I had no idea everything2 was still alive! Nice surprise
replies(3):
So yeah, I have a sad feeling for a moment about that, and then it passes.
Just recently my wife developed a sudden and very aggressive infection. She's healthy and it totally came out of left field. Then it spread to me. It was definitely humbling. I don't believe in living in fear, but it's funny how everything can change in an instant.
I have to commend the title though:
> You have a sad feeling for a moment, then it passes
Coming to understand the ephemeral nature of emotions is what finally allowed me deal with them. They're still real, but they always pass, no matter how strong they seem in the moment.
I remember everything2 which was sort of a forerunner of wikipedia, and better in some ways. The contributor community was much less obnoxious. I'm glad it is still around. It's been ages since I looked at it.
As I recall this message appears when your pet dies but you weren't able to see it happen. It's definitely a sad feeling when you are a weak character with a strong pet doing most of the fighting.
Nethack is one of the original "roguelikes," back when that meant a text-console game based on `rogue`. It's an RPG where your character kills monsters, picks up loot, and descends into the dungeon. If you die, that's it -- you can't just load a save; you have to start all over. It's legendarily unforgiving.
In Nethack, most (all?) roles start with a pet, e.g. a puppy or a kitten. In the early game, your pet is often stronger than you; it follows you, fights monsters, etc. It's useful in many ways beyond fighting: it won't walk over a cursed item, it can "fetch" items from stores without angering the proprietor, and so on. Your pet gains experience and levels up (puppy -> dog -> large dog), and after a certain point you're prompted to give your pet a name.
The message "You have a sad feeling for a moment, then it passes" is displayed when your pet dies while out of sight. It's pretty difficult to keep your pet alive all through the endgame, so much like any real-life pet owner, there will come a time where you have to say goodbye, one way or the other.
It also had an accidentally-fun feature in its hyperlinking system. Hyperlinks were intended to be used to be used for words that had their own articles, but you could link to any article, and when you hovered your mouse over the link the name of the target article would pop up. This could be used to make the closest thing I've seen to an English equivalent of Japanese furigana puns. I'm having trouble finding a good example right now, sadly.
I don't know anyone in my life who's heard of the site besides my uncle, but I enjoy showing it to friends and coworkers as an example of the type of website I grew up with, and which stands in a class of its own, at least to me.
One key idea:
"Try to vote according to the standard of writing, not because you agree or disagree with what someone has written."
This is where HN's use of downvoting fails, it's often mistakenly used to signal disagreement rather than something off-topic or below site standards.
Weirdly, one of the ones I liked (by adding it to my homepage) was 'AT fields cannot be penetrated spiritually fallacy' was around 20 years ago. Just this year I finally watched Neon Genesis Evangelion, and finally understood what it meant :)
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47651/after-great-pai...
I don't necessarily mean with me, but there is research to suggest this is true in general. Also, after having reached a certain stage of life, and of experiences, and witnessing others, I think it can be true.
Burrrrp!
He was somewhat famous on the server at the time. Eventually got rid of him because he had no benefits compared to other pets. No logical reason to keep him.
Huge regret. I grieved for that damn crab for months. Finally stopped playing that class all together.
"what is grief but love persevering?"
which kind of implies the sad inverse -- that once we pick ourselves up and carry on, it necessarily means that the love isn't persevering quite so hard.
The main point from the writing fits right along with what I consider the main point of mindfulness and meditation practice.
Everything that arises, also passes away.
Highly suggest people try out the practice through guided intro courses. There are tons of benefits, but even just realizing and witnessing how all types thoughts, feelings, emotions that come up will go away is alone worth the time.
> If you die, that's it -- you can't just load a save; you have to start all over. It's legendarily unforgiving.
Ehum...
( $ cp -r /var/games/glhack/saves/1000user /home/user )
( ...suddenly a wild fire ant called Rita appears )
( # cp -r /home/user/1000user /var/games/glhack/saves/ )
( # chown -R user:games /var/games/glhack/1000user )
( $ echo "muahahaha im alive, stupid fire ant" | glhack )
( Pssst, Don't tell it to anybody )
It's certainly poetic, but I don't think it's accurate.
Then Wikipedia came along and ate. their. lunch.
The experimental folks already lit off for greener pastures, and others had been driven off by "XP Pack Rape," a practice as charming as its name, wherein a user would be targeted and just sort of ... de-karma'd or whatever you would have it.
Between those forces and the decline of Slashdot, well ...
In my experience, it doesn't pass, as in disappear. Instead, the fact of the loss slowly becomes a new fact of your reality. The newness of it will pass. The rawness of the pain will fade - most of the time. There will always be things that bring the person right back sitting next to you. But you begin to re-make your life.
If you continue to struggle and haven't already done so, I can recommend talking with a counselor (I hate the word therapist). Sometimes we just need to unload, but don't want to unload on/burden the other people in our life. Grief can be isolating in this way.
But I just can't make heads or tails _at all_ about what exactly this website is. Someone's blog? Collective input? No obvious "About" section? What am I missing?
Drink from the cup as if it's already broken: https://everything2.com/title/Drink+from+the+cup+as+if+it%25...
And: Bread is the staff of the proletariat. Toast is a decadent capitalist luxury https://everything2.com/title/Bread+is+the+staff+of+the+prol....
See also, I suppose, conduct runs in many roguelikes.
Nethack is notoriously unfair with the player, and not a really winnable game. The player can be killed at any moment without allowing a single defensive move. If I think that the game was cheating, I act accordingly.
The other option is the exploring mode (X), when you can't be killed, but I find that is boring.
