The MudHole: The MUD Party

You oldtimers will recall that back in '93, '94, and'95 there wasnt a world wide web. You used telnet to hop from computer to computer for various reasons. IRC became popular, as did text based games. MUDs, MOOs, MUSHs... depending on how they were arranged were actually the precursors to today's forums, chatrooms, and online gaming. A MOO was like a text version of the Sims. While MUDs were often online versions of role-playing games.

My friends at the MUDhole, and Josh... were all coders at a particular MUD, based on AD&D. It was lame, sure, but it was my first exposure to C and C+, so I can honestly say I learned something.

At any rate this game that we pretty much made from scratch became known as Final Realms. It was hosted in the Netherlands by some good natured folk who knew more about programming than I know about drumming. Which is rather like calling them the Neil Pearts of the code world. I could be exajurating... but these boys rocked. That's all I'm tryin to say.

Anyway... We'd spend hours everyday coding and playing and antagonizing the players, mostly the latter. We became fast friends... and all was right with the world.

At some point it was made known that our European hosters were coming to America for a vacation, and for whatever reason, they wanted to come to cookeville to meet us.

Freaks.

Anyway... What started out as a little get together ended up being advertised all over the MUD and became a big deal. If you can imagine... we had people drive from Texas... several people in fact... just to come to this party.

What I remember most of this great drunken fest.. well.. is that the Strunk got drunk and grabbed me by the dick... just before he puked over the balcony... But... what I remember the most besides that, is the reaction these Europeans had to America.

In short, they were stunned. They had never seen a refigerator as big as the perfectly average sized one in the house. They had never seen a dishwasher that big. They'd never seen a microwave that big. The house, again, not a huge house at all... was larger than any they'd ever been in. They went from room to room, and went ape-shit when they realized that every bedroom (6) had its own PC, and they were all networked. They commented that they don't see businesses with that kind of computer power.

They walked through Cookville's Walmart Supercenter awe struck. At the beer isle, one nearly passed out. They talked about it all weekend... like they had been to disneyland.

When guests started arriving, they couldn't believe the cars. A convertible mustang? They flipped out like 14 year-old when he sees a Lamborgini in person. A corvette??? Are you serious? Again... they were delirious.

They couldn't understand how college kids, or anyone for that matter, could have the kind of stuff that we had, and we thought we had nothing but second-hand crap.

But the greatest moment to me was when we asked them what their plans were. They had just arrived in atlanta, and had rented motorcycles to ride around on...

They said... "We are here for 6 more days. We want to see it all. Tomarrow we will ride to New York. Then we will ride south through Washington, and then We will spend the rest of the time riding out to California and back."

After realizing that they were serious... we got out a map, and explained to them just how big the United States is. I about busted a gut when Sam pointed to Texas and said, "See this? This is bigger than Europe."

They told us they figgered they'd ride 10 hours a day. We chuckled, and explained at that rate, they'd reach California in about a week. It took a long time for all that to sink in, but in the end they amended their plans considerably.

I've sorta danced around the party itself... mostly because I was so traumatized by the actions of the drunken Strunk that I quite nearly erased it all from memory. But can ya blame me? It ain't every day that a full grown man walks up and grabs ya by the John Thomas.

What I remember most is... there were at least 120 people there... they slept all over the place. We had tents pitched in the yard... front and back... and lord how the booze did flow.

The disturbing thing.. was everyone was refering to each other by their character, or screen names, because it was to hard to associate them with anything else. So it ended up feeling, and sounding, like a drunken superhero party.

It was a great time though... and the only time I've ever been to a get-together of folks from an online community. Suprisingly, some of the chicks were hot... and not just the ones who came with me either!

Previous experience had taught me to be leary of chicks met online... in fact.. chick is not a descriptive word at all... No... that's another tale... about... not so much a chick.. as a Great Bloated Hen... Spitting venom, fire, and hate like a basilisk on Angel Dust. Thanks Josh.