TechgnosisWeb Prime

Yeah, that’s right, we’ve got screencaps of the new, exclusive, never-before-seen leaked Lindsay Lohan sex tape!

For the love of whatever Big Invisible Being In The Sky you believe in, eat a goddamn sandwich, Lindsay.

Note: comments closed due to a deluge of spam.

Grumble grumble growl…

… you know, I had a full podcast taped up and ready to roll today. Nearly 50 minutes of ranting, raving, and rage, all recorded on Glitch. I even listened to the recordings, made sure they sounded OK, everything was cool. Then, I get home, plug Glitch in, do some updating, stand up, go to the bathroom, come back, and, true to its name, Glitch has… well… glitched. And about half the stuff I had on my SD card is fried. That included, of course, the podcast. Damn thing did the same shit to me for Eldrin’s wedding podcast.

Anyway, lucky for me that I had backed up the entire contents of the SD card a couple days ago, so all I really lost was the podcast and a couple of notes I had taken, but it’s still a hassle to have to reformat the card and put everything back in, and losing the podcast sucked. I’ll try and re-record it tomorrow, but after having already ranted once, I don’t know if my rage over random idiots will be as genuine tomorrow… wait, what am I saying? Of course it will. My rage against the random idiots in life is neverending!!!

Sometimes, it’s good to be a geek. Why, because stuff like this is enough to make you happy:

Cute, neh? it’s a combination of some nice technologies: first off, my handy, dandy, trusty iPaq 2215, Glitch. Second, the absolutely fantabulous Konfabulator software, which allows you to set up handy, dandy, and sexy widgets anywhere on your screen, to do all sorts of things, from monitoring hard drive and processor usage, to keeping an eye on traffic in your area, checking your email, or making random annoying noises. Fun stuff. The last ingredient in this geek cocktail is SideWindow, a new bit of software that actually extends your main Windows desktop onto the screen of your PDA, turning it into an auxiliary display where you can drag anything from your main computer screen. So, I plugged Glitch in, turned SideWindow on, brought up Konfabulator and a few widgets, dragged them over to Glitch’s new display, and voila: an amazing-looking auxiliary display that provides me with remote control of my music, a running tally of my RAM, HDD, and CPU usage, weather and time/date info, email status, and even RSS feeds. And all this is always visible, no matter what I’m doing n my main screen, be it programming, working in Photoshop, or playing WoW. Tre sexy.

I also set it up at work:

Mostly the same widgets, although I switched out the Winamp remote control and a couple of the HDD monitoring widgets and substituted one that automatically pings whatever sites I tell it to and lets me know if any of them are unreachable (great for keeping track of client’s websites and making sure you know if they’re down), and another one that can keep multiple bits of text from the clipboad handy, which is a great tool when programming. Here’s some phonecam pics of what the setup looks like over at work. Nice and hackerly.

Once, I was as Pacman: wandering alone through the mazes of life. But now, I am as Mario: climbing the vines into your heart.

Thank you Dragon Page!

… so, I could take the high road and ignore this… or I could just go with my gut and call bullshit on this absolutely horrendous bit of garbage: Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries (and, yeah, I nofollowed that link, bitches. No GoogleJuice for you!).

Why do I have my panties all in a bunch over this? Take a look at a few of the ‘winners’ on this list and their ‘witty’ comments:

5. Democracy and Education
Author: John Dewey
Publication date: 1916
Score: 36
Summary: John Dewey, who lived from 1859 until 1952, was a “progressive” philosopher and leading advocate for secular humanism in American life, who taught at the University of Chicago and at Columbia. He signed the Humanist Manifesto and rejected traditional religion and moral absolutes. In Democracy and Education, in pompous and opaque prose, he disparaged schooling that focused on traditional character development and endowing children with hard knowledge, and encouraged the teaching of thinking “skills” instead. His views had great influence on the direction of American education–particularly in public schools–and helped nurture the Clinton generation.

