This is a fan website. This is not the official Digital Underground or Shock-G website. This website aims to serve as a memorial to one of the greatest musical legends of our time.
Early in 1998, This is True author Randy Cassingham was distressed to see that not only had actor Jack Lord died, but that his death was virtually ignored in the mainstream media. Wanting to honor him somehow, Randy came up with the idea of an “honorary unsubscribe” — symbolically deleting Lord from the This is True online distribution list. (Randy had no way of knowing if Lord actually was a subscriber, since it’s virtually impossible to positively identify someone by their email address alone.) Reaction was immediate: True’s readers loved the honor, so now someone is honored almost every week in This is True’s email newsletter.
But there’s no point in rehashing what everyone already knows about. Rather than jump on bandwagons recognizing celebrities, the Honorary Unsubscribe is designed to “recognize the Unknown, the Forgotten, and the Obscure People who had an impact on our lives.” So you will probably recognize few of the names, but you’ll come to understand the impact the honorees have had on your life. These are the people you will wish you had known!
On the occasions that Randy does write about someone well-known, it’s usually because he has found an angle that most people don’t know about — or the person dropped out of the limelight and was forgotten.
X-Clacks-Overhead is a non-standardised HTTP header based upon the fictional work of the late, great, Sir Terry Pratchett.
In Terry Pratchett's science-fantasy Discworld series, "The Clacks" is a network infrastructure of Semaphore Towers, that operate in a similar fashion to telegraph - named "Clacks" because of the clicking sound the system makes as signals send.
In Sir Terry's novel "Going Postal", the story explains that the inventor of the Clacks - a man named Robert Dearheart, lost his only son in a suspicious workplace accident, and in order to keep the memory of his son alive, he transmitted his son's name as a special operational signal through the Clacks to forever preserve his memory:
GNU John Dearheart
G: Send the message onto the next Clacks Tower.
N: Do not log the message.
U: At the end of the line, return the message.
This site is maintained as a memorial for Geoff, who tragically passed away at the age of 38 after living with cancer for many years. Those who knew him remember a kind, gentle soul full of generosity and warmth for friends, family, his students, and small fuzzy creatures. He was known as a talented researcher and teacher in academic circles, but few knew that Geoff was also a dedicated game developer and programmer in his off-hours.
NakedMUD's development began at the tail-end of Geoff's undergraduate years at the University of Alberta (2004-2005), and then continued at a measured pace during his graduate student years at University of Cincinnati's Masters of Experimental Psychology program (2006-2008). After being admitted to the Experimental Psychology Ph.D program (2008-2009), NakedMUD received a couple more years of bug fixes, feature additions and updates.
This is Geoff's site, maintained exactly as he left it before the University deleted his webspace. Some of the links/additional downloads remain unavailable. Thanks to the efforts of fellow software preservationists @avidal, @stevestreza, @crawfordsm and @lewiscowles1986, most of Geoff's source code for NakedMUD has been located and restored to this site.
The site where you can purchase the online-only Sophie Lancaster memorial album. DRM-free. All proceeds go to the Sophie Lancaster Foundation of the United Kingdom.