Hakim, the Masked Gamer of Minneapolis

beschizza · July 8, 2015, 5:30pm

Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2015/07/08/hakim-the-masked-coder-of-min.html

Internet madness, Gamergate, and the special happiness of farewells.

avunculoid · July 8, 2015, 5:45pm

This is a nice story–is it a Rob Beschizza original and is this a first in such long form?

beschizza · July 8, 2015, 5:53pm

It’s an illegal remix of Borges.

pastebin.com

http://pastebin.com/raw/sN9VjWzV

Hakim, the Masked Dyer of Merv

JORGE LUIS BORGES

Unless I am mistaken, the original sources of information on Al-Moqanna, the Veiled (or, more strictly, Masked) Prophet of Khorasan, are but four: (a) the excerpts from the History of the Caliphs preserved by Bãladhun; (b)the Manual of the Giant, or Book of Precision and Revision, by the official historian of the
Abbasids, Ibn Abï Tahfr Tarfur; (c) the Arabic codex entitled The Annihilation of the Rose, which refutes the abominable heresies of the Rosa Obscura or Rosa Secreta, which was the Prophet's holy work; and (d) several coins (without portraits) unearthed by an engineer named Andrusov on ground that had been leveled for the Trans-Caspian Railway. These coins were deposited in the Numismatic Museum in Tehran; they contain Persian distichs which summarize or correct certain passages from the Annihilation.

The original Rosa has apparently been lost, since the manuscript found in 1899 and published (not without haste) by the Morgenländisches Archiv was declared by Horn, and later by Sir Percy Sykes, to be apocryphal.

The fame of the Prophet in the West is owed to Thomas Moore's garrulous poem Lolla Rookh, a work laden with the Irish conspirator's sighs and longings for the East.

This paste has been truncated. show original

avunculoid · July 8, 2015, 5:57pm

Most excellently done!

piers_whyte · July 8, 2015, 6:23pm

My hat is off to you, sir. Brilliant on many levels.

Aquaman5K · July 8, 2015, 7:20pm

Truly and utterly confused by this one. Is this reporting or fiction? Does it matter? If it’s a joke, I’m not getting it. Wikipedia usually fixes everything, but not this time. Embrace the confusion.

Thanks for the GIANT FUCKING SPACE PYRAMIDS.

libertyy · July 8, 2015, 8:20pm

Great, now I have to go re-watch BirdMan.

beschizza · July 9, 2015, 12:09am

If you like this, you might also like this

Tanya_D · July 9, 2015, 2:13am

As if we could ever forget.

Thebarton_Gamer · July 9, 2015, 4:20am

NickSay · July 9, 2015, 11:19am

Quite the twist!

Maybe a second read will help me process all this better…

JayStephens · July 9, 2015, 1:43pm

Enjoyed. Think I fully understood it. Probably wrong.

muneravenmn · July 12, 2015, 11:03pm

Geeze thank you. I’m an old English major, and when I read this I felt the weirdest uneasiness but I knew I hadn’t read it before. Ah, but I HAD read it before . . .sort of.

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Hakim, the Masked Gamer of Minneapolis

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