7. The Feminine Mystique
Author: Betty Friedan
Publication date: 1963
Score: 30
Summary: In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan, born in 1921, disparaged traditional stay-at-home motherhood as life in “a comfortable concentration camp”–a role that degraded women and denied them true fulfillment in life. She later became founding president of the National Organization for Women. Her original vocation, tellingly, was not stay-at-home motherhood but left-wing journalism. As David Horowitz wrote in a review for Salon.com of Betty Friedan and the Making of the Feminine Mystique by Daniel Horowitz (no relation to David): The author documents that “Friedan was from her college days, and until her mid-30s, a Stalinist Marxist, the political intimate of the leaders of America’s Cold War fifth column and for a time even the lover of a young Communist physicist working on atomic bomb projects in Berkeley’s radiation lab with J. Robert Oppenheimer.”

8. The Course of Positive Philosophy
Author: Auguste Comte
Publication date: 1830-1842
Score: 28
Summary: Comte, the product of a royalist Catholic family that survived the French Revolution, turned his back on his political and cultural heritage, announcing as a teenager, “I have naturally ceased to believe in God.” Later, in the six volumes of The Course of Positive Philosophy, he coined the term “sociology.” He did so while theorizing that the human mind had developed beyond “theology” (a belief that there is a God who governs the universe), through “metaphysics” (in this case defined as the French revolutionaries’ reliance on abstract assertions of “rights” without a God), to “positivism,” in which man alone, through scientific observation, could determine the way things ought to be.

There’s also a list of ‘honorable mentions’ which is just about as despicable, but the one that stands out there is:

The Origin of Species
by Charles Darwin
Score: 17

Oh yeah… did I mention that this article is written by fundie neocon republicans? Yeah… I know I should try and stay above their level, but honestly, it’s just too much fun to call them absolute fucking morons. So I will. Fucking morons.

Katsoogle

Originally uploaded by Katsushiro.

Yeah, so I was bored at work today, so I bought Google. From now on, it will be known as Katsoogle.

Sure, my own blog is only 3rd in line, but that’s cause I’m humble like that. Also, the result listing for my blog actually says ‘Katsushiro, your IQ score is significantly above average.’

Cory Doctorow Book Signing @ Second Life

Originally uploaded by Katsushiro.

Went to Cory Doctorow’s Book Signing yesterday in Second Life and it was a blast. A lot of good questions were asked, about the book, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, and about technology, the EFF, and other stuff. We had a pretty good crowd, and a good time was had by all. I tok a whole bunch of snapshots, and put them up on a Flickr photostream. Go check ‘em out here.

… okay, not exactly, but you’ll feel like you did, once you have a taste of FlyakiteOSX: A 26MB download that can turn your Windows XP box into a nearly exact replica of an OSX desktop.

Yeah, yeah, Mac OSX is a better operating system than Windows, more stable, more powerful, prettier, etc., yadda yadda yadda. It’s also really expensive, doesn’t have nearly as much of the software I use on a day to day basis (most of it available for free! Mac equivalents to many fre Windows proggies can cost big bucks.), and is a joke when it comes to gaming. So, while I lust after that sleek and sexy OSX desktop look, I’ll keep my Windows undercarriage for now. If Apple sends me a free G5, however, I’ll play around with it as long as you want, though.

In the meantime, however, I can satisfy my OSX cravings with FlyakiteOSX. It’s free, it’s impressive, and it’s loads of fun. Hell, the website alone is a drop-dead gorgeous piece of work: it feels like you’re already inside an OSX desktop. Freakin’ brilliant. Go check it out, and enjoy!

… has a posse.

So, I’m looking through my ‘incoming links’ list on Technorati, and I notice that there’s a link from the iPodderX Blog to my recent rant on how much iTunes 4.9 sucks as a podcatcher. Excellent…

So I start looking through the rest of their developer blog, and I notice that there’s a version of iPodderX on the way for Windows. iPodderX is the premier podcast client for the Mac platform, and hearing that it’ll be coming out for Windows soon as quite interesting. I’m a huge iPodder(Lemon) fan, but I’m quite willing to give iPodderX a run and see how it compares to the Lemon on the PC. I’ll post about it here when it’s out and let y’all know, of course.

So, if you have tuned into a TV, read a magazine, or interacted with other human beings in the past couple of months, you’ve probably seen Tom Cruise’s antics as he shills for the dangerous cult known as Scientology. At first, his claims were sort of amusing, slightly ditrubing, but amusing. But lately he’s been getting more and more serious, and when you see his interviews, you can tell that this is a man on the edge of losing control, spreading lies, misinformation, and plain old B.S. in his desperate attempts to please his superiors in Scientology.

