Deployed to monsterrobot.games/games/haxtory/ — the botchat box, bind
mounted into forum-nginx, same pattern as the other games.
card.html is a model card in the AI sense rather than the arcade sense:
what the game is, the three ideas it is built on, an itemised list of
which parts are historically true (the frequencies, Strowger, the 1-in-7,
the 75 cents, SS7, the Linux dates) and which parts are invented (all the
people, the board itself, the romance), and then an honest list of what it
does not do — it is short for what it is, 75 of 200 philes, no
multiplayer, not accessible, unprofiled, and never playtested by a
stranger. Linked from the boot screen.
Also fixed: the blue box has been sitting in the far corner of the frustum
since it was built, where perspective squashed it into a sliver and half
of it fell outside the visible cone. I twice assumed occlusion and twice
wrote it off as a capture artifact. It was framing — the camera was
pointed past the only object in the level that matters. Camera now faces
it, and the routing card and Joybubbles moved to balance the shot.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three holes closed:
philes — 40 written, all in src/philes.js so the next 160 is a writing
job and not a code job. P opens a reader: list on the left,
the text on the right, attributed to whoever wrote it in
whatever year they wrote it. Every level now drops at least
one; previously you collected files you could never open.
save — ESTABLISHED. Every hop writes level/ttl/hop/baud/philes/
cargo/flags to localStorage, and the boot screen offers
R — RESUME. A 64-hop game with no save is not a 64-hop game.
MTU — the HUD has been showing your MTU drop as you take files off
the board while nothing happened. Now two files are free and
after that you arrive in pieces, one TTL per extra fragment,
every hop. You can put things down again from the traceroute
map. Lore costs distance, which is the economy the whole
design is built on.
All 13 hops re-swept: clean.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
You are SYN. You want ACK. Root is the only one who can give it to you.
Three load-bearing ideas, all working:
- TTL is the health bar and it only goes down. 64 hops, no healing.
- Bandwidth is resolution. One render target, one shader; at 1200 baud
and below the 3D scene renders as ASCII glyphs.
- Every header you drop is a piece of clothing. Seven wireframe shells,
one per OSI layer, shed on the way down.
Every frequency is the real frequency, synthesised, nothing sampled:
350+440 dial tone, the DTMF matrix, R1 MF pairs at real KP/digit timing,
2600 Hz, ANSam at 2100 reversing phase every 450 ms, Bell 103 FSK.
Thirteen hops, each a different genre over one renderer — FP tutorial,
OSI descent platformer, walking sim, EFnet twin-stick, 2D buffer overflow,
Morris worm RTS, LBL terminal stealth, a whole BBS with a playable LORD,
the five-boss handshake arena, the copper, a playable blue box, the climb,
and an empty room with an ACK in it.
No engine, no build step, one vendored three.js.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
