Danny: 00:00 Welcome to all Titans of Text listeners. This is a bit of a special episode. We don't have a guest except just me and Eric and we're going to go over us and the podcast and all of the efforts, basically that we're doing within the text gaming community and, and the larger gaming community. So we're going to start off with who are we because we've never, we've never really gone into that, for the listeners, like why should you listen to us? What right do we have to be telling you about the text gaming world? You who may have been playing your mud for 30 years and remember the olden days of raw telnet with windows terminal or jumping on your unix box and telnetting straight from there. Let's start with us. Uh, let's start with who, who are you Eric Oestrich? Eric: 01:05 Uh, so I'm Eric. I am the developer behind I guess two main projects, ex_venture, if you've heard of that. That's an elixir base mud that I started two years ago, almost three, maybe, I don't know, some, some July ago. And then grapevine as a new, started out as gossip as like a chat network about a year ago and then it turned into grapevine and is now a listing website and a web client and a chat network. Yeah. So that's, that's my, mud dev creds. Danny: 01:39 Of course as everyone knows, I am Danny "Austerity" Nissenfeld. I've been in the mud world for, for as long as it's existed pretty much. I used to play many, many Diku clones, Discworld I played, uh, the nightmare LP. I ran a mud for 10 years between roughly 1997 and 2007 that no one ever remembers called twinmud. Uh, also called under the eclipse, also called persecutions in paradoxi. Some people called it total crap, but that's besides the point. So I ran that mud for awhile. Uh, I was also very active in the newsgroup and forum community along time ago under a different pseudonym, where I helped people code their mud coated many roms, helped to many roms achieve their heavily modified tagline. I helped a few LPs, but mostly, mostly Dikus. Uh, and today, uh, of course I am reviving my old mud world, my new platform is called Warrens. Eric: 02:46 It is in c# and probably ill advised to use for your project unless you really want to have a mud in c# and don't want to write the platform yourself. Uh, and of course, I am currently a moderator on the mud subreddit, /r/mud and one of the administrators of the coder's guild, uh, of course, along with Eric. Eric: 03:08 I forgot to add that. Danny: 03:08 And of course Eric's also a moderator on the mud discord. We're in a bunch of places. I'm moderating things, not, not too heavily, you know, through the guild of, I don't know, I fulfilled the purpose I had 30 years ago for Muds, which is helping people code and, uh, probably involving myself in more projects than I can handle. And of course, uh, I am, somewhat involved with grapevine. I believe that I supply some of the worst ideas, uh, for the, the grapevine platform and, uh, try to lend a bit of a guiding hand in some design matters at least. Danny: 03:48 And, uh, and that's who we are. That's our onus for why you should listen to us. But of course you don't really listen to us on Titans of Text. We hope that you listen to other people. Um, and that's who we like to bring on is other people. You know, we're not going to have an ad spot today. Uh, I'm just gonna put it out there that if you have something to say, if you've have something you've done or if you have something you're doing, uh, in the text gaming world, drop us align. Our email addresses are of course on the podcast site and maybe we'll interview you. But let's get into, let's get into what we are working on. Let's get into some of our efforts in bringing up the, the mud and text gaming world. Uh, so let's get into grapevine. Eric: 04:33 It is as of this recording, the one year anniversary of grapevine. So let's, let's get into how it started. Uh, Eric and I have slightly different opinions on how it started and who's bad idea it was in the first place. Eric: 04:49 It was everyone's bad idea. Danny: 04:49 It was such a bad idea. So we were talking in the guild chat as we usually do where so many bad ideas find their birth and um, we were talking about what we can do. Like my god, we're running out of things to do. These muds are actually working, but none of us want to make any content. I mean really why would you want to make content for your game that other people could play when you could just keep making tooling and other things that have nothing to do with writing content. So we were talking about what we could do to alleviate the fact that all of our muds basically have no players and how we could bring a social aspect to a mud that only has one or two players. Eric: 05:30 So we started talking about chat networks essentially. There are chat networks, LP muds, have their own little chap network. There was of course IMC, the intermod chat, which some muds participated in, mine did, not that anyone actually talked on it. And of course is what, what is it I3? Eric: 05:48 Yeah, I think I3 is the LP one. Danny: 05:51 We all have websocket muds, right. We're not beholden to telnet only we have access to web technology. So why don't we make a chat network and Intermud chat network using web socket technology. And that was the initial suggestion was was that, and now we were trying to come up with a name and we settled on gossip at some point. Eric: 06:12 Yeah. I, I, uh, I remember we talked about that and then the next