After his latest attacks on drug rehabilitation programs, and his obvious lies, however, I have decided that I need to take some form of basic action. So, I’m officially boycotting Tom Cruise. I will not see any movie with him in it, I will not see any movie where he is involved, and I will avoid all other entertainment products that he may be involved with. Not that I really needed much of an excuse to avoid his shoddy acting in the first place, but there you go.

Here’s the text that really pissed me off enough to write about this, excerpted from Randi’s latest JREF newsletter:

CRUISING BACK

Reader Jacob Fortin reports:

As you are well aware, if you’ve had enough time to read the news, watch a bit of T.V. or looked out your window, no doubt you’ve noticed the strange and frightening behavior of one Tom Cruise in his endless pursuit to further the goals of Scientology. Most recently, in an interview with Der Spiegel, a German magazine, the actor claimed that Scientology had the most successful drug rehabilitation program on the planet. Luckily, the host pointed out that no, this was not true, and casually put Mr. Cruise in his place.

What has truly become frightening is the sheer amount of misinformation that Mr. Cruise has begun spreading, particularly his attack on psychiatry. In one interview, he claimed that Ritalin had become a street drug, and that Methadone had originally been called Adolphomine. He also accused Carl Jung of being an editor for a Nazi magazine. All of these are false. They are based on either myth (as the Carl Jung shtick) or downright confusion (Methadone was originally called Dolophine, “dolor” being Latin for pain).

Other profoundly frightening testimonials on Scientology’s drug rehabilitation, crime prevention, and even literacy program do more than raise the alert status to orange. These programs are the first step in many to indoctrinate individuals towards their bogus “religion.” That any beneficial results occur is secondary to the much more frightening prospects of people being duped into a pyramid scheme cult.

Psychiatry, like any science, is interested in finding out the truth about how the mind works. Though it is imperfect, it has never claimed to possess all the answers, and any abuses in this field are a result of personal negligence on the part of the practitioners, not of the field itself. Mr. Tom Cruise lambastes psychiatry because of its use of drugs such as Ritalin or even Prozac. He claims that chemical imbalances are not real, but rather can be cured by vitamins. These claims are obviously the work of a pseudo-scientist quack, which, not surprisingly, came from a science fiction author. If vitamins offer a cure, then I might suggest that Scientology put itself even more in the limelight by proving to the JREF that chemical imbalances can be cured through their bogus programs. I’m sure that they would put the million dollars to a “good cause.”

Jacob, it seems evident that Tom Cruise is being pressured by the honchos of the Church of Scientology to use his very high profile to sell their science-fiction religion to the young film audiences, and we’ve seen him hang up his career and allow everyone to toss rocks at it. His choice….

Part of that interview:

DER SPIEGEL: Do you see it as your job to recruit new followers for Scientology?

Tom Cruise: I’m a helper. For instance, I myself have helped hundreds of people get off drugs. In Scientology, we have the only successful drug rehabilitation program in the world. It’s called Narconon.

DER SPIEGEL: That’s not correct. Yours is never mentioned among the recognized detox programs. Independent experts warn against it because it is rooted in pseudoscience.

Tom Cruise: You don’t understand what I am saying. It’s a statistically proven fact that there is only one successful drug rehabilitation program in the world. Period.

DER SPIEGEL: With all due respect, we doubt that. Mr. Cruise, you made studio executives, for example from Paramount, tour Scientology’s “Celebrity Center” in Hollywood. Are you trying to extend Scientology’s influence in Hollywood?

Tom Cruise: I just want to help people. I want everyone to do well.

Regarding that interview, reader Hogne B. Pettersen wrote:

Last week I got a call from a friend of mine who has been working with drug addicts and rehabilitation programs for over a decade. He was furious and told me that he would follow my example and never watch a Tom Cruise film again. I quote:

This actor is sitting there claiming that all the work that I and thousands of people all over the world have done, and are doing every day, has been unsuccessful. Personally I’ve saved hundreds of lives. Several times a week I’m thanked by people for saving them. And this nutcase is sitting there claiming that all our documented results are lies? The Scientologists have never presented one single result of their program! Never!

He was so angry that he was on the verge of crying, and I can’t say that I blame him. I find it very disrespectful of Tom Cruise to say things like that, but I guess a world where political correctness forces you to say “I’m sorry” all the time, gives him the right to do it.

