NECROCOMICON

Translator's Introduction

by Aloysius Thudthwacker

Recently, I was given the task of cleaning out the account of a user on a computer system in dark Schenectady. It seems that there were many things in his account which spoke of Eris and Greyface, and I was the only one that their Sysadmin could locate who was familiar with these kinds of things. He decided that, since the user vanished under mysterious circumstances, he had best leave the deposition of the user's virtual goods to someone with experience in the field.

I found many things cluttering his public_html/ directory -- snippets of hymns to Eris, a few rants linking hemorrhoids to Greyface, a small archive of old alt.discordia posts dating back some years, and many such similar knick-knacks.

I was about to tell the Sysadmin that he should go ahead and blow the directory away when, for no real reason, I thought to take a listing of the hidden files in the directory. Meeting my eyes was an entire directory entitled, in the High Church Language of Discordia, `.ecrocomiconay/' -- the Necrocomicon, or fabled Book of Dead Jokes.

Within that directory I found many HTML files, all written in the Hi Church Lingo, which I painstakingly translated (and if you think that was a small task, UUEncode a GIF, run it through a Hi Church Lingo filter, and see if you can do anything with what comes out the business end. In fact, try it). Its content filled me with dread, and I don't think the blasphemous one-liners of Vaudeville will ever again fail to elicit a scream of terror from me.

Being the sharing type, I decided to post what I found. Beware -- sane men should never wot of what is in these dread Web Pages, so you wouldn't believe what this schtick will do to Discordians.