/*** More exciting tales in the history of Wacko ***/
7/31/94 - (f) grover confirmed that Triton was the Newsleak. I assume he
told her. Turns out he was being interviewed for r.a.d, and
that he mentioned wacko, not knowing they were actually going
to put it in the article. I had figured out that it was him
(well, pretty darn sure. :P) due to the fact that a),
Newsweek couldn't have found those two areas w/o help, B)
triton's areas is one of the two mentioned, C) Triton was the
one reposting the article -with- permission, and he included
the author of the post, which wasn't in the actual magazine.
(not in a obvious way, that is)
(f) Kafka got on. Turns out I locked him out cuz he was Delphi.
I asked him to find out who I should mail about the mudlist,
and he shows me a room on the muck which is a 'Delphi welcome'
room. I start asking the owner of the room what the deal is,
kind of rudely at first, I guess, but with the usual valid
points that everyone is ignoring (should ask first, don't want
zillions of players, yadda yadda). He sees the point, and
explains that originally, it wasn't supposed to be > 10
people at once, and that it must have got out of control. He
removes us from the mudlist & advertising, and he's going to
fade into the background while he figures out a way to do this
mud thing without getting all the muds to sitelock out delphi.
(which would have happened, almost guaranteed). His login
name was Lupin, and he was actually a pretty nice guy.
8/ 3/94 - (f) 76 guests since last check.
Grand total since Newsweek: 259 guests,
53 new characters.
And, granted, most of them are newsweek people, but not all.
The rest are mostly Delphi people.
(f) Tink interviewed Den & I for her rec.arts magazine thing.
It covers rec.arts.disney, and theatre stuff. Tink showed
her boss the Newsweek article, he asked about us, and so
the interview. Den, Tink, one of Tink's Bosses (Olivia),
and I were all there. The interview was about oh, 3 hours
long. pretty nifty. Discussed a lot of mucking fundimentals,
why wacko is the way it is, etc, etc.
Some things we pointed out in the interview that haven't been
listed before:
The point of Wacko was for Den & I to have a place to play,
and to invite our friends to play too.
Wacko is like a party Den & I are throwing at our house.
anyone is invited, and bring your friends.
Wacko is also like a small park in a huge city. Nobody
really knows where it is. But we invite people,
and the trick is to see how many people we can
invite before we accidently invite someone who
decides it would be cool to set the park on fire and
ruin it for everyone.
08/06/94 - (p) Nothing interesting to report. (11:30 am CST)
08/08/94 - (f) Duh, why didnt I think of using 0s in the dates to be place
holders.
Okay, I'm boooored again. Of the 4384 objects, here is the
breakdown:
Top Ten:
Doc : 205 ch'od : 154 [*] : 111 Kafka : 99
Psychoferret : 163 Triton : 150 MG : 108 MikeLaga : 96
Munro : 157 Boobear : 138 WillowWind : 103
Rest of break down in the form of: [Number of objects = number of players]
61-70 = 3 41-50 = 7 21-30 = 14 8-10 = 11 3-4 = 25 1 = 55
51-60 = 6 31-40 = 4 11-20 = 19 5- 7 = 24 2 = 30 0 = 262
Remember, [*] never changes - globals, storage rooms, and the cone.
Can you say, 'sudden growth in players? I thought you could.'
08/12/94 - (f) New login screen:
This is the official Wacko
'I like 2400 baud' login screen
(connect guest guest)
08/22/94 - (p) I'm back from my extended leave. Nothing seems to
have happened. Yay.
8/23/94 - (f) Well, looks like our friends from NAILS are back. Some bozo
from er2.rutgers.edu logged on and made 6 charming characters
ranging from BIGBOY to byte-me. I toaded all 6, and locked
out character creation from rutgers.
08/31/94 - (p) looks like byte is moving red-branch tonight, so we're running
temporarily on mccdec1. I don't know, however, if frank or
francis managed to solve the dumping problem it was having on
that machine. Any hints?
09/05/94 - (f) yeah, byte edited the time() function so it wasn't out of whack.
we were on mccdec1 for about 2-3 days until red was back up and
at em.
09/12/94 - (f) Okay, I'm not happy. Someone discovered the Newsweek ad and
then posts to r.a.d asking about it. great. I respond. Then,
four days later he crossposts the post to rec.games.mud.misc!
didn't he even check r.a.d for responses? ARRRRRGGGGGH
09/22/94 - (f) check this out:
Thu Sep 22 17:15: ACCEPT: ic x . qi. g. (1801) on fd 9. --[780268544]
Thu Sep 22 17:15: CONNECTED: dexter(#4247PBH) from ic x . qi. g. on fd 9.
--[780268553]
neat, huh? zero idea what causes. that.
(f) Den & I have decided that Wacko is getting kinda stagnant and
that the cone is getting kinda old, so we're going to nuke the
db sometime and start over. We're taking some flak about it,
people who made a lot and are kinda hung up on their building,
but Wacko isn't really too great of a place to get hung up on
your building in the first place, so oh well.
