u/Dear_Cockroach_3170

Here is my baby. Amputated five years ago. Had him almost the entire time since. Light of my life. His PTSD and abandonment issues have improved incredibly! 💜

This is how I've seen DC ever since towelgate.

Hold still, please

This is my baby. Got him 4 and a half years ago from SPCA. He was hit by a truck and had his right hind leg amputated. Struggled with PTSD and abandonment issues. He was fostered for 9 months and seemingly forgotten about. I saw two pics on their website and went and got him. We've lived in three different states since and right now he's passed out on my bed. Best kitty I've ever had. Ragdoll / Tabby mix is my best guess.

Hello!

I was the creator and sole founder who remained an implementor for Bad Trip MUD.

The three original founders were Coby Chappel (me/George), Velveeta (a friend/Richard) and Loser (a friend/Paul).

We were all very young. After 9 months of knocking-elbows and disagreements on which direction the game should go, I was the last founder remaining. This was the case until about 2008-2010 when I phased myself out of the game and passed it to another friend to run.

I began to create this game with my buddies when I was 14. It was a very early release of ROM 2.4. When I turned 30 years old, I realized I had more years *in the game* than I had *out of the game* and decided to move on. It hardly resembled the original codebase, being practically completely rewritten on the inside by this point. Plus, graphical online multiplayer games were around the corner and everyone knew it; the glory days of MUDs were numbered. It was cool, but the whole gameplay model was something phasing out of nerdy-tech society.

Staff memories:

Zedd - One of my RL friends who worked at Frito Lay! He was mostly invisible, watching people for scripting and cheating. His name is Bryan and he was one fantastic dude. Never had an issue with this guy in all the years he played and helped me administrate. A true legend.

Peej - One of my best IMP's who started as a player. This guy did anything needed and enjoyed the hell out of it. I've recently looked him back up and we've been speaking the past few months. He's got about 15 years on me, when I was a young scrub running the game (15-20 years old) he was almost like a surrogate father to me. He helped me with situations that needed a fresh perspective and experience. This dude helped me learn how to wipe my own ass on the internet, in a manner of speaking. I spoke with him yesterday. His name is Philip.

Kso - A RL buddy I met online through local BBS's. This guy loved to play the game in all aspects. When he wasn't adding incredible color schemes to the game and fine-tuning humorous ideas, you could find him leveling, grinding, or even running quests or guilds. This guy truly enjoyed the experience and it was a treat to have him a part of the staff for so long. Many people came & went, Kso tended to stick around.

Forrest - Another RL buddy named Zach. He'd do anything online that needed doing. One of the most dedicated quest gods & guild leaders BT ever had the luck having him as a participant. I think he ran V00D00, ARMADA & even the Merchants at one point. Always a good guy & fair.

Daigen - Joe. He completely redid the code from scratch, down from how the skill tables worked and their limitations. He practically rewrote everything in the game. He worked for Enron during the bust (but he was a coder) and we became good buds. My friend Loser (Paul) and I would travel to Houston from Austin to go to MTG tournaments with this guy. We even did a team draft and named ourselves "Team F*uxor" and they allowed it. We did terribly. But damn was it fun. Daigen not only contributed more to the code base than anyone else, but he was severely addicted to the game & gameplay and would help me test everything, not only from an implementor's standpoint but also from a gamer's. Our "mortals" were pretty beefy characters, as we dedicated a ton of time to playing the game, not just running it. We wanted to make the game fun for us, and if it was fun for us, then it was fun for others.

Janduin - Cory. The original host of the game for the first many years. We sent him a 16mb (megabyte) RAM stick that was valued over $800 dollars at the time to secure a permanent hosting location for the years to come. We were hosted on UMD.edu and I was given admin privileges on the server. I've never kill -9'd so many PID's in my life. Boy. What a time. Thanks to this fine gent's flexibility and adaptability, BT was an initial success. A lot of MUD's end up being summer flings, let's be real about it. Starting off this way made sure that this game would be here for the years to come. This was our very first foot forward, and it was a massive leap.

