I did a poll a while back asking what I should write about. Surprisingly "my old boomer times" won by a large margin. So I present you with a history of MUDs, the thinking man's multiplayer game.

Telnet

Back in the 1800s (yes, that's how far back I'm going) Americans invented all kinds of awesome things: telephones, machine guns, movie cameras, record players. Two of these devices, the typewriter and the telegraph, were combined into something even more powerful. The keyboard of one typewriter sent electrical signals to control a typewriter at a distant location. This was known as teletype. It's how big organizations like militaries and multinational corporations sent data for about a century.

Teletype Model 33.

Eventually Americans invented even more cool stuff like mainframe computers capable of doing time sharing. This meant they could respond almost instantly. You could connect a teletype to the computer but that was suboptimal as the teletype couldn't print as fast as the computer could think. So the printer was replaced with a video screen, and now you had a dumb terminal. It could show text on a screen and accept text input but that was about it. These came into use in the 1970s among big organizations that could afford to pay for the luxury.

A DEC VT100 terminal. This is the standard terminal that's emulated in software.

Another revolution quickly followed in the 1980s with microcomputers, little computers so cheap that an individual person could own one. These were not very powerful at first but they were smart enough to pretend they were a dumb terminal and connect to mainframe. It's a computer emulating a terminal emulating a teletype.

Telnet being used for something more serious.

Why waste your time with this history lesson? It's important to understand the environment we're dealing with here. The Telnet protocol that you use to connect to a MUD is all about text. The technical details of how it gets from one place to another are more advanced, but in the end it's just alphanumeric characters going in and out like a machine from the 1800s.

Gaymers Rise Up

As universities got mainframes capable of time sharing, computer games soon followed. Among the most revolutionary was 1976's Colossal Cave Adventure. The player explores a cave system made up of a network of rooms. Each room has a text description and it can have items in it for the player to pick up. The player gives commands by simply typing in what they want to do. Many more games following this formula followed and the text adventure genre was born.

Don't get eaten by a grue.

Zork was among the most popular of these new games. Some nerd at the University of Essex loved to play a version of it called Dungeon. In 1978 he decided to make a multiplayer game based on it, which he naturally called Multi User Dungeon, and the MUD was born. In 1980 the university was connected to the internet, exposing MUD to the whole world.

UNIX Nerds Emerge

The roots of the MUD genre were now firmly planted but it would be many years before it bloomed. There were a number of technical obstacles which made it prohibitively expensive for all but a lucky few to play MUDs. The internet was only available at a few dozen universities and major computer companies, most of which frowned on using it for monkey business like playing games. By the late 1980s there were several MUDs running on commercial networks like CompuServe and AOL but these charged obscene amounts for connection time. Microcomputers like the PC became available but were still far too expensive for an ordinary family to get just to play games. A modem had to be purchased separately and these were incredibly slow and expensive as well.

Remember how to calculate your THAC0.

Despite these challenges, the 1980s saw great progress. A new nerd monoculture was sprouting in America and Europe, one that would prove to be fertile ground for the emergence of MUDs. The UNIX operating system and C language were taking over university computer science programs replacing a hodgepodge of weird proprietary systems. This made it much easier to share code, which would be crucial in the golden age of MUDs. There was compatibility in culture as well. Every nerd liked The Lord of the Rings and Dungeons and Dragons.

Explosion

Ultimately MUDs would explode in popularity not because of some revolutionary idea from a creative genius but simply because computers got better and cheaper over the years. By 1995 you could get a Windows PC with a modem for a reasonable price. The fiber optic backbone of the internet was laid and in the early 1990s the government allowed it to be used for commercial purposes. University computers became powerful enough that running a MUD wasn't too big a drain on resources.

Around 1990 a few free (as in Richard Stallman eating something off his foot and calling it "GNU") MUDs appear. Most MUDs in the future are descendants of these, especially the enormously influential DikuMUD. However there are also all kinds of MUDs with their own unique codebase, some of them quite bizarre like one based on LISP. The most enduring are true labors of love, often based in a university computer science department and passed down from one class of students to the next.

