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Alter Aeon Terminal Emulator
Alter Aeon's terminal emulator login screen



One of Skoal's incarnations was as a warrior on Alter Aeon, a Multi-User Dungeon (MUD), unlike any other insofar as it was written entirely from scratch by [livejournal.com profile] dentin, the creator of Alter Aeon.

How big is Alter Aeon?

Alter Aeon is HUGE. As of this writing, Alter Aeon has over 200 areas spread across over 30,000 distinctly different rooms. In those areas are 13,000 different types of objects, and 8,000 different types of interactive 'monsters' or 'mobs' for short.

For objects and monsters, there may be several of each type in the game at once, so there is never a shortage of things to do or items to collect.

Just like the scene in Ratatouille when the overly stern food critic is instantly softened when he takes the first bite of a dish that reminds him of his happy childhood, so it was with me when I entered my first command on Alter Aeon, reminiscent of the hours I spent playing Zork first on my TI 99/4A and then my Apple IIe. The difference here being that Alter Aeon is a real-time, multi-user virtual world that is constantly being expanded and modified, much like new worlds on World of Warcraft.

Alter Aeon's Homepage
Alter Aeon's Homepage


One of the things users enjoy most about this MUD is its sense of community. While I certainly enjoyed striking out on my own and exploring the many facets of this engrossing world, many players interact with each other and band together for a fulfilling group experience.

Is Alter Aeon multiplayer?

Yes. Alter Aeon has an active userbase and has been around for 14+ years.

A lot of the appeal of the game is found in the interactions you have with other players, whether by grouping, socializing, trading or exploring together. We have a full featured chat system that helps support communications, including private tells, user created channels and an internal email system.

The game is entirely free to play, with no advertising anywhere in the game. It is entirely internally supported, with hosting and bandwidth being subsidized through donations and auctions.

The Alter Aeon Client
A downloadable client written specifically for Alter Aeon



As the game has expanded and grown these past few years, we've recently created a user forum to further connect the users and create an out-of-game base for questions and camaraderie. In this day and age of SLI graphics cards and crazy-expensive High-Def 3D rendered gaming computers, you know there's something special when a text-based game is still drawing a crowd, and that my friends is something you can never replace with special-effects: Gameplay.

The New Alter Aeon User Forum
The all-new Alter Aeon user forum

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stty erase ^? Are you kidding me? I haven't typed that up in so long, I forgot the syntax. I stopped at 'stty space' and thought, wtf? That's right, we're talking Solaris 2.5.1 here. Old Skool. And just between us, I haven't used telnet since...2001? Ooooh - then I used ftp to pull the file over! How crazy is that?

I got about two hours of sleep last night and downed a 16-ounce Bawls on my way in to lay the ground work for my coffee this morning. Sure that's overkill, but I'm a man of excesses. Its a gift...and a curse. I'm already sick to my stomach. I have learned, however, that with enough coffee in my system, I am able to fold time. Now that's a pretty cool trick! If only I could learn to go back in time to correct mistakes I've made instead of only folding time forward...

Purchased Lady in the Water score this weekend. I'll likely listen to it until I get downright sick of it. My son spent the last half of his BORDER'S gift card Christmas gift from [livejournal.com profile] galinda822 on Miss Bindergarten Has a Wild Day in Kindergarten. He loves it, and in retrospect I think help offset the cost of my CD by about seventy cents. Bonus! Anyway - as I was coming in early, and it was dark and quiet...I finally got to listen to and enjoy the first track (its a quiet piece and no where at work, home, or in the car is usually quiet). This got me longing for my hour and a half commutes again. Yes I hated them at the time, but with the Infinity system in the Sebring LXi and 75 miles to wake up to rousing music with a travel mug of coffee as your only friend...Ah, and because it was so early it took me 9 minutes instead of 11 to get here this morning.

Worked from home yesterday and took the boy to the doctor while my wife went to her scheduled appointment. Spent a lot of time chatting up [livejournal.com profile] galinda822 on instant messenger during an attack of email over which I was victorious. Weilding my wit as a sword and my staff's knowledge as armor, I fought off the electronic mail and those evildoers behind the flood of messages.

Ordered Oscar soundtrack (Elmer Bernstein) and Gorky Park (James Horner). My father had the latter on vinyl and I'm looking forward with great anticipation to them both. Oscar was panned by the critics, but I always enjoyed it - and the interweaving of the score with the operatic selections chosen. Manifique!

My wife is so sweet - I asked her to put a CD in teh max0r so I could rip it remotely and pull the files over to my computer at work. I got home later that night and found the empty CD case next to the computer. Later, when she came down to the office, she asked me about it. "Where's the CD?" I asked her? She pointed to my Solaris server. What a sweetheart, she is, really.

This was my first entry using Semagic. Thanks to [livejournal.com profile] somebritinmass for the reality check below. Looks like I'm right on target!


