@ilinx:~$ Miskatonic Virtual University (MVU)
MVU dates back to the early 1970s, when the N.W. Peaslee Chair in Hydro-History was created for Professor Echidna Stillwell. The‘University’ had no campus as such (it still doesn’t) – hence the ‘Virtual’ of its title – but was a loose agglomeration of scholars, most affiliated to other institutions, especially MIT. (Miskatonic had beendescribed as the ‘Shadow MIT’.) What bound them together was a shared interest in the‘hyperfictional’ aspects of the work of H. P. Lovecraft. MVU thus brings together experts in fictionalsystems, mathematics, physics, geology, semiotics: all engaging in strange, crossdisciplinary pollinations that, if they are not actively forbidden, are unsupported in any other academic institution. The University representw the convergence of the Miskatonic University, the Cthulu Club, whose account can be found in the Vysparov-Stillwell corrispondency and the studies of the occultist wing of Virtual Ethnology directed by Stillwell himself.

^{Some say that Miskatonic University is nothing more than a rumour, or a joke. Yet rumours have anunsettling ability to make things happen, and jokes, it is often said, have a serious side. My journey tothe semi-fictional Miskatonic Virtual University hasn’t yielded much that’s definite. But perhaps that’sthe point ...}