1月15日　「Tour Diary」

Deciding to take a vacation?  Now where can you go?  Ireland?  A bit too cold this time of the year.  Paris?

No.

A week at the cricket in Johannesburg.  England touring.  Readers will be spared the tedium of my memoirs; I confine myself here to the salient points:

Morning session.  Arrived at Wanderers for second day of fourth Test.  Conditions smashing.  Thermoplyae not in attendance, contrary to dream as recorded in {d0×9B5:TERMISFORBIDDEN}.

Lunch.  Can now confirm the thermophantasm’s assessment: J.P. Duminy is, in fact, not hot.

Afternoon session.  Inclement weather; remainder of day’s play called off twenty minutes prior to tea break.  Praise THE LORD for having mercy on the boys.  Returned to rooms at embassy; telegram waiting with tea.  Monsignor Pasco may raise an eyebrow at the allusion, but what sprang to mind was the interclerical salutation of the Greek schismatics.

Hotmodal is in our midst.

He is and ever shall be.

I confess I’m rather bemused by the great man’s invitation. I fear I’ve as much interest in administration as I do in wikis [?women].

Be seeing you.

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.

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.

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.

So let it be written, do let it be done.

The long-awaited graphic novel adaptation of Macsforever’s early epic novel Marathon: The Chilron is now available! We have big plans for it, including ray’s annotations of the original work and my own extended commentary on the graphic novel. Chances are these will be exclusive to the print edition, so keep an eye out for that announcement.

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)