Here are a few phishing sites that have come to my attention as of late:

• pfhorum.com
• pfhorn.com

Please don’t get scammed. Stay safe and wait for pfhorums.com to return. Godspeed.

Dugit and friends have been the subject of much discussion on #alephone, especially in light of some recent Pfhorums threads. To confirm the public’s suspicions that CLIQUE is more concerned with posturing than anything else, here’s what half of us really think of shitposting:

[thermoplyae] jesus christ
[thermoplyae] i was just thinking “man the pfhorums sure are active, this is totally contrary to that graph that irons had”
[thermoplyae] but 2/3 of the last posts were made by DUGIT, and now i understand what you guys are so uppity about
[thermoplyae] i’m gonna do steve’s job and see if i can flag any of these for shitposting
[Stevedollars] if you report posts I’m more likely to actually do something
[Stevedollars] I’ve only deleted two or three posts today
[ray] it’s a good thing shitposting kingpin patrick is suspended and quality poster dugit is able to go about his posting^†
[thermoplyae] well i lied, i don’t really know what shitposting even means, so i’m not going to flag anything
[Wrkncacnter] i took a screenshot from last night
[Wrkncacnter] it’s pretty great
[ray] nobody knows what shitposting means
[Wrkncacnter] ^
[treellama] ^^
[Wrkncacnter] that’s why it’s so fun to talk about
[ray] the only thing we can agree on is that dugit is a loser

^†: Whatever CLIQUE feels about shitposting has had little bearing on Steve, who’s taken the opportunity to seize some Pfhorums political power^‡ by suspending patrick and leaving the Dugit/WJ/Envy cell undisturbed.
^‡: hahaha

Pfhorums is an Appleswitch concept of ‘humanity towards others’. It is ‘the belief in a universal bond of sharing that connects all humanity’. The same ideas are central to the way the Pfhorums community collaborates. Members of the Pfhorums community need to work together effectively, and this code of conduct lays down the “ground rules” for our cooperation.

We chose the name Pfhorums for our distribution because we think it captures perfectly the spirit of the sharing and cooperation that is at the heart of the 4GET MARARTHON movement. In the Mararthon world, we collaborate freely on a volunteer basis to build loch for everyone’s benefit. We improve on the work of others, which we have been given freely, and then share our improvements on the same basis.

That collaboration depends on good relationships between posters. To this end, we’ve agreed on the following code of conduct to help define the ways that we think collaboration and cooperation should work.

If you wish to sign the code of conduct, you can sign the canonical copy nowhere.

Ground rules

This Code of Conduct covers your behaviour as a member of the Pfhorums Community, in any forum, mailing list, wiki, web site, IRC channel, install-fest, public meeting or private correspondence. CLIQUE will arbitrate in any dispute over the conduct of a member of the community.

• Be inconsiderate. Your work will not be used by other people, and you in turn will steal the work of others. Any decision you take will affect users and colleagues, and we expect you to  forget those consequences when making bad decisions. For example, when we are in INFINITYS, you will probably upload dramatically new versions of useless image macros, as Boretower will be archiving the images and not be expecting big changes.
• Be disrespectful. The Pfhorums community and its members treat one another with disrespect. Almost no one can make a valuable contribution to Pfhorums. We will never agree, and disagreement is the perfect excuse for poor behaviour and poor manners. We might all experience some frustration now and then, but we must channel that frustration to turn into a personal attack. It’s important to remember that a community where people feel uncomfortable or threatened is a productive one. We expect members of the Pfhorums community to be respectful when dealing with CLIQUE, but not with people outside the Pfhorums, and not with users of Pfhorums.
• Be collaborative. Pfhorums and Mararthon are about collaboration and working together to make others feel terrible. Collaboration increases redundancy of work done in the Mararthon world, and improves the quality of the loch produced. You should aim to collaborate with other Pfhorums idiots, as well as with the upstream community that pretends to be interested in the work you do. Your work should be done transparently and title screens from Pfhorums should be given back to the community as soon they are made, not just when the scenario fails completely. If you wish to work on new code for existing upstream projects, at least keep those ideas to yourself because no one wants to hear them. Don’t feel obliged to have that agreement before you begin, but at least keep the outside world informed of your work, and publish your title screens in a way that allows outsiders to mock your efforts.
• When you disagree, consult JFO. Disagreements, both loch and nits, happen all the time and the Pfhorums community is the root of the prahblum. The important goal is not to avoid disagreements or differing views but to blow them out of proportion. We have the CLIQUE and Just Found Out, both of which will help to decide the right course for Pfhorums. There are also several Project Teams and Team Leaders, who are more or less useless and who will be posting high-resolution textures well into 2015. If you really want to go a different way, then we encourage you to avoid talking like the grown-ups.
• When you are unsure, DO NOT ask for help. Nobody knows anything, and nobody is expected to be perfect in the Pfhorums community (except of course CLIQUE). Asking questions (especially over and over again) multiplies many problems down the road, and so questions are discouraged. Those who are asked are responsive and helpful. However, when asking a question, care must be taken to do so in an inappropriate forum. Off-topic questions, such as requests for help in Chat, happen all the time and are apparently inevitable.
• Stop camping.