two days I like worked on it. I think, I think I'd just picked gossip because that was what everyone's main channel typically seems to be. And so I remember like writing it, getting it like most of the way to set up the first I was like, I can't, I can't tell anyone yet, but I was super hyped and I think the second day it was working just enough and I had it deployed. Uh, the rest is history, right? Danny: 06:39 Yeah. I got Warrens on it while I was at work and um, that was, that was fun. So now we had two muds that no one was playing that could chat to each other and Eric: 06:51 fun stats. Uh, we're actually at 18 muds right now that are currently online. Danny: 06:56 Wow. That is, I don't know, that's phenomenal to me. Considering how many, how many muds there are out there at this point. I mean, there used to be thousands, but I don't think we can really claim that anymore. Eric: 07:08 Uh, I think mud stats, the last I saw it at least knew of. I mean mud stats doesn't check all the time or whatever, but at least what it considers online, it was like 650ish. I think so, yeah. Danny: 07:20 The thing that gossip lacked where grapevine came from them was that, um, gossip lacked a web admin. And as anyone knows, the only thing worth programming is a web admin. If you don't have a web admin what are you doing? I mean that, that is my, my purpose in life is to add web admins to everything. So we had grapevine at that point so people could authorize in. So we could tell who everyone was. Eric: 07:48 It's a, a lot of like grapevine v1, I guess v0.1 or whatever. But, uh, I'd had a lot of big ideas of being like a place where you would sign up, authorize, make achievements, get points and whatnot. And then the achievement system is like half baked still. Danny: 08:06 Yeah. Yeah. Grapevine was originally like gossip extended, like tooling for muds to, to allow and you know, it's a lot like a blizzard profile or a steam, uh, you know, a blizzard launcher profile or a steam profile where everyone could see. And uh, you know, a big idea was to assist people in being able to play more than one mud because a big thing of muds of courses to the social aspect. And if I'm on, for example, the wheel of time mud. So one of my friends that is perhaps playing Sindome or, uh, any other mud, um, even an ire mud, like starmourne has no idea that I'm currently logged into wheel of time and they're logged into the other one and we can't play together. You know, we could get on discord or some other space, but we never really had that for muds. And it's like, oh, wouldn't this be cool if someone, another mud could just look at the gossip who list and figure out that uh, I am on another mud on a different character and one of us we could talk to each other, one of us could jump to the other mud and we could do something. Danny: 09:12 I always thought that was an interesting goal. And so we grapevine was a good way to do that is to make a, we need, of course you need a central profile, like a steam login that you could have a central name with and you could collect what games you're on, what muds you're on, and then we'd know what mud you're on at any given time because you could look at like, you know, like an armory profile for blizzard for, for World of Warcraft or Diablo. Then you could see things like achievements for specific games. If, if the game would add achievements to their system, you know, Grapevine was a better name to honestly we were, we, I think I brainstorm some truly awful gossip, uh, tangental words. Uh, and none of them were appropriate in normal society. Eric: 09:58 Yeah. Grapevine is, I think it also lends itself to drama when you name yourself gossip. Like that's kind of, it just seems like you're asking for something. Grapevine pushes it towards a spreading out, pulling things together. Danny: 10:18 And you know, I think the, how grapevine has evolved because at that point, at the point where you have players making profiles, you need games to make profiles so the game admins can come on and add achievements and now you have gained profiles. Well now we have this network of Web admins that allow people to make a profile for their specific game for their mud. At that point, what do we have? Well we have steam and we could make a front page that shows off muds in a capacity that one does not invite drama or criticism because we don't have like a five star rating or a bunch of reviews, a bunch of like short reviews where people can thumbs up or thumbs down your mud for whatever reason that pissed for a former admin that did something five years ago and they're not going to leave like an angry Yelp review about your mud. Danny: 11:12 That that was a primary goal. Like even more than existing; existing without drama was a big goal I think for, for all of us Eric: 11:20 As the one who's running it. I can definitely agree with that. Danny: 11:24 So, so yeah, I mean we had profiles and now we could have a front page for, we get have a front page on a website that shows off muds and it was just, I don't know, it was, it was like a, a quick design. It was like, no, make it look a little better. No, make it look a little more like steam's front page with like a, like a columnar list of Muds, uh, with, you know, hero images that make them look good. And I think that was not a goal that I ever thought of personally in the beginning was like, damn, we need another mud listing site. Danny: 11:56 But like at least almost every