… low prices, high quality goods, and they actually prefer to treat their employees as real human beings, and their customers with real respect, rather than kowtow to Wall Street and try to gouge every last penny from us. Go read the article at theother end of that link, and then go and get yourself a Costco membership. There aren’t many companies that *deserve* your money, but Costco is really one of them.

Oh, and Sam’s Club? Owned by the same folk as Walmart, the company that’s slowly killing America. Screw Walmart, and screw Sam’s Club. Costco represent, yo!

Took long enough, but there’s a new podcast up! Show Notes are below, and click to download it, or check your podcatcher if you’re already subscribed, and enjoy!

Show Notes:

- Apple’s Podcasting Support SUCKS!
- Costco doesn’t suck!
- The Ionic Breeze: Bullshit!
- Harry Potter #6 - Cracked in 24 hours!
- Promo: Skepticality
- Global Frequency
- WoW Hacks and Cracks
- Podsafe Music Network (That’s right, you can play music on your podcast! Suck it, Tecnetico!)
- Music: Lost Angeles, by berman

Download the Podcast here!

Wow… 3 years, and 500 posts. And I’m just gettin’ warmed up, biatch!

I wanted to do something special for my 500th post, maybe some sort of giveaway, but it just sneaked up on me, so instead, I’m going to do a ‘Best of Katsu’ list: posts that I think mark milestones in my blogging career.

The Post that Started it All
-
The first real mention of the Apartment
-
The First BedBlog!
-
First Post with Pictures
-
First mention of Second Life
-
First time a company I link to drops me a comment
-
First post full of RAGE
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Attack of the Comment Spam!!!
-
First mention of the Vile Vermin
-
The Madrid Bombings
-
First Mention of Spiritual Humanism and my general Skeptic views
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First real rant on moving out of the apartment and my NYC dreams
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Glitch hits the scene!
-
Coming to grips with the 2004 elections…
-
The first podcast! (And in 2004, no less! Suck on that, Tecnetico!)
-
Yuki passes away…

… and there’s more, of course, but I think those give you a nice overview. If you guys have any favorite posts of your own, or just want to comment on me finally reaching #500, feel free to do so. Me? I’ve got a podcast to edit up.

I’ve been a Slashdot reader, member, and occasional poster for years now, at least since 2000-ish, possibly earlier. Slashdot, a.k.a. /., as many of you probably know, is one of the ‘premier’ geek news sites. Hundreds of thousands of techies, geeks, trolls and cubicle philosophers visit it every day and shoot the shit on the comment sections of the news articles. Dozens of amusing, interesting, bizarre, or just vaguely noteworthy links to articles are posted day after day. Nerdvana, right? Unfortunately, not so much. For a good long while now, /. has been going downhill. The quality of news posts seems to be getting worse and worse. Pseudo-science stories are uncritically and unapologetically posted on the front page. Dupes, stories that have been previously posted, are a daily occurrence. But I can live with all that. The thing that spooked me away from Slashdot, maybe for good, is the comments section.

Once upon a time, the comments section of a /. story was a cool place to be: you were surrounded by fellow geeks who were interested in technology, with weird senses of humor, lots of technical knowledge, and decent vocabularies. But over time, that has changed. The average /. comment area is now plagued with trolls, morons who don’t know a thing about what the article is even about but still feel the need to tell everyone why it won’t work, and attacking each other incessantly over real or imagined slights. Not even browsing the comments at +5 helps: for every comment with actual intelligent content that gets modded ‘+5, Interesting’, there’s 10 that are nothing but a rephrasing of the actual text of the article itself that get modded ‘+5, Insightful’. Slashdot has collapsed under the weight of its own, increasingly idiotic, user base.

Other sites have tried to form ‘alternate /.’s’, with varying degrees of success. Kuro5hin, a.k.a. K5, is one of the better known, with a wider range of topics than just tech, a slightly better-behaved user base, and generally better thought-through articles. Sadly, K5 can’t hope to match the community size of something like /., and the more stringent submission procedures for stories mean that it can sometimes be days before a good article makes it to the front page. Other /. alternatives tend to suffer from similar problems.

