So this is absolutely true:

When I was 14, I wrote the (as far as I can determine) first parser-driven BBS in the world, basically creating the first purpose-driven, "multi-player" online adventure game, with the following caveats:

- Unis had such games themselves, but their access was limited to other university students and not the general public.

- It's also possible that someone else might have done the same thing before me, but I have never found any record of a such a BBS or online game existing prior to 1981.

The name of the BBS was 'New House of Wrath' and it featured a house that you explored via simple verb-noun syntax. Each room in the house was a BBS function (various text games which I wrote myself / a message base / a philez repository / a graffiti wall) as well as a simple underlying adventure in the style of Zork. The whole thing was written in sloppy TRS-DOS BASIC on a TRS-80 Model III and resided within 48k of memory including a primitive DB engine that I wrote. I still have a 8-pin dot-maxtrix print out of the code.

Shortly after my BBS went "online", a couple of multi-line BBSs sprung up, but these were straight BBSs without an overlying structure like mine.

At the time, I thought nothing of writing the BBS other than it was a fun thing to do. 80 Micro, the magazine that covered all things TRS-related, was going to write a story about my BBS, but nothing ever came of it. I ran it until about 1986 when I finally gave up because everyone was going to online service like Compu$erve and Prodigy.

I know I'll never get a single bit of credit for what I did, but I know what I did and I'm proud of my little contribution to the online world; that'll have to be enough.

@newtboy
-Including race as a determining factor in your admission score
as a 'liberal' ideal
This IS happening broadly, link to how and arguments for why it is 'good'
https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/10/03/harvard-beat-an-effort-end-its-use-race-factor-admissions-what-will-supreme-court-do/
https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/news/2019/10/01/471085/5-reasons-support-affirmative-action-college-admissions/

-Enforcement of a race based "day of absence" where based on your race you were to be 'kicked off' campus for the day
Specifically the day of absence was at evergreen:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreen_State_College#2017_protests
Similarly reverse racist attitudes though are common enough, like chasing out a student journalist here for simply covering an event:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kVGtqp7usw

-"deplatforming" people for having dissenting opinions
Jordan Peterson is the biggest example, but my local uni has also banned pro-life student clubs too, so maybe I'm a little Canada biased on this?

-The entire circle-jerk of intersectionalism:
---"whiteness" needs to be defined as something inherently negative
Here's the Standford course on it if you or your parents wanna enrol:
https://explorecourses.stanford.edu/search?view=catalog&filter-coursestatus-Active=on&page=0&catalog=&q=CSRE+32SI%3A+Whiteness&collapse=

---"Racism" needs to redefined as not simply racial prejudice, but racial prejudice PLUS power(you know, so only white people can be racist under the new definition)
Likewise offered at Stanford, unless this is the lone critical race theory course that doesn't champion the above prejudice+power definition.
https://law.stanford.edu/courses/critical-race-theory/

---"systemic racism" getting defined as anything with unequal outcomes, so if asian students do too well in math it must mean the system is favouring them and we need to step in


And I'm out of time,

but seriously I'm a little baffled this was remotely controversial? Identity politics is a game the left has been playing at HARD for at minimum the decades since Affirmative Action was launched. The notion that the idea would eventually get national level push back should have been easy to see coming.

That last one sounded like Uni nazi ism! Wha..!!

Cool bonus video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQiykoPBMbg

Hmm. I wonder if he could threaten to sue the university, but offer to drop the suit if they let him back in on a 100% all-expenses-paid scholarship. Any degree he wants to get, for as long as it takes for him to complete.

Punishing her harshly (although she deserves it) does nothing to help him get his life back on track. The uni issuing a mea cupla and saying that they will let him back in on their dime AND allow people to speak in their defense before suspending students over hearsay would at least be a step in the right direction towards actually doing something positive for the real victim here.

Missed the Jordan Peterson reference. Being Canadian I've seen a lot of hate thrown his way from the left, but only hyperbole as reasons. Would you have specific things he has done or said to justify this?

Edit: The summary of my familiarity with Peterson is here
https://videosift.com/video/Secret-recording-of-Canadian-Uni-blocking-free-speech

Har har har.

I went through every calculus class my uni offered, so not so much.

Mayhaps I didn't explain the example given in enough length. The simple operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, division all have a single correct answer. Insisting that students find multiple methods of performing those operations and demonstrate multiple different learning methods for them is mental masturbation. You could spend that same time actually moving on to the more advanced stuff that is supposed to 'in theory' prepare them for.

Another example was solving a double digit multiplication problem like 37*86. The marking example showed a student using the old school vertical method and showing their work to arrive at the correct answer. The provincial grading system declared that as WRONG. The student was 'falling back' on the algorithm and should have demonstrated the use of multiple methods of solving the problem. That is idiocy.

Basic add/subtract/multiply/division isn't MATH it's arithmetic and it's a basic operation with a single answer and so long as you use a correct method to arrive at the correct answer you are good to go. Teach students that foundation and then move on to teaching them actual MATH. Read through our provincial curriculum, they are STILL teaching add/subtract/multiply/division at the Grade 11 level in the curriculum on the premise that students are still 'mastering' something that should've been a given by junior high.