It'll happen whenever we can think of a good thing to change
it to.
09/23/94 - (f) Byte fixed the problem that caused #91 to crash the muck on
a dime. (#91 - map-contents, used in @sweep). It had to do
with a bug in rotate.
Took him like, a whopping 2 minutes to fix it, gee.
10/ 3/94 - (f) We've got another clan. Tiamat-l. A group of people who want
to cast 'spells' or something in VR. Like faith healers, it's
weird. Anyway, they're here because they were getting bugged
on the original muck they were on. Anyway, it sort of annoys
me.
pali151@netcom.com
(f) I changed the code so that Audible objects are now Visible. So
you can see if someone has bugged their rooms. or your room.
10/03/94 - (p) After a long battle with 3 design projects, I'm back. I guess
the db changed. Neeto. I wish to appologize for not being
here, I think maybe I need to be more responsible. waaaah.
10/14/94 - (p) nothing to report.
10/16/94 - (f) I wrote the beginning of this login screen a while back, but
got stuck after the NAILS part, since nothing interesting had
happened since then. Then the other day I realized I could add
something about the disney clan, and so.....
Current login screen:
(Sung to the tune of 'The Beverly Hillbillies')
Well, listen to the story 'bout den and ch'od
had a wacko muck, were the wizards and the god
And then one way, when ch'od posted to the news,
up from the ground, came a babbling brood.
(NAILS, that is)
(crumb crushers)
(run, run, run.)
Well, the next thing you know, ch'od and den are getting killed
The muck is a wreck cuz they don't know how to build
But you know that NEWSWEEK is the place yer gonna be,
Courtesy of Disney and the wacky FDC
(Castles, that is)
(floatin' rooms)
(connect guest guest)
10/20/94 - (p) I got on to look at the happy.log but it was gone. I don't know
why, but it was gone. The happy.log~ was still around tho, so
this is based on that. I don't know if anything happened
between now and the 3rd of october.
10/26/94 - (p) blah blah blah, I blah and blah blah with the blah blah blah
Then there was blah blah blah, of course, I had to blah blah
so then blah blah blah blah blah blah blah spam blah blah.
11/01/94 - (p) I added a bit to sanity.c. Now it generates a listing of
statistics for properties. Use it the same, except it's
probably a good idea to do sanity < in.db > sanity.log
or you get a screenfull of object-by-object property listings.
actually that was just a test, but it seems pretty useful
to see which objects have the most properties.
Most are the 'Last object' and such, but a lot of people
seem to have 150-200 props due to mail. Mail itself had
something like 400+ and this is a less than 2000 object db.
Well.. anyway....
11/03/94 - (p) the russians are coming, the russians are coming.
11/04/94 - (f) We had our first russian login, I think. Timur. Yay.
8 hrs ahead of EST.
11/05/94 - (f) Well, it's been a while since I've posted. boo.
(f) I have officially given up trying to get Wacko back to a nice
little private type of place. It doesn't seem particularly
possible. I still ask new people how they got to Wacko, tho
cuz it's rather interesting.
I am a bit annoyed that this guy on twomoons MUSH that has
Wacko on his MUSHlist. What's up with that. I asked him to
take it off a few times, but he/she didn't. Now we are on the
MUSHlist Mosaic page (http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~lwl/muds.html
But, our listing is: Another silliness-based MUSH. No theme,
very few people. I don't think this'll be a problem.
(f) I just spend 8 hours manually coloring a black & white scan
of ch'od with xpaint. yee haw.
11/08/94 - (f) uh. I forgot.
(f) Oh ya, notice how many people run out of money, and then stuff
doesn't work? If you run out of money, .pmatch goes floosh
which scrunges up most globals. Usual complaints are about
mail and @last not working.
11/10/94 - (p) oops, did you work on that? I think it's fixable by adding
an easy, addpennies thing into .pmatch. or.. I dunno. whatever
doesn't really matter.
Anyway, the stats is at 1866, 352 players.
11/11/94 - (f) I turned off logging. I had it on because a few people were
being bothered by a few others. Some person called cincinnatus
from nwu.
- (f) Oh yeah, don't turn on score. byte removed it from the
Makefile, so if you add it in the 'commands' file, the muck
won't compile. I had to remove it.
11/12/94 - (f) Oh, great, now the 's' command doesn't work either. I'm using
the backup of the source I made a week ago or so. It's okay
now. Did something in the code get changed recently?
11/13/94 - (p) I had re-added score to the makefile so that it would work.
I didn't realize it interrupted the 's' for say, tho, it
wouldn't be much of a problem to change that around.
I ocassionally use the score command, instead of 'inv' or
examining myself, so I thought it would be nice to have.