*I could add more to the list above but decided to stop updating for now*

After a couple of years being away from the game, I passed it off to a player named "Puck" and told him there was only 1 rule; never remove the credits of who created the game, as we had spent a decade-and-a-half making this game very special. A week later, I logged in and saw my name had been removed from every single help file completely. I never looked back, it's hard to put into words even 15+ years later just how much having credit stripped from a passion project like this hurts, but now that I'm older I can safely tell you that that's life.

This game's code was stolen, distributed and butchered so many times, I think it's hilarious to see a game I created with others still in a semi-functional state over 30 years after we began working on it. Stolen copies were re-branded with new names, as coders who ended up being thieves would take the game, and try to repackage it as if it was there own when it in fact was not. Temporal Rift is the biggest example of this. The original 2 admins from there helped me with the game before stealing it, renaming it, and attempting to lure people to it from the original. The game was basically rewritten from scratch after this happened, which is why so many of the clone versions of this game lack a bulk of the content from the original. This, of course, is nothing new. People still do this today with memes, social media posts, or anything else released for free on the internet. Creators create. Fakers fake. Some people think that contributing less than 1% to something entitles them to 100% of it. It is what it is. Greed, avarice & jealousy isn't going anywhere. But it's a part of the story of the game, so to avoid mentioning this would be a disservice.

If anyone here remembers the game, or us, please feel free to respond. It would be really nice to reconnect with some of you.

Thanks for reading. :)

BONUS random facts:

As a young teenager, in order to drive fear and respect into the hearts of cheaters or boys who thought it was appropriate to send inappropriate message to young ladies, I started telling everyone I was a 57 year old who was addicted to crack. I went as far as to elaborate after '1st warning' situations, telling people narrowly dodging a penalty that I had "nothing better to do than sit here all day and watch you and wait for you to do it again" - that "we would have them logged indefinitely from now on, and one simple 'grep' command would expose every action they ever took in the game" and that "if they ever harassed another person or cheated again, they would be fried" (which meant their character would be deleted). Unfortunately, due to the nature of cowards on the internet, anything sort of a full ISP IP ban wouldn't deter the real pervs.

You see, we had a website, and pictures of ourselves up on there. People could see who they were playing with. This was social networking before social networking. But it also motivated the wrong people with the wrong type of energy at times.

After one young lady had been harassed several times due to her lovely pictures, she finally asked me one day "Can I just join your harem or something?" - I think her name was Miz? She was a cool chick. We laughed about the idea so long that we formed "Coby's Harem" and any female who wanted to join could, and anyone with that phrase in their title was under my wing, and the sketchy players knew that their unwanted advances wouldn't go unchecked.

I have so many stories and memories like this, I'm just hoping I get a few real responses from ex-players so we can walk down memory lane some!

From Los Diaz Tacos in Greenville, NC

From Los Diaz Tacos in Greenville, NC

Smoked on applewood at 275 for two hours, then wrapped in foil with butter for an hour, then sauced and finished for an hour unwrapped.

Smoked on applewood for 2 hrs

Toasted brioche bun

Blistered red and green onion

Mustard

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Damn.

3lb chuck roast smoked at 275 for about 5 hrs, once 201 internal pulled to rest

Dry rub was pork barrel bbq mixed with Penzey's Tuscan sunset

Guacamole is avocado, jalapeno, onion, tomato, cilantro, garlic salt & lime

Frontera yellow corn salted chips

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Some of the beef will probably to into sandwiches tomorrow, but this is how I like to break it in 😂

10 hard boiled eggs diced

1 red onion minced

2 celery stalks minced

4oz mayo

1oz spicy brown mustard for acidity

1 tsp paprika

1/2 tsp fresh ground Himalayan pink salt

As much pepper as you'd like

Fold it together gently

Makes enough for 6-10 sandwiches depending on size

Less than 12 bucks total to make, including 🍞

Chicken legs were on sale again, so I fired up the east oak with some applewood and did some drums on 275 for about 3 hrs. Seasoning used was S&P and the Tuscan sunset herb blend from Penzey's

The collards were cooked with bacon, onion, garlic and chicken broth; braised for about 4 hours. You can add your own S&P, vinegar, hot sauce etc!

Hickory 250