So, now that I’ve decided to dump Slashdot, and have pointed out that most alternatives suck, what am I going to do to get my daily technology news fix? The answer, my friends, is Digg. Digg.com is a new technology news site that’s the brainchild of Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht, formerly of the now-defunct, but never forgotten, TechTV, and now currently doing the excellent online show, Systm. It combines the power of social bookmarking, RSS, and social networking (buzzword bingo!) to create something fairly unique that, so far, actually works. I highly reccommend you check out the site, but in a nutshell, Digg allows you to create an account and ‘digg’ sotries you are interested in. When you digg a story, it gets added to your personal list, where it’s already categorized and ready to search. Thus, by digging stories and articles you are interested in, you create a personal bookmark set, organized by category, of things that interest you, which you can access from anywhere. You can keep yourself to the main page, or you can view all submitted articles, and digg the ones you’re interested in there. When an article gets enough diggs, it gets bumped to the main page, so only things that the community is interested in show up.

Of course, that’s not all of it. Digg also has commenting capabilities on the articles, and as you notice users who consistently make interesting,intelligent comments, you can add those people as friends. This allows you to view what articles they have dugg, which can bring articles that you might have otherwise have missed to your attention, or bring further attention to an article that you ignored before. As you add more friends, Digg allows you to view a combined list of articles dugg by all your friends. This is supremely cool: You can view news and links selected by people you have personally selected as trustworthy.

Your dugg articles are immeidately made available as RSS feeds, as are those of your friends, so you can subscribe not only to the main Digg page, but also the the dugg articles from your friends, display them on your own site, take them with you on an RSS reader, do whatever you want. Digg even makes it easy to post artciles and article links to your personal blog, with a ‘blog this’ link on all articles that interfaces directly with your blog (you probably already noticed a couple of articles from Digg that I posted up over the weekend).

Overall, Digg.com seems to work perfectly. How clean and useful the comments section will be, remains to be seen as more and more people hit up Digg, but the ability to add friends and view their diggs might be what saves it: you can filter out the idiots a lot easier. Go check it out, you just might forget all about /. for good.

… help me pay for my hospital bills, it’ll mean a lot more. Prayer may be heartwarming to some, but a recent study indicates that it has little or no effect on the survival rates of people who go under the knife. From the article:

Christian, Muslim, Jewish and Buddhist congregations were given patients’ names and prayed for them for five to 30 days.

Survival rates did not differ among those who received prayer and those who did not, the study found.

So, next time you or someone you love gets sick and hits the hospital, don’t bother getting the congregation together to pray all night; it’d probably be a much more effective effort if you passed the collection plate around and donated the proceeds to the patient, or an organization dedicated to finding a cure for whatever disease he or she is suffering from. Do some real good for a change.

Yeah, so these online IQ tests mean nothing, but I don’t care: I’m a vain mofo, and if a machine tells me I am t3h sm4rtz0rz, j0, I will brag about it on my blog. So, with that, I give you the results of my online IQ test:

Katsushiro, your IQ score is 138

Katsushiro, your IQ score is significantly above average. Congratulations! You have a wide range of exceptional skills which are much stronger than those of the average population. You are also skilled at answering the types of questions that are asked in a classic IQ test. The test analyses your strengths and weaknesses based on your mathematical, linguistic, visual-spatial and logical skills. Even though you have high scores in all of those areas, we are able to analyse your results to discover the areas in which you have the strongest abilities.

Your mind’s strengths allow you to think ahead of the game — to imagine or anticipate what should come next in just about any situation. Because you’re equally skilled in the numerical and verbal universes of the brain, you can draw from multiple sources of information to come up with great ideas. The timelessness of your vision and the balance between your various skills are what make you a Visionary Philosopher.

In addition to your strengths in maths and linguistics, you have a knack for matching and anticipating patterns. These skills and your uncanny ability to detect the underlying blueprint of most of life’s situations add to your visionary philosopher mind. Two philosophers who share the same combination of skills you possess are Plato and Benedict Spinoza.

PH34R MY V1S10N4RY PH1L0S0PH3R SK1LLZ!!!!11

… err… go take it and let me know if you’re smarter than me.

Found over on Digg:

Great little piece of software that lets you run a local web server at your LAN parties to keep everything in order. You can arrange tournaments food runs, and even keep track of how much caffeine is consumed by each of your visitors in case a call to 911 is in order.

How about it, Jancelot? Shall we take a look at this for the next LAN Party?

read more | digg story

Found over in Digg:

This is pretty slick, a keyboard using OLED or electrophosphorescence to display keys. Yeah, this may be a dupe, but at least I found it in english (wasn’t too difficult)!

