But for those of us that need a little help dealing with that, I present the manual solution. (User "kinkittie " discovered this and was kind enough to share it with the rest of us! I'm posting this here for those on my F-List or on my F-List's F-List that don't want to dig through dozens of entries and comments on lj-backup.)

( If you lost a character journal and would like to retrieve posts, comments, and layout codes... )

The only major downside in all this is that LJ doesn't want to cooperate with it's own layouts. I can't get my "Generator" layout to convert properly. :[