Sometimes I'll be reading logs or newsposts and something along the following lines will pop up:
"Please excuse the previous post... The scribe who wrote it messed up and has been sufficiently punished for his transgressions"

I'm just curious, where did that come from? Is it from other IREs, or did it spawn with Lusternia?

I'm not sure exactly, but I think it's just a good excuse for in-game insanity. To explain away why there are commands and syntax in the middle of a post and such. It probably came around when some Admin needed to cover his tail and it stuck ever since.

Definition: Scribe
1) A way for your character to attempt to dodge blame for screwing up.
2) A "RolePlay" way for a character who cannot write to be able to "post/write".

With that, I really doubt it spawned here.

They had it in Achaea when I played, so it either originated there or someone imported it from another MU* and it stuck.

I like to point and laugh at people who blame their typos at scribes, because they semi-consciously admit that their characters are too stupid to know how to write and hire scribes to do it for them.

so those big polititians in real life that have scribes can not write?

The problem with talking about scribes is that a news posts ends with:

Not:

There has been examples of folks blaming their 'scribes' for shoddy work since the beginnings of online role-play; it is not an IRE only joke in the slightest. There've been folks using it since at least the early 90s in Usenet groups, probably even before that.

I'm not sure where the newspost roleplay is.

How do we read them? Is it the same with aetherscrolls where we 'see' the scrolls in our minds? And how would we 'write' the scrolls telepathically?

A clarification from anyone more roleplay-oriented than I would be appreciated.

News posts are posted/distributed all around the city for people to have access to? Would explain the scribes. You may have written the original by your hand, but you didn't make the hundreds of copies necessary for distribution? That's how its thought of in some other muds.

Doesn't work so well when you can access it anywhere. It seems more like you physically write it, and then it's like posting it online-- anyone can read it over the aethers.

Also wouldn't work with communes. I doubt we nail things to our trees. Also, with all the news posts, the walls would get much too crowded.

Also, what Xenthos said.

I personally find the "damn scribe" excuse to be pretty dumb, particularly with everyone seeming to have a fixation on beating up a scribe for doing a poor job when that's likely to make their handwriting even worse... but it's not important enough to raise a fuss over.

I dunno, I quite like "the scribe" as the Lusternian equivalent of "the tooth fairy" or "those damn fairies stole my shoes again."

I actually RP Arix as being unable to write Common in a legible manner, and having to rely on scribes for anything in the news. It's funny too, because ever since I accidentally encrypted the newbie journal, it's completely unreadable to anyone including Arix

Can't speak for Glomdoring, but...

...looks like they are, indeed, very crowded.

Maybe, in Lusternian IC mentality 'the scribe' is kinda like Murphy. Not the Lusternia Murphy, the Murphy's Law Murphy. You know, the saying that Murphy's Law states that if anything can go wrong it will? I know Murphy's Law is fairly common where I've grown up and lived, and whenever something goes wrong, folks will say "Damn Murphy" as a way of acknowledging that something went wrong and kind of trying to distance themselves from it - even if only metaphorically.

Or maybe that's just how I see it and everyone's reading this going, WTF?

Noola's logic has convinced me to blame Lusternia's Murphy for all things.

You know, I always kinda wondered if Murphy picked his name based on the Murphy's Law saying. But I don't even know if Murphy's Law is as common a thing in Australia as it is in the US.

He posted once that he picked it because he wanted a name that sounded like just a regular guy you might have a beer with.