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I could never stand those tile interfaces. The little 16x16 or even 8x8 tiles were always too small for me. It was much easier to visually discern a D rather than a blob of green and red pixels.

I started using ChrHack around version 3.2, and I'm addicted to it. It takes a bit of tweaking to use with the latest versions (due to the addition of graves and trees), but it replaces the item and dungeon symbols with something a little more item and dungeon-looking, but keeps the monsters as their ASCII letters. Best of all, everything has the original aspect ratio, so it doesn't look *too* much different.

...unless you take away the main reason they were using it.

Even then, it can be difficult if there's politics in the way. You see, I'm a regular (and sometime admin, when I bother to have my server up) on the same network as A.P., and we moved several channels away from DALnet in 1998, at a time when DAL was nothing but 10-minute lag (seriously) and multi-way splits. Several people who were regulars in the channel that moved to our network (WTnet) were also regulars in another channel that (because of the politics) moved to a different network. Later on (mid-1999), when that network self-destructed, the populace of the other channel wanted to move to WTnet, but the higher-ups were against it, fearing their authority would be usurped. Eventually, they moved to WTnet anyway, and all was well, for a while anyway. There's more to this story, but I'm not sure I want to talk about it here.

It was one person in particular who was responsible for the grandstanding and stubbornness (and several others who complained about having to run two IRC clients, but that's also partially Khaled Mardam-Bey's fault for not having proper multi-server support :P), and that's mainly what A.P. is upset about. The dynamics are different for every network and every channel, and your mileage may vary, of course.

-lee

I'm surprised to read quite a few posts from people saying "What's Nethack?" ... well, here's some information to get you started on an answer:

Unsung Heros: NetHack : "NetHack is a spectacular dungeon crawl that has been in development for more than 15 years. It's the only game in this feature that we can refer to in the present tense, because it is the only game still being actively worked on. It features random dungeons, enough monsters to fill an AD&D menagerie, and enough commands to create a programming language."

The Gamespy Hall of Fame : "Here's a game that's been under continuous development for over 15 years. It has no graphics, unless you count the primitive patterns made of ascii characters. And yet is has a huge following -- a very active newsgroup, fans all over the globe, and many instances of major media coverage. There's some kind of magic in NetHack, a world so huge and complex that every game is completely different, where each new item can twist the gameplay in new directions. Mostly we love it for the surprises -- the number of times you try some amazingly obscure action and find out that it works, leaving slump back in your chair and exclaim, 'They thought of everything!'"

Salon: The Best Game Ever : "But as any hacker worth the title will tell you, Nethack is still one of the best games ever made. What's more, it's one of the best open-source games ever made -- meaning anyone who cares can grab ahold of the game's source code and make changes and improvements. The player's guide is even authored by none other than open-source ontologist Eric S. Raymond..."

The Nethack Homepage : "Nethack is a single player, ASCII graphics-based adventure game, similar to the lines of Dungeons & Dragons and similar fantasy games. It is commonly classified in the larger group of Rogue-like Games, which generally are all text-based, solo adventures. Within the game, your character is after the infamous Wizard of Yendor, who has stolen the Amulet of Yendor and plans to use it for his evil purposes. You, a young member of your chosen class, have been blessed by your people and your god to retrieve the Amulet, and to save the world from the Wizard's evil plans."

Variants and Utilities : "One of the most impressive features of Nethack is the amount of 3rd party developed material that either is a varient of the Nethack game, or can be used to enhance your Nethack gaming experience. You'll find both variants and utilites for Nethack listed on this page."

But this one may be (in my biased opinion) the coolest project of all...

Nethack-Palm Porting Project : "The Nethack-Palm porting project is a loosely-knit group of Nethack and Palm enthusiasts who are working to port the classic game Nethack to the Palm platform. The project is well underway, but still far from complete so we welcome any new contributors." (See also Roguelikes for PalmOS)

I'm surprised to read quite a few posts from people saying "What's Nethack?" ... well, here's some information to get you started on an answer:

Unsung Heros: NetHack : "NetHack is a spectacular dungeon crawl that has been in development for more than 15 years. It's the only game in this feature that we can refer to in the present tense, because it is the only game still being actively worked on. It features random dungeons, enough monsters to fill an AD&D menagerie, and enough commands to create a programming language."