A map of the city of Midgaard. DikuMUDs generally kept the same layout.

Some MUDs were for roleplaying. You were expected to stay in character pretending you were an elf or a Romulan or something. As shameful and embarrassing as it was to engage in this type of behavior, it had a charm. You were essentially cooperating with the other players to write a story in real time. If nothing else, you could learn how to write quickly under time pressure. Some of these artsy-fartsy type MUDs let you create your own areas and even program them. It was kind of like Second Life except without graphics or Bardfinn. With no graphics and such a simple user interface it was easy to add whatever gameplay mechanics you could think of.

But most were simple hack and slash affairs. You go out to an area appropriate for your level, preferably in a group, and hunt for mobs. When you find one you type something like "kill orc" and enter combat, taking turns attacking each other. Occasionally you "kick" or "cast magic missile" or whatever your class' special power is. When you kill it you get xp, gold, and maybe equipment. This should sound very familiar to you. MUDs were inspired by D&D and in turn became the basis of MMOs. EverQuest, the first MMO to achieve mainstream success, ripped off DikuMUD to a large extent.

Legacy

The golden age of MUDs lasted until around 2000. During this period they were really the only game in town. There were multiplayer FPSs and RTSs but nothing that gave you a similar experience. On a 56k modem it took a few seconds just to download a jpeg. Internet connections were much less stable, frequently cutting out for a second or two. So text still made sense as the medium for a multiplayer game.

Then MMOs arrived like Spanish conquistadors, bringing ruin for our civilization. Better PCs and better communications technology like DSL finally allowed the dream of a "graphical MUD" to come true. These were the shiny new thing. Why read walls of text written by some random 20 Finnish nerd boy when you could be looking at 3D graphics instead? If you had any normie friends they would be playing WoW, not words words words. Of course some MUDs have survived and are still thriving today, but the age when there were a thousand running at a time with all kinds of creative new ideas is over.

You can't compete with graphics like this.

So why do I lament the passing of this era? Is it just nostalgia for a time when ska ruled and action movies had real stunts? No. It's more. That was a time when we were free. Free to express yourself. Free to make your own world. Free to implement any crazy gameplay system you wanted. Free to be a Romulan. Jolan 'tru, dramanauts.

23 year old

Mother pays for (inclusive, not exclusive) -

• 1200 a month rent? Lease ends in April

  • "Everybody has rent. Rent sucks" timestamp

• Lyft rides to the golf course and everywhere else

Caddy Jobs -

• He thinks 3000 a month once things pick up from talking to the other caddies, brought in 400 last month

  • Wait no actually he's leaving in 3 months

• Likes being a caddy?

Caleb's shilling BetterHelp now

Muh mentals

• Claims "really bad ADHD" makes 9 to 5 impossible timestamp

  • Has been going to therapy for "a while" (10 years), gone through 4-5 different medications

Education

• for college will be moving to NYC

• wants to do a year of Community College to raise his GPA, he's not sure how much he can raise it

• Way too far away to commute to the golf course

• College for Cyber Security

  • I couldn't handle working with this fricker lmfao

  • "I think that being red team on a Cyber Security job would be fun"

• "Certified with Cyber Security" through Google career cert

  • has applied to over a hundred jobs, not a single interview

    • Later clarifies that he applied for about a week and then gave up, this might be a different application spree but I'm not sure timestamp

  • Resume is shit and has no idea how to make one

• "High school was really really rough for me... I effectively tested out of high school"

  • Went to college for a couple years and "fizzled out" with covid, later clarifies that he "tanked out of college"

• "I had a bit of a stint of I don't want to go back to school because I'll make my own way and blah blah blah Internet redpill stuff"

  • "As much as this is possible I've been failing with consistency so hard that I need to go back to school"

"Do you follow pro golf at all?" timestamp

• "If you look up a couple people like [name] and [name] they come out to that club"

• Looking to get a scholarship for gaming "esports"

  • "I am a very high level g*mer, I play Overwatch" timestamp

  • Caleb slaps him down, this guy was third best in some game he shared and he copes massively for the next few minutes about how stats aren't everything

  • ranked 41 in America "multiple times"

    • Currently "somewhere in the top 500" he thinks 220

  • If he manages it this would be close to a full ride

  • He pays for a pro Overwatch coach - $35 a session? Only one so far?