11/14/94 - (p) Recompiling the fixed current. see VERSION in /archive/current
for details, however, suffice it to say that I've changed
'score' into 'money' for lack of a better word, and now
we're back to the exe that I was running before with all of
the other mods, including the @extract command. I guess
I forgot to write into the happy log what I had done. I put
it into the VERSION in /archive/current but forgot to write
in this log. OOPS, sorry for the confusion. 2:30am
- (f) I edited dexter's login thing on 5/whatever/94. It had a
tendency to totally screw up some text terminals. I put the
original in happy.dexter just for nostalgia. Btw, His login
did look like that, so it's not like made up or stuff.
11/15/94 - (f) I have 260 pages of AI reading to do, and I want to get it
DONE, so I'm not going to log back in until it's done. So
there. (time: 3:22 am)
11/17/94 - (p) 2:30am. Why did I just walk over to the computer lab at
this hour? I must be insane. Anyway, I'm in the midst of
finishing a lot of projects before t-day. Sooooo.. this
is sort of an explaination for my absence. I guess I'd just
like to throw in a 'hi frank, how're you' since I never see
you on when I do get on :) so... enough for now.
11/17/94 - (f) Okay, maybe not. :P Hey, I only got 95 pages left, so there.
(f) connect notifier is now global. has two options, hide your
own notifier, or do/don't recieve any.
(p) Wrote a 'whisper' interrupt so you can now whisper poses just
like page. Also upgraded 'think' slightly.
11/29/94 - (p) I didn't debug the whisper interrupt very well, so I
uninstalled it. yay. Ok, umm, I've been gone a while, and
it looks like I'll be gone a while longer, at least for
the next two weeks. Final projects exams etc.
12/02/94 - (p) Captain's log, stardate 3.1415926.. I have class in 15 minutes
Nothing interesting is happening. Whisper is re-installed.
now you can pose whispers. whee.
12/05/94 - (f) Life is okay, pretty much. I gotta go home 12/21 - 1/16.
Gonna be boooring.
(f) Had someone from the philipines on today. As far as off
continent goes, we've had: uk, russia, singapore, philipines,
can't remember where else. italy, I think. Not a big deal for
most mucks, but still interesting.
12/06/94 - (f) Ta da. Boy, is it hard to make new login screens, or what.
Maybe we should start repeating them.
Current login screen:
I'm sorry, the creative login s
creen department of Wacko, in
c has appeared to have gone
bankrupt. Any donations
should be mailed to ga
mesmgr@red-branch.mit
.edu. Please hurry,
there is barely e
nough creativit
y to make thi
s gratuitou
s triangl
e shape
d scr
ung
e
12.09.94 - (p) How do you like my new date thing? Doesn't matter, anyway
I'm donedonedonedone. I only have one final exam.. my bad
luck, it isn't until next friday. Oh well, no big deal,
plenty of time to study (waste) before (the night before)
I have to take (be taken by) my exam (scholarly torture).
12@10@94 - (f) Yay, is this the most annoying date symbol? maybe.
(f) I turned 22 today. yee.
12.11.94 - (f) ken had Jiro@Cavemuck's look program. It lets you look at
the description of an object someone else is carrying. I
made it a global as olook (objlook)
(f) I decided to split the history, so the first part is 50k. So
people don't have to download the entire 60k or however large
file if they just want to look at the last entry.
12.12.94 - (f) Yesterday, Arken told me he saw a ch'od action figure in a
department store, so I decided to go buy one. It looks like
they made figures for just about every x-men character in
existance. The ch'od figure has 'DOUBLE ARM HURLING ACTION!'
and, "furry familiar" sidekick, which is cr'reee. I can't
believe it has cr'reee. Unreal.
12.20.94 - (f) Current login screen:
Wacko Christmas to all,
and to all a good scrunge.
01.06.95 - (p) first entry of the new year.
whoopie.
I guess red-branch has been down for a few days because of
a power outage while byte was gone on vacation. I've been
travelling all over the place... I've landed in Boston at the
moment visiting the crew up here. Met Deimos, that was a lot
of fun. Anyway, I got on last night, after wacko had been
running for about 4 hours.... and we had something close to
10 people on. I couldn't belive it. It's been down for a
week and over vaction even, and BLAM-O, people pop on.
It will be a sad day when byte leaves and we are forced to
move/get rid of wacko. :(
- [f - backlog] Current login screen:
In the year of our world
nineteen hundred and ninety five
we, the wackos, who brought you
the Cone of Tragedy,
scrunge,
the 'wizardless muck',
confusion and endless DB changes,
new and exciting welcome screens, (cough cough)
10 MILLION DOLLARS,
(no, wait, that's Ed McMann and Dick Clark)
and countless other things that I can't think of....
PRESENTING........
the same wacko you saw before.
