"Just like old times! Well, except for the torture and all."
---Imoen

Wherein Regina wins the Internet.

click me!

Also this, which may explain some things to some people. Maybe not.

The X-ray rabbit picture at the top there would like to extend an appropriately X-ray rabbitish gesture to our younger readers. What exactly said gesture is, we're not sure. We're working on it.

Wherein the non-MUD types, which I realize is most of you, flee in terror. However, I realized something the other day. I've been doing this, more or less, for about ten years this week. A long time ago, on a MUD far, far away, a certain dwarven warrior, who we shall call Dwip, began randomly jumping through portals in GD. Of the ones I remember, I definitely got killed by sahuagin in sea elves (an area where you take groups of level 50s) at least twice, drowned to death (probably in sea elves) at least once, and for the longest time thought the Gypsy encampment was next to Gwynned Dyr (it's on the other side of the world). Those were the days.

A won't bore you all with the full recitation, because I did it all already here, but among other things, this means I've known Samson for 10 years, Cam for 10 years, and Whir for 10 years very shortly now. I'm pretty sure that makes them my oldest friends outside of maybe Cole, and Jason, who I've known for more like 20 years (which in and of itself is somewhat mind-boggling).

So let's instead bore you with a few of the things I referenced in that last post, such as, for instance, our sense of humor. Which as I was telling Samson just now, is along the lines of "Seriously, guys? You'd be absolutely astonished at the shit you can come up with at 3am with too much caffeine. Astonished."

Because, yes, I WAS that guy who spent his entire senior year in HS sleeping 4 hours a night, going to school, napping for an hour, then doing MUD stuff the rest of the time.

1. This, I think, sums everything I wanted to talk about up quite nicely:

Samson's Moongate Chamber Vnum 1203
[Exits: North East South->(Closed) West Down->(Closed) Somewhere]

*snip room desc, which is a marvel of textual design, with plenty of lookable items and such, but not what we're here to see*

(Invis 101) Samson the Supreme Iguanadon [The Cartographers' Guild] is here before you.
(Translucent) Krusty is sitting here.
(PROTO) A straw effigy of the implementor shambles around, waiting to die
A giant rabbit is here, dressed in a superhero costume.
SuperRabbit glows with an aura of divine radiance.
SuperRabbit is engulfed within a blaze of mystical flame.
A Squirrel Alien is sitting here.
Dwip's Pet Rabbit is sitting here.
Dwip's Pet Rabbit shimmers beneath an aura of dark energy.
A Lesbian Puking Sheep is sitting here.

Samson says 'We are truly sick.'
You say 'I blame Cam.'
Samson says 'Yes. It's all Cam's fault.'

Where do we start, here. The Cartographer's Guild has been well-established, I think. Wherein Shard's areas were mapped, adventures were had, and we became some of the most famous people on all of Shard, and probably some of the richest. Definitely we knew things about lots of areas that almost nobody else did.

Krusty was Samson's pet iguana, who is since deceased (hence the translucence). This partially explains the Supreme Iguanadon thing, too, but we'll come back there.

The implementor effigy is the infamous 666 effigy, named because its vnum (a sort of serial number, if you will) is 666. We used to slay it a lot back in the day, because you couldn't use the slay command on people who were higher level than you, meaning Samson couldn't be slain. We had a lot of slay wars back in the day. And some assassinate wars, because it got changed so you couldn't slay people of your own level, either. Which is why I have a Zmud trigger in the form of (Pattern: Whir wields) (Value: assassinate whir), which would repeatedly slay Whir every time he died, teleported back to the room, got his corpse, and wore his stuff. I'm a real bastard sometimes like that.

What does a slay look like, you ask? Well, there are a few ways:

        diediediediediediediediediediediedie
                 die         die
                die          die
               diediediedie  die
              die       die  die        die
             die       die   die       die
            die       die    die      die
           die die die       die    die
          die    die         die  die
               die           diedie      die
            die              die     die  die
         die              diedie          die
      die               die   die         die
                     die       diediediedie
 
               (The deed is done.)

Peanut screams furiously as he falls to the ground in a heap!

And

You wave your hands, and before you appears a large battlemech.
You climb calmly inside, as An Effigy of Samson watches in disbelief.
Seconds after activating it, you vaporize it with a PPC blast!

An Effigy of Samson screams furiously as it falls to the ground in a heap!

And about 20 others besides.

SuperRabbit is of, oh, late 1996 or early 1997 vintage, by which time Samson and I were running the Kingdom of Graecia to our heart's content, having ousted all rivals to our claims (in an early, successful attempt at world domination) I'm not really sure how I got associated with rabbits at this late date, but there we are. Also note my Pet Rabbit mob there.

The invention of the squirrel aliens and the lesbian puking sheep are both Cam's fault, though I suppose I ought to take credit for releasing the squirrel aliens into the wild.