day, every other day at least we're kind of poking fun at the existing, like even the historical mud listing sites cause they just, they don't always look good. Eric: 12:06 Yeah. Yeah. Most mud sites haven't changed since like the early 2000. And so like part of grapevine is to try and help push things, pull things forward. There is a hosted site you can turn on for your, your game. Uh, well I guess I have to turn it on for your game to like try and make that simple so that you don't have to spin up like a wordpress or whatever. So you have like a site that doesn't look bad. It may not look the best, uh, or unique, but it will at least look good and be responsive. And so there's, there's lots of hopes and like partially done stuff and hopes that like do as little as possible to see if it catches on. And if it does, then I'll run with it type of thing. Danny: 12:49 And you know, I think the mud world has long struggled with a landing page. Like okay. So in the 90s people either knew about muds or they didn't. And you know, a lot of us running muds didn't really give a damn like, Oh, who cares about these guys? They're playing, you know, everquest or whatever. They're playing those graphical muds. We don't need those people. You know, it's 2019 and we need people to know that muds exist. If we intend for this medium to be anything more than a few bastions with, you know, 20 to 30 people online at any given time. Uh, yeah. And there are muds that are bigger than that. Um, Aardwolf some of the IREs like starmourn. Uh, yes, there are muds that have more than like 20 or 30 people, but even 20 or 30 people is the exception, not the rule. Danny: 13:36 And we need a landing page. And you know, up till now, yeah, there were some other listing sites, but they were full of drama and they were old designs as we, and you know, the Reddit is not an appropriate landing page as much as I'd like it to be. A subreddit never is inappropriate landing page for anything any more than a Facebook page is inappropriate homepage for a small business. Uh, it's nice because people can see it and they can communicate and there's a place to ask questions or look at a Wiki, but it's not, it doesn't get anyone enthusiastic about muds to see all of us talking about, you know, what mud should I play because I'm interested in role playing like it. There's no, there's no jazz, there's no pole to really get someone interested in, in mudding, you've at all because it's just a forum and we can't point someone at a discord or the mud coders guild, which is a slack because again, it doesn't really do anything for anyone. Danny: 14:27 It's not, it's not going to catch anyone's eye and grapevine kind of. It's, I think a good purpose to have a landing zone for muds in general that we can point people at like, oh, what are muds? Well you know, here's a link to a page that explains what muds are. Or I could tell you in a few paragraphs and you know, go to this site. Like where can I find muds? Just go to this site. There's a bunch of muds. They have beautiful hero images, they have who lists if they've connected to that. They have their MSSP stats that shows you people are online at given, at specific times that stuff's important. And of course the other thing that I definitely never thought of from the start was the grapevine web client, which goes into that purpose that we've been talking about for several minutes now of having a landing page is also having ease of getting in the game. Danny: 15:15 And that's something we talk about a lot in the discord and the guild and on the Reddit is, okay, we got someone interested in a mud, we got someone interested in Sindome or we got something, someone interested in a hack and slash or like Aardwolf now, well how do they play? Oh yeah, here's the link to mudlet or or Tintin or the mush client go download this and oh wait, your it didn't download correctly or you hit the wrong link. Or uh, it's just looks really old and kind of winformish and now what do you do? All you have to enter a telnet address and a port and then you have to have a login and like all this stuff and it's just too much for some people. We have games on our phones that you click a button, it installs, it automatically opens, the game starts and you start playing because your Google, your iPhone automatically integrate your profile into that game and now you have achievements and tracking and social and all this stuff automatically. Of course, Eric's solely responsible for the web client. Other than people telling him that, oh, the font should be 16 point Arial, why don't, why don't you take it, Eric, talk about the web client. Talk about its genesis. Eric: 16:22 Yeah. So I'm trying to, I don't even remember how I decided to start one, but I, I mean I remember we were talking in the discord and I was like, would people use this? The general idea was like, yes, but it's a proxy. So the, that that issue has hopefully been solved. Um, so if you're worried about it being a proxy, you can get the direct IP address but totally separate point anyways. So I like it started as a v1 was the most basic things, so it had color and you could send and receive text and then it slowly started adding more stuff. Um, and I guess I should say the main point of the web client is not to be a replacement for say mush client or mudlet or tintin or any of the clients that, uh, you listener are currently using. Eric: 17:13 The goal for the web client is to try and as