YAY!!! (CLAP CLAP CLAP *CHEEEER* *OTHER HAPPY SOUNDS*)
01.10.95 - (p) I added a new flag. OPEN is the new flag that is available
on ROOMS ONLY. It allows any BUILDER to open exits to and
from that room. It should be very useful in making links
available. I have not restricted it to WIZARD only because
otherwise we will end up with 'nexxus' rooms with like 10212
exits in them. Maybe this way we will get all the floaters
to link their rooms in.
01.10.95 - (p) I wrote a few nifty little programs to help clean up the db
a little bit.
#1414 move-things : moves all things in a room to a
pre-determined room #.
#2455 move-contents : moves all contents of a room to a
pre-determined room #. Good for clearing out
objects, players, rooms.
#2969 chown-contents : chowns the contents of a room. only
works on objects.. possibly rooms, I didn't try.
#3092 toad-contents : I think this is self explainatory.
Anyway, I did a little cleaning of room #0 and #100, moving
all the rooms in #0 to #168, and everything in #100 to #407
anything in #407 after say, a month, should be deleted.
then the process starts over again. It's really easy.
----
'open' flag seems to have caught on. 13 rooms so far that
people have set 'open' and a number of connections to the
3 rooms that I set 'open' near to room #121.
(f) [backlog] Current login screen :
Hi.
01.23.95 - (p) nothing new to report. trying to get rid of the status log
once a week, zipping the old log to be deleted one week later.
some sort of overlap-kinda-thing
01.26.95 - (p) blah
01-27-95 - (f) I seem to have not added anything in forever.
(f) Nails crashed, and they were using some sort of wrong db.
We only had a couple of bozos come over this time. Hoo hah
(f) Mikelaga had been telling me every now and then that the wacko
home page links to the history were messed up. I couldn't
figure out what was wrong, but it turns out, it works fine for
mosaic & netscape, but didn't work for lynx. weird.
(f) Current login screen:
Ingredients
-----------------------
Start with: Two wacky wizards
One unidentified tie fighter god thing
One SUN
Gradually blend in: A cup of clans
One fest
3 databases
9 servings of fruits and vegetables (yes, I counted)
37 different login screens
More caffeine and scrunge than you can shake a stick at
Add a pinch of people with annoying names to mess up spoofs
Serve with plenty of netlag.
Warning: May be hazardous to your time clock
(oh, and just for the curious, the 9 people are: Artichoke, avocado, banana,
Cumquat, Eggplant, Kiwi, mushroom, papaya, Rutabaga_man, zucchini)
01.29.95 - (p) nothing to say.
02.01.95 - (p) more nothing to say. I lied. Last night I went and cleaned
the gamesmgr archive directory a bit. things have now been
split between the source code ( /src ) and the old dbs that we
are saving ( /dbs ). THE-SECOND-DB.tar.gz is the db just
before this current one. I don't know what happened to the
first db. Apparently we are on #3 afterall. whee.
02.02.95 - (f) Things are getting out of hand. we have 27 people on at the
moment. Lotta real rugrats getting on too. Word of mouth is
spreading without discretion. We're going to turn off new
character creation at least until we drop to a regular crowd.
probably still make characters at request, depending.
02.07.95 - (f) I ignored the krungy factor.
02.13.95 - (f) Having registration is too annoying. I'm turning off player
create from carthage (198.51.130.*) but removing registration
otherwise.
02.14.95 - (f) Thank goodness for the occasional random shutdown. Den
accidentally @reced the mail object (#54), and just started up
another one. I re@shutdown, and reloaded the in.database,
which is only 25 hours old, since I was messing around
yesterday.
02.24.95 - (p) I'm tired.
02.26.95 - (p) see how tired I was, I'm 2 days behind. I wrote the wrong date.
02.27.95 - (p) Monday. I hate Monday.
02.28.95 - (p) Tuesday, 4:06am, boot bug struck again, had to restart. We only
lost about 10 minutes worth of fun, and it was just me and ken
mal and Raven on at the time anyway.
03.03.95 - (p) I have a cold, I feel awful.
03/06/95 - (f) New login screen:
Raaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar!
03.08.95 - (p) It's really just BUTT cold outside right now. Last night I
added new features to thinknet and re-wrote whisper so it
works correctly now. Isn't that GREAT?! yea well, you know.
03.11.95 - (p) spring break is upon us. Lets hope nothing crashes, because
neither of us will be around to fix it :)
03/13/95 - (f) Geesh, I haven't written in this thing for a while.
(f) I got back from break. Turned out to be shorter than planned
(I had planned on coming back around 3/20). I only had about
3284374932 pieces of mail to respond to.
(f) I decided to remove the !connect to *.tiac.net. Bubsy has
mailed and me asking to get on. Zapf was actually sly enough
to get on from some british site. (vampyre.foobar.co.uk). So,
what the heck.
03/19/95 - (f) There's been an annoying increase of objects that a) kill other
people, or b) teleport other people. @tel is, imho, way too
powerful (you can move a person if both rooms are J, regardless
of who owns the rooms? give me a break!). No real complaints
yet, tho. Wacko has never been to big on complaints ever,
though.