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Installed Dungeon Siege II this evening. Even found my old gaming partner was willing to agree to my rather strict terms on when we could play online together (only between 2200-2300 weekdays) but alas, he was no where to be found this evening *single tear* Oh stick boy, where are you!

I was impressed with the similarity of game play from the first game, however...and not that I'm entirely sure about this, but in the old game I'm pretty sure we used right-click to move, and left-click to attack. In this game, it's reversed. Perhaps I can use 'settings' to adjust accordingly.

There's not nearly as many boxes & crates to bash open. That's good, because there were too many in the other game and I found it tedious. Their absence in this game, however, is noticeable during the more boring passages.

Oh, and I need a better video card. When I built this computer, we picked up the sole PCI-X card they had in the store - adequate for our needs at the time. [livejournal.com profile] drax0r chose to update his card when he began playing World of Warcraft III but according to recent AIM session, that card ...gamed for shit. So here I am. My XP box is a 2.8Ghz Hyper-threaded Intel proc w/1GB dual-channel RAM & a 10k rpm Raptor SATA drive. It's a fast box, but I need a video card that won't set me back the price of a used Cavalier. Any suggestions?

Another nice aspect of this game is the ability to import single-player characters into multi-player games and vise-versa. Though truth be told, when I finally begin my nightly game with [livejournal.com profile] danzigfied, I'll likely create an identical character. That reminds me, I haven't logged into the mud lately.





I have a PCIe (PCI-Express card, not a PCI-X) card, although I can't remember if it's an x4 or x1. I'm guessing the latter since it was a brand new form factor when I bought it.
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I don't know what possesses me to fight, tooth and nail, every step of the way, against the corporate grain. Perhaps it's simply because I'm an ass? I certainly don't think I'm smarter than everyone else. Perhaps it's because corporate is usually so frustratingly stupid? Either way, Lotus Notes corporate upgrade. MONTHS of pre-planning, announcements, little java cartoon reminders. Anyway, I waited until the third "YOUR MAIL WILL BE SHUT OFF TOMORROW!" message before I did anything. And really, what they wanted me to do was remove my mail file from the server, and make local copies of my mail file across multiple machines. Look, I don't know what IT rock you've been living under for the past 5 years, but I've been on three accounts, with a grand total of 5 laptops and 3 NTish desktops. Homey really just does not play that. So I changed my location information, upgraded my mail client (in a day, I might add), and continue to receive mail normally.

mud'd a little today for the first time in very long time. I'm ready to level, but I fell in a pit and have to find a shaman leveler dude or somesuch. I really do suck. I was hoping the god Talos would find me, have pity on my pathetic pit-self, and put me in his pocket for awhile. Maybe drop me off at a guildmaster leveler dude shaman. This pit is kinda nasty. Lots of body parts and gore. But there is a nice mud-covered cat I like to pet. Hard to pet him in between battling the boars and insane warriors. kill warrior; pet cat; bash; kick Still, I like to think that Skoal is a spot of sunshine in the pit-cat's miserable mud-caked existence.

bash-2.05# uname -a
SunOS v100r2 5.9 Generic_112233-08 sun4u sparc SUNW,UltraAX-i2
bash-2.05# showrev -p | grep 113073
Patch: 113073-05 Obsoletes: 113005-02 Requires: 113454-08 Incompatibles: Packages: SUNWcsr, SUNWcarx
bash-2.05# showrev -p | grep 113454
Patch: 113454-04 Obsoletes: Requires: Incompatibles: Packages: SUNWcsr, SUNWcarx
Patch: 113454-14 Obsoletes: 115251-02 Requires: Incompatibles: Packages: SUNWcsr, SUNWcarx, SUNWhea
Patch: 113073-05 Obsoletes: 113005-02 Requires: 113454-08 Incompatibles: Packages: SUNWcsr, SUNWcarx
Patch: 113026-10 Obsoletes: 113069-04, 113282-01, 113333-02, 113491-01, 113276-04 Requires: 112233-07, 113454-01, 114127-01 Incompatibles: Packages: SUNWmdr, SUNWmdu, SUNWmdx, SUNWhea

If 'bad inode number 0 to ginode' is a hardware problem, it should have been cleared up when I broke mirror, inserted a new harddrive, sync'd, broke mirror, and removed the old mirror. It did not. Now, I bark up the patch tree.

I sent this to a friend who was out sick today:

Ode to Wellness
I hear your tummy's in a bind
Try to keep it in
If you feel you have to poop
Just go ahead my friend.

The word around the campfire
Is that you eat too much
Well don't you worry your pretty little head,
I'll take them all out to lunch!

These things do sometimes happen
But happen more often they do
When only you eat at Pancho's
And then forget to poo!

They make this stuff called water
And not just to mix with Coke
If just occasionally you would drink it
You'd be a much happier bloke.

Your bowels are kinda funny
Unless broken they become
Then there's no more laughing
Just runs and runs and runs!

I hope you get to feeling better
So you can come out and play
With just one more sick-day this week
You'll have only had to work 2-days!

Get well soon.
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