The Gamespy Hall of Fame : "Here's a game that's been under continuous development for over 15 years. It has no graphics, unless you count the primitive patterns made of ascii characters. And yet is has a huge following -- a very active newsgroup, fans all over the globe, and many instances of major media coverage. There's some kind of magic in NetHack, a world so huge and complex that every game is completely different, where each new item can twist the gameplay in new directions. Mostly we love it for the surprises -- the number of times you try some amazingly obscure action and find out that it works, leaving slump back in your chair and exclaim, 'They thought of everything!'"

Salon: The Best Game Ever : "But as any hacker worth the title will tell you, Nethack is still one of the best games ever made. What's more, it's one of the best open-source games ever made -- meaning anyone who cares can grab ahold of the game's source code and make changes and improvements. The player's guide is even authored by none other than open-source ontologist Eric S. Raymond..."

The Nethack Homepage : "Nethack is a single player, ASCII graphics-based adventure game, similar to the lines of Dungeons & Dragons and similar fantasy games. It is commonly classified in the larger group of Rogue-like Games, which generally are all text-based, solo adventures. Within the game, your character is after the infamous Wizard of Yendor, who has stolen the Amulet of Yendor and plans to use it for his evil purposes. You, a young member of your chosen class, have been blessed by your people and your god to retrieve the Amulet, and to save the world from the Wizard's evil plans."

Variants and Utilities : "One of the most impressive features of Nethack is the amount of 3rd party developed material that either is a varient of the Nethack game, or can be used to enhance your Nethack gaming experience. You'll find both variants and utilites for Nethack listed on this page."

But this one may be (in my biased opinion) the coolest project of all...

Nethack-Palm Porting Project : "The Nethack-Palm porting project is a loosely-knit group of Nethack and Palm enthusiasts who are working to port the classic game Nethack to the Palm platform. The project is well underway, but still far from complete so we welcome any new contributors." (See also Roguelikes for PalmOS)

Hi,

I'm going to unabashedly karma whore for a second because Nethack is my favourite game ever. I can't tell you the number of hours I wasted playing this (or other rogue-like games, such as rogue, larn, adom, or omega).

Here are some links to get you all started:

Nethack.org

One of the first and best Nethack pages, from the legenday Boudewijn Waijers

another Nethack homepage

A newer Nethack page

QT Nethack

An impressive graphical Nethack

The google Roguelike directory entry

the classic rec.games.roguelike.nethack

Happy hacking!

> See here for details.

It's /. vs Kuro5hin and ... ~. wins? what a great plug for Smokedot! Hoorah for the little guy!

I've played a lot of Nethack, and the randomness of the gameplay is way too frustrating -- your hero can die through random events that are no indication of your lack of skill as a play. For example, it is too easy to get down to the lower levels and run out of food, and there are no places to buy food anywhere within the last 15 levels and no monsters that drop food. The worst part of this is that if you carry enough food to feed yourself you are too slow to fight. 110K of good examples are here. I especially like "Welcome to NetHack. --Zap--. The death ray hits you. You die...". Also, play this under Aleph One (open-source marathon2). Them try to tell me it's bad (as a matter of fact, you can tell the rest of the devteam too .

I've played a lot of Nethack, and the randomness of the gameplay is way too frustrating -- your hero can die through random events that are no indication of your lack of skill as a play. For example, it is too easy to get down to the lower levels and run out of food, and there are no places to buy food anywhere within the last 15 levels and no monsters that drop food. The worst part of this is that if you carry enough food to feed yourself you are too slow to fight. 110K of good examples are here. I especially like "Welcome to NetHack. --Zap--. The death ray hits you. You die...". Also, play this under Aleph One (open-source marathon2). Them try to tell me it's bad (as a matter of fact, you can tell the rest of the devteam too .

Could you possibly be more ignorant of what HTML is? You fail to realize that HTML is a semantic markup language, not some presentational language, which you obviously think it is, judging from your webpage, which uses a plethora of deprecated presentational HTML elements. I've written about the topic of HTML email at length; it comes down to the fact that HTML provides a greater means of communication since it is a semantic markup language, and since it is such, gives the ability of presentation to the reader, not the author, as which is done with flat text. Having the author decide presentation is one of the worst evils we are plagued with concerning email.