03/20/95 - (p) Going to probably go for !creation *.tiac.net instead. and ask
mr sabin to change his @odesc.
03/26/95 - (p) Everyone is alive. That's a good sign.
3/27/95 - (f) *sigh* maybe he shouldn't have put him. Divebomb, aka Joe
Podlucky was shot in the head outside of a bar in York, PA
in a botched robbery attempt. He hasn't been on wacko much
lately, but is one of the oldest, in terms of how long he has
been on Wacko. A very creative builder, and a nice guy. A
moment of silence.
04.09.95 - (p) just a note, I really didn't mean anything by the 3.26.95 entry
it just so happened that that phrase came into mind... and
I guess it's unfortunate that it coincided with the accidental
death of divebomb...
3/29/95 - (f) Blue M&Ms voted in at 12 million votes. Whee.
New login screen:
Yes, there are now blue M&Ms.
Wacko : it still doesn't melt in your hands.
4/ 1/95 - (f) Merlin made me a keen program that changes the description of
everything on the db to something else. I spent all day
changing the descs of everything to varying form of green, and
changed the login screen to:
Life is like a box of partially green stuff
04.09.95 - (p) it's cold outside again. I haven't written in here in a while.
so I thought I would pop a note about something here.
note: something
4/16/95 - (f) The Easter Ch'od gave out about 120 easter baskets today.
04.19.95 - (p) It's the 19th of April, and it's wednesday. ooh, scary
4/20/95 - (f) Took of the !creates for *.tiac.net, and for carthage. THere's
another !connect which I have no idea what it is.
4/21/95 - (f) New login screen:
Welcome to Wacko! The land where building is free (kinda),
the players are fun (usually), and nobody gets @toaded! (vroom)
Come see what all the hype on rec.games.mud.misc and Newsweek is all
about! See the amazing Tie Fighter god thing in action!
Amaze your friends!
Confuse random NAILS people!
Act now and get a completely lag free connection!
(Note: Lag free connection offer not valid for some states, time zones, or
for characters with ascii symbols in their names)
(Sub-note: Scientific study shows that hiding hidden messages in parenthesis
has not been proven to be effective. Not to mention, it's extremely cheesy).
5/17/95 - (f) Amazing what the end of year can do to you. I had two major
projects whick took me out of action for almost 3 weeks. Den
has been MIA for a while, probably due to the same reasons.
(f) I had decided to make a shirt of my own, since I wanted one, and
nobody else could decide on one. Just for me. I mentioned it
to Nothingness, who said he also wanted one. So I put it on
the motd, and I guess lots of people want one. People seem to
want 'wacko' written on it, tho, which I definitely do not.
So people are mailing me about it, and we'll see what happens.
(f) Check this out:
Wed May 17 05:10: PANIC: weird object: Typeof(8114) = 6 --[800701849]
Apparently Beldin went to link an exit. He typoed the db#,
and linked to *garbage*. The muck let him, then crashed.
It did Panic Dump. Very strange, and not reproducable.
6/ 4/95 - (f) Can you say,haven't touched the news in forever? I thought so.
The most annoying part is a lot of interesting things have
happened recently, all lost. boo hoo.
(f) Finally got tired of Maxaxam, and sitebanned his site. He
seems to have another site which he can get on from, tho.
If he can still get on regularly I doubt I'll do anything
unless I continue to get complaints. He still has a lot of
programs which we really shouldn't let him have,like remote
spoofers, and spam programs and such.
(f) There's been a slight resurgence in FDC Folk getting on here.
Not sure what the deal is - they've all switched names, too.
A good number of them have multiple characters. A huge
majority of them do that Clan thing, and hide in their private
rooms. I wonder if they're getting worried about command
logging on FDCMuck or something.
(f) Current login screen:
Wacko shirt design finalized! read 'news shirt'
This short login screen sponsored by the letters M and C
[Note: MC was asking me how to reduce the amount of spam he got when he logged
in]
(f) Done a lot of work the past couple of days on the Wacko shirt.
From news.txt:
______________________ ______________________
/ \ / \
/ \ / \
/ \ / ---------+ \
/ \ / |Wacko | \
/ \ / | | \
/ /| [*] |\ / / /| | | |\ /
\ / | | \ / \ / | | | | \ /
\ / | | \ / \ / | | | | \ /
\/ | | \/ \/ | |Made w/ | | \/
| (woot) | | |100% | |
| | | |pure yay| |
| | | +--------+ |
| | | |
+----------------+ +----------------+
Front: [*] will be larger, filling up most ofthe front w/o being ridiculous
hopefully 'woot' will be in glow in the dark. If not, it probably won't
be there at all
Back: The whole point is this is supposed to look like a soda/Coke can.
