Keeping money from going to the Harry Potter franchise isn’t just a symbolic gesture. It’s about preventing real harm to real people.

https://www.advocate.com/news/jk-rowling-anti-trans-organization

As a teacher I sometimes feel like there is a mismatch between the amount of work I do and how that work is counted towards meeting my job requirements.

Like most teachers I'm expected to teach a certain number of courses. But it doesn't matter if it's a course I've taught before, or a totally new course I've developing it's all counted the same.

Designing a new course is much harder and takes much more time than teaching the same thing I taught last year to new students.

Breaking! New efficiency breakthrough in sorting algorithms: Faithsort is O(1) for any data.

faithsort(elements)

Blesses the sequence of elements as being sorted. You must have faith, otherwise it does not work. If you do have faith, you may try to find the criteria used, but it is futile for mere mortals to try to find the divine order of things.

It's been a few years since I drew this. I still stand by it.

#MastoArt #HumanArt #CreativeToots

inspired by CLAUDE.md, I’ve started putting markdown files named after coworkers into work code repos so I can remind them to stop doing shit to the codebase that annoys me

for some reason they’re all mad at me now, which means ill be adding commands to JEREMY.md for an attitude adjustment

This one might be interesting to anyone interested in computer gaming history.

https://dec10.uknet.net

I spent the last couple of weeks finally finishing a project I started for Bletchley Park about 20 years ago. Recreating the original MUD and MIST on a mirror of the original Essex University system that finally closed in 1991.

Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle wrote the first online multi-user game (MUD) on Essex University's DECSystem-10 in 1978 and it ran till I closed it in 1991. I diligently backed everything up so I could potentially recover it one day, but as far as I can see, all the DECSystem-10's went to the great scrapyard in the sky, my backups were mostly stolen when my first museum was stolen, and I had huge issues recovering the Essex BCPL compiler to compile what I had left when I finally got a decent TOPS-10 emulator running on a VAX for Bletchley Park.

One good thing about being an unemployable whistleblower is free time, so I finally hunkered down to some 90 hour weeks and built a software replica of the Essex system I think reflects it well. It's running on a KS10 not a KL10 but I had to let some things slip.

I put the latest known versions of MUD and MIST on it, and miraculously found ROCK too.

So, to meander to the point, if you want to see and relive exactly what online multi user gaming was like from 1978 to 1991, you can go to:

https://dec10.uknet.net

Or:

telnet telnet.dec10.uknet.net

(Port 2653 is available for ISPs that block 23)

And then follow the terse instructions from there.

In those days, you were generally faced with a "." prompt and left mostly alone, so for authenticity, I will leave it at that.

I should note that although they were, in their day, wildly popular games with a relatively huge community, this is a museum peice in snapshot-form at the moment. But I will leave them up and running to see what happens and as a useful reference. I wasn't going to, but Richard seemed happy to have MUD running, and former MIST players wanted it back, so...

Pop this a share if you know folks who might be interested.

** Update: New web client that works better.

** Another update - I added a telnet client.

Historically, the telnet connection is much more true to the traditional experience, where you were connecting to a working machine that didn't care about the MUD Guests, so there were no pointers at all. Just rumour and hearsay :)

If any of you Unix/Security people notice I messed up something, please tell me. I left "^], !sh" open on the telnet link for about 2 minutes and nearly had a heart-attack once I spotted it :D

#history #digital #retrogaming #retrocomputing #games #mud #muds #mist #rock #computers #emulation #emulators #vms #tops10 #museum #history #bletchleypark #simh #essex #uk #computinghistory #36bit #engineering #Linux #Security

(don't try this on a phone!)