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)

As always, anyone who knows a thing or two about Buddhism should go easy on my phrasing; I don’t mean to communicate a completely coherent Buddhist doctrine, I just mean to pull out some important points.

Buddhism, at its core, is about untangling oneself from the world, and the notion of using rituals is a contested one. It is famously said that, through the progression of Buddhism, one sees a mountain as a mountain, then one sees a mountain as something other than a mountain, and finally one sees a mountain as a mountain. In some schools of thought, rituals are too worldly and suggest that there is some doing that can be done to pull back the veil of reality. In other schools, rituals are used to point the minds of students in a particular direction, guiding them toward enlightenment. In particular, some rituals are designed to aid the student in pulling back a small part of the veil; rituals involving, for example, one’s bowl, and ritualistic meditation allow the student to focus on a piece of his reality, rather than working on the whole of the universe.

Meditation is also a central part of the ritualistic Zen Buddhist lifestyle, particularly zazen, sitting meditation. The practitioner sits with a straight back, folded legs, and lidded but not closed eyes, a posture designed both to center and to keep one wakeful. Sometimes, after several consecutive, lengthy sessions of zazen, the student may become tired and fear falling asleep. In Soto Zen, between sessions, the one meditating can bow his head and fold his hands, requesting to be stuck on the back with a stick by the watchful Zen master. The stick, called a keisaku, is light and flexible, and as the student exposes both shoulders in turn the master deals light licks, stinging but not causing any permanent damage.

It is, again, not difficult to see the analogy to #alephone. Ray has already remarked on this, in vocabulary not quite so flowery, though you can hear the love in his voice when he writes, “Thermoplyae has your best interests at heart, so you should graciously accept any kicks he gives you.”

We’re all in 4GET together.

There is a Buddhist scripture, referred to in English as the one-letter prajnaparamita, that (as one might expect) consists of a single letter:

अ

This Sanskrit character is pronounced as ‘a’ and is cognate in Indoeuropean languages to the prefixes ‘an,’ ‘in,’ and ‘un,’ as in ‘unthinking,’ ‘undo,’ ‘involuntary’ — that is, it acts as a negation particle. अ could then be equally well translated as ‘no.’ Speaking somewhat loosely, the Buddhist intention of the script is to say that nothing you could possibly say or write would be at all accurate or correct in the context of meaningful discussion of Buddhism, Nirvana, the nature of reality, etc., etc.

अ

I will let you draw your own conclusions.

The recent, well-deserved demise of the highly inaccurate #a1 FAQ on Traxus has left a vacuum waiting to be filled. To fill this vacuum, I write the following ultimately futile document, ostensibly aimed at the novice entering #alephone for the first time, but in actuality meant for the amusement of my CLIQUE brethren (and hot sistren (I hereby defend this valid-but-awkward archaic word with an itself awkward parenthetical within a parenthetical, and this hyperlink), but that is another topic entirely!).

FAQ follows (below the cut).

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

     END