This is easier to understand if you have or check out a coke can,
putting the UPC symbol in the lower left corner
right side, (up the can, like 'Coca-cola' ) Wacko
To the left of the 'nutrition box': Please @Recycle
the middle of back:
Very Low Scrunge (Was: Very Low Sodium)
-------------
Nut Facts
Serv. Size 1 Can
Amount Per Serving
Colories: 6
% Daily Value*
Total Fun: 100%
Lag: ?
Caffeine: 50%
green: 20%
* Percent Daily Values are based on a 1,440 minute diet
(end box)
Made with 100% Pure yay
Canned under Authority of the Tie Fighter God Thing
And then the UPC code, which is 2 parts:
1) the bars, which will be the actual upc encode of '6003'
2) your personal db#
mail all comments/suggestions to ch'od. This shirt is pretty final. It still
maintains the total confusion aspect, and has 'wacko' on it, so you get the
best of both. However, good suggestions from many people have been added to
the shirt, so let me know if you think of something fun.
Note: The shirts are probably going to be made by a guy called Japhet.
He's thinking about mailing the screens to me so that I can
make more shirts later as needed.
(f) This is old news, too, but it doesn't seem to have an entry. I
had made a survey with the intention of giving it out on FDC
Muck. The survey was general enough, however, that since it
was 'rejected' for general distribution on FDCMuck, I decided
to give it out on this muck. The survey is as follows:
Howdy folks. Now, pay close attention. This is going to be an anonymous
survey, to let us, the wizards, know what you like or dislike. To submit your
entry, there are a few ways you can do it. If you like particular things a
lot, say so. If there are things you really don't like, then say so.
If you don't want to mail anonymous, that's fine. But nobody gets kudos for
being extra nice. In fact, the main purpose of this is to know if there is
something real bad we are doing. We would rather know, and fix it, and be a
more fun place to be.
Oh, and p.s. If you can think of any other characteristics that are important
in a muck, feel feel to mail those to ch'od or Den. This survey is not
intended to be muck specific.
Survey follows:
Part A) Rank the wizards on a scale of 1-10, 0 if you have no idea.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
In alphabetical order: ch'od, Den. For all those unaware, the other
wizard characters are incarnations of Den and/or I.
Questions to Rank:
Fairness:
Availiability (includes mail responding):
Willingness to help:
Muck aptitude; i.e. 10 = knows every bit and piece of MUF and the C source
code of the muck. 1 = Sometimes forgets the WHO command
Approachability: (would you come to this wiz if you had a problem)
What do you like about this wizard? (indicate most if you want to)
What do you dislike about this wizard? (indicate most if you want to)
To make things easier, fill in this handy chart:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Fill in a number from 1-10, 0 if no opinion:
ch'od Den
Fairness:
Availiblity:
will. 2 help:
Aptitude:
Approach:
Other comments (likes/dislikes) for: (use as many lines as you want - I have
big separation to the cut & paste at the end will be faster)
ch'od:
Den:
-------------------------- end of form part 1------------------
Part B) Do that comment thang (this basically covers everything else. Feel
free to answer just some or whatever).
--------------------------------
Do you think there are just enough, not enough, or too many wizards?
Liked/disliked rules?
Can you think of any rules that do not exist, which should?
What do you like/dislike about this muck (as a whole)?
If I could change something, I would change........
How do you like the Building structure and quality of the muck as a whole?
Any other Suggestions or comments?
Thank you for your support.
Oh, and p.s. If you can think of any other characteristics that are important
in a muck, feel feel to mail those to ch'od or Den. This survey is not
intended to be muck specific.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
The results of the survey are interesting. 3 of 6 responses were anonymous.
For the most part, they liked it here. Of the criticisms,
Not surprising: Den had a couple 5s on availibility
I had a couple of low scores in Aptitude (in fact,
one person ranked Den's availibility higher
than my aptitude! Waaah)
Lack of Centrality/structure in building
Surprising/Things to think about:
Almost all of them thought we could use another wizard.
Mostly for a 'in case neither Den or I are around'
situations.
6/16/95: (f) This is also slightly old news, but red-branch returned to the
Store. It's ip address changed, and about 5 days later, the
name server returned the ip address to red-branch.mit.edu, so
it's a transparent change for most folk.
06/27/95 - (p) ok, for some reason the muck was down when I got on today.
I think it might be that someone restarted red-branch or
something, because there was a PANIC db that would have arisen
if the machine was shutting down or something.
06/27/95 - (p) it's me again.. just wanted to mention, I've been working every
day for the last month or more, a job that has left me dead
tired at the end of the day. It is now, however, over and I
should be on more often, except for next week (6/30 - 7/10)
during which time I will be on vacation.. anyway.. that's it.
07/15/95 - (p) it's true, I'm not really dead, I do actually exist.
but the big question on my mind is... where's ch'od.. well,
anyway, I guess I'm on the other end of it now, all of the time
before, he would wonder where I went, and now I'm wondering
where he went to :)... looks like the foot's on the other hand
this time...
