Thursday, August 15, 2013

Stupid hackers. Eat hot flaming death for breakfast.

Some of you might already know that I help maintain a fansite for Robin Williams. (Heavy emphasis on HELP -- it's wholly Linda's site; she coded it all and does the lion's share of the heavy lifting. I'm just the janitor, fixing minor spelling issues and so forth.) Anyway, don't go there now, because you won't find anything. At some point in the last 24 hours, the site got hacked. A person or persons unknown swept through the host server like a Japanese tsunami and destroyed everything -- even the backup files. Yes, we probably should have had off-site backup. Thank you for noticing that now.

Creation takes time.  Even the simplest scene finger-painted by a preschooler required time to come up with an idea, to find the paper and paints, to paint exuberantly and stick it to the wall.  And the more complex the act of creation, the more time it takes to complete.  But it only takes 30 seconds to start a fire that destroys every painting in the building. Destruction is the slacker's way of making a mark. Since he doesn't have the wit, the talent or the drive to work at making something useful or beautiful, his only contribution is to piss on everything.

You might not think of coding on a website as a creative act, but let me assure you, it requires serious activity from both sides of the brain. It took literally years for Linda to collect and display the information for that site -- news, interviews, screenshots, exhaustive information on movies and television appearances -- but it's all gone now. Because some unwashed little punk somewhere gets his kicks from destroying stuff.

Damn right I'm upset.

Fortunately Linda and I have some files backed up on individual computers, so we ought to be able to put the site back together (or at least most of it) when we have a space dedicated to recreating it. Meanwhile, I'ma go out and punch a wall for a while.

2 comments:

Chelly Wood said...

Hey Suzanne,

We met at the 2012 PNWA summer conference. I'm wondering how your writing endeavors are coming. If you have a book that you've e-pubbed, I'd be happy to like it, follow you, etc.

Just click on my website and you'll find there's a contact option on my site.

Sincerely,
Chelly

Soozcat said...

Hi, Chelly! Thanks for coming by the blog. I would have loved to go to the PNWA 2013 conference, but scheduling issues and cash flow this year made that impossible.

I haven't e-pubbed anything yet -- have a couple of projects in the pipeline, but nothing finished. I see you've got a novel up and running, though. Looking forward to seeing more of that.