The parties were nice.

As were the side-benefits. 

Thu Mar 27 2025 13:09:52 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar Subject: Re: Happy birthday UNCENSORED!

I miss the chaos. Online culture was different before the mainstream people got online.

How does that work if he owns them both?   Or some sort of money laundering fraud by that scumbag?

"Musk's xAI buys social media platform X for $45 billion"

He is and you have no idea how much i dislike him and want him gone from the earth. And all like him.

Fri Mar 28 2025 23:04:07 UTC from IGnatius T Foobar

The deal was overseen by Elon Musk, who is not a scumbag. Please reserve all hatred to be used towards Bill Gates.

And just to clarify, while morally i have zero issue with making them all vanish, its not legal. So therefore i wont.

Fri Mar 28 2025 23:37:24 UTC from Nurb432

 want him gone from the earth. And all like him.

 

And unrelated to the above desire for a purge ( ill back off on that anyway, before anyone gets some silly ideas that i was trying to hint i would act, which im not.  Remember its America, free speech and all. Just because you would like something to take place does not mean you are going to go out and do it.. )

Is it my imagination or has chocolate  ( candy ) gone up like 10x in the last couple of years?  Was at the grocery, the candy bags with the choco eggs and stuff which were everywhere due to the holiday, 8 bucks for a tiny pack.

Hello folks. For reasons I'll explain later, I found myself searching tonight to see if Citadel code was floating around out there somewhere, and was shocked to discover that there were still active versions of Citadel running out here. I hope this is a proper place for an introduction.

As the subject says, I am a VERY old Citadel old-timer. I moved to Seattle in 1979 and lived there until about 1990 when I moved to Oregon. I was one of the users on Jeff's (then known just as Cynbe Ru Tauren to most of us) original Citadel, and was there for the whole Sugar Bunny blow-up. I was also a user on Glenn Gorman's Minibin, which was a Citadel clone running on an 8-bit Radio Shack TRS-80 with 48K of memory and one (initially I believe, though it might have been two) floppy drives! I not only knew Glenn, we were housemates for a while after he separated from his then-partner, and I even ran a Minibin briefly (through it never had a dedicated phone line, and ran limited hours for a small audience). I also Knew David Bonn and was on his first Stonehenge and several other installations of it. I also knew (and know) Caren Park, and we still chat fairly often on Facebook.

Maybe that's fascinating to some of you, or maybe you're looking askance at this dusty relic that has come crawling out of the darkness. Let me know. If you have questions, I'll try to answer them if I can.

Anyway, the reason I was looking up Citadel was the rather dire situation that the U.S. seems to be heading into. I've mostly pulled out of commercial networks (I stay on Facebook only to keep in touch with family and a few old friends) and most of my online activity is on the Fediverse, which consists of many independently operated servers, and this is hopefully less vulnerable to censorship and corporate or government control. But it's also a very site of anti-Trump sentiment, and so a big target that could draw the attention of government censorship, blockage of international servers, and shutdown of US servers. I'm not taking anything off the table at this point of historical insanity.

Anyway, I've long had a notion of a pocket sized BBS, originally just because I thought it was a cute idea. Those early room systems, as I said, ran on AMAZINGLY anemic hardware by modern standards. It suggested that you might easily be able to run them on a tiny microcontroller, maybe something as light as an Arduino, but definitely, something like a Raspberry Pi. In fact, it would be a hardware upgrade that those early 80's systems never could have dreamed of. Moreover, rather than dial-up, it should be possible to set something up as a direct wifi and/or web host. My thought was that you could incorporate this, plus a power supply, in a small package that could be plugged directly into wall outlet and run self-contained. Originally this was just a fun idea, kind of guerilla/art concept, a retro way of bypassing the internet completely and setting up a secret way for people to communicate.

But now I'm see a more grim utility for it as a potential way of bypassing censorship and organizing protest and sharing information. Plug one in, at an office, a library, in a business, even in a public place where it could anonymously be accessible to nearby people with their phone or laptop. And the time to develop something like this would be now, before it's absolutely essential, and before the pathways to share the code and information around are closed.  Though I have my personal bent, I see this as a project not to support any given ideology, but as an agnostic communication tool that could be used for many things.

Now, I'm an idea guy, but I'm not a programmer and not more than a casual hardware hobbyist. But I'm putting the idea out here to see if it can take root somewhere. I'd love to hear your comments, positive or negative, and reactions, so I've set up an account and will be checking back. Thoughts? (Maybe should start a room for this if there's interest.)

....and at the local CVS the same bag is 12 dollars, so right at 1 dollar an ounce..  ( they are always higher than the real world, but geesh )

Tue Apr 01 2025 01:15:55 UTC from zelgomer

I don't know. I'm actually a chocolate fiend, particularly dark chocolate. I remember seeing the articles about Bidenflation wrecking chocolate prices, and I've been waiting to see my brand go up, but it's been holding steady for years.