No, I mean it. Really.

After getting the requisite ID, I went to the Computation Center to get my account at UT. We were still using green-screen terminals to connect to a gigantic VMS/VAX machine at U.T., and new UNIX accounts had not been allowed for years, due to overuse. I sat down at one of the terminals, logged in, and was completely lost. This wasn't DOS! How the hell would I even change directories?

I saw a really cool-looking woman sitting fairly close to me, with this neat ring on, and she was vigorously typing away at what seemed to be a game. I asked her what it was, and she obligingly told me that she was playing a MUD. I was immediately excited --Multiplayer Zork!, and asked her to help me get started. So, she logged me into FuskerMUD and I promptly forgot everything but MUDding (kids, don't try this at school).  I skipped classes to MUD. I got someone _else_ hooked on MUDding. That person got someone else hooked, and...well, let's just say a large UT contingent (many prior to me or Trea, the person that started me down the Road to Slack) got started.

After a time, I had played Fusker long enough to want to become an immortal and create my own area, so I asked for the builder documents and was made an immortal. I envisioned four large (well, they seemed large at the time; RoadKill and Iggy's areas make them seem really damned small) areas: a good area, a neutral area, and an evil area, surrounded by an ocean. Since I couldn't put them on the Fusker site until they were ready, and I wanted to test them, I decided to set up a stock version of a DIKU MUD on my box. After a bit of "shopping around", I decided on CircleMUD 2.2 and set it up on Cyntax's UNIX account (which he had inexplicably managed to obtain).

This was January of 1994, the official Year of the Beginning.

I was still sort of new to UNIX, and the SUN keyboards were slightly differently spaced than other keyboards. The worst thing was that EMACS puts a "~" on its backup files, and the "~" was right beside the "Return" key on the SUN keyboards, so I would sometimes type "rm *" instead of "rm *~" -- and since UNIX doesn't have delete protection unless you explicitly set it, I deleted the source code in UNIX twice.

After finding out how easy it was to code on a MUD, and wanting to start my own, I got Cyntax, Wiilf, myself, Trea, and another person from Fusker, Alorn, to help me start. I already had a name -- StrangeMUD -- in mind, so we got some basic rules and hierarchies, as well as command divisions, down. We decided upon a motto -- "Where thinking just might become a prerequisite" -- because we were tired of MUDs where all you do is mindlessly go out and find things to kill, loot their corpses, and go on to the next mob.

That vision is still in the making. :P

I was still a starry-eyed liberal type person at the time, and figured that a strong hierarchy of people was unfair and only caused friction and elbowing to the top. So, I made all five of the original founders equal IMPs, and it worked really well for several years, until we finally started dropping off due to not paying attention to our studies at U.T. Of myself, Trea, Cyntax, and Wiilf, only Wiilf is still at college, and he had to stop MUDding just to be able to do well in college.

After a summer with my father (August 1994), I came back, got a low-paying job at Wendy's, and started running the MUD again. I found out that a lot of strange(tm) things had happened while I was gone, and went about trying to rectify them. So, I set up what I thought was a highly organized system where our insanely large number of immortals would all have a say in what they did. I devised four major areas of  influence, offered  four goats as sacrifice to the Gods, and set up several small "committees". All this did was cause several smaller immortals to take over their "committees", shutting out everyone else, as well as make people feel like they were running through a myriad of mazes just to get anything done. Production and progress on StrangeMUD came to a standstill.

About January 1995, my ID at UT expired, and policemen started patrolling the area, checking IDs. I was actually detained at one point to scare me off  (which worked, quite nicely). So, for a while, I was unable to log in to MUD except for when Trillian (a new immortal, and highly into the MUD) was able to give me access to her computer. Caila and I were rooming together at the time, and I could not find a job, and she was having problems with hers, so we couldn't devote much time to the MUD. Eventually, Caila and I had to stop being roommates, and it was a very difficult time in both our lives. Anyway, Trillian and Caila pretty much helped me to run the MUD incognito while I advised.

Under their prodding, I very reluctantly agreed to our first Immortal Purge, getting rid of completely inactive IMMs and setting up a more formal policy of being made immortal. We dumped committees entirely, and I set up a new set of implementers to help me, as Trea and Wiilf and Alorn had had to bow out.

RoadKill and Iggy were the two most prolific coders and builders on the MUD in the entire MUD's history. Some of the most awesome areas on the MUD were made by these two,
and we owe a lot to their work. I made them implementers.

Around about August 1995, we were about to lose access at UT, so had to find a new home to put StrangeMUD on. We decided on Spectrum's site at the University of Maryland, and spent a while there. At this time, a couple of players, Reality and Valen, were playing a lot. After a while, they both became gods and Valen offered to house StrangeMUD on his machine. I became good friends with both people and would often take trips from Austin to Houston to visit them. Valen and Reality together bought more memory for the computer they were using, spent a lot of time making the Linux box they were using very stable, and bought the domain name strangemud.org.

For a period of about four months, I left the MUD because I thought I had found the One True MUD, SojournMUD, and was a god there making an area. I figured that StrangeMUD would do just fine with Valen, Trillian, Caila, Iggy, and RoadKill at the helm. Unfortunately, Iggy and RoadKill became more involved in their own projects, leaving Trillian, Caila, and Valen to run things all on their own, which with the gap left by my leaving left all unsure as to who was in charge of what.

I was on the MUD at the time as an inactive imp, Tartuffe, and watched things deteriorate to a point where I couldn't sit back and watch it any more, so at the prodding of Trillian and Caila (we call ourselves the Bitch Trio), I came back and started what I called the Policy Group, with six people and stringent rules for creating new rules. This really did work for some time, until we found out that Valen, Trillian, Caila, RoadKill, Cyntax and myself had very different views about how the MUD should be run. Valen and Trillian had major
personality conflicts, and at the time I thought that Valen was the more reasonable of the two (Valen's policies were more draconian, and that's what I thought the MUD needed), so when it came time to choose between Valen and Trillian, I chose Valen. This was a bad command decision, but I didn't find this out until much later.

Cyntax and RoadKill left eventually to start their own MUD, FucmMUD, and so I put Tracy and Iggy in their place. Unfortunately, Iggy eventually became inactive, so I held an election, and the imms eventually picked Valdamax.

Around about this time (February 1997), Cyntax helped me to get a job at Proxicom, in Washington, D.C., so a lot of my time was spent getting ready to go work at that job. Valen took this time to implement some policies he thought were necessary to the continuation of the MUD, and slowly began taking over things. I began to feel out of the loop (as did Caila), so I eventually confronted him with the problems. We had a big fight, and I gave the MUD over to him because I felt I couldn't do anything else.

Valen was not a bad head IMP, I admit freely. He instituted some good coding policies, and generally improved the MUD. However, I did _not_ like his administrative leanings, and still don't.

Slowly, though, I began to feel like I couldn't in good conscience leave the MUD in his hands -- after all, I had started it to begin with, and I felt like I had a stake in the MUD, so I quietly began to try to shore up support. With the help of Hitman and Caila, we decided to confront Valen once more.

In April of 1997, Caila confronted Valen, and I politely (really, this _was_ a cordial conversation) let Valen know that I wanted to be head IMP. However, Valen was less than cordial with Caila, and eventually got angry and gave up the MUD entirely. We found a new box with the help of Trillian, who I invited back and apologized, and tried to get the domain strangemud.org; unfortunately, Valen and Reality never gave that domain up, so we got strangemud.net -- once again with the help of Trillian.

The current owner of the MUD is myself, and I don't see that this will change again. Lucifer, Caila, and Trillian run Coding, Building, and Admin, respectively, and all seems to be going well!