That was the idea, at least. In the grand scheme of things, I know, one night isn’t much.

When I got back, I cancelled my preorders for Assassin’s Creed II and Settlers VII. In case you haven’t heard the news, Ubisoft has developed a copy-protection system that requires a continuous connection to their servers. As interesting as the games are, that kind of disconnection yoyo is more trouble than it’s worth, and I don’t trust Ubisoft to keep their servers online once the game stops selling. There are plenty of other games to keep me occupied, and even when there aren’t, I should spend more time writing. Even with the weekend out, I shouldn’t be this far behind.

After I make myself some lunch, I’ll go work on First and Last and Always again. We’ll see. Given the complications that keep coming up, I’m going to stop announcing specific posting days. Right now, all I’ll say is “soon”. Poke me and see what I’m up to; I’ve pretty much been asking for it.

It was getting hard; the game mattered too much. At the very least I wasn’t about to let Rio beat me just by playing around. The tension started building in my muscles, winding me up tight, from my hands up to my arms, from my shoulders down my back, and I started to welcome the drain, the precious few seconds of rest before I sent another ball up the ramp.

Eventually I had no more, and I slumped over the machine, exhausted, staring at the scoreboard. The numbers continued to spin, catching up to my last bonus points. Rio laughed, delighted, as he walked up behind me. “That’s very good! You’re very intense when you want to be.”

Still trying to catch my breath, I barely managed a smile.

“Close your eyes,” I heard him whisper. “Your score isn’t going anywhere.”

I did as I was told.

He took both of my hands in his own and spun me around. Suddenly I felt the warm press of his body, catching me between himself and the machine, and then the faint press of his mouth against my lips, little more than an invitation. It was fleeting as a thought and sweet as cherry ice-cream, but it burned like fire.

They said that he was part demon, that he had slain even great and noble silver dragons and forged armor from their hides. When finally the last of the old royal line lay exterminated at his feet, they said, he had spat in disgust, turned away, and walked into legend.

And it was true. Even now, the Rebellion turned into a new royalty for over a hundred years, Erdrick’s armor still glittered, bright with malice and enchantment.

In the second room Snickt visited, even before the first combat, he found a chest with a fully-loaded Wand of Wishing. He wished for blessed scrolls of charging, blessed +2 silver dragon scale mail, and blessed fireproof +2 speed boots, then recharged the wand and made some more wishes, for a blessed rustproof +2 helm of brilliance, a blessed +2 Magicbane, and +2 blessed fireproof gauntlets of dexterity. For storytelling purposes I decided that this should be his “starting” equipment.

The fabled Magicbane gleamed in his hand, elemental chaos black. Blood rushed in his head, and he heard the voice of Anhur calling to him.

“Serve me,” it said. “Go forth into the Dungeons of Doom. Bring to me the Amulet of Yendor and you shall become more powerful than Erdrick even dared to dream.”

And Snickt knew then his destiny. For nearly a week he prepared himself and said his few goodbyes. Then, one evening, he looked up at the bright, full moon for the last time, and he slipped into the unending, subterranean night.

The beginning was easy. Jackals, newts, and foxes posed no challenge. Gnomes and even dwarves could barely scratch his armor. He only laughed at their futile attacks, effortlessly swatting their blows aside, or watching them bounce harmlessly off of his polished silver shell. Killing them with Magicbane grew boring, and he began to toy with them, parrying long enough to refresh his mystical energies, then blasting them to bits and kibble.

Soon they learned to fear him. Any who came within arm’s reach were cut down without a word. The smarter ones fled his approach. One betrayed the entrance to their Mines, and Snickt followed. They would make fine sacrifices to Anhur, and in any case they annoyed him now, with their thin, shrill voices and their stubborn refusal to stand still for his target-practice.

One of their traps squashed his kitten beneath a rolling boulder. This made him angry, and he swore that they would pay. All of them would pay. He went on a rampage, killing everything that crossed his path, hostile or indifferent. Minetown was particularly satisfying. A small community of Gnomish Wizards lived there, and Magicbane fed heavily from their energies. One of the shopkeepers sold Snickt a new kitten, and Izchak sold him a lamp that oozed magic. This mollified him somewhat, and he spared them from his wrath (Izchak seemed like a charming fellow anyways).

