While waiting for Bronzebeard to come back up, I decided to head to a European server that was up for some reason.  Faith in humanity:  Shattered.

Congratulations to Auttylynn, who today turns that magical arbitrary age at which the good ol’ US of A has deemed her socially responsible enough to enjoy an alcoholic beverage.

As I’m sure you’ll understand, there will be no raid tonight, because her and I will instead be raiding seedy bars and strip clubs across the city (Saturday’s ICC-10 is still on and I’ll get it on the calendar in a couple hours).

Congratulatory epics can be sent to her through in-game mail.  *Wink, wink.*

Today’s blog title is brought to you by The A-Team…coming to theaters on, um…eh, who cares?

So, The Censored Linguists are up and running again and things are starting to get back to somewhat normal.  The guild bank is full and when I feel like spending another couple hours staring at Blizzard’s terrible, terrible guild management system, I’ll get all the ranks fixed, too.

I’ve mailed out in-game letters to every former guildie I could possibly remember, so hopefully we’ll get a lot of them back (the Armory doesn’t show that they’ve joined new guilds yet, at least).

The hackers deleted my guild advert macros (which, by the way, is just plain mean you fuckers) so I’ll have to recreate them to start advertising again.  Other than that, we’ve got guild elections coming up in the beginning of July, the relaunching of the monthly Northrend Exposure contest and a ton of Cataclysm news to start looking at.

So, exciting times coming up.  We came, we saw, we got F’d in the A.  But that’s all behind us.  Time to look forward and get this guild back to its awesome normal self.

Upon logging in recently, you likely noticed something missing:  Your guild.

That’s right.  No more witty repartee in /g.  No more awful pink tabard.  But don’t worry…it wasn’t something you said.

Allow me to clarify what happened.  You may have heard about the recent increase in gold-hacker activity.  Well, as a result of this, my account was somehow compromised.  Sunday morning I found myself locked out by an authenticator that had been attached to it overnight.  I was able to get in touch with Blizzard and regain control of my account, but obviously the hackers had done a bit of damage in the meantime.  The guild’s disbanding was an annoying side-effect of their attempt to transfer Cutaia off-server.

The good news — depending on how you look at it* — is that Blizzard denied the server transfer, leaving Cutaia in realm limbo with pockets full of stolen gold.

As soon as the GMs get him back on Bronzebeard where he belongs, I’ll be able to start piecing the guild back together.

For now, I’d like to say that the aftermath thus far has been very encouraging.  Several folks have wrote us e-mails to figure out what happened and as word spread Nightdolphin even put together a temporary guild where our members could congregate in the meantime (which means that if you are a previous member trying to find us, you can type “/who The Linguists” to get a list of people who can invite you to our temporary home).  This is one of the things I love about our guild members.  It’s been great to see everyone banding together in the face of a shitty situation.

Going forward, I’d obviously like to regain as many of our old guildies as possible, but the disappearing roster will make this a little difficult.  I do have a list of names I’ll be trying to contact in-game, but in the meantime, please feel free to help by adding folks you remember to your friends list and spreading the word.