Hoorah wayback machine

[lucky_guess]

I finally got around to backing up my alternity files.

I also couldn't help myself, and read the codas, and the final month of game play, and also the Battle for Hogwarts month.

It took me a solid two-day marathon just to get through all of it, and I cried like a dozen times. Mercy. (Also, I may end up getting on a computer that has advanced adobe and rearranging some of the pages during 2015-05 to match order of events -- silly time zones interfering in the height of battle. I'll re-post here when I do in case anyone else wants a copy.)

There were so many sweet little touches I'd forgotten, or let fade a little.



Draco and Ron's mutual respect.

Ernie being so good to Linus.

The agony of Ginny and Charlie.

Tonks and Hydra being awesome cousins to one another.

Titsed.

Toast.

The sheer resiliency of the younger Order members in the aftermath, despite their obvious hurts -- their hope, and joy, and sense of the future being so wonderfully wide open, and how damn few of the original were left -- in the end, just Poppy, Molly, and the Longbottoms.

And Padma continuing to be Padma despite everything, for which I loved her endlessly

And Seamus and Jason! God, those two.

And Dolohov and Barty's totally epic dramafest of death, and Hydra and Justin's maneuvering and sense of... immense destiny and doom about the whole thing that was just EPIC.

The sheer audacity of what the Order and allies managed to pull off in 24 hours, and after, too, cobbling together a brand new government while fighting a war. (I seriously got chills when Alice called out for Jerusalem.)

I cried about Daphne, and Harry, and Severus, and Neville, and Colin, and Justin, and Sirius, and Remus.

It was SO GOOD, y'all.

Just.

Thank you.

I may also have to dig around for some of those final letters, and re-read them, and let them break my heart all over again.

Comments

[gwendolyngrace]

Aww.

I was at a great party Saturday night and we were talking about HP and JK's flaws in the story, and also about fix-it fic and somehow I mentioned how we were scheduling the Battle for Hogwarts, and how of course it had to be held on the weekend of one of my big camping events. I still chuckle thinking about having to leave site, drive home like a maniac, and get online as soon as possible while y'all were stalling in the meantime.

Good times. Miss it and you all like crazy some days.

[jenett]

If you can't find the final letters, I'm pretty sure I still have them all in my email somewhere.

[sporky_rat]

I keep poking at the Wayback Machine for more of the .pdf's but it's not working.

[jenett]

The link I found that worked most reliably (a couple of weeks ago) that got me all of them was this one.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160401014658/http://hpalternity.com/

If that doesn't work, and you can't get specific ones, feel free to ping, and I can see about email or something.

[sporky_rat]

MAUAHAHAHAHAHAHA MINE IS A KNOWLEDGEABLE LAUGH. HURRAH FOR THE MIGHT OF LIBRARIANS!

[longstrider]

I believe this is the final zip file that I made.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2_yk-uKW6AqUm9hSEQ5YVNiOU0/view?usp=drivesdk

[naomikritzer]

Wait, is that the whole thing?

(I got asked about the whole thing a few weeks ago and said, "well, the server went down, and the person who maintains the server is having some health problems and I kinda don't want to bug her about this...")

[longstrider]

I believe so. I did it shortly after we finished so if files got fixed later it likely doesn't include that.

[aedifica]

Ooh, thanks! I was just thinking the other day that I should download all the Alternity files, only it was too late, only it wasn't too late after all!

[naomikritzer]

The other night I was online and saw both Gwen and someone else from the game in my Google chat bar and had this impulse to just ... start up a conversation.

I was on a panel at Convergence (big volunteer-run fandom con, local to me) with Seanan McGuire a couple weeks ago on profic/fanfic (like being a fanfic writer who moves to professional writing OR being a professional writer who writes fanfic for fun) and in my intro I mentioned I'd participated in a journal-based RPG/fanfic thing that was a real-time Harry Potter AU. Seanan turned to me and said "which one?" I said, "Alternity." She said "SHUT UP." I guess she read it!

[(Anonymous)]

Sweet! Our readers are everywhere!

[queenbookwench]

Ooops! That was me not logged in--and, yeah, I often think about it when I see you or D or a certain lioness around social media.

[gwendolyngrace]

Should have pinged! Though I admit I hardly even notice sometimes when someone contacts me in chat... I hardly use it anymore.

I just lost my ENTIRE evening (literally, from 6 PM to just now) re-reading August... and then digging through my email and the non-redacted files for some of the final letters and the "behind the scenes" bits of Justin's death...and weeping all over again for him, Sirius, Remus, Harry, Daphne.... And that's after going to wayback over the weekend and spending a good hour or two downloading all the pdfs!

I look back on all this and think how extraordinarily lucky I was to have the time and freedom and access to online that I did from 2008-2015. My current crappy job would make a game like this and my level of involvement in it next to impossible - even with smartphones and the like now. (Remember when we started and pretty much none of us had 24/7 online connectivity?)

Anyway... yeah, I miss it so much. I don't know how I would play in anything like it again at the moment, but man, I miss everyone.