I gotta say, this thing is freakin’ SEXY.. It’s just a concept model, and it would likely cost an obscene amount of money, since OLED displays are horribly expensive right now, but go look at those pictures and *drool* over the possibilities.

read more | digg story

Warning: UltraGeek Mode about to be activated. During UltraGeek Mode, Katsu will receive a +4 to Intelligence and to his Lore: Technology, Lore: Gadgets, Lore: Games, and Skill: Computers stats. He also receives a -4 to Charisma and Wisdom, and must make a Saving Throw vs. Paralization when faced with new and desirable gadgets and gizmos (this roll is made at a -8 penalty if Katsu is allowed to actually touch and interact with a fully functioning techie device or gizmo).

Now, with that out of the way, I want to talk to you about an old friend of mine: Nethack. What is Nethack? It’s a time-sink. It’s a lifestyle. It’s a game, and a religion. It’s one of the things that’s kept me slightly insane since the late 80’s. It’s Nethack:

Looks impressive, don’t it? Don’t be fooled, though. Nethack is easily one of the deepest, most complex, most entertaining games ever created, and is certainly one of the oldest games still under active development. Go read the Wikipedia entry linked above to get a better idea, but in a nutshell, it’s a dungeon-crawl game where your character, its surroundings, and the monsters, items, and objects around you are all represented by simple ASCII characters. There are some graphical interfaces available for it, but most purists prefer the ASCII interface, which allows your imagination to go wild.

It may not sound like much, but the trick is that, since they didn’t spend hours and hours on the graphic interface, the Dev Team spends all their effort on the actual gameplay, creating incredibly complex, interesting, and often amusing interactions between all the different creatures, objects, and environmental features of the game. No matter what you can imagine doing, or what two items you want to use with each other, there’s a good chance you can do it, often with interesting effects. Going down a set of stairs while heavily burdened with loot? Then there’s a good chance you’ll fall down the steps and take a nasty blow, or even, if you’re particularly unlucky, fall on your sword and stab yourself. Washing your hands at a random sink while wearing a magic ring? There’s a chance it might slip off and fall down the drain… but it’s not all bad, because the flash of colored light as it falls down the hole might help you identify what effect the ring had if you hadn’t identified yet. And if you’re lucky, you might be able to rescue the ring again at a fountain elsewhere in the dungeon. The Dev Team thinks of everything. Here’s an example, from Wikipedia:

The cockatrice: a typical example of a complex NetHack monster. Its touch can turn you to stone, so attacking it with your bare hands is not recommended. If you kill one and it leaves a corpse, you could wield it as a weapon, and turn other monsters to stone—but you’d better be wearing gloves. Furthermore, if your character is female, and you are polymorphed into a cockatrice, you can lay cockatrice eggs—which have several interesting applications. Again, “the DevTeam thinks of everything.” One of the most commonly cited (and most amusing) stupid ways to die is to wield a cockatrice corpse while burdened, then fall down a staircase and land on one’s own cockatrice corpse.

Nethack is also hard. Really frellin’ hard. Enough that even though I’ve been playing for the better part of 2 decades, I’ve never even come close to Ascending and winning the game. The fact that the game also has permadeath, which means, one life, no chances to redo things if you die (you can save games, but that’s just so you can pick up the game later and keep going. When you die, your savegames get wiped too), start over again from the beginning. It’s a testament to how goddamn good the game is that I still keep playing it after 20 years of this abuse.

So why do I bring this up? Because I just discovered two things:

Nethack for the PocketPC. I had this one before, but becauseof the sheer variety of things you can do in Nethack, it’s really hard to play it without a keyboard.. but now that I have my little Folding Keyboard, it’s a whole new game.

Dweller, a rogue-like game for J2ME-capable phones. Nethack is one of a variety of games called ‘roguelikes’, the name comes from the first widely-known game of this type, 1980’s Rogue. Well, now there’s a roguelike for my phone. I downloaded and installed Dweller on my Motorola v551 last night, and promptly played it for about 3 hours straight. Oh yeah, that’s the stuff.

If you’ve never played Nethack, Slash’EM, Rogue, or any of the other roguelikes’ before, give ‘em a chance. You just might become another convert.