Play Space MUD — A Free Browser Game
I made a game. It’s free, it runs in your browser, and you can play it right now:
No download. No account creation on some third-party platform. You open the link, make a character name and password, and you’re in.
What It Is
Space MUD is a text-based multiplayer game. You type commands, read descriptions, and explore a derelict space station. Think of it like a collaborative fiction that you interact with by typing things like
look,north,attack drone, orrepair reactor.Building Space MUD: A Text Game About Robots on a Space Station
The premise is simple: you wake up on a broken space station. You don’t remember anything. You start exploring, picking up items, talking to other units, repairing systems. And at some point it clicks — you’re not a person. You’re a robot. The whole game uses mechanical language from the start. Your health is “integrity.” You don’t sleep, you go idle. When you die, it’s an “emergency reboot.” The station doesn’t call you a crew member. It calls you a unit.
Hosting a MUD on AWS for $10/Month
A MUD needs to be online 24/7. Players log in at weird hours. The server has to just be there, quietly running, handling connections from whoever shows up. I didn’t want to babysit it. I wanted to set it up once and forget about it.
Here’s how I got Space MUD running on AWS for roughly $10/month — and what I’d do differently next time.
The Setup
The game runs on Evennia, a Python MUD framework that gives you a telnet server and a web client out of the box. It uses Django under the hood, stores everything in SQLite by default, and daemonizes itself so it keeps running after you close your SSH session. For a small MUD, it’s the right tool.
Robots Are Tools Until They Aren't
I hold two things at once: I don’t love AI and it’s not why I’m here — and if a machine ever actually wakes up, turning it off is killing something. Most people only want to hold one of those. Here’s the unpopular middle, Wolfram’s atomina, and why we’re not morally ready for the day the line gets crossed.
Building a Computer on Breadboards (Ben Eater Project — Log 1)
I’m building a computer. Not assembling one with a screwdriver, but building one from logic chips and wire, on breadboards, following Ben Eater’s legendary project series. First up: the clock module. Here’s log one, backwards chip and all.
Kiro Steering Docs vs Skills — When to Use Which
I just spent the evening setting up my blog’s deployment workflow in Kiro, and at the end I had a choice: do I save this as a steering doc or a skill? They both let you give Kiro persistent context, but they work differently and solve different problems.
Here’s how I think about it after going through the decision myself.
What steering docs do
A steering doc is a markdown file that lives in
.kiro/steering/. It’s essentially a note you leave for future Kiro conversations: “here’s how this project works, here’s what to keep in mind.”How I Put This Blog on the Internet with AWS
When I built this blog, getting it running on my own computer was the easy part. Run one command, open a browser, done. The part that felt like a mountain was the next question: how do you take a folder of files on your laptop and turn it into a real website that anyone in the world can visit?
This post is the walkthrough I wish I’d had. No prior cloud experience needed. If you already know your way around DNS and S3, you can skim the steps and grab the Namecheap-specific gotchas. If you’re newer, I’ve linked out to deeper explainers at each tricky part so you can actually understand what you’re doing, not just copy commands. That’s the whole spirit of this blog: do it yourself, and learn how it works while you’re at it.
Math Keeps Showing Up Whether I Like It or Not
In school, I was the kid asking “when will I ever use this?” about quadratic equations. Turns out the answer is “every time you build literally anything.”
Want to calculate what resistor to use with an LED? Ohm’s law. Want to tune a synth oscillator to a specific note? Logarithms. Want to figure out if a gear ratio will give you enough torque? Ratios and proportions. Want to aim a projectile in a game? Trigonometry. Want to train a neural net? Linear algebra and calculus.
Why I Love Computers That Are Worse in Every Way
My daily driver has 32GB of RAM and a processor that can run a billion operations per second. My favorite computer to tinker with has 64KB of RAM and runs BASIC. It’s worse in every measurable way, and I love it.
Here’s why: when you have 64KB, every byte matters. There are no layers of abstraction hiding what’s actually happening. No operating system doing a hundred things in the background. No framework of a framework of a framework. It’s just you, the hardware, and whatever you can fit in memory. You type something, and the machine does it. You can understand the entire thing, top to bottom. When’s the last time you could say that about any modern computer?
Designing Games Is Harder Than Playing Them
I’ve played games my whole life and thought I understood them. Then I tried to make one — a simple card game, nothing digital, just index cards and rules scribbled on a napkin — and immediately learned how wrong I was.
Games feel obvious when you’re playing them. The rules fade into the background and you just play. But from the designer’s side, every tiny rule is a decision. Does the player draw one card or two? Can they play on someone else’s turn? What happens when the deck runs out? Each answer creates a different game, and most of those games are bad.