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09/16/2001 Archived Entry: "Rhyme and Reason"

Tuesday: To absent friends, in memory still bright...

When I was about 11 or 12, I went on the Internet for the first time, using the Solaris machines at Liverpool University. Back then, there was very little of interest on the Internet to someone of my age apart from perhaps newsgroups about computer games or fiction. I probably spent most of my time looking at the Trojan Room Coffee Machine or the latest Cool Site of the Day.

One of things that I did do was to join a MUSH - a 'Multi-User Shared Hallucination'. MUSHes are a bit like MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) where people travel around text-based fantasy worlds killing orcs and beasts and so on. I had a look at a few MUDs but I found most of them to be pretty pointless and in any case the other players had far more time to spend on them than I ever would. Even back then I considered something of a personal principle that if I was going to be involved in anything, I'd be involved as much as I could - which meant that a MUD was out of the question.

MUSHes are MUDs without the fighting, so they're just concerned with people sitting around and chatting - a bit like IRC but with a stronger sense of physical space and interaction. Anyway, I was in a bit of a whimsical mood at the time when I joined the MUSH, so I called myself 'Reason'. This caused no end of confusion for me since whenever I saw anyone on the MUSH, they'd always ask me 'Where's Rhyme?' and I had absolutely no idea of what they were talking about.

I was definitely an irritating brat some of the time back then, at least on the Internet (and some would also argue that I was off it - and still am now! Hah!).

The MUSH was called TooMUSH and it may well still exist today - its website is still online, but that was only last updated about five years ago. I can still recognise some of the names there; one of the administrators, Tangent, got me onto a beta-test programme for Ultima Online, which I was pretty happy about.

I find it pretty difficult to believe that I've been on the Internet since 1993 and for some reason I think that it would have been better being older or younger than I was. If I was older, I really would have appreciated being involved right from the start and maybe could have participated in some ground-breaking things - who knows, I could have even made a few million on an Internet startup? If I was younger, then right now I'd be growing up with the current whiz-bang Internet and would be able to take full advantage of it.

Not that it bothers me too much - you have to live some time and some place, and you might as well make the most of it.