Arcane Gazebo

Could you explain the picture for those of us with minimal exposure to that?

NO NO NO!

Excellent!

wow i have not played net hack in a good 7 years.

I'm guessing this is a weird cross between nethack and I Can Has Cheezburger...

How long did you have to play to catch that screenie? Not terribly long, I expect, but I don't remember what makes the pet lethargic. Also -- I thought the gnomish mines were a little deeper than this (I see two branches down).

Also: this is ftw.

Mason: Nethack is a "rogue-like" game, a very old (originally) ascii-art based dungeon crawl. Most of the classes have a familiar -- in this case, AG is playing a Wizard, which gets a cat familiar. He did something (don't recall all of the mechanics) to make the cat unhappy (message in top-left), and finally the LOLCAT connection is complete.

And, in honor of my caveman...
CAN I HAS DED KOBOLD
NOM NOM NOM

Yep, I'm invoking the LOLcat meme of a cat recoiling in horror with the caption DO NOT WANT. In nethack, pets can sense cursed items and "move only reluctantly" onto squares containing them. In this case, it was a cursed dagger that the cat recoiled from.

As it happens I've been playing a bunch of nethack lately ("someone" installed it on one of the lab servers and there's been a kind of intra-lab competition), and so I just had to wait for the right moment in the course of my normal play. I frequently use my pet for curse-detection (until I find an altar) and so the main problem was remembering to stop and take a screenshot when it happened.

(As for the Gnomish Mines, the entrance can appear as early as level 2 and as late as level 4.)

I know what nethack is at some basic level. What I meant by minimal exposure was that I never played it. I did play some old mud once that Ben Williamson wanted to show me. He stole my belongings as a joke within 1 minute of playing and my interest lasted only a little longer than that. I think I should have tried it when I was younger and had fewer hobbies. That would have given me the chance to get into it.

Also, I wasn't getting the connection to the LOLcat meme at all, which is where my comment was really going as to what I should be looking for.

Always my favorite Do Not Want picture

On a related note...

While we're on the subject of nethack, this is a new achievement for me:

You made the top ten list!

 No  Points     Name                                                   Hp [max]

  1    4659894  hime-Wiz-Hum-Mal-Neu ascended to demigod-hood.        296 [299]

  2     277823  hime-Val-Hum-Fem-Neu died in The Dungeons of Doom on

                level 27.  Killed by a zruty.                           - [101]

  3     232131  Shane-Wiz-Elf-Mal-Cha died in The Dungeons of Doom on

                level 5 [max 16].  Killed by an invisible stalker,

                while helpless.                                         -  [99]

I think Shane's about to join me in the demigod bar, too...

AG, so you're blogging less because of nethack?

Mason: That's... actually pretty accurate.