07.21.95 - (p) I made some changes in the server. Added a new flag.. GUARDIAN
so I can make some people to help out since I may not be around
as often as I like.. anyway, replaced the login screen, this
is what it was....
__ __ _____ _____ __ ___ _____
| |/\| |/ _ \/ \| |/ // \
| || _ || <--<| < | | |
\__/\__/ \_/ \_/\_____/|__|\__\\_____/
"where the fun is"
('outline' curtesy of Bubsy)
But now it's different. Anyway, nothing new seems to be going
on, so I guess that's it. Oh, wait, mccdec1 has been sold, so
everything on it had to be moved to red-branch, and
consequently, the homepage is in a shambles. I'm working on it.
07.27.95 - (p) Everyone misses ch'od. I do too.. ok.. it's hot out again..
the other day we crashed for no apparent reason, and the day
before that I managed to score the @dboot bug again, I locked
@dboot, and pretty much, I plan on not using it again. It's
really useful, but not worth the price of having to kill the
game process and start up again.. bleh.. I think I'm going to
pick someone to be a 'GUARDIAN' soon, I'll be gone from the
7-19 or so of august.. I don't really want to give other
people access to the gamesmgr account, so I'm going to have to
ask byte to watch out, and bring the game back up if it goes
down.. ok.. other than that.. nothing new to report.. trying to
get access to a scanner to make something new for the homepage.
08.02.95 - (p) Nothing to report.. heard that the log was garbage charcaters or
something like that... anyway.. must've been a local error,
since there doesn't seem to be anything wrong with the log.
08.03.95 - (p) Sometime early this morning, around 2am or so, we hit 10000
objects. I then proceeded to recycle a bunch of players
who had not logged in since 1994. I think they had plenty
of time to have gotten on by now. :)
- (p) Recompiled the server today to fix a problem with the MURKY
flag. Also changed the role of SILENT flag slightly and
some other changes. Nothing exciting.
08.20.95 - (p) I'm back from vacation. Nothingness seems to have run into
very few problems, except maybe bubsy, and someone from
ods.ods.net causing problems. And apparently, the game went
down on some thursday or another, I dunno which.
09.01.95 - (p) Something.
10.15.95 - (p) Nothing.
10.15.95 - (p) Addenda... I removed the survey from the homepage, because 1)
noone was responding to it, 2) I wasn't maintaining, 3) it
was a bit out of date. I'm out of date as well.. A lot of the
pictures transfered from MCCDEC1 were corrupted for some reson
or another, so... I deleted them, and I'm going to start anew
when I get the chance.. I'm going to have people send their
own scans to me.. joy. The login screen has said
Press Any Key to Begin
since the end of time. I'm now changing it.
[Editor's note (frank): I believe he changed it to: ]
It's Another
One of
those
crazy screens
that doesn't make
much sense but
it sure does
look kinda cool
especially if
you're looking at it all
crosseyed or maybe if
you have someone elses
glasses on
or like
looking through the
bottom of a glass
bottle or something
connect guest
guest
10.17.95 - (p) Blah blah, blah blahblahblahblahblahblahblahblahblhablhalbhab
12.01.95 - (p) Boy it's been a while.
01.29.96 - (p) Instituted repairs in /compile/compile.c to repair a bug in
the MUF compiler. Also adding a feature to
/builtins/examine.c to accept arguments so you can see
Basic, Attributes, Properties, Contents, and Exits on an
examine, if that is the only feature you want to see...
The interface is similar to @find = (flag) .. works like
examine me=B
10-06-96 - (f) Holy crow. Nine months? It's been ine months since we've
updated the happy.log?
(f) First things first: Here's the old loging screen:
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Have More Fun. Go Further. Do More with your computer at home. |
| |
| Try WACKO FREE!!!!!!!! NO RISK * NO MONEY * YOU JUDGE |
| |
| See for yourself how much more you can do with your computer at |
| home when you play WACKO. Return this card and get a character |
| to play - Free! |
| |
| If you like WACKO, save 58% and get 12 logins (your trial login) |
| plus 11 more) for $0.00. PLUS get a FREE woot! |
| If not, return the bill marked "@toad", keep the woot, and owe nothing! |
| |
| NAME (please type): Company: |
| ADDRESS: City/State/Zip: |
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
New Login Screen:
To prepare you student types for the up coming tests, We'd like to
bring you our very own test! Print this out and grab a pencil!
1) Who recently said, "I'm back." 2) Wacko Will:
w) ch'od a) Never be the same again
x) A "Kick me" sign b) Rename itself to 'Waco'
y) Back Rodgers c) Be a hot topic of the 96' debates
3) To Log on, type: 4) When in doubt.....:
a) connect guest guest j) Drink caffeine
b) connect(or create) k) Bug the wizards
c) All of the above l) Eat your Wheaties
5) Which of the following is a legal command:
n) strawberry Answers:
o) boisenberry +-----------------------+
p) blueberry | 1 2 3 4 5 |
| Welcome to |
+-----------------------+
10.22.96 - (p) foo.
