Welcome to Mycal Labs

Tinkering with Time, Tech, and Culture #1

This isn’t a blog. It’s a field report for anyone still awake — still shipping code, still remixing culture, still giving a damn. The terminal’s still open — and so is the story. A lab where time, tech, culture and a touch of mischief mix.

I’m Mycal, your host on this chrononaut’s journey. I’ve been online since before the web had pictures — back when CSU Chico had one of the first dedicated Internet connections to the AT&T 3B5s that hummed quietly in the corners of real labs. We dialed in over SLIP connections, mapped out the net by hand, and posted from terminals that didn’t know what an emoji was. I lurked in sci.crypto, surfed the chaos of alt. hierarchies, and spent countless hours coaxing bits out of 8086 registers, building bridges and routers from scratch. Yeah, I helped shape the backbone others now take for granted — I even wired an Elmo doll to the Internet, just because it needed to be done.

So why now? Because today’s AI renaissance feels like the ‘90s again — unpolished, full of promise, and just dangerous enough to matter. The sparkly-eyed futurists are back. The code is messy. The stakes are high. And this time, the weird kids with soldering irons and ethics have another shot.

Here you'll find firmware hacks, forgotten RFCs, remix culture, tales from the playa, and the occasional burner’s lament. It’s part archive, part lab notebook, and part punk zine for the ones who remember — or want to.

So welcome back. Or welcome forward. Either way, we’ve got work to do.