The temple held a single priest, a contemptible, snivelling follower of Ptah. Snickt brushed past him without a thought, on to deeper parts of the dungeon, but soon a plan began to hatch in his mind. He visited Minetown again and sold a few gems, building up his funds. Carefully he led a beast to the temple doors and slew it. The idiot priest seemed not to notice the body Snickt dragged to the altar. They spoke – briefly – and Snickt offered him a few donations. Each time the priest prayed to Ptah on his behalf, and Ptah rewarded him with a magical, protective glow.

Snickt threw the creature’s lifeless body onto the altar, screaming out his offer to Anhur. A hot black glow announced its acceptance, and the growing power of Chaos. The priest became angry, but it was too late. He only lived a few short rounds, dying as Snickt’s vicious smile (and Magicbane) struck sweet terror deep into his heart.

Anhur must have smiled upon this trick, or perhaps Ptah felt some impotent anger, because as Snickt left the temple, he found a white unicorn grazing just outside, its hide pure and unblemished. In minutes its throat was slit, its milk-white coat stained red, and its body offered to Snickt’s dark god. Snickt roared his triumph. Erdrick would be proud.

Originally I planned to write out the entire epic of Snickt’s descent into the bowels of the Earth, through Gehennom, and back out, into the Elemental Planes, but it’s very long and actually not as good a story as I thought it would be. Suffice to say that he is every bit as malicious as I painted him (he pulled the same trick on a priest of Thoth), and that the (Middle) Finger of Death is a whole lot of fun.

Snickt eventually learned to live without his entire arsenal of spells. It winds up being a whole lot of effort to keep them all memorized. This got much worse when (while confused) he accidentally fell into some water, and erased a disturbingly large chunk of his spellbook collection. Scrambling through the last third of the game, racing his rapidly-diminshing spell list, made the game much harder, though it lent the endgame a nice kind of end-of-the-hero’s-journey weariness.

After losing his fifth cat and second dog, Snickt stopped caring about the creatures around him, and would frequently tame anything reasonably tough-looking, just so he could send it to its doom. It worked surprisingly well.

I’ve been playing NetHack, on and off, for almost ten years now. I consider it one of the greatest computer games ever written, and it continues to amaze me even now. I’ve never beaten it… until now.

You offer the Amulet of Yendor to Anhur…–More–
An invisible choir sings, and you are bathed in radiance–More–
The voice of Anhur booms out: “Congratulations, mortal!”–More–
“In return for thy service, I grant thee the gift of Immortality!”–More–
You ascend to the status of Demigod…–More–

Do you want to see your conduct [ynq] (y)
Voluntary Challenges:
You genocided 20 types of monsters
You never changed form.
You used 13 wishes.

Goodbye Snickt the Demigod…

You went to your reward with 6388264 points,
Magicbane (worth 3500 zorkmids and 8750 points)
The Eye of the Aethiopica (worth 4000 zorkmids and 10000 points)
The Bell of Opening (worth 5000 zorkmids and 12500 points)
Demonbane (worth 2500 zorkmids and 6250 points)
15 opals (worth 12000 zorkmids),
12 aquarmarines (worth 18000 zorkmids),
10 dilithium crystals (worth 45000 zorkmids),
10 sapphires (worth 30000 zorkmids),
9 amber stones (worth 9000 zorkmids),
9 jet stones (worth 7650 zorkmids),
6 diamonds (worth 24000 zorkmids),
5 jacinth stones (worth 16250 zorkmids),
5 citrine stones (worth 7500 zorkmids),
5 topaz stones (worth 4500 zorkmids),
5 jade stones (worth 1500 zorkmids),
4 rubies (worth 14000 zorkmids),
4 chrysoberyl stones (worth 2800 zorkmids),
4 garnet stones (worth 2800 zorkmids),
4 emeralds (worth 7500 zorkmids),
2 jasper stones (worth 1000 zorkmids),
1 black opal (worth 2500 zorkmids),
1 turquoise stone (worth 2000 zorkmids),
1 fluorite stone (worth 400 zorkmids),
2 amulets of life saving (worth 300 zorkmids),
1 amulet of magical breathing (worth 150 zorkmids),
and 147415 pieces of gold, after 91087 moves.
You were level 28 with a maximum of 298 hit points when you ascended.

