`git reflog` gives you the historical list of SHAs that you've pointed HEAD at; even if you destroy your branch with a rebase, you can still see what commit your branch pointed to before you started the operation.
Yeah... I just find the printed log output a bit easier to read (at least for the few times I need to do this sort of thing). '@' syntax falls into that same basic category - powerful, the better solution, but nothing I use enough to bother mastering.