    • Coach works at a school that he might want to go to?

  • He streams his Overwatch (sometimes)

  • His girlfriend took the PC during a rough patch

"What if I just don't feel like getting a job right now?" timestamp

Finances:

• Near irrelevant since his mother is basically paying for things? I'm confused about this because I don't think he admits this but the 1200 a month has to be coming from somewhere

  • Later details on the mother timestamp

• Tries to explain why he's spending so much on his stupid shit timestamp

  • More justification about how tough it is and how expensive things are listening to this subhuman talk about a mom-funded Lyft trip to the store is actually making me mad

• His card is interest free right now but will be 35% interest in 2025, he's not even paying it off lmfao

"You either lied before or you're lying now, choose which one" timestamp

Video Link -

• Married at 22, divorcing at 23

• He can't stop spending, he doesn't help with the finances timestamp

• Why a divorce? timestamp

  • Went to therapy, decided they weren't compatible

  • Soy keeps talking about "trauma" while based wife talks facts and cold analysis

  • "He's a crier and I'm not"

  • "It happens so often that instead of consoling him I roll my eyes, here we go again"

    • She's perfect bros

• Wife wanted to come on the show

Finances:

• Three bedroom house with a roommate

  • Will continue living together post-divorce, different rooms

  • "What about dating other people won't it get awkward and stuff?" timestamp

    • "That... I'm probably not gonna get into that until later until I actually get out of therapy personally"

  • Just moved into that house, decided to divorce slightly after the move

  • a year left on the lease

• "He could probably burst into tears at any moment" timestamp

• Scores

  • She says 0/10, he thinks 3/10

• He's cut off his mother because she's "narcissistic" timestamp

• Spending

  • Tiktok marketplace timestamp

• Card 1 ($6969) timestamp

  • 410 minimum payment

  • She didn't know about this card until after marriage

  • 171 interest, 250 in new purchases

  • lot of useless shit on here

• Card 2 (3'233) timestamp

  • 3'200 limit

  • Over the limit at the time of the statement, made payments since?

  • "After I gave him my emergency fund to buy his new car I then had to go fix my car which was $2'500"

    • Stick insect freak didn't have an emergency fund of his own

  • Had to replace the "arms" on all four of her tires

  • Gym membership that neither doesn't uses

  • Gollum takes pot shots at her from behind Caleb during this segment, little freak sitting there all smug

• New Car (16'207) timestamp

  • 6ish percent interest

  • $326 minimum payment

  • 2022 Chevy Spark

  • The Freak tries to explain his financial reasoning and upbringing, I don't understand it because he doesn't understand it. It's a inhuman thing trying to masquerade as one of us.

  • His father cosigned for it

• She has a Chevy Trailblazer 2006, no debt on it

  • 230k miles?

  • [Midge tries to gloat calling the van a shitheap] "He thinks he knows a lot about cars"

• She nearly beaned him with a box when he started questioning if she really loved him timestamp

  • He deserved it. NTA. This woman is a queen.

• Checking account deets timestamp

  • The creature tries to speak and is immediately slapped back into into reality

Some Loans

• 1200 - to family friend

  • Friend owns a furniture store, no minimum monthly

  • She wants to keep the bed but is open to selling it to him

• 800 - to father in law

  • His father in law, bills from old apartment?

• 5000 - to parents for wedding

  • This was a gift but she feels obligated to pay them back since they are divorcing so soon

• 1900 - financing an appliance

Spending Graph - timestamp

Careers:

• He's a front desk guy at a hospital timestamp

  • The dynamic here is really interesting, she's got a better idea of his income than he does

  • Just started full time, part time for the last year, 1400 then, around $16.00 an hour now?

