I want you to shut up right now. We'll talk about what I want to talk about, and I will not take any of your shit. Welcome to the TrippyMUSH home-page, home-boy. Boy-page. What is Trippy, you might ask. Well, well, well. Up to your old tricks already! Just for that, I suppose I'll have to show you what it is, and boy-page, I don't think you're gonna like it.

Luckily, the United States Congress has just passed a bill ruling that everyone except those with a history of nose disease and grandmothers under the age of 7 must play TrippyMUSH at least 26 times a day, for at least two hours each time.

Please note that this refers to the United States of Ted, and not the nation of North America known as the United States of America, all rights reserved, all wrongs reversed, be multiple and fruitfly

For you impatient types, here's a direct link so you can telnet your ugly ass down to TrippyMUSH. Those of you with a touch more patience might want to read through the rest of the home-page.

A long long time ago in a galaxy in far-off Guam, several magical faeries were working on a way to link the entire elk population of Earth together over an international computer network. Like so many other things in life, once the humans found out about it, they gave it all sorts of fancy names (Informal Highway, BurgerNet, SideburnSpace) and took it right the hell over. It would be used for all Humankind! It would be educational, it would be commercial, it would edumercial, it would be governcomedunetual! No one needed to understand what it was about; they just needed to know the fancy nicknames and be told that it was the wave of the future, thus making them confuse it frequently with Pepsi.

Then came the next division in Net Applications: the Useless aspects. I mean games, stupid. Jim Aspnes made something he called 'MUD', which stood for Multi-User Dungeon. This was a Zork-like thing with multiple users, so instead of typing 'slay elf', you could type 'slay this guy from Utah'. A whole new world opened up before us, and it wasn't Pluto.

I thought I told you to shut up. Anyway. MUD was nice and fun and mean- spirited and caused cancer, and people ate it up. So then someone thought: Hey! What if we made this more confusing? Made it harder to use, and give it a name that's a little bigger, maybe at least by one extra letter? With this in mind, two new variations of MUD were invented: MUCK, which stands for 'Something', and MUSH, your new friend, which stands for 'Multi-User Shared Hallucination'. No, really! I wouldn't make stuff up.

MUSH is just MUD, but with more ability to program. What does this mean, you ask? Shut up. I will be vague as long as I want to. MUSH also allows you more CPU-credit drives in your co-dependant-processor, and cooks up better hash-stats. It's made of 100% wood substitute, and stays dry as long as it is kept away from liquid. MUD was made of dirt and sticks. Aren't you happy you chose MUSH?

You don't. Anyway, there was MUSH, originally implemented by Larry Foard. Way to go, Larry! Then some other stuff happened, and there was lots of excitement, drama, humor and cheese. Right about this time, maybe a little after or before, TrippyMUSH was born.

See, there's tons of these MUSHes out there, along with MOOs and MUCKs and MUSEs and MUGLYPIGMANGLERs and other M-based acronyms that tend to mean something. Most of them are set up to be little virtual worlds that have a theme, such as the Dragonrubbers of Pern or the StarTrek Looniverse or Little MUSH on the Prairie, where everyone lives out their geeky fantasies until they forget to pay their phone bill or they fail out of college and have to get a job in the local yeast-processing plant.

TrippyMUSH, on the other hand, has no theme. You can play Godzilla, if you like. You can play Lucille Ball, you can play Squidgy the Talking Pencil. You can be all that you can be, without the morning hikes. So what do we do there? Well, you see, these l'il cute games have their own similarities to Real Life, just like Real Life does. Things get weird. Politics sprout, drama ensues, relationships happen, arbitrators pull their hair out, and small virtual kittens pee in your shoes. Just like life! Oh, I seem to have gone and lost my point again. I think I was trying to say that TrippyMUSH is just like all the other games out there, but we're a good deal more relaxed. We're gold-filtered apathy in with a general who-cares attitude, sprinkled with laziness, and frothed to a fine bizarre head.

That's just as well. As you can probably tell, we're not for children. We're not for dentists, either, or for Young Bourbon Professionals. We welcome Czars. We approve of the word 'brouhaha'.

See, I knew you'd come around eventually. One last piece of advice.

DON'T EAT KIDS!

To connect to TrippyMUSH, you can either click here, or you can
TELNET pebkac.trippy.org 7567
Many people use a 'client' program to play MUD/MUSH/MUCK/MELONs called TinyFUGUE, which is available for UNIX platforms at several lovely FTP sites, including ftp.tcp.com in the /pub/mud/Clients/tinyfugue directory, usually called something like 'tf.35a19.tar.gz' or something stupid like that.