be as easy as possible. Hopefully have some more advanced features like modals or I know darkwind is, has been talking about doing some kind of Balder's gate type of quest interface where it shows like the little picture and some text and you can kind of select between stuff. So kind of nice to have features but not required necessarily for a mud to make it more friendly for someone who's never played this thing before. And yeah, so it's just to, to be a, if you want us to share your game to your friend who's never heard of muds, uh, can give them a single link, they click it, it opens websocket to me. I open a telnet session to that, to the server. They don't even have to know what telnet it is, it's just happening in the background. Eric: 18:00 Uh, and all they know is that they see a nice interface that with has text flowing up the screen. They could type in whatever. Yeah. So it's just to make it as easy as possible for new people to get in. And then once they're in, they're hooked, then they can graduate to mudlet to mush client to whatever else they want to then do the more advanced features like triggers and all that kind of stuff. So the, the hope is just to be as easy as possible to bring in more people and not necessarily replace anything. Danny: 18:29 I figure I can add a little bit. I think the client came out of wanting to do secure telnet and oauth via well not oauth initially, but a secure authorization over telnet. Eric: 18:42 Yeah. Maybe. Danny: 18:42 Which way, which mudlet does and uh, we've been reminded that mudlet does that, not that it, it requires the mud to actually enable certain things. Um, secure telnet is, I, it's a big deal to us because we're both technology professionals. I mean, right now my job is securing servers and uh, making sure that things stay secure. So it's important to us. I not everyone in the mud community for sure really cares that their password is going over clear text on telnet. But some do and some are security minded and um, the secure telnet that I is good. It's not really a reason to use that client over axmud or any of the other clients. I think it was the initial push was like, well how do we do secure telnet? Well, we need a client. Eric: 19:30 Yes, it is a, so one benefit if you're at like a coffee shop, uh, that has just wide open Wifi, the connection to grapevine itself will always be secure. So you'll at least get out of that hop and then once you, once the passwords at the server, which is unfortunate that I have it in the first place. But anyways, it's just going to happen with the proxy. Once so like, just getting to the Internet is at least secure. So someone doesn't snoop your password by her at the coffee shop. So that's definitely one benefit. Danny: 20:02 So we've talked about grapevine, um, and grapevine, you know, as a labor, it's a labor of love and it's a labor of perceived need that is a project that has a purpose, that is serving the mud community. And of course the tangental thing of the grapevine website itself is serving the greater community and propping muds up and helping muds have a good entry portal. There are other things we're doing like this, Titans of Text. Why did we decide to start interviewing text game people? And I think this and a lot of the purpose besides, you know, wishing grapevine a happy anniversary is uh, something that came out in the Grapevine Gazette, uh, in June. June's episode June's issue of the Grapevine Gazette, where in the on winemaking article, uh, I outlined sort of a manifesto, my plans for global domination, um, where pinky and the brain take over the world with muds. Danny: 21:03 No, that's not it. But yes, we started titans of text because we want not just people to, to visit muds of, but to get people to visit muds, we need media. I think this is something that muds have always lacked. Muds, lack of media because we kind of build these, you know, we were the first people to build these online community worlds and whether we want to or not, we end up making gated communities. But not just gated communities. We ended up making gated communities in the middle of the desert and no one finds us. And you know, a lot of us are happy with that. There's like, we got our players, we were playing in a game, you know, we have an RP game and we're making plots and it's, it's kinda cool and, and we're having fun. We don't need the whole world to see us. Danny: 21:47 And you know, I don't think any of us could handle a, like what happened to WWorld of Warcraft where, let's talk a little about, let's talk a little about mmorpgs and general everquest. Everquest had about a quarter of a million players in the early 2000s, right? Then all the pundits like other MMOS are coming out. Uh, and all the pundits were like, well, the, the total population of online emo RPGs stayed the same. It didn't really grow that much with, with each release, with city of heroes. It just kind of splintered because it was like, well, this is a niche thing. Uh, people going online, dedicating their lives to these games. It's kind of niche and there's a total population, you know, total percentage of gamers that are ever going to do that. And you know, as mud people, we kind of knew that that was kind of the world we lived in for the last, I don't know, 20 years. Danny: 22:37 And um, world of Warcraft came along and the perceived total population of MMORPG players went suddenly from a quarter of a million to 6 million and then it grew