• She also has the same desk job kind of thing, I assume paid the same?

• He is trying to start a graphics art design thing?

  • Both went to school for graphic design

This is a topic dear to me, and one I struggle to write about. For years I identified as asexual. To this day, I am still trying to make sense of why I did so, and what my feelings were at the time. It was not a farce - I genuinely believed I lacked any source of sexual attraction.

I think part of it is just having a low libido. That is to say, my interest in s*x is low, but not non-existent. Secondly, Being asexual is the less painful route. To be a heterosexual male is to expose yourself to a world of rejection and of finding common ground with women. I don't think most women understand how terrifying they are, and how crippling the thought of talking to them is. It feels like a life or death situation, especially if you have social anxiety to top things off.

Lastly, I do believe that sexuality is fluid and can change over one's lifetime. I think some may disagree with me on this one. What I am arguing is that, for example, a lesbian woman might find herself developing an attraction to men in her thirties, either due to changing neurochemistry or improved self-knowledge. For others, it may be a case of sexuality influenced by trauma which, once overcome, reveals a different sexuality.

Might environment play a role? We've all heard of the concept of being prison gay? Personally, I don't believe that environment plays a significant role in sexuality, at least not outside of the womb. I think youngsters might try on different sexualities in their teens and twenties, but this does not represent their true biological sexuality. For example, a woman might experiment with another woman during her first year of university because she's in an environment where the LGBT kids seem to be the cool ones, but she never experiences true sexual attraction to women. Remember, actions are not the same as attraction.

With that out the way, I think we can begin this discussion. It's going to be a long one, but when have my posts ever been short?

What is asexuality?

One of the earliest mentions of the term “asexual” can be found in Lisa Orlandos's Asexual Manifesto written in 1972. This is a feminist text in which women declare that they want relationships in which s*x is not a factor. As the text explains:

Consequently, the feminist roots of the sexuality cannot be denied. Though the sexuality may have existed before 1972, the way we understand it today is almost entirely forged by feminist discourse and of course the concept of "political asexuality" where one chooses to be asexual. This concept sits alongside "political lesbianism". I reject both concepts and assert that one cannot choose their sexuality and that reducing sexuality to the theoretical political realm is to foolishly ignore the material biological realm.

Asexuality is not celibacy. One chooses to be celibate but one does not choose to be asexual and therefore is essentially asexual. Of course, as I did, one can mistakenly believe they are asexual. This is also true of women who are unable to engage in penetrative heterosexual s*x due to chronic pain, and of disabled people.

In many ways, asexuality shares commonalities with the various members of the LGBT community. Roughly 1.05% of the population claim they have never felt sexual attraction to anyone at all. Some, though not all, studies suggest that more women than men are asexual.

So Are Asexuals Sick?

When research was done, it was found that asexual men had higher rates of mood disorders than heterosexual men; asexual women and men had higher rates of anxiety than heterosexual men and women. These researchers also provided evidence suggesting that asexuality can be conceptualized as or akin to Schizoid personality type from the Diagnostic Statistical Manual, 4th Edition (DSM-IV). Specifically, asexual people endorsed greater social inhibition, and coldness/social distance with vindictive and exploitable personality styles. To explain this finding, researchers postulate that asexual people have avoidant attachment styles as children that may have led to relationship issues as adults.

Thus, researchers concluded that asexuality may not be the cause of these factors but may be a product of social functioning. Specifically, “increased mental health problems may be a consequence of discrimination or a consequence of lacking sexual attraction in an environment that is arguably centered on sexuality”. Taken together, these studies demonstrate that asexual individuals may also experience psychological distress as a consequence of their marginalization.

It has been suggested that those who lack sexual attraction but have yet to find community may experience more isolation, distress, and confusion. In other words, individuals who have yet to “come out” as asexual, may be in greater distress than those who have reached an integrated asexual identity.

With that being said, Several papers have shown connections between the presence of the asexual phenotype and traits that are found in mental illness patients, specifically those with Asperger's syndrome or Schizoid personality disorder.

