Disclaimer: This was originally found elsewhere but for personal reasons I have decided to take it down. Those of you who have any idea what it’s talking about, please be aware that I moved it here because I didn’t want it there. Don’t go downvoting me on E2 for something you read in my journal. Thanks.

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My first daylog was much better received than I expected. With this daylog, I am committing XP suicide.

I found the SparkMatch Registry, and sent a /msg to moJoe asking to be added (hasn’t happened yet). Last night I looked at the SparkMatch personality types node, and clicked a few of the types - hey, no descriptions. So I thought I’d post a couple. The test had pronounced me a Porn Star, so I added a writeup there. A friend had just been declared a Senator, so I filled that one in.

Then my XP started dropping. It’s not that I care about the number being lower than it was five minutes ago, it’s that those downvotes indicate I’m doing something wrong. Okay, so somebody doesn’t like me writing up the SparkMatch types. It was awfully late by that point, so I went to bed, intending to look into it further the next day. When I woke up, Senator was at 0 (+1/-1) and Porn Star was at -1 (+3/-4). Apparently my mistake was leaving the “Don’t show in New Writeups” box empty.

So I started clicking it. Why didn’t I take those early downvotes as a signal I was doing something wrong? Because I don’t feel I was. ModernAngel had created the type listing with hardlinks, leading me to think there was more information back there. I thought other people might feel the same way, so I wanted to provide that information. (Sparkmatch.com is a pain anyway, full of pop-up ads, and I even had to have somebody else tell me the type profiles were hiding behind the sketches.)

The next personality type I tried to node was the Fratboy. Wait a minute. Looks like Cow of Doom has already beaten me to it. Looks like the write up has a C! and a rep of 5 (+6/-1). Okay, well, I know E2 is unfriendly to new noders. No problem. But then I kept looking. Some types had additional information added - what everythingians were that type, what other type best matched it, etc. - but many were just verbatim from SparkMatch. I found Rancid Pickle’s Iceman writeup: verbatim, but with a rep of 10 and a nice shiny C! beside it. Of the types already noded, only Backstroker had a low rep - 1 (+4/-3) - even though some additional tidbits had been added.

But I continued filling in the rest of the types, continued a little bit of creative hardlinking, and continued checking the “hide me” box. I knew people could still see the nodes being created, but that was okay. I was just trying to avoid a massive attack. After finishing the writeups and doing some chores, I came back and looked at the E2 Node Tracker.

total rep: 337 (-13)

I see. Looking further down the page, I saw that nine of my new types had lost 1 rep, and co-ed had lost two. (Oddly my Hello Kitty writeup, which hadn’t been touched in a while, also lost one - but that’s probably unrelated.) So I came back to my Message Inbox. Nothing new there. Somebody - I doubt it was several somebodies - had gone through and systematically downvoted a set of my writeups without indicating why. Hadn’t they seen Romeo with Monobrow? Didn’t they notice Vixen?

By submitting this daylog, I may really be shooting myself in the foot. In fact, I’m afraid it’s going to get me scared away permanently, which would be a shame because I do enjoy writing here. No, I don’t have the talent 80% of you do, but I’m trying. Sometimes I submit fluff, but once in a while I have the occasional good piece. But now you’re all going to go to SparkMatch personality types and see all of my writeups. They’re probably going to get downvoted. This daylog is probably going to get heavily downvoted.

Keep in mind that I’m not complaining about the numbers. I don’t care about the drop in XP. I just want to know why I am apparently not as qualified as others (nothing personal to those in question) to fill in the gaps. Should I have asked one of them to do it for me? Part of the information was there. The rest was missing. I filled it in. What happened? If there’s a legitimate reason for it, that’s fine. I’m not even complaining about anonymous downvoting: my e-mail address is on my homenode, it’s easy enough to send me an anonymous explanation for why you think I suck so much. Tell me what I did wrong, so I won’t do it again.

(I expect this is poorly constructed. I could have written this better. But it’s a daylog, and I’m having my say. I think my message makes it across.)

While working on my Kerri Strug writeup yesterday, I wondered what kind of vault she had performed to win the gold. I found her e-mail address in Stanford’s online directory and wrote a message, but then completed the writeup before hearing back. Today she actually wrote back!

Meredith,



My Vault was a 1 1/2 twisting roundoff entry vault. You were right!



I hope you are enjoying your tim ein DC and wish the best of luck…



Kerri Strug

I’m quite giddy over getting a response. I’ve written to famous people for years and only sometimes heard back, usually with a form letter. But she really did write to me, and even if it was short I’m still delighted. I’m so glad I decided to do that writeup.



Unfortunately somebody put a bit of a damper on my delight when I posted about it - he said “You really think there was no other way to find out this information? Contact her if you must, but at least be honest about your intentions.” I almost responded - I even posted a response and then removed it, which is okay because he was offline - despite my personal policy of never responding to this person. I don’t have to explain or defend myself to him, but I do want to say it so I’ll just say it here. He doesn’t know that I did spend about forty-five minutes or an hour trying to find that out. I found pages about Kerri and pages about the vault itself, but nothing specifying exactly what kind of vault it had been. He doesn’t know that I was interested because I was working on the writeup, and so doesn’t know that getting that info really was my main motivation for writing. Oh well, he’s an asshole and he knows it. Fortunately it hasn’t rattled me the way yesterday’s comment did.



My allergies were so bad last night that around 2:30am I had to take a couple of hydroxyzine to knock myself out. I turned up the volume on the alarm clock, but when I woke up the first thing I saw was that it was 8:52. Normally I wake up at 6:45 to be at work by 9:00, so that was bad. Fortunately my boss didn’t really seem to mind, he even understood, maybe. The president is out of the office through the 30th, so I’m happy about that.

My first real writeup at E2 was actually cooled! It took me a while to write it and I’m really pleased with its having done so well. Yay me!
The writeup itself



And I got my first worm in my personal e-mail today (though my work account was hit by the Love Bug last year), what fun. Fortunately I use Yahoo! Mail to receive mail, so when I saw “Hi! How are you? I send you this file in order to have your advice See you later. Thanks” an an attachment called penelopeannmiller.zip.pif I immediately used the site’s scanning. Sure enough, it popped up as infected with W32.Sircam.Worm@mm. Fortunately I’d never use a program that would allow something like that to actually infect my machine.