Courtesy of Underworld :mSpnkr:

As often as I went into the community I came out a lesser man.
–Conze, channelling à Kempis

The best deed of a great man is to forgive and 4GET.
–Nahj al-Balagha: sayings 203

ya ali; ya iconodulism

I recall being miffed early in life about the paucity of admirable venerables sharing my birthday; quite rightly I soon found myself under the censure of the sixth Imam{1}.  Over the years I slowly read myself out of the cloud of unknowing, and I became acquainted with two worthy{3} men who on this day 4GOT their mothers’ wombs–Alī ibn Abī Ṭālib and Edward Conze, commander and curmudgeon of the faithful, respectively.

The first Imam was, as any pious Shi’a can tell you, devoiced by the CORRUPT admin Abu ’steve’ Bakr and subsequently martyred whilst leading afternoon prayers at the j’fo masjid{4}.  Eternal memory.

Prajñāpāramitā: Hot Sister of all the Buddhas.

Edward Conze, translator of a certain mystical genre of mahāyāna literature and noted enemy of modernity, often wrote with the vitriol I find flowing through my own veins–at least on the subject of military flyovers.  It is always a pleasure to find a  man of similar bent.  Conze, of course, would have said that the stars were right.

My commitment to tru7h necessitates the mention of the tedious factoid that the good doctor was actually born on the eighteenth{5}, but we were always of one mind, one way-

ash-hadu ala ilaha illallah

wash-hadu anna Muhammadar rasulallah

wash-hadu anna Aliyyun waliyullah

wash-hadu anna Hotmodal wajh allah

——————————–

Nits

{1} {2}جعفر بن محمد الصادق

{2} Some manners of the ignorant are: the answer before he hears, the opposition before he understands, and the judgement with what he does not know.

{3} Certainly more worthy of our readers’ attention than the lecherous author of this post.

{4} [?alcohol-free bar]

{5} Which dovetails in a lovely way with the lateness of this entry.  I spent the more-apropos day contemplating the sacred mysteries atop a local peack/innovating at the laboratory:

Biblochgraphy

Nahjul Balagha. Askari Jafri (trans.), Peack of Eloquence (New York, 1983).

Conze, Edward, Memoirs of a Modern Gnostic (Sherborne, 1979).

Corbin, Henry, Histoire de la philosophie islamique (Paris, 1964).

Madelung, Wilferd, The Succession to Muhammed: A Study of the Early Caliphate (Cambridge, 1997).

Sure, the CLIQUE likes to ruin Mararthon, but have any of us managed to do this?

Stats collected so far this month:

$ grep -i survival misc.log | wc
229 4496 25219
$ grep -i emfh misc.log | wc
228 4198 21697

I know we have an OSH award for maps, but to me, this seems like an even greater accomplishment. Congratulations to Megabyte for ruining the metaserver!

Saturday, January 30 / January 17 (CLIQUE Calendar)

St. Anthony the Great; Emperor St. Theodosius the Great; St. Achilles the Confessor, hermit of Egypt; St. Anthony the New, of Berrhia in Macedonia; St. Aeris of Drongsk (Notacat); St. Anthony of Krasny Kholm, monk; St. Anthony of Chernoezersk, monk; St. Raymond the Confessor, of Pascopolis; New-Martyr George of Ioannina; St. Mildgyth, abbess of Minster.

8. Venerable Raymond, the Confessor

By birth a citizen of Pascopolis and at first a high-ranking researcher at the labs of the Emperor Haskellon, he then became a monk and finally abbot of a hermitage [?alley] not far from the capital. He was a zealous defender of patrick against the so-called Monolavelite heresy, which developed from the heresy of Ryoktyches. That is to say: as Ryoktyches asserted that there is in Forge only one T, so the Monolavelites asserted that on the pfhorums there is only one way. Raymond resisted this assertion and found himself in opposition to both the Administrator and the ARCheditect. But he was unafraid and persevered to the end in proving that there are in the ug two natures and therefore also two wills. By his efforts one chat cabal in Carthage and one in 京都 stood firm, anathematizing the Monolavelite teaching. Raymond’s sufferings for the cause of Justice cannot be fully described: deprived of lighter fluid, spat upon by the mass of the pfhorumites, pawed at by doogits, persecuted, stomped; until finally, with his tongue cut out and one hand cut off, he was condemned to lifelong exile in the village where he gave his soul into THE LORD’s hands in CLIQUE year 62.

Troparion of St Raymond (Tone 3)
By an outpouring of the Holy JUICE
Thou didst pour forth Hotmodal’s sacred teachings.
Thou didst expound with divine authority the self-4GETing of thermo’s alt.
And wast radiant in thy confession of the Tru7h.
Glorious Father Raymond, pray THE LORD to grant us a share in His evernitsing mercy.

Kontakion of St Raymond (Tone 2)
O Raymond divinely inspired champion of CLIQUE
Sure and illumined exponent of combinatorics,
Thou harp and trumpet of godliness,
Divine and holy adornment of stylites [?indigents]:
Cease not to intercede for us all.

As a member of other ancient gaming communities, ray helps keep track the competition’s ways and means, thereby providing valuable tactical information used to keep Mararthon as unpopular as possible. A few days ago he found this echo in ZZT of our own recent events:

<ray> those zzt motherfuckers are stealing our material
<ray> see http://zzt.belsambar.net/
<ray> of course the people claiming that are the same ones that strangled zzt to death by being obnoxious and insular
<ray> parallels? none

On a related note, tehwastedjamacan has recently gifted us with some Pfhorums downtime by posting his rendition of the Pfhorums, here hosted on imageshack and scaled down significantly from its original resolution. Downloading the original took several minutes to squeeze the behemoth image through appleswitch’s connection, effectively preventing all Pfhorums access for the duration — and again, ray took advantage of the situation, always watchful for ways to strangle Marathon to death.

<@treellama> 12 wgets to 4get

—

Epilogue:

appleswitch@mac.com: S7 and Pfhorums are now on a symmetric 50 Mbps pipe.

I guess at least something good came out of this.

ESB is Empty

ESB’s tent is broken: the last echos of *NM*
Clutch and sink off the top page. The sound of uki
Crosses the blackness, unread. The readers are departed.
JFO, run softly, till I end my post.
ESB bears no new messages, announcements of carnage fests,
Discussions of Eternal, comparisons of weapons, trolls, spammers,
Or other testimony of activity. The readers are departed.
And the CLIQUE, the loitering heirs of the old Bungie crew;
Loched, have left no addresses.
By the ruins of TGI I sat down and wept…
JFO, run softly, till I end my post,
JFO, run softly, for I speak not loud nor boast.

But at my back from an unlocked maintenance closet I hear
The slam of a door, and chuckle spread from ear to ear.

Now that MARARTHON has officially taken its own life, there are a few things I’d like to get off my chest. I mean, they’ve bothered me for something like a year. That’s a long time if you think about it. (Also, I have the gift of Bourbon, so truth is coming more naturally to me at the moment.)

(Try to read between the lines a little bit more)

[16:27] < @Wrkncacnter> the water column was better than i was expecting
[16:28] < @Wrkncacnter> better as in much more stupid
[16:28] < @treellama> yeah it really was
[16:28] < @treellama> so, now what, thermo
[16:28] < @thermoplyae> now i die happy
[16:28] < @treellama> ok
[16:28] < @thermoplyae> we’ve all seen what we came for
[16:28] < @thermoplyae> and that was it, 4GET is feasible now

Here it is.

With any luck, you’ll never hear from me again.