Down a deep dark rabbit hole (a very fannish one)

After seeing several people reporting on Yahoo Groups going away (oddly enough a crap ton of groups still use these in the publishing world. I have more under my pen name than I ever did in fandom), I thought about trying to download and save Sunnydale Writers where I was a mod before it just slowly died (all the other ones I belonged to were purge eons ago).

I managed to find three of my old stories there earlier in the year and I spent the early afternoon thinking about rahirah's post about how to download it. When I got how I noodled with the idea more and somehow that lead me to look for something in my email where I learned a) I never deleted MOSt of the Sunnydale emails from 2004 and after, really wtf? b) the group never sent me back MY emails so I can't get my stories that way c) I found that someone I didn't know had edited two chapters of my lost story Fumbling Toward Ecstasy.

SOOOO I tried to find that story via my yahoo sent folder. No go, it only saved back to 2014, a full ten years too late. So I just sorted oldest to newest and started looking by hand. I found for some reason all of evil_little_dog's edits were not attached (If I pieced it together right she had a very old computer at the time I think I was using a strange file (rtx? txt?) as a result because it was all she could open but whatever it was yahoo has since stripped those files off.

I found edits by people I don't even know who they ARE any more. I found stories to edit for them too. I found things from friends I had entirely forgot about. I found the fights from some RPGS (I did I think 6 online RPGs, only one ended naturally all the rest ended in BITTER fights that ended in destroyed friendships), I found so many freaking ficathons.

What I didn't find were my stories beyond two edits on Fumbling (ch 8 & 9( but no indication I ever sent her any of my other chapters though I obviously had to (and that was one of the people who stopped talking to us after RPG drama).

I did learn that Fumbling Toward Ecstasy was most likely written for the Buffyverse Sandwich ficathon in July 2005 for Flurblewig. The other story I've been after (which I STILL don't know why FFN took it down because if a story had a sex scene, I just cut that scene and posted it there. I still think someone got pissed at the pairing and reported it), Young Lies which was Buffy/Connor (written in part for a project rahirah was doing way back when). It was another one posted around July 2005. I need to post these two to that search site. Sigh.

I got light headed during all of this and realized that I was hungry because I started this at 4 in the afternoon and it was now after 8 in the evening. Oops. Ended up eating the dinner of champions, hot dogs and raman noodles (and before you ask why do I even have those things in the kitchen, it's obviously for nights like this when I can't be trusted to remember to eat).