#micromuse

Micro Muse #1

On MicroMUSE, my handle was Nib Noals. (Reverse ‘Robin’ and ‘Sloan’, drop a few letters, get it?) After I had spent some time exploring the existing space station/holodeck, I set out to build a home of my own, a hideout that I called Nib’s Knoll. I created a hill and a mammoth oak tree, and inside the tree I carved out a house. There was a library, lovingly described – you could examine the shelves and see the titles of individual books. There was a lookout post set high in the branches. There was a secret passage. There was a small dragon programmed to follow me from room to room. I obsessed over this place. Almost daily, I would connect to MicroMUSE and rewrite the rooms’ descriptions or rearrange them entirely. This wasn’t entirely solipsistic: there were always other users around. Nib’s Knoll had a guestbook, and if you typed the command to inspect it, you would see ‘a thick tome on a low table, with a quill pen and a pot of ink’ and then an invitation to scribble a greeting. I would often log in to discover that another user had visited in my absence, explored my house, and left a message behind. It was spooky and thrilling. When users I recognised were online, I would invite them to visit, an act that prompted all the nervousness and last-minute clean-up of real-world entertaining.