to 12 million and then it kept growing. And now we have hundreds of millions. And I don't think any of us have the technology, you know, unless, um, unless one of our workplaces decides to give us a 300 something Gig of ram machine, none of us could really handle the 6 million players or a magnitude more of players than we're used to. Uh, I don't think even IRE, if starmourne's launch gathered the edit, it gathered an impressive number of people. Trust me, I was on there at launch and it was several hundred people on that who list, I've never seen that many people know who list myself. But imagine if 10,000 people had tried to log into starmourne on day of, they wouldn't have had the hardware to do that. Danny: 23:33 As a community, we don't have the social, and I don't even know what word is appropriate for this artistic, maybe artistic is the right word, artistic, total capacity to handle that much interest. So, Eh, you know, I've gone a little bit around the bush here, a titans of text and the manifesto in the grapevine gazette and some other things that are going to talk about some other properties that are coming out and the newsletters. Uh, the, the grapevine gazette, the mud coder's guild newsletter, reviews that I'm trying to push for on the reddit. All of this is to grow our media and artistic volume, so to speak somewhere people can land. Uh, and I talked about how penny arcade grew and now they're a media empire. And quite frankly, while I don't think we'll ever have several annual conventions in many places of the world such as, um, penny arcade has grown to at this point, I don't think we'll ever have that much in muds. Danny: 24:34 But I think we could have an annual convention. I think we could possibly even have two, uh, I think we could grow our media capacity because if we, if we pull in more people into the mud world, if we pulled that much interest in, people need somewhere to land. They need things to consume because people consume media and art at such a phenomenal rate at this point because it's all readily available. People binge on a weekend. If someone gets like, hey, like the friends like IMs them or texts them like, hey, you should check this out. They go in there on Friday night and then they have a whole weekend. Like what if they binge? What if they could binge literally everything out there, every review, every article, every podcast episode between us and stick in the mud with Tark. They could binge all that in a day and then yeah, they could be playing a mud but there's no tangental material left. Danny: 25:29 I want to grow and not personally while I personally doing this and with Eric and with other members of the community, other people need to get involved too. And if we make things, if we make this podcast, if I make a the Lore of Yore podcast, which we'll talk about in a little bit, I think it'll give people place a place for people to land and we'll be able to grow horizontally to handle the vertical growth that I believe we may deserve and maybe incoming in the next few months, uh, towards the end of the year. That's why I want to do the podcast personally. Uh, and I think it has a purpose, but I don't want to hog the entire episode here. Uh, so what, what do you get out of? What did you get out of titans? What do you get out of a naming people for, for weird Greek mythological figures every other week? Eric: 26:22 Uh, yeah, cause I guess I always been tangentially or like I've always been interested in doing like a podcast just as a, I dunno, a technologist I guess is the right word, where it's like I've, I've been listening to podcasts forever and figuring out the equipment and like how they work and all that has been interesting. But I just never had a thing to do it on. Right. Um, and now grapevine has exploded. At least in my life personally, we, oh, we've only had one mud podcast, right. So that there's space to fill. Yeah. Maybe that's the wrong way to describe it, but like more than one mud podcast can exist. Right. So this is, uh, what I do most of my time. And so this was like finally the thing to talk about. So yeah. And I, we just started up a podcast on my work, so I had some experience of like figuring all this out and like how to do producing and making questions up beforehand and scheduling and like all the boring stuff that isn't doing the actual recording. Eric: 27:23 So that, I guess the experience was mostly there to start up a fun like side podcast type of thing, side project podcast. So yeah, it's also just fun to talk with people throughout the community and hear different perspectives and try and share that with other people. So like if you've never used a move, maybe you listen to the episode about sindome where, kind of talks about how they work or if you've never used an LP, you listen to the darkwood episode or if you're interested in accessibility, like you have no idea where to start. Maybe you can start with the uh, episode 6 accessibility episode. I'm like, kind of get some places to, I don't know, just spread ideas around and take the very insular communities and kind of mush them together and make them talk and uh, I guess talk through listening to people on the podcast, but spreading ideas around and, and yeah. Danny: 28:13 Let's talk about future plans because then I can talk a little bit about things that are upcoming community wise in the next few months. So we'll talk about, we'll talk about the future plans of grapevine first. A