And why squirrel aliens, you ask? What are iguanadons? Because when you're bored, and it's 3am, you invent animal-themed spacefaring creatures, and have them fight intergalactic battles with each other in your collective imaginations. Which is, I should note, where the Negative Magnetic Space Wedgy comes from. Who I can't really describe, save for its being the ultimate embodiment of evil in the universe, and something we spent way too much time toying with. Note the following prog:

>act_prog p has sent a swirling vortex to transport you.
if name($n) == Gormican
chat Insolent pixie bug! For that you shall pay!
mpat gormican mpslay gormican

We had this thing about exploiting the pixies, see. We did those sorts of things, then. As well as, you know, assassinate and slay each other at random. Every so often we did actual work, which back in the day was pretty arduous, involving writing a bunch of text formatted to 80 columns, plus a bunch of numbers that you made by adding a bunch of numbers like 65536 and 2097152 together, and then adding a bunch of tildes and the like. If you did any of this wrong, at best your room or whatever was messed up. Forget a tilde (and there were many), you crashed the entire MUD. Sometimes crashed it dead.

Imagine doing a hundred plus rooms, twenty or thirty mobs, and as many objects. By hand. If it sounds like it sucked, it did (and yet I could somehow write areas that way in a day and not have them crash anyway). When we saw our first OLC/editor system to make the MUD format things for us? We couldn't believe it. Could not believe it.

We DID walk uphill both ways to school, and you youngsters better realize how easy you have it with your fancy graphical editors.

Which brings us, finally, to world domination. If you said something and mispelled something? You lost it, and everyone would tell you about it.

We all lost it. Repeatedly. You may interpert that as you like.

Wherein I come home last night, and have the following conversation with Mom:

Mom: So, how're you feeling?

Me: Really sore. My hand cramped up for a couple hours, and it really sucked.

Mom: At this point, some people would say "Welcome to the real world."

Me: *rather painfully looks up* Say that again and die. Besides, when's the last time you were standing 10 hour shifts, anyway?

Mom: Yeah, well, I put in my years.

Me: Uh, no, really.

Mom: Well, I didn't _stand_ 10 hour shifts, exactly...

Me: Trust me when I say being able to sit down makes all the difference here.

Because, well, it really does. Leg pain for the lose.

So if you meet me, have some courtesy
have some sympathy, and some taste
use all your well-learned politesse
or squirrel aliens will lay your soul to waste

There will be non-work bloggage at a somewhat later date. But not yet.

Conversations around the household today:

*Morning, as Mom leaves for a day in Eugene*

Mom: So, what are you doing today?

Me: As little as humanly possible.

Mom: I see.

*Evening, as Mom returns*

Mom: So, what did you do today?

Me: I played video games ALL DAY. Later, I will play video games ALL NIGHT.

Mom: So you didn't do anything productive today?

Me: Well, I totally saved Tatooine. I'm about to save some Wookies, too.

Mom: I see.

*Dad enters*

Dad: So, did anybody call?

Mom: Nope, no messages.

Dad: Good.

Mom: Tell me about it.

*a short pause*

Mom: That made us sound really anti-social, didn't it?

I got I got the skills, as it were.

Whir can now be placated with a Beastie Boys ref after the Counting Crows song quote.

Or I could bust out Mom's N'Sync CD and watch his ears bleed. However, since that would make MY ears bleed...no.

Anyway. Let us begin with a picture.

This is not, I assure you, the sort of New Year's resolution I intended. But that new job I mentioned requires it for the respirator mask, so there you go. It feels decidedly odd, yet strangely familiar.

I wish I could show you a picture of said respirator mask, because, as the guy sitting next to me in orientation said, "Hey, now we get to look like Darth Vader." I don't think I get to take it home, though, so.

So what am I doing, anyway? Working at Country Coach. They make RVs. Nice ones. Me? I sand cabinet doors. Many of them. From 6:55 in the morning to 5:25 at night, I sand doors. And putty them. We sand more before 9am than most people sand all day, as it were, leaving aside that most people don't sand anything at all, let alone before 9am.

This is more complicated than you might think. There are steps:

1. Doors, already assembled, arrive to us.
2. Various cracks, nail holes, etc are filled with the appropriate colored putty.
3. Somebody hits it with a little sander across the surface.
4. Somebody else (not me), hits it with a little sander around the edges.
5. Somebody (usually me), hits it with a big sander over the surfaces.
6. Doors are then stained and released into the wild.

We did, I dunno, 2 RVs worth of cabinet doors today, which is up from yesterday, since I'm getting better (I can't putty for shit). We'll probably get 2 and maybe 3 done tomorrow if we're awesome. I will then arrive home at around 6-6:30 more sore than exhausted, though I somehow managed my first day on a whopping 2 hours of sleep. Monday through Thursday, week after week. At $10/hour. This is all surprisingly ok, especially since you're generally far too busy paying attention to detail to actually be bored or anything. But it only leaves me like 3 hours at night to Civ, which is bad.

And now I had best go, before Whir hurts me.