10.28.96 - (f) Got 3 more e-mails compalints about blutvergiftung. I locked
the guy out already. been loads of complaints about this guy
in the past. He connected from 3 sites, and appears to be the
only guy connecting from these places.
(f) Another breakoff for a related topic:
It seems to me that Group leaders would be useful indeed.
The question is, how to choose them. In the past, attempts
to select representative leaders have been a complete and
utter failure. There have been two serious attempts, neither
of which are logged:
1) Player Council:
Concept: Have a group of players, selected by popular
vote, act as representitives of the players.
Players could go to them with complaints/
ideas, and they could then tell den & myself
the ones actually worth considering. This
would be especially helpful when Den & I are
saturated with this sort of thing.
Result: Certain players, thinking that they would
gain wizard powers (or something), went on
massive propaganda schemes, which caused them
to be voted in. Once they relized that they
were just 'leaders' by title, they abandoned
wacko. If I remember right, they were from
NAILS during their influx.
2) Substitute wizards:
Concept: Occasionally, neither Den nor I are around.
Have another player act as a backup to maintain
wacko while we are gone. Wacko being a pretty
self sustaining place, the duties should be
minimal.
Result: Den created a Gizmo bit, which allowed
linking/unlinking of anything.
We selected , who remains anonymous in this
entry for courtesy. We explained what was
going on, and vanished for several months.
I came back, and after a few more months,
told something along the lines of
"Thanks a lot, but we're back. No more G-bit".
Chaos ensued. Basically a huge rumble between
Den, myself, , and lots of people
who supported as a semi-wizard.
/**** patched entry made on 2/6/97 *****/
Editor's note of the following Editor's note:
I'm making a judgement call, and leaving most of this in.
There are several reasons for this, which I should formally state:
A) I do not consider any of the following to be a slam
against . What happened was not entirely
unexpected. See Next item.
B) Occasionally, players ask me if we would like any help,
wizard-wise. The survey done earlier made note that
there are times when having another wizard would, in
fact, be quite useful. Perhaps even important.
Everytime, my answer has been: "No. Period." End of
story.
I usually give no explanation. Trying to explain why
is rather difficult.
The bottom line is, if instead of choosing
we had chosen someone else, the same thing would have
happened. The circumstances surrounding what happened
would probably have been different, with different
people handling it in different ways, but as far as the
basic scenario - it would have been the same thing.
In fact, as I ponder back on it, Den and I should have
had the foresight to expect this. Both of us have
been there, and done that. We've both been granted
temporary wizardship on Pegasus. I know I reacted
in a similar way.
C) The events that followed happened. They are very
signifigant. It is impossible to grow without knowing,
and learning from the mistakes in the past.
/******* End patched note on 2/6/97 *************/
[ Massive Editor's note by ch'od:
What is highly signifigant in the entire incident is that nothing
was logged. In fact, my log from after the chaos is missing from the log
files. So this is all from memory. I don't even know what month this all
happened.
At first, when I took the bit away from , he seemed OK about it.
Which I expected. Then, a few days later, he really let me have it.
In that conversation,between insults,cursings, and etc, I gathered this much:
A) He thought it was permanent. Or at least he said we weren't clear
about whether or not it was permament.
B) He was pissed about my never responding to his mail.
C) The fact that the bit wasn't taken away for several (6?) months
emphasized, to him, that it was permanent.
My thoughts/responses about the above A-D , which I believe I mailed to him:
A) Permanent? I didn't see how he could think it would be permanent.
I would rather shut down Wacko than have another permanent
wizard. This is fact. It has been like this since day 1 of
Wacko's existance, and is quoted in the history file.
B) This is very true. I did log on sometimes. I apologized. The
fact remained, tho, that I didn't respond to anyone's mail. So
it wasn't really just a diss of him. I should have responded
to his mail.
If I recall correctly, most of the mail was
regarding: "is X okay?" "Would it be ok to do Y to Z?" and
so forth. Not very intelligent of me to give someone powers,
and then not give directions of how to use then. Then again,
this entire affair was sort of an emergency situation, and
would only happen when Den & I would be out of touch to begin
with.
C) By the intensity of his flamethrowering of me, I highly doubted it
would have made much difference if I took it away from day 1.
Especially if item A) is true.
Things got rather weird at that point. I had -lots- of people asking me why
I took away the bit. (I took it away after a discussion of Den of whether
or not we should take it away). Most people thought that did a
very good job as the Gizmo.
I explained - that's not the point. Wacko is supposed to be: Den & I are the
wizards. Everyone else gets -completely- -equal- rights. No favoritism of
any form. That is the heart and soul of Wacko.
Everyone accepted that. They didn't necessarily agree - but they understood
why
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