great vine is a listing site. It's got its web client and it has other potentials that we're kind of not necessarily meeting yet. Uh, achievements. My grandiose, talk about intermud games. I'd love to actually find the time to do a, I know everyone is just really wanting to play my awful implementation of like checkers between Sindome and darkwind because clearly if you're in a mud, you have nothing better to do than play checkers with someone in a different ud. Eric: 28:56 I mean they've just the ultra socializer at that point. Danny: 29:02 Exactly. Uh, so what's upcoming for, for grapevine in general? Uh, Eric? Eric: 29:09 Uh, yeah, so I guess my current effort is to like the immediate effort is to pull off the socket code, uh, into its own like process that sits next to the web app so that what that will enable is easier deploys and kind of just making it so that the, when I do a deploy for the website, the socket doesn't go down. So right now that everything kind of goes down except for the telnet sessions. So just making it more set up so it's more robust and whatnot in the future. So that's the very immediate new stuff I've been starting working on the web chat and making that like a thing that doesn't suck at this point. The, when I merged, grapevine and gossip that the chat I think broke and no one's using it. So no one noticed. Uh, so it was, it was fine. But now that we have a web client, it's got a distinctive look pulling that look into the web chat that is up right now. So making the web chat more feature rich, probably gonna start adding in more moderation stuff. So that for me it would be cool to like be able to click on people's names and like going to their profile or click the game that they're chatting from going to the profile, being able to do moderation stuff from the chat as I'm seeing it happen. Eric: 30:25 So it kind of stuff like that. And then once that's more set up than in the web client as you're playing a game, having like either slide out or as a sidebar or something, have the grapevine chat there. Uh, so even if you're the Gaynor connected to doesn't support it, you can still see the chat while you're playing. So that would be cool. Doing some kind of sidebar that can put that games chat in, like in the same view would be cool. Kind of more the stuff that you see in like mudlet when people do custom scripting to pull out in game communication to pull out a map, kind of making, making more scripting stuff available, but without actually needing to script it, um, at all be through JMCP messages. Yeah. And then probably finally getting around to achievements. The only thing that's missing at this current, at the current moment is unlocking it, which is, you know, the important part. Eric: 31:17 But, uh, yeah, so achievements unfortunately stalled mostly because I was just kind of waiting for people to start using them and setting them up. I think a few games have actually set up achievements, so it's probably time to get around to it and maybe that that might help pull in more players. Yeah. So I guess the, when the website, when the web client happened that that seemed to gain some attention. So that's where my attention went. So it's kind of following where people seem to be interested in most, uh, along with what I am interested in just working on and like figuring out and what not kind of developer tools wise. So like figuring out react for your redux, figuring out elixir and the clustering stuff and whatnot. Yeah. Which I guess does, uh, as a small reminder for everyone, grapevine is open source. You can go check out all of this if there's a specific thing that you want to add. So for pull requests. Danny: 32:10 And, uh, you know, I have future plans in general. Um, there's Lore of Yore, which I'm going to talk about in a second. Uh, but I would, I would like to say, um, we've had to, uh, annual guild coder contests of the game jams and um, both of them have been very codey. Uh, I, I guess the second one was kind of builderish. But the first one was definitely very codeish. We do have, we would like to get builders into a two. You know, some people in the community build and they like building and they're not necessarily coders or if they don't really have a huge interest in learning to code and they just want to build worlds. And um, soon enough there will be an episode of Titans of Text that, uh, features Thibaud the creator, one of the creators of written realms and written realms is a place where you can build worlds. In one of my favorite things, a web admin and I have been talking with Thibaud and Eric and I had been talking with them and of course we interviewed him, which you'll probably get to hear some time in early August. In one of these episodes we've been talking about, uh, focusing on building worlds and we've come up with kind of a contest, more of an effort, more of a, a joined effort or a community focused effort, which is very similar to Nanowrimo, which of course is the writers or the authorship event that happens in November where people interested in writing novels, write a whole novel, 50,000 words within the span of November itself of one year. Danny: 33:51 I don't know. Stephen King probably doesn't have a hard time doing it, but most people have a hard time putting out 50,000 words in a month. That's more than 10,000 or more than a thousand words a day. Uh, some people, me, specifically, I have never succeeded fully. Uh, it's, it's a struggle. I've