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* CmdrTaco is an idiot.

- A.P.

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* CmdrTaco is an idiot.

- A.P.

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* CmdrTaco is an idiot.

Let's see the Lego DJ do that.

- A.P.

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* CmdrTaco is an idiot.

You forget that the Internet allows people to publish their works without having to go through a corporation to do it. MP3.com is the classic example, though the various online comics (User Friendly, Penny Arcade, etc.) should be considered as well. Not to mention the existence of MSTs of works of fan fiction that happen to be bad, IRCRPGs and their logs, and so-called "role-playing stories" such as NuRPG, all of which are unique to the Net.

I'm sure others here could name other examples of entertainment found only on the Net, including ones as obscure as the last two genres I mentioned, as well. That's the great thing about it; it allows the world to see ideas and products that corporations would never consider publishing. It has the potential to free the artist, provided the corporations don't manipulate things such that it's illegal to publish something without the possibility of a corporation making a profit from it... (Of course, if they do, it would serve them right if a "creativity drain" into countries with more favorable Net laws took place as a result...)

Your point about the purpose of copyright and patents and the corporations' desire to distort these in order to have complete control of and maximum profit from the content they sell is well-made, however. Would someone please moderate that post up to 2?

- A.P.
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"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

My first online dating experience started off fairly decently, but soured after a few months. It also had the dubious distinctions of being my first-ever serious attempt at a relationship, after years of having crushes on people (indeed, this one was influenced somewhat by a past crush), and of being my first long-distance relationship.

It started around May 1997. I was (and still am) a frequenter of the Usenet group alt.tv.animaniacs (having been a fan of that show basically since Day One), and also of the IRC channel #watertower, and had been for a few months at this point. I saw someone posting on the newsgroup, expressing a desire to get more involved in one of the fan documents. I eventually helped her out, and told her about #wt, and we became close friends. In early 1998, I started to take a liking to her, as it were, and things started clicking very quickly. By August, though, things were falling apart. Both of us were very immature and inexperienced about this sort of thing; I had begged my way into the relationship in the first place (on the false belief that someone female couldn't be special without being a SO), she expected me to be something I just wasn't, and also could be very manipulative and condescending at times. It came to a head when I came down for a weekend, and she said I couldn't stay at her house -- this was a problem because she lives near a resort town, it was a Friday night in the middle of August, and I didn't have any hotel reservations or the money to even get a room on such short notice. I ended up sleeping in my car, and going home the next day. I was reluctant to talk to her for a long while, but eventually got over that...as far as I know, we're still at least acquaintances, but she hasn't been on IRC in a while.

Now, I should note that I'm not very experienced about this; before I got to IRC, I was very paranoid about people I didn't know from HS or church. I'm only now shattering some myths and phobias I've long had about how talking to other people and having friends works. That said, though, there are cases where meeting online does work; some people from #wt have gotten together, with excellent results (one couple is now married).

As of right now, I'm not sure if anything will happen again; my situation at the moment is such that having a SO would be a drain on my time and resources (not to mention the fact that meeting online increases the chances of an LDR substantially), so I'm not really looking. I'm hoping that the next time, things will go more smoothly for me and the person I'm seeing -- whether it starts online or off.

-lee

http://www.skoardy.demon.co.uk/rlnews/

Check out the links page for various "Rogue-like" games, many of which have Linux ports and most of which are ASCII. Several are also Open Source and often under the GPL or a variant thereof.

Although there are plenty of games there, a lot of them are incomplete; it's really only worth looking at those with subsidiary sites (in light blue on the page).

My personal favourites are Crawl, Zangband, and, of course, Nethack. But there are a heap to choose from.

I wonder what the Queen would do with the Amulet of Yendor?

Get the source here. Yes, it really is just one C file.

-A.P.
--

"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

- A.P.
--

"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

Last night, my friends and I held a wake for MST3K, then signed on-line to mourn in bits and bytes. It was sad, but a ten year run is a damn good run for any show.

We take comfort in the fact that it isn't dead, however. There are websites that have text 'MiSTings' such as (Website #9 and SVAM, and there are rabid MST3K fans everywhere. Some of us circulate amateur MiSTings on video or audio tape as well.

Dead? Hardly. As long as there's drivel, ranting, and shallow pop culture, we'll be there with quips.

