Last One Out Of The World, Turn Off The Lights
Feel free to skip this post: to the majority, I suspect it will sound like great-grandpa complaining how talkies ruined the silent cinema, or how video killed the radio star.
Today is the last day of existence for Haven, a MUSH I first joined in 2002. A MUSH is a "Multi-User Shared Hallucination"; an online environment-slash-world that is entirely text-based, usually built around a single prevalent theme (Star Trek, the Middle Ages, Vampires, whathaveyou). The key phrase in there was "text-based" you were looking at a black-and-white display, reading about the world around you, with all the characters and places described in text and nothing else. Interaction with others was also purely text-based, forcing players to describe their actions as well as simply saying their "lines".
Below is my character's description, just to give you a feel for how we rolled. It's not really necessary to read it, so feel free to skip over the blockquote.
Dan Malone is a tall human male in his low- to mid-thirties, standing approximately 6'2" tall and weighing 220 lbs. His long, black hair is pulled back in a tight ponytail, bound in place with a short rawhide strip, and his hazel eyes glitter with a coldly analytical gaze. His face is not perfectly symmetrical: the right cheek bone looks slightly off-kilter, and his nose has clearly been broken at some point in the past. His right eyebrow is bifurcated by an age-old scar. Three or four days' worth of stubble covers the lower half of his face, a quarter inch of growth that serves to darken his visage while simultaneously being too sparse to call a proper beard.
He is currently wearing a dark blue greatcoat of a cut that seems to have begun life as a naval uniform. Slightly darker, regularly-shaped patches of material bear this theory up; they appear to be places where once upon a time were crests, rank insignia, and brocade. Mismatched, dark-coloured buttons march down the front in twin rows, closing it tightly across his torso. The collar is quite high; even folded back down on itself double it goes up almost to his ears. The slightly frayed ends of a dark coloured scarf protrude from each folded end of the collar. The cuffs, which fold back nearly halfway up his forearms, are devoid of any rank markings.
The greatcoat flares outward from beneath the wide black leather belt cinched tightly about his waist, and sweeps nearly to the ground. Here, another modification has been made to the garment: the back is slit almost to the waist as well, making it suitable for riding. Visible through the wide, inverted 'V' opening at the front are his breeches, dark grey in colour, tucked into the tops of a pair of scuffed, calf-high black boots. A cutlass is scabbarded at his left hip, a main-gauche at the right. Protruding from the front of the wide belt is the curved wooden handle of a flintlock pistol.
Atop his head is perched a tri-cornered hat familiar to any seaman, made of a stiff felt the same colour as his greatcoat.
Ol' Dan started out life a bit better looking and a lot friendlier looking, but he went through some hard times. My online roleplaying buddy, Gail, and I were pretty much the only characters on the entire MUSH who were not drop-dead gorgeous and absolute winners at everything they did.
So why is Haven closing after so many years? World of Warcraft. Second Life. Any one of a bazillion graphics-based gaming systems where you don't have to bother with anything as plebian as typing words; you can simply click your mouse and watch your character do his thing. To my mind, it is nowhere near the same thing (and my imagination has always been a damned site better than anything a Second Life poseball can provide), but to the current crop of Internet gamers, it's good enough. And so, Haven closes its doors tonight due to inactivity for the last two years, the user base has been slowly but steadily dwindling away as people drifted away to more graphical universes.
I joined Haven, as I said, in 2002. Because I've always been a look-under-the-hood kind of guy, two days after I'd joined I found a fairly serious coding bug. When the then head-coder pooh-poohed my discovery, I exploited that bug to give myself the maximum amount of "pennies", promote myself to the Royalty rank, and post a note on the inaccessible-to-normal-players Admin board asking if anyone was interested in discussing it further.
Eventually, I made it all the way up to Head Coder, and I coded the hell out of that place. Some of the best and most creative codework I've ever done is tied up in and spooling through Haven, and I shall be sorry to see that go, too.
Two of the friendships I made on Haven made the jump to other mediums as well. The aforementioned Gail is known on these pages as dearmary, and is the very best roleplayer I have ever encountered. Also on my flist is theambrosia, who I am fairly certain never uses livejournal; theambrosia is the best coder/computer-savvy person I have ever met. I have known theambrosia for eight years now, and I know two things about her in real ife: (1) she is female, (2) she lives in Germany. This has not prevented us from talking about things technical across many varied forums (including Second Life), and when I say "discussing", I mean me saying "Why the hell doesn't this work??" and her explaining it to me in gentle, soothing terms.
This is an awful lot of writing about a topic that is important to me, but not to you. Thanks for reading this far along. I guess all I wanted was to note the passing of something fairly significant to me. I mourn the loss of the text-based world where complete sentences were used. I shall miss Haven, and poor old Dan Malone, who did not end up very well at all. His current description is only this:
You are looking at an unmarked grave in the pauper's cemetery, located just outside city limits of Ravencrest. The earth here looks freshly turned -- this was most likely a recent burial. The earthen mound is not that high; the grave is likely a shallow one, and since it is unmarked, there is no way to know who lies here.
