livejournal.com/422767.html but I don't think it's cached anywhere.
-- 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

Oh man. MY POLLS ARE GONE. Motherfuck. I will have to post many new polls to make up for it, but not tonight because tonight I am way not mentally coordinated enough for that.

I am having fun with tags, though. So far new ones include "cranky sam is cranky", "i might be crazy", "reasons i love my job", and "ways i have injured myself". None of them have many entries yet but I'm sure they all will soon.

This is a pretty big task, and it's going to take a while. Which in a way is fun because if I only upload 15 - 20 days' worth of posts a night, it gives people a chance to re-read stuff if they want. Also, where appropriate, I am adding "commentary post-hack" with thoughts, two years on, about various things I've said.

Earlier, I talked a bit about not knowing how I feel about it all. twirlynoodle posted an image in comments that came very close, and it reminded me of another image that I looked up in my image archive when I got home.

I found this when I was writing my senior capstone; it's a newspaper photograph taken in what remained of the library after the Oregon state capitol burned sometime in the late-19th or early-20th century.

And it is how I feel.

Hung out at R's a bit tonight -- he was still running the Roomba when I got there, and while he was delighted with it, one of the Bluesmen was over and was Not Impressed. Pah!

And whoever said he was going to try to feed it stuff was totally right. Not change, thank goodness, but increasingly large pieces of tortilla chip. Yes, R has indeed reverting to subsistence on chips and salsa.

He loves that thing. He's bonded with it. We ran into Bland as we were walking back to my place...

Bland: What are you doing?
Me: Oh, just heading --
R: WALKING THE ROOMBA, OF COURSE.

Bless.

Okay. I think I've pulled all the little strands together, at least of information if not of hard actual text.

( How to recover from a hack in three easy steps and one difficult one. )

I vacillate quite a bit in how I really feel. On the one hand, this has been intense and difficult and heartbreaking, On the other hand, I still have "Jesus, it's just a fucking LJ" moments. On the whole, let's retain a sense of perspective; there's worse happens in war, as they say, and thinking cruel thoughts about the hackers does nobody any good.

Over the course of the next few days I may very well be doing a lot of memes; to start with, the One Word meme, and perhaps a Charity Flopsyfest if I feel up to it. And a game of Mornington Crescent, I think, yes.

Watch this space! And Pardon our Dust.

FYI, to break up the tedium of reformatting and reposting my SGA fic, I've posted a short SGA/Torchwood crossover that you may find amusing.

Title: Technically
Rating: PG-13 for talk of orgies
Summary: The Rift has a sense of humour and is not afraid to use it.

( Technically )

Relatedly, i_defeated_sga is almost totally restocked, except for My Home And Native Land, which I'm at work on as we speak.

I need some kind of icon that expresses how I feel about all this but I don't think I can make one until I actually figure out how I feel about all this.