BWHAHAHAHAA

Some of my housemates in uni would actually watch that crap, but at least they did it stoned.

Subliminal message at 07:59

Real talk:
For God knows what reason, some of you occasionally drop me a line asking about what to study at uni: whether to follow your passions or take the safe route.

While I’m far from an authority on anything whatsoever, I would say the following: You will never be this young again. It seems silly not to follow what you truly love. (There are limits to this advice. Celebrity Studies and Twitterology are not recommended.)

The arts and the humanities aren’t the most practical of routes. Law and medicine are probably safer, that’s true. Yeah, well so is never leaving your fucking house. If it’s in your blood, it’s in your blood. We don’t get to play the life game for too long. Don’t be a silly panda and waste it. Go after what you generally love, and I wish you the very best of luck.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

The Fox reporter, Malia is actually a really old friend from uni days - surreal.

Watch further, particularly his videos on authoritarian regimes. His issue is that controlling language with force is a hallmark of classic far left regimes (ie. Lenin/Stalin's Russia, Mao's China etc), so his beef is not only with the uni, it's with the government and the deluded (or worse, calculated) morons who think that state sanctioned and enforced speech is a "good thing".

He has spent decades studying authoritarianism and makes compelling arguments as to why the current "SJWs" are almost identical to the precursors of other authoritarian regimes.

I don't ask anyone to take anything said at face value, but Peterson does the due diligence for his arguments, and will often defer answering a question if he doesn't think he can offer a well reasoned response. I've yet to see a single video where he has said anything negative about trans people (as opposed to saying negative things about a government law to force language), yet he is described as a homophobe because it's far easier to label him to discredit him than to actually listen to what he is saying.

Not sure about 1968, but these days, the only requirement is enough money. I don't know anything about his past, but I'm going to assume that he got his degree from one of those pay-your-way-through universities, where they just give the degree if you keep failing but paying enough.

Even at normal uni's this happens somehow too: I see thousands of rich international students get degrees at my uni each year, and there is no way they have passed anything given that they can't even speak the local language. They all seem to have really nice cars though....
But international students pay upfront, and pay many times the admission price of local students.

Trump could have payed someone else to do the course work, or even still bribed or blackmailed someone too I suppose. Everyone has a price, and most people have skeletons in the closet too.

I followed my passion and it worked out. Grew up in a bunch of small oil towns in Canada, no where near any big cities in the 80's and 90's(oil is where most of my friends from that time ended up and look where that's gone.) I really liked to draw and had a lofty goal to work in visual effects for film, which was a VERY difficult, niche thing at the time... very unrealistic to get into. People laughed when I was getting a bachelor's degree in fine art in Uni because there was no money in it. Long story short, I'm doing quite well, have worked on many films at several companies including Pixar, and am currently working on the next Starwars at ILM. People from my childhood can't even believe it, but that's the difference between following a passion and "applying passion" to what seems a sensible, realistic choice.

Following a passion may not lead you to where you expected to go like the post above, but there is no right and wrong decisions, just choices that tell the story of your life. All you can do is negotiate the fork your currently at, with some loose idea of where you want to go and you'll go somewhere interesting. Maybe I should have been a fucking motivational speaker...

I'm impressed Unlike @newtboy, I don't automatically assume you're lying and feel compelled to do a bit more reading myself before discussing it further.

It's been a long time since I studied it at Uni, and even then we never studied the entire Koran (a one semester course would not have been sufficient for that).

There is, of course, some disagreement about what the hadiths say. The one that immediately springs to mind is "Seek knowledge even as far as China", and I'll quote the former prime minister of Malaysia here:{quote}A hadith says: “Seek knowledge even as far as China.” It was pointed out by detractors that this was just a saying of the Prophet and it was not a command from God. When they disagreed with a particular hadith, they were quick to discredit it and refused to acknowledge it as a source of Islamic teaching. But if they subscribed to it, then they would not cease to highlight it repeatedly, even if it’s authenticity is doubted. Surely seeking knowledge in China does not mean Islamic knowledge. During the Prophet’s period, China was also known to have deep knowledge in such fields as medicine, literature and paper, explosives and many others.{quote}

Certainly the early muslims were very keen on acquiring knowledge, and did indeed travel as far as China to do so (and brought the art of paper making back with them).

Nope. Right with you. I lasted 90 seconds.

He is lying about his transgender friend and his doctor. He doesn't have a transgender friend. And his doctor is not educated in the complexities of human sexuality. Or he is lying about talking to his doctor.

What we really need are group uni-sex bathrooms. They have them in Europe and in California.

Americans are such prudes.

Canadian here, have lived all across the country and have shed any and all regional dialects as a result. I studied "Standard North American English" in Uni, and sadly it just sounds like the news anchors of every major Canadian/American network. So Canadians and Americans in the larges urban centers have the same 'standard' and you'd be hard-pressed to tell them apart. But there are fun local dialects like this in both countries.

This is obvious, but I'm pointing it out because I get tired of Americans not in 'the know' saying Canadians sound funny when really all 'country folk' in both countries have odd local dialects.

Great timing and execution in this show though.