Previous installments: part one, part two, part three. Now, prepare for the conclusion. It’s been great fun writing so much crap and having Bleating Lhowon disapprove of it so deeply. Let me know if you want me to keep the Essentials series going, and feel free to give me suggestions, or (if you happen to have an account here), run wild with the concept on your own.

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Parts One and Two are required reading before diving in here.

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If you haven’t already taken a look at the first part of this grand analysis, please do so. Now that you’re caught up…

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Welcome to The Essentials, a new concept here on JFO. Our goal today is to take a look at an essential facet of the Marathon community, some well-preserved record of perseverance, conflict, creativity, brotherhood, and so on. In this case, I’ll be taking apart the infamous Pfhorums thread 2.5D Game Discussion post by post, analyzing everything that occurred in this great war of CLIQUE vs. Sweatervest (a.k.a. Mr. Cardigan). Although I don’t have the time or energy right now to go over the entire thread, I’ll take you on a journey through the first page. Won’t you please join me?

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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.)

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I thought this was funny as hell, and I’m bored, so here you go.  See if you can tell who the idiot is.
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We think someone has been writing books about us and disguising the main characters as girls. We do not take kindly to this. Here is the evidence of the intentional similarities to actual persons, living or dead.

Us, obviously.

This is about the feud between hux and me.

Slave.

This is about the cliquestories site, who stole what should have been the domain for our own CLIQUE stories.

ESB takes Pfhorums offline roughly once a month.

Dialing L!

Maybe the story here contains Patrick, who seems to understand the bad man behind blue eyes.

One word: Stomped.

I’m thinking “meatserver” here.

Nearly two years ago, Appleswitch bequeathed the power of administration upon Ryoko. What did Bobwithkeycard think? Cue shitstorm. I was fiddling around on this site earlier and I realized that Ryoko actually does a smooth job; so smooth that I didn’t think about it, and indeed, Ryoko’s admin powers seemed to me like unto a myth rather than a reality. (Kind of like CLIQUE.) What is the thought of our fair populace?

Before the #alephone IRC channel became as “popular” as it is today, and before a metaserver existed to allow people to play games easily, there was the Aleph One chat room on the AOL Instant Messenger servers. These were interesting times, when Ryoko was just beginning to test Red Spectrum publicly, when I was wreaking havoc with AORPG, and when W’rkncacnter was being the best keyboarder on earth. Then we got the meatserver and the chat room suddenly became locked.

Thanks to Appleswitch, I now have in my possession chat logs from that period of time, intermittent conversations from April 29 to October 12 2005. I’ve converted them to slightly more readable HTML and split the giant text file into daily digests. You can read the HTML here, and if you’re hard-core, you can pick up the text file here (~764kb, BZipped).

Back in the old days of alt.games.marathon, things could get pretty hairy. There were no moderators, and some of the greatest trolls (jht) and drama llamas (???) in Marathon history were posting messages right next to each other. Flame wars were bound to happen.

Some time ago, Wrk and I started looking for such gems. Here’s my favorite; it puts almost anything in Pfhorums to shame.