The Sexual Assumption

I know those who dare to even open this post will already be sneeding, ready to assert that asexuality isn't real. This is something asexual people are used to. It is known as the sexual assumption. Humans are considered to be creatures with innate sexual desires. Consequently, one of the most pervasive social assumptions is that all humans have sexual desires. This sexual assumption manifests in various fields of knowledge such as psychology and medicine where sexuality is seen as a natural, healthy, and essential aspect of the human. Tell your doctor you're asexual, they'll probably think you're sick. The same goes for your psychiatrist. One of the people you can blame for this is Sigmund Freud who had a huge influence on psychology but assigned a sexual basis to basically every aspect of human psychology.

According to research, these are the common assumptions about asexuals:

individuals who identify as asexual cannot fall in love, do not have s*x, have been the victim of sexual abuse, have chosen to be celibate or abstinent, are not attracted to anyone, just need to find the right person, are sociopaths or nonfeeling, are sexually deviant, are sexually frustrated, are denying their feelings, do not masturbate, do not enjoy any sexual activity, will be/live single/alone forever, or that the asexual orientation is just not real

The consequences of this should not be ignored or taken. Research by Cara MacInnes et al reveals that “sexual desire is considered a key component of human nature, and those lacking it are viewed as relatively deficient, less human, and disliked”. In a questionnaire distributed among undergraduate students, “asexuals were attributed significantly lower uniquely human traits than any other sexual orientation group”. Yes, if you're asexual, you're seen as less human than others.

Thanks to folks like Freud, furthermore, asexuality is often pathologized and seen as a detrimental deviation from a normative mode of being which can cause mental health issues. Some asexuals are led to believe they are sick and have hypoactive sexual desire disorder.

As I'm sure you know, underlying the sexual assumption is the concept of compulsory heterosexuality. Compulsory heterosexuality can be defined as the assumption that heterosexuality is the default sexuality. This idea permeates society due to the manifold ways it is enforced both subtly and overtly. The assumption that all people are innately heterosexual is fraught with problems as it results in all other sexual orientations being erased, pathologized, or seen as deviancies which must be corrected.

In the next few sections, we'll have a look at whether asexuals are discriminated against. Is anyone being oppressed for not fricking?!

The Weirdness of Asexuality

I would argue that asexuality challenges society's construction of humans as inherently sexual and hence can be thought of as anarchic. While asexual marriages have never been specifically outlawed, definitions of marriage typically assume sexual activity between spouses. In some US states, for example, nonconsummation of a marriage is a ground for voiding the marriage. Fortunately, it has never been illegal to have asexual inclinations. Thus, while asexuals may face problems in their personal lives, they have never had to counter any legally enforced oppression.

Similar religious prohibitions of asexual marriage can be found in faith systems such as Christianity where, in 1 Corinthians 7, it is written that “each man should have sexual relations with his own wife, and each woman with her own husband”. The verse goes on to instruct married couples to only abstain temporarily, and for the sake of prayer, after which they should return to their marriage duties lest they be tempted by Satan.

Such laws and religious doctrines assume sexual activity as an integral part of marriage and consequently make asexual marriages anarchic.

The anarchic qualities of asexuality are not limited to State laws and their religious appendages, however. Broadly speaking, anarchy can be defined as a movement that attempts to, as Noam Chomsky writes, “dismantle […] forms of authority and oppression”. One of the forms of oppression anarchy hopes to dismantle is representation. While many view anarchism as a movement that opposes the representation of democracy, as Cohn explains, “anarchism extends its opposition to ‘any form of representation'”. Asexuality, by defying the sexual assumption, has the potential to be an identity that opposes prevailing human representations.

So how does one wield this anarchic power? We can learn from Judith Butler. She tells a story of once walking the streets and having someone, in a derogatory tone, ask her if she's a lesbian. Butler's response? Why yes I am! Don't fear to embrace your uniqueness!

