A little over a decade ago, I got really into the Angband family of
roguelike games. There was a good community at
http://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[0], a variant of the terrific Sil[1] 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[2], and then I was off to the races.

This BBS -- which goes by aBSINTHE[3] -- 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[4], 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[5], 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.

P.S. Is it considered bad form to link to WWW resources from within a
gopherspace? I am completely new to this, and am mostly just
absorbing what to do based on reading other spaces. Email me at
zot@sdf.org if you have a take on this. 

[0] https://github.com/sil-quirk/sil-q
[1] http://www.amirrorclear.net/flowers/game/sil/
[2] http://www.mysticbbs.com/downloads.html
[3] http://absinthebbs.net/
[4] https://lord.stabs.org/about.html
[5] http://68k.news/