You made the top ten list!
No Points Name HP [max]
1 6388264 Snickt-Wiz-Hum-Mal-Cha ascended to demigod-hood. 163 [298]

This five percent is, by definition, LiveJournal’s most profitable five percent of users. Out of these five percent, permanent accounts are, I suspect, the best deal… for LiveJournal’s coffers. $150 buys five years of upgraded service, not counting the interest earned by not paying up-front. I suspect that a Permanent account actually stays profitable more or less forever – on a commercial scale, a gigabyte of bandwidth costs about fifteen cents, a gigabyte of storage about the same – but they get less so if they’re active for more than five years. For comparison, LiveJournal has only existed at all for nine years this March, and as a paid service for eight this September.

Unfortunately, once a user buys a permanent upgrade, that user immediately and forever-after becomes deadweight to the company, an expense that has no hope of bringing in future revenue. Let me repeat that – permanent account holders are not LiveJournal’s customers. LiveJournal has precious little incentive to care what they think. Customers write checks. Once LiveJournal cashes the user’s check, a permament account is a liability, pure and simple.

In 2006, though, they found a way around this problem, which recently became the default for new users: the ad-supported upgrade. I think this was a brilliant decision, in this twirling-moustache, corporate-Machiavelli kind of way. The advertising program means that permament and basic accounts, which ordinarily generate no revenue, are still financially valuable – LiveJournalers (LiveJournalists?) maintain extensive lists of interests and associations in their profiles. This giant database can be mined, and the interests and demographic information mined to target advertising to their friends.

I suspect that people willing to pay $20/year or more for LiveJournal are probably pretty good at keeping their profiles up-to-date, people willing to pay $150 up-front even more so. That’s good, and very important in this business model. Targetting is money in advertising-land.

I have a point in this long and rather unwieldy setup, a reason for this little Gedankenexercise. I don’t have anything against LiveJournal, per se; it provides a useful service and there’s nothing wrong with paying for it, or with it turning a tidy profit.

It just entertains me. Late last year, SUP bought LiveJournal for about thirty million dollars (this before our currency really tanked, when thirty million dollars meant more in international business than it does today). They certainly didn’t do it without looking at the balance sheets. So, when a Permanent Account member says

I am not anyone’s marketing project or marketing research group or cash cow. Either you enter into a recorded, serious contract with me to pay me for my efforts or you can just fuck off.

I just have to laugh.

Moo Harder.

One night at Pilades, he slid up beside me and took a seat on the edge of my table, smiling just a little too much. I tried to ignore it, but he tugged insistently at the top of my newspaper, like a kitten who’s done something endearingly naughty and very much wants you to know. “Hello again,” he said, practically singing with happiness. “The Times? That’s a very good paper. I approve. And I have something to show you.”

“Rio, you are a strange, strange human being.” I folded my paper back together, shaking my head. “What do you want?”

Still smiling, he stuck out his tongue at me, then nodded over to the pinball machine. “I think she likes me.” The Billionaire’s Club listings began to scroll, glowing orange in the dim corner of the room.

I ran over to look. The first score wasn’t mine anymore. Three letters laughed back at me. R. I. O.

He’d beaten me by exactly a hundred points.

“You beautiful fucking bastard.” I glared at him as he padded over, his hands clasped innocently behind his back. “I gotta fix this.”

Rio dug through his pockets and handed me a fistful of quarters. “I thought you would,” he said, smiling a little wider. “I wanted to watch you play.”

The machine loves me. Most machines do, but there’s something particularly about this one that scratches me in just the right places, something about its ramps and lights and all its moving parts that mixes with the synthesizer and pulls me into its frantic, exhilarating logic. I tried to ignore Rio as he leaned against the wall behind me, watching, waiting for me to sink into that magic place between thinking too much and not thinking enough, between playing the game and letting the game play you.

It took me a few dollars to get there. Most of the time it’s not so hard, but before Rio walked into my life, I held a hundred thousand points over anyone else on the board. Having competition makes it harder, but when it’s just right, that’s only part of the thrill. I felt the machine coming to life beneath me, brighter, louder, and more seductive with every snap of the paddles. He wasn’t going to beat me; I would make sure of that.

Over the noise of the game I heard Rio thinking aloud, half amused. “Jacqueline says you want to fuck me. Or maybe she said you want me to fuck you. I forget exactly.”

I choked, missed a beat, and hit the paddles a quarter-second late. My last ball drained, five thousand points low. “Cheater.” I glared at him.

He ran his fingers through his hair, leaning close to offer me an innocent little smile. “I was just saying, you know. It doesn’t mean anything, unless you say it does.” Those beautiful blue eyes caught the lights from the machine, gleaming in the darkness, daring me to answer.

I pushed him away without the satisfaction. “Gimme another quarter, asshole.”