One of the side effects of spazzkat playing all this Skyrim here at the Murk: I’ve totally gotten back onto a Nethack kick.
I had a great game going, and fired up the save file from yesterday’s run tonight. I was in Sokoban and died horribly, like ya do, ’cause, well, Nethack. I proceeded to have the following conversation with kisanthe:
annathepiper: I’m in the middle of Serious Nethack May Be Serious annathepiper: Level 11 character currently in Sokoban kisanthe: Ooh! Hope it’s the Bag of Holding Sokoban. annathepiper: SHIT DEAD annathepiper: Hallucinating and burdened and surrounded and then a damn incubus started taking my armor off! annathepiper: Also, it was the amulet of reflection sokoban! kisanthe: …okay, that’s not funny, but it is funny. annathepiper: It was, really ;) annathepiper: I was cheerfully sneaking through the final treasure room killing monsters one at a time and then a damn black light went off annathepiper: And then suddenly HELLO EVERYBODY AWAKE! kisanthe: You’d think a *black* light wouldn’t wake everybody up! annathepiper: So I backed into a corner and started shooting everything in sight, until the incubus showed up! kisanthe: So, assuming the black light affected the critters it woke up too… you died naked in a big murderous hallucinatory orgy? annathepiper: Yeah pretty much XD kisanthe: Best way to go! ;)
And now in my current game, I was hungry, so I whipped out a tin and discovered it contained pickled dwarf. There I am nomming it, and the next monster I see? A dwarf. And all I can think is AWK-WARD!
It has amused me for a while now that in the vast repertoire of tunes available to Irish musicians, several of them have vaguely SF/F-nal names, like “King of the Fairies”, “Queen of the Fairies”, and “The Elven Cloak”.
That last one in particular, though, got me thinking of Nethack thanks to my propensity for playing Elf characters. Which, of course, led me to wonder about other hypothetical Nethack-themed Irish tune names! Such as:
The Surly Shopkeeper
Farewell to My Pet Cat
Gold in the Bag of Holding
The Cursed Loadstone Lament
The Polymorph Trap Jig (this one would definitely change keys AND time signatures between the A part, the B part, and the C part)
In which our heroine does get the Amulet–but doesn’t even make it out of Gehennom once she has it. AUGH. Farewell, Natil the Elf Ranger, and may your passage into the West be smooth sailing!
In which our heroine really hasn’t played Nethack in a long time, because she forgot an easy way around her whole Crap I Don’t Have a Means of Levitation problem–and in which she finally clears not only Fort Ludios, but also the Castle and Medusa as well.
It’s been quite a while since I’ve played Nethack–and I’m kind of surprised that on a day that ISN’T a full moon, I’ve got a serious Ascension candidate!
Short form: Natil the Elf Ranger has completed the Quest and is now seeking a ring of levitation so that she can finish Fort Ludios. She’s currently at Exp. level 16, HP 114, and AC -38! Thanks to early wands of wishing as well as other lucky finds she is armored for bear, with gray dragon scale mail, speed boots, gauntlets of dex, and a shield of reflection. She’s armed with her original elven dagger as well as the Longbow of Diana.
Wish her luck, folks. Details for the Nethack geeks behind the fold!
I have also had reported to me that my blurb scripts do not work under the Opera browser, unfortunately. The problem is that I can’t figure out what exactly I need to do to fix that. If anybody out there knows Opera well enough, or knows Javascript well enough, to try to help me out with that, let me know and I’ll see if I can roll Opera into the list of browsers on which my web page is known to go.
I fixed a couple minor bugs with the blurb scripts, as well; the addition of the Nethack button had screwed up functionality on Netscape 4. This is now fixed. The Writing and Credits blurbs should display there just fine.
spazzkat