Just some random person who came to the end of their life. Nothing more dramatic than that.
So long, Haven. Thanks for everything.
Today is the last day of existence for Haven, a MUSH I first joined in 2002. A MUSH is a "Multi-User Shared Hallucination"; an online environment-slash-world that is entirely text-based, usually built around a single prevalent theme (Star Trek, the Middle Ages, Vampires, whathaveyou). The key phrase in there was "text-based" you were looking at a black-and-white display, reading about the world around you, with all the characters and places described in text and nothing else. Interaction with others was also purely text-based, forcing players to describe their actions as well as simply saying their "lines".
Below is my character's description, just to give you a feel for how we rolled. It's not really necessary to read it, so feel free to skip over the blockquote.
Dan Malone is a tall human male in his low- to mid-thirties, standing approximately 6'2" tall and weighing 220 lbs. His long, black hair is pulled back in a tight ponytail, bound in place with a short rawhide strip, and his hazel eyes glitter with a coldly analytical gaze. His face is not perfectly symmetrical: the right cheek bone looks slightly off-kilter, and his nose has clearly been broken at some point in the past. His right eyebrow is bifurcated by an age-old scar. Three or four days' worth of stubble covers the lower half of his face, a quarter inch of growth that serves to darken his visage while simultaneously being too sparse to call a proper beard.
He is currently wearing a dark blue greatcoat of a cut that seems to have begun life as a naval uniform. Slightly darker, regularly-shaped patches of material bear this theory up; they appear to be places where once upon a time were crests, rank insignia, and brocade. Mismatched, dark-coloured buttons march down the front in twin rows, closing it tightly across his torso. The collar is quite high; even folded back down on itself double it goes up almost to his ears. The slightly frayed ends of a dark coloured scarf protrude from each folded end of the collar. The cuffs, which fold back nearly halfway up his forearms, are devoid of any rank markings.
The greatcoat flares outward from beneath the wide black leather belt cinched tightly about his waist, and sweeps nearly to the ground. Here, another modification has been made to the garment: the back is slit almost to the waist as well, making it suitable for riding. Visible through the wide, inverted 'V' opening at the front are his breeches, dark grey in colour, tucked into the tops of a pair of scuffed, calf-high black boots. A cutlass is scabbarded at his left hip, a main-gauche at the right. Protruding from the front of the wide belt is the curved wooden handle of a flintlock pistol.
Atop his head is perched a tri-cornered hat familiar to any seaman, made of a stiff felt the same colour as his greatcoat.
Ol' Dan started out life a bit better looking and a lot friendlier looking, but he went through some hard times. My online roleplaying buddy, Gail, and I were pretty much the only characters on the entire MUSH who were not drop-dead gorgeous and absolute winners at everything they did.
So why is Haven closing after so many years? World of Warcraft. Second Life. Any one of a bazillion graphics-based gaming systems where you don't have to bother with anything as plebian as typing words; you can simply click your mouse and watch your character do his thing. To my mind, it is nowhere near the same thing (and my imagination has always been a damned site better than anything a Second Life poseball can provide), but to the current crop of Internet gamers, it's good enough. And so, Haven closes its doors tonight due to inactivity for the last two years, the user base has been slowly but steadily dwindling away as people drifted away to more graphical universes.
I joined Haven, as I said, in 2002. Because I've always been a look-under-the-hood kind of guy, two days after I'd joined I found a fairly serious coding bug. When the then head-coder pooh-poohed my discovery, I exploited that bug to give myself the maximum amount of "pennies", promote myself to the Royalty rank, and post a note on the inaccessible-to-normal-players Admin board asking if anyone was interested in discussing it further.
Eventually, I made it all the way up to Head Coder, and I coded the hell out of that place. Some of the best and most creative codework I've ever done is tied up in and spooling through Haven, and I shall be sorry to see that go, too.
Two of the friendships I made on Haven made the jump to other mediums as well. The aforementioned Gail is known on these pages as dearmary, and is the very best roleplayer I have ever encountered. Also on my flist is theambrosia, who I am fairly certain never uses livejournal; theambrosia is the best coder/computer-savvy person I have ever met. I have known theambrosia for eight years now, and I know two things about her in real ife: (1) she is female, (2) she lives in Germany. This has not prevented us from talking about things technical across many varied forums (including Second Life), and when I say "discussing", I mean me saying "Why the hell doesn't this work??" and her explaining it to me in gentle, soothing terms.
This is an awful lot of writing about a topic that is important to me, but not to you. Thanks for reading this far along. I guess all I wanted was to note the passing of something fairly significant to me. I mourn the loss of the text-based world where complete sentences were used. I shall miss Haven, and poor old Dan Malone, who did not end up very well at all. His current description is only this:
You are looking at an unmarked grave in the pauper's cemetery, located just outside city limits of Ravencrest. The earth here looks freshly turned -- this was most likely a recent burial. The earthen mound is not that high; the grave is likely a shallow one, and since it is unmarked, there is no way to know who lies here.
Just some random person who came to the end of their life. Nothing more dramatic than that.
So long, Haven. Thanks for everything.