Hi #fediverse. We need to talk about something.

While talking to a colleague about how I recently learned most people have never been sat on by a seagull it came up that she has never been sat on by a lizard. Like, not even once during childhood.

Another colleague admitted they also have never been sat on by a lizard.

My hypothesis is that most people have at one point in their life been sat on by a lizard.

🦎🦎🦎

Have you ever been sat on by a lizard?

Please boost for scientific accuracy.

#Ohio don't need no education

Republican Ohio governor candidate #VivekRamaswamy floated an idea this week to consolidate Ohio universities to pay for eliminating the state's income tax.

He said Ohio has too many universities."

https://www.cleveland.com/education/2026/03/vivek-ramaswamy-says-he-loves-ohios-universities-but-we-have-too-many-calls-for-consolidation.html

"we caught one" god. Luxurious.

Once again, I strongly advise you to set up fail2ban so that anyone you serve a 404 catches at least a full day ban, and if you don't care about talking to other people's services, do your best to fully block the IP ranges associated with all the major hosting companies.

https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2025/10/21/raised-shields/

https://infosec.exchange/@foobardevs/116246141464905287

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

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: I replaced all the annoying Guacamole stuff with a straight through path on a different machine. So it should work now and be more stable.

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

(don't try this on a phone!)

My friend @GWillow is up for a Nebula!

https://locusmag.com/2026/03/2025-nebula-awards-ballot/