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

VOICES blurred and incoherent, swirling in vortex loch
Irons’ cries cannot reach Wrk;
Adminstrations fall apart; the Pfhorums cannot hold;
Brainless listing grips the community,
The youthful tide is loosed, and everywhere
The pride of Marathon is drowned;
The best, exhausted, have all 4GOTten, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely TGI:B is at hand.
The Gray Incident! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image from JFO
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the forests of Minnesota
A shape with a bulbous nose and daggers for teeth,
Eyes lidded and craw full of Mariusnet meat,
Is slowly texturing its floors, while all about it
Fly protestant posts of vulturing mappers.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That six months of stony stillness
Were vexed to nightmare by semester’s end,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Simplici7y to be born?

6/6/2009 chat cabalism ?

old guard of remakes #alephone, hux imitation fun .

tor nodes? any new ideas? wb cult

ahuxley gone, ahuxley flow beginning, 6/6/2009

no bs

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.

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.

It took me long enough. Part of the issue I had was that I have my own domain now, and I was too lazy to move the IRC-related stuff to my new site. So here we go: this month’s stats are located right next to the all-time stats and everything else.

This transition also obviously indicates that the original spylog is now located at the new and protected  irc.jonirons.net.

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)