Neutral Wizard blessed PYEC, blessed Orb of Fate, blessed magic marker, +3 blessed greased SDSM, BoH, +3 fireproof speedboots, +3 greased fireproof cloak of magic resistance, write out +ID, ?charging, get your Magicbane or better Greyswandir, etc.
Check out Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup. Feels like a much more modern Nethack, with convenience features (`o` autoexplore, `tab` autofight, etc.) and less of a focus on one-and-done intrinsic immunities in favor of tradeoffs ("this armor comes with cold resistance but vulnerability to fire").
For more of an "explore the world" feeling, Caves of Qud is on Steam and has a ton of depth.
It’s totally winnable! The player almost always has a chance to avoid death. Deaths are usually due to missing knowledge or laziness/impatience. The knowledge is really really hard to gain without wikis, and I absolutely wouldn’t have ascended without wikis, but reading them added another layer of fun for me.
Edit: If you really want this, you can always enter explore mode (e.g. with `nethack -X`), which makes death optional. It doesn't make the rest of the game any easier, though.
Technically true, but there are always moves you could have done prior to avoid being in that situation. Part of the game is knowing what protections you need to have before advancing deeper into the dungeon.
Um, it's quite winnable. It's much easier to win once you've been thoroughly spoiled (either via investing a large amount of playtime or reading spoilers), but it's quite possible to Ascend (win) through extensive preparation and brute force. The number of truly unavoidable, single-move deaths, particularly in the mid-to-late game is a very tiny part of the whole gamespace (as witnessed by the many, many players who win without anything more than knowledge of the game). And wearing an Amulet of Life Protection will save you from most of those.
Veteran players (at least, back when there was Usenet), would regularly refer to Yet Another Stupid Death (YASD), called such not because it was unavoidable, but because it was avoidable if the player had not made an easily avoidable mistake.
I came across the site when I read Daniel Rutter’s Dan’s Data(1) pre-blog blog in the early-2000s when I was devouring everything about Palm devices as a geeky teenager. Dan had a tendency to link terms and phrases to sites that discussed what he meant in detail. Everything2 was his go-to for a lot of references and it soon became mine. Before a certain point, I think I was looking stuff up on E2 before looking on Wikipedia.
A few years later, I found my group of “wholehearted geeky but well-masking” friends in university. A couple of them also read Everything2, and the discovery of this site was one of those subconscious things that nudged us closer together.
I hope this site stays up forever, and I am disappointed it does not often come up in search results for random topics.
Of note, E2 has indeed had a small change in the last decade, and that was the main interface colour going from Burnt Orange to Purple.
* Love * Sadness * Happiness * Hate
All have wrought countless problems when we made a decision on those feelings.
(Yes, Love, is mostly a temporary emotion)
It's totally winnable. It's your job as a player to avoid getting into situations where you don't have 'a single defensive move'.
(It's not the best game ever, nor is it the most fair game ever. True. But almost all games of Nethack are winnable, if you are careful enough and learned enough about the game.)
If ascended a tourist and a healer and an archaeologist and quite a few of the easier classes, too.
It was originally designed as a more general wiki (the name is a pun of C2 ) and then evolved into a a quasi-literary, quasi-blog thing, with thousands of contributors.
Its key features were a supremely easy way to create links between articles ("nodes") as well as empty links ("nodeshells") for others to fill in, encouraging sprawl but also connectivity; a rich voting and reward system, chat and messages, bookmarks, lists - if we had all had a half a brain, we could've pivoted to Medium or Substack no problem.
A couple of things I'm proud of there
https://everything2.com/user/kthejoker/writeups/Snuff+Etique... - this is an example of filling a nodeshell someone else created with ... something not intended but appropriate
https://everything2.com/user/kthejoker/writeups/Ghosts+I+hav... - using the annual Halloween writing event, I shared a personal story about Alzheimer's
And some great stuff by others
https://everything2.com/title/Around+nine+PM+my+heart+was+br...
https://everything2.com/title/You+love+these+machines.+These...
https://everything2.com/title/Why+the+willow+weeps?author_id...
https://everything2.com/title/How+to+brush+your+teeth+in+a+c...
And I think this is my favorite, I think of it often!
https://everything2.com/title/Me+and+Sue+and+Ricky+and+God
But there's just a ton of great stuff on there.
https://marzzbar.wordpress.com/2012/04/17/awesome-game-exper...
No
> "You choke on your food and die after 20200 moves"
> "It seems that you are having a hard time eating this dragon corpse? stop eating?"
Hum... yes?
"You choke on your food and die after 40678789 moves"
Well, this is simply ridiculous.
In the last 20 years playing nethack, consulting the oracle, reading the wiki, and learning, I reached gehennon... once. This is like the 30% of the game or so. Don't even reached a quest. After a while, solving sokoban and gnome mines by the 800 time is just... meh; Wesnoth is better.
The game would greatly benefit of something like: You lose 70 of your 71 points just descending the stairs into a bones level and become stressed, unable to move and surrounded by enemies. This is your last point, do you want to try something?
The actual diagnosis was double depression, which is dysthymia ("permanent depression") + major depression (acute depression)
Or if you want to be really fun, polymorph into a Xorn or whatever and eat a few amulets of magical breathing to gain it as an intrinsic.
https://nethackwiki.com/wiki/Amulet_of_magical_breathing
Generally just go through your death list and find what is killing you then look at how to avoid that. Eating random corpses late game is pretty much always a mistake, you should have normal food to rely on in your bag of holding and a blessed tinning kit from the mines for intrinsic granting corpses.
Get your levels up, your stats up, your resists covered and it's mostly just a slog at the end because turns take forever when 30 monsters want a piece of you.