Sinister: Yakult have been a brilliant bacteria

[honey at xxx.org]

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 at missprint.org. To unsubscribe
     send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to
     majordomo at 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!                +-+
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+