A couple weeks ago, I connected to my VPS to check on something. There’s a part of my dotfiles that runs during login shell initialization that prints the currently running tmux sessions associated with my account. I noticed I had a session running and attached to it to see what it was.

In that session I found a Nethack game that I’d started back in January and never finished. I finished the game, killed by a Woodland Elf, and, well, the damage had been done.

It has been three weeks and I’ve had at least one game of Nethack going on my VPS or my laptop nonstop since then. There’s been at least one Safari window packed with NetHackWiki tabs too, including a pinned one for the Price Identification page.

I may have gotten a little carried away a time or two.

Me, a normal person, SSH’d into my VPS from an iPad to play Nethack. pic.twitter.com/Br1bqm0RL1

— Eryn Wells, erynofwales @ mastodon dot social (@erynofwales) April 3, 2022

I’ve gotten much better in that time. My scores have increased from the 1000-2000 range to my best game so far in which I scored 9401 points. Who’s to say if I’ll ever ascend, but I am having a lot of fun with it.

It’s even got me thinking about building roguelikes… (hmmm)

For fun and cause I’m a huge nerd, I put together a page on my site that will auto-update with my latest scores each time I publish the site. Check out my Nethack logfile for that.