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.

{he chose the right guy to copy from on his final}

Stop coding.

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)

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)

I got this meme from one of our sister sites, the aptly-named clique.blogspot.com:

I AM IN A CLIQUE MEME!!!

What is your clique’s name? CLIQUE.

Who founded your clique? Hotmodal.

Who is the prettiest member? Ray. Bridget.

Who is the richest member? Treellama.

What is the hottest boy your clique has tamed? I don’t know about boys (maybe Thermoplyae or Bridget could tell us), but most of us would agree that more than a few hot sisters have fallen to our charms.

What is the official mascot of your clique? lochnits

What is your clique’s clothing style? We mostly wear crappy clothes, because not much comes in AGENT ORANGE/GAN GREEN. The sisters aren’t complaining, though.

Who is the least likely person to be accepted into your clique? There are so many, it’s hard to chose. *blushes* But if I were forced to answer, it would be MarsMartianMan.

Who is the most likely person to be accepted? Patrick!!

Where does your clique hang out? #alephone, sometimes here, too.

What is your clique’s favorite store at the mall? Two words: Hot. Topic.

Are you close enough with your clique to call them sisters? Considering our genders and sexual attitudes toward hot sisters, this is extremely creepy to think about. Bridget is probably into it, though.

I will grant you one wish. What is it? Stop camping.

It’s a tough topic in a male-oriented community (which, let’s face it, is every gaming community—but especially Marathon): Misogyny.

misogyny (n.): The hatred of, or pathological aversion to women.

Phallus 1

Phallus 2

Phallus 3

From birth to unbirth, there is no way to fight against the prejudices of our greatest passion.

Or is there? Let’s explore some methods.

12 July 2008

Dear Irons,

We have decided that your Proposal (EN-C445C-9A) no longer speaks to the hearts or minds of the Single White Female audience that was originally our target demographic. While we would still like to see your new Marathon game, we feel that it would do best as a scenario among the multitude that followed Infinity, rather than as our new project.

Our Deepest Apologies,
Bungie Studios

They didn’t like the gratuitous sexual content.

Here’s what experts say:

  S
  t
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Camping
  p

She was honestly the most gorgeous woman I had ever known. The most gorgeous, too, that I ever will know. That alone created all sorts of difficulties–standards I constructed on my own, without her help, not to mention those she brought to the relationship. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

There were times throughout my formative years that I would catch a glimpse of her. Oh, no, it wasn’t actually her until some time later. But you know how it is: as artists have their Muse, my past self had, from the womb, a conception of idealized beauty that drove every action in my life. A few of my early finger-paintings hold the shadow of my ideal; here and there, amid the smiling suns and grassy fields, a feminine form–unmarred by the later impositions of society–reveals itself in simple lines. Extended fingerprints create flowing hair, misunderstood breasts, skirts and dresses, crude hands grasping flowers.

I saw her later in cartoons, in campfire reveries, and finally, before my own eyes during English class in my sophomore year of high school. It was not a dream come true; it was a simple nod from Fate that yes, she had existed all along.

In my daze, I hardly remember the months of that year spent in agony, in bliss. I can no longer recall if she ever caught me looking at her, for that would imply gazing into her eyes–something which erased all memory. My journals from that period are suspiciously devoid of her name or description. I suppose it makes sense, after a fashion; how often do you describe the veins in your feet, unless something has gone wrong with them? But I can still feel the tension in my writing from that time. I was a lion ready to spring forward.

When I did, it went surprisingly well. It was sudden, there was no warning, and there I stood on her doorstep with a lump of clay in my hands, both literally and figuratively. She let me in after I uttered the sweet, brilliant, foolish line, “Let’s shape it together.” Hours later, we conversed with words for the first time ever–the sculpture was a conversation of its own, never to be repeated–and oh, her voice, that enchanting power was finally directed at me of all people. “Come with me,” she said that evening, “come with me forever.”

From that day forward, the ground dropped slowly from beneath my feet while I took no notice, instead staring at the heavens with no concept of evil or loss. Every breeze was her caress. Not a single night went by that her face and body strayed away from my dreams, pillaging my heart and soul. There is a word in French, farouche. It means both “wild” and “tame.” We experienced l’amour farouche.

I know she felt it, too. With love, it’s easy to tell the difference between a one-way street and a boulevard–provided you’re experiencing the real thing. She invested as much of her self in me as I did in her, and I think that was the beginning of our problem. As I already said, both of us had notions that gradually filtered in from outside our protective circle. No, it was not a circle; it was an impossible two-sided shape that could only last for a fleeting moment before vanishing, left only as the most powerful memory on Earth. And that is just what happened.

While I confess that the beginning of this decade-long ordeal of joy is mired in oblivion, I can say with certainty that its end and decline (in that order) are clearer than the crack of Arctic ice during an everlasting dawn. The end came and went; it was instant. But the energy it imparted to us left us rushing to the future with no clear goals. We crashed through barrier after barrier: college, careers, family deaths, and finally pregnancy. How, in our decadence, could we have wanted to generate a new life out of the readily-apparent death of our delirious love? We did see that happening, but the love still lived, and I believe that was the root of our particular delusion. Hope was just a heart in a bear trap.

I held her so often, felt her radiance through our clothing. With her, there was no such thing as nakedness: such a concept involves shame and the implication that we wore something encumbering to begin with. How often do you call an animal “naked?”

Only when it has come to lack something important.

So it was that we ended up in the hospital. The pregnancy had been difficult, but doctors had assured us that it was nothing to worry about. It was only until that last moment, when our child emerged in blood from his nine months of growth, that I knew the truth. Her wan smile broke my heart, the monitors attached to her went wild and then only rang with the alarm that the patient was about to die. Her lips moved with both a word and a kiss, and she left this world.

“My God!” I shouted at the doctor, my infant son cooing in my arms. “Please, tell me what she said. I’ll give my own life to know her dying words.”

The doctor smiled and shook his head knowingly. “She told you to stop camping.”

-fin-