It's prime time to start taking the MST3K treatment to all media, not just ones that someone happens to purchase the "rights" to. (Apparently the licensing fees became a significantly larger cost for the MST3K producers.)

For some time now, fanatics have been riffing off the junk scraped from USENet with "mistings". That's an ok start.

And we're all familiar with that brilliantly-inspired by horribly-design (ie, closed-standard) ThirdVoice annotation system.

We need a better 3rd-party annotation standard for web-based media. This should lead to a nice solution for broadcast-TV & VCR. I mean, when "convergence" comes along, do you really think you'll be watching TV and have the itch to "click on" a ballplayer just to find out what his batting average is with 2 runners on in the seventh during a meteor shower?

Nooo... you'll have your choice of armchair broadcasters all across this great web, spinning their own plot, analysis, and all that in the name of postmodernism!

Just take a look at the web pages designed by the "WYSIWYG editors are a crock for the ignorant!" crowd. Just for kicks, I took at the web pages of the people holding that attitude in this thread, and the most striking thing about all of them is how absolutely ugly and/or simplistic (read: uninteresting) they are -- usually just a bunch of links in a list, with a smattering of images. Wheeee! It's as if they're existing in a time warp from way back in the first year of the web, so I can understand them thinking that a text editor is the be-all-end-all in HTML design. One thing that is clear is that if any of these people's jobs depended on making quality web pages, they'd be out on the street begging for spare change. Hey, don't believe me? Just follow the links for yourself and see. The people coming out against WYSIWYG editors, who also had links to their own web pages:

• Masem (http://pinky.wtower.com/mneylon/)
• quadra (http://quadra.demosoft.org/)
• jawsh (http://jcs.superblock.net/)
• doobie (http://www.doobie.org/)
• Azul (http://bachue.com/alejo/)
• Scott (http://www.gothic.net/~raindog/process/of/disasse mbly/)
• TypoDaemon (http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Labyrinth/8955/)
• Haight6716 (http://www.julianhaight.com/)
• Mark Hughes (http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/) Okay, so this one's from yesterday's discussion on live updates of web pages, but after reading his quote, "We should be trying to *RAISE* the level-of-entry training needed to make a web page, not *LOWER* it," and then seeing his web site, I just couldn't resist. :-)

In other words, for those of you complaining that WYSIWYG HTML editors are for unsophisticated dummies, I can only look at your own web pages and wonder just what your idea of sophistication is. If I had seen even one of you using some interesting HTML techniques, you might have a better chance of persuading me. Fact is, anybody can make ugly web pages, whether they're using vi or DreamWeaver, but most (not all) of the better-looking and interesting sites that I see out there are using tools other than just text editors. Most importantly, if you're going to come out and bash people for using WYSIWYG editors, you might wanna check your own sites first.

Me? FrontPage 2000 and DreamWeaver 2, using UltraEdit and vi for quick-and-dirty changes.

Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

-A.P.
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"One World, One Web, One Program" - Microsoft Promotional Ad

I don't expect MST3K to die away - it's an idea as well as a show - the idea of making humorous but insightful commentary on various forms of media. The idea is there, and exists and will survive in on-line form at:

Web Site #9
SVAM
MSTie Web Ring
And a ton of other sites.

My poor 486! :-) But seriously, I've been running the net equilvalent of MST3K for the last several years, and I don't expect the art of misting to die off with the end of the series. Web Site #9 can be found here.

Web Site Number 9

I'm hoping they don't attempt a "let's bring mike down and dismantle the bots" type deal that ends it wholly. Let the show end without trying to bring it to a "happy closure" no "death of the bots" or lame 'star trek' endings that they've parodied for the past decade...

I want to see the show end, with the hope that Mike/Joel/whoever and the Bots will make an appearance again.

I got into MST3k "seriously" at the start of Season 8, having seen a few rare episodes before that. (I was without cable access until Season 8) I love the concept, and have done quite a few "movie mistings" at home. (nearly got kicked out of "Titanic" for making mst3k style comments at baby-faced what's-his-name.)

I'm a big fan of Web Site Number Nine I have, somewhere in the dusty tape backups, a few of my own mistings... even one on a piece of fiction I wrote. In many ways, MST3k is more than a show.

Farewell SOL. Victim of another corporate decision.