In a way, asexuals are the ultimate rebels. They refuse to create new life, or even to reproduce the social and cultural continuity in the form of a heterosexual monogamous marriage. By not producing future consumers and producers of economic goods, asexuals partake in social non-productivity and take economic advantage of the well-adjusted elements of society, and this is based in my books. Anyone still reading?

Asexuality and Race

I am a black man, which made it harder for me to identify as asexual. Historically, black men have been hypersexualized (think https://BLACKED.com), thus the asexual label is seen as incongruent. Associations of black males with hypersexuality can be traced back to early colonial discourse where blackness was associated with savagery and primitivity. Hence, the hypersexuality of the black male was simply another way of framing the black male as bestial, crude, and less civilized than the white colonisers. This strong association of black males with hypersexuality poses a problem for black males who are asexual, as it represents a contradiction. They are rendered illegible, as language has not created a non-contradictory means for such individuals to describe themselves.

Fortunately, as a 5 foot 1 male, I am seldom sexualized, so when I identified as asexual, it was not questioned all too much regardless of my race.

It should be noted that hypersexuality is inflicted upon all men to some degree. Hence, being an asexual male invites prejudice regardless of your race. masculinity and sexuality are so inextricably knotted together that when men face sexual problems such as erectile dysfunction, they see it as a loss of manhood. Consequently, asexuality in men is much more pathologized than in women. My research reveals that "identifying as asexual (or more precisely, their disinterest in attracting a sexual partner) meant they felt they did not have to conform to particular gendered standards of appearance". As a male who wears a LOT of pink and paints his nails, yes being asexual freed me of the notion of having to look masculine.

Asexuality and Media

As you can imagine, asexuality is seldom represented in our hypersexualized media landscape. Due to the limited awareness of asexuality, relatively few asexual characters can be found in literature and even less can be found which could be considered as examples of positive representation. The absence of positive asexual characters can have an alienating effect on those who identify as asexual and find themselves in a culture that promotes sexuality as a normal part of human existence.

AVEN

I'd like to end off by discussing AVEN. No, not the creator of this site. I'm talking about the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network which has been pivotal in the asexuality movement. There is currently underway a small social movement, perhaps akin to the gay rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which has brought together people who identify as asexual.

It was founded in 2001 by David Jay as a place for asexuals to interact, and for people to share resources regarding asexuality. AVEN facilitates not only asexual identities but also conveys the importance of ‘legitimizing' asexuality as a biological or innate characteristic, not as a choice like celibacy. For many asexual individuals, the internet has facilitated the discovery, not only of a language by which to describe themselves and a community that offers support and acceptance but also a way of thinking about their asexuality as an essential characteristic of themselves. No, this doesn't mean the internet is turning people ace.

According to David Jay, sexual people who identify as highly s*x-positive, after overcoming their initial skepticism about asexuality, often end up the strongest allies and supporters of asexuals, and those who are asexual find the site to be a place of solace.

Conclusion

I deeply miss being asexual. It was safe. Women weren't scary to me. Since dropping the label, I have felt this intense pressure to fulfill heterosexual obligations such as finding a partner and having s*x. However, as a truecel, it could be the case that it'll never happen. I heard my neighbors have s*x this evening. It felt like a gut punch.

I did try to tell a girl I like her but it failed. The worst part is that we're still friends and she constantly talks about the love we share for each other and how special our friendship is. It hurts so bad. I don't want to be your friend, I want to be your boyfriend. Why do women do this? You know I have a crush on you, I literally told you and you turned me down, yet you talk about how much you love me. Do you know what that does to my emotions?!

Anyway, that's all I wanted to say. Sorry for the longpost. It was either this or harm myself with something in the house. My thoughts aren't racing so much anymore and the self-harm compulsions have quietened a bit. I only slept for about an hour and a half. On Wednesday, my psychologist suspected I'm entering hypomania and it seems so. She said it's dangerous because it's followed by depression so I have to be careful and that it's exacerbated by a lack of sleep but I don't feel like I need sleep.

If you read this whole thing, I'm impressed.