FROM: meme_mechanic@...
TO: alt.oneirology.entheogens
SUB: RE[3]: The Earnestness of Our Conversion

On the subject of the archives: heron74@... and I have traded emails privately, and because I know some of you have been wondering, I want to publicly respond.

During the twenty-two months when I wasn't administrator of this list, the individual who was made some systematic alterations to the data on the physical server where the mailing list archives reside. The changes were subtle enough that I didn't realize anything was amiss until I noticed some strange syntax in a few of my emails—phraseology that I wouldn't use, words that weren't part of my vocabulary, that sort of thing. When I ran a diff utility comparing a large portion of my own sent mail to the archive, I got a huge output of differences between the two.

There shouldn't have been any difference. The archive isn't so much as gone, as it is corrupted so badly that I can't attest as to the veracity of any given email. (Further compounded by the ISP's cheap-ass data retention policy that gives me absolute no time to notice data corruption.) As such, it's a useless set of documents. We can't trust them.

Yes, it's not lost on me that I could have just as easily said, "We can't trust each other."

-meme