CarsmileSteve seth:

but but i DID attempt to tell the list about the picnic, and it failed, how come you can get through and no one else can? i shall try sending again and if it fails again, i shall send to you to post!!

Oh my! Sinister lives. I'm sorry for the glitch Steve and everyone, which was less of a glitch and more of a mass global power blackout really. Sinister, and in fact the whole of missprint.org went down teh interweb tubes sometime in the beginning of February, raised its weary head like a tired drunk every few days and babbled, and finally gave up the ghost a week or two later. And I didn't spot it! Which is kind of catastrophic to my personal mail too, as you can see from this email address. If anyone mailed me in the last few months please resend! Je suis idiote - but when something disappears, it's hard to notice it's gone because it can't tell you. Ask any ghosty. SO! We've just entered a new revolution in The Sinister Years, because I panicked (as I do) and squirmed helplessly around wondering what to do, and then thought I had nothing much to lose and spent a few days trying to move missprint.org over to a new server I'd had waiting for it before I got iller. I was still in the process of thinking "no WAY will this work", when Ken's mail came winging down the tubes and plopped in my in-tray. He's a little trooper Ken, isn't he? Do you know he has his own worm farm? I can't promise for one second that Sinister is actually working properly. Maybe the nursery is broken, or the new server will start adding sweary words to our mails. If something's broken and you can't post, I guess you should mail me privately, and then wait a month and see if I can fix it. But baffingly it *kind of looks like it's working* doesn't it? What's more THERE'S NEWS. Which I think will make half of you happy, and another half reach for a gun... mwahahahaha. Lots of people have sighed about the demise of the Sinister mail archives. The recent book on B&S by Scott Plagenheof (thanks for the mention Scott!) mentioned how the archives had been lost years ago, and how this was a pity because Sinister in some ways represented that brief golden age in the late 90s when the music and fan-based websites were in the hands of the listeners themselves, before we all got Myspaced out and Facebooked to hell and back by big money. It even made me wonder if those brief few years were worthy of some historical reflection in a decade or so: certainly, B&S are continually credited with being the band who raised roots-based internet support from scratch. I'm not quite sure if a historian in 2020 will be interested in why George Henry Dickie wrote mails as he did, or who Struan was and why, but these reflections on the loss of the archive gave me an odd smile and a twinkle in my eye (and sometimes a quiet, misjudged evil cackle) because I knew I had them all saved and was still collecting them: I just had nowhere to put them. Well... they're back. Check http://www.missprint.org/archives/html/sinister/ - and here's the facts ma'am: * Search doesn't work. It might one day, but it may be some time. I'm tired. * They don't auto-update with new posts. At the moment you'll see they're up to date from August 1997(!) to Feb. I can update them manually and will from time to time until I find out how to make it happen automatically. (this is the important one:) * No I will *not* remove that mail you posted in 1998 about your acne-filled drunken Sinister party horror-stories because you are now a high-earning barrister and frankly it's an embarrassment. This has always been how things are, and it's the same anywhere on the net, in a mailing list: you post something publically and it stays public. I don't care that you were 15! You knew the score. And you're earning a lot more money than I do, so you can hire a doppelganger to fool your barrister friends. I promise you I have a lot more to cringe and gasp at than you in the archives. Besides I don't know how to remove them. Each removal would take days of work. I'll try to stop google indexing them. OK? As for the webpages themselves at http://missprint.org/sinister: * Loads of stuff is broken, like "Hello to our latest list member", which should be followed by the member's name, but isn't, and so looks more like a general philosophical statement than a specific welcome: I quite like it really. I might fix it all one day, but not yet. Also, looking the Sinister site, my first reaction is a rush of horror at the hilarious 1997 HTML and formatting, and generally how totally un-Web-2.0 it is. It doesn't even know what a frame is! But then my *second* reaction is a giggle at how, in a way, I LIKE how bad it is. Is it so bad it's retro now, like formica? I'm hoping so. So, much as I'm tempted to update it, and fix all the broken links, and convert it to a preposterous content management system or some such twaddle, I think I'll leave it how it is - broken, and funny, and cute - the Internet as it was in 1997. And it still contains my little animated cartoons, which I was unaccountably proud of in 1997. So the website will probably remain like the mail archive: an funny, embarrassing historical relic of how the Internet was in 1997. I promised you a long time ago that nothing would be lost right? :) I wish I could come to the picnic! Have *fun*. Miss Honey, your faithful servant. +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. WWW: http://www.missprint.org/sinister +-+ "sinsietr is a bit freaky" - stuart david, looper +-+ +-+ "legion of bedroom saddo devotees" "peculiarly deranged fanbase" +-+ +-+ "pasty-faced vegan geeks... and we LOST!" - NME April 2000 +-+ +-+ "frighteningly named Sinister List organisation" - NME May 2000 +-+ +-+ "sick posse of f**ked in the head psycho-fans" - NME June 2001 +-+ +-+ Nee, nee mun pish, chan pai dee kwa +-+ +-+ Snipp snapp snut, sa var sagan slut! +-+ +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+