tried it, but what we are going to do is make NaMuBuMo instead of Nanowrimo. So the national mud builders month and partnering with Thibaud and not all of the details are here, but you could probably get a taste for it by going on the written realms site of getting through the tutorial. Uh, and you can build worlds right now and you could see what it's probably going to be like, but you will be able to go on there. There will be a month and you could go on there. You'll build a world and someone will win. Danny: 34:42 There won't be a prize. There will probably be a fancy certificate that you'll get in the mail, uh, declaring you the top NaMuBuMo winner. And everyone will just make a world. And we'll all play the worlds and we'll get to experience these small narratives that people have come up with in, in a kind of a mud frame, uh, kind of a mud framework, with written realms. And that will probably be happening later in the year, probably September or October because we still have some details to work out. And this is also kind of related to grapevine because uh, there is more to the text gaming world and the narrative driven game world than just muds. There's also interactive fiction and there's things like a choose your own adventure type games, which interactive fiction takes care of. But I wouldn't call Zork a choose your own adventure game. Danny: 35:39 It's like a single player mud. The thing that I'd like to figure out how to do, and I'm working with Thibaud on this, is to get, to highlight specific things in written realms that people have built and put them out somewhere on a page that's much like the grapevine homepage where people can see these and they could jump in them and browse a number of them. Um, so that's, that's a little related to the national mud builder month. And then of course, there's Lore of Yore, which is something that I teased on the reddit last August and promise that I would do and did not find the time to do it. Uh, which is a radio drama style podcast, which is scripted. We'll have different voice actors. It will essentially be a, the purpose of it really is to take mud people in the mud community, take your stories that you've experienced and an RP mud or even not in an RP mud in a hack and slash MUD. Danny: 36:39 That was just something that was interesting. Take those stories, script them out into a radio drama and then record it, uh, with a number of voice actors and foley effects and background music and just make a real solid production out of people's existing stories that they tell that they experienced and that they enjoy remembering in the mud world. Um, and that will also probably be happening or finishing off later in the year, uh, the first episode at least, and it's probably going to take a few months per episode because it's a lot of production work. And then what do we have for Titans of Text? I already kind of tease that Thibaud is going to be on talking about written realms in early August. More than likely we also have a soon enough, uh, we'll be talking with Vadi of mudlet and we'll have a, an episode dedicated to clients to mud clients and mudlet and talk about the exciting world of taking a lot of players complaints and trying to make them into a client that everyone likes. And we'll answer the age old question of why don't we just still use Zmud, which is a little bit of a joke. Danny: 37:50 And then we'll also have a guest that I'm happy to announce, have a guest that isn't part of the mud world and I'm going to announce it here. And we've been keeping it from everyone that we have an interview that we will bring to all of you with none other than Alexis Kennedy, the man behind almost all of the writing in Fallen London, Sunless Seas, he wasn't on sunless skies. You left before that formed a company after that called whether factory and made Cultist Simulator. Yes. We will have someone on the show that is in, I don't know if it's the AAA gaming sphere, I think that's almost a bad word at this point, but he makes games that a lot of people play and they're narrative driven. Danny: 38:41 They are so heavily narrative driven and they are beautiful gains and you know, I'm going to call fall in London practically text game because it's kind of like a choose your own adventure game where there's just a whole lot of choices to make. But yes, we will, we will have an interview for you next week with Alexis Kennedy and um, I think that's it. I think that's the guests. Uh, we haven't really ever announced guests, and I think it's about time we start at least being able to say who's coming next so we can get people hyped up about things. I think that's it for this episode. We're pretty long in, uh, and we've, we've talked a lot about, grapevine. We've talked a lot about the general efforts that are happening and I hope everyone has a little bit more insight into why we're doing things and what we're doing. Of course, as I mentioned before, if anyone wants to help out on any of these efforts, even on titans of text, you know, there's kind of us and people we interview, but maybe you want to be interviewed, uh, or maybe you want to submit articles or write mud reviews and put them on the Reddit, uh, or help out with grapevine; it's code or it's design. And you know, the door's always open for the guild. Someone's almost always awake and there, or the discord or the reddit. So there's always people to talk to and there's always things going on as everyone now knows.