💾 Archived View for gemini.hearsay.tech › old › 2022-07-04-absinthe-bbs.gmi captured on 2023-11-14 at 07:50:07. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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A little over a decade ago, I got really into the Angband family of roguelike games. There was a good community at angband.oook.cz, and later an IRC channel that was dedicated to one of the more well-crafted variants that I felt at home in.
I burned out on these games about five years back, but I still keep up with the community. Some months ago, someone dropped by the oook forums to announce that they'd managed to build a popular Angband variant called sil-q, a variant of the terrific Sil for their Amiga BBS (!).
I was intrigued, but didn't have the time to check it out. As I wrote in previous posts, I've recently been moving through a period of recovery, and this seemed like the right time. I spent a few minutes compiling netrunner, and then I was off to the races.
This BBS—which goes by aBSINTHE—is in my opinion absolutely incredible. There is just _so much stuff_ jam-packed into it. I first started out doing comfortable, familiar things—reading message board posts and playing Legend of the Red Dragon, mostly. (I was quite the LORD champion in my youth.) In the week or so since I started connecting, I've discovered a ton of new things.
Visiting this BBS every day has also concretized some habits that I'd tried to establish for myself before, too. For example, I'd meant to read my news more often from 68k, a plain-html render of stories from Google News, but I never got into the habit. There's a direct interface to 68k that shows up in the aBSINTHE login process, though, so now I tend to check it every day.
The author has also built their own custom door game called Skyraiders that is based on the Korean war. It is excellently done, and I've been burning most of my precious minutes on that in the last few days.
I say "precious minutes" because this BBS does something that I had forgotten was popular among the BBSes of my youth; it limits the amount of time you're allowed to stay connected each day. In the 90s, this was because a BBS usually had 1+ dedicated phone lines for connections, and if all of those were in use, no one else could connect. This made connection time a very limited resource.
I am not sure if there's something about the aBSINTHE setup that means this constraint still exists, or if it simply present to retain the aesthetic. I find it refreshing, though. I really look forward to those ~30-40 minutes, and I feel a bit sad when they're over.
If you have any interest in BBSes (or Amiga) I highly suggest checking aBSINTHE out. There's some stuff there that many might find offensive, but it's consistent with the era in which BBSes thrived. At the very least, I think it's worth perusing a few times just to marvel at the skill and dedication of the maintainer.