There was definitely more excitement when the technology was exciting. Remember when you first got a cordless phone? "I AM CALLING YOU FROM THE FRONT YARD LOLOLOMMGOGIGGLEB". Just exploring the internet and usenet and newsgroups and finding ftp site addresses posted on pages like notes scribbled on a bathroom wall was pretty exciting. It was exciting to log into an unknown ftp site and download whatever was there regardless of what was in there.

Hmm, good point.

I guess lately I have been nostalgic about the early days of the text adventure rebirth. We were all on Usenet. We were all really exploring the medium. We had tools (and I don't just mean computer programs, ha ha ha) and it really was an exciting time to see what this small group of people came up with.

It's not that way any longer. I mean, we all left Usenet due to three pieces of shit, but even they seem to have finally fucked off. But the people I respected and enjoyed talking to have drifted away. There's a small core on ifMud but so many people are people I don't know. I get that this has happened to many, many other ifMudders.

Nostalgia for a time -- early 2000s -- where we were all making games in a format we were nostalgia for. It's starting to eat itself.

I recently turned off new user registrations on my forum. I think this year I've had two real new users and 50 spammers. I have to manually validate them so they don't get through, but amazingly all of them now know the area code of Oklahoma City is 405. I could change the question but it seems that just slows them down for a little while.

It's probably time to change the auth code from zork2 to something!

How have you guys all been, though? Anything new and exciting in your lives?

Well, hello thar. I am a lousy spammer. I only have one leg named Smith. My rain-deer got run over by my grandmother. I once was a man from Nantucket.