Gary Wong

@yon @orci Nice! Me, too. I've been playing NetHack (very intermittently) since Izchak was alive, and just noticed I've only ever played version 3.*. (Though I had also played Rogue in the 1980s.) In 1993, games were banned in the university lab, but Usenet was available. So I spent much time saving posts, and running some ghastly scripted combination of unshar/split/tar/compress to assemble the source onto a series of floppy disks to take home to compile and play. I never won the game until version 3.3.1 in 2000: https://groups.google.com/g/rec.games.roguelike.nethack/c/Z1ao8wpc914/m/lvKG7v_7VHkJ In 2007 I accidentally won the Highest Scoring Priest Trophy in the nethack.alt.org tournament. I made some severe mistake in the mid game (accidentally polymorphed and ruined most of my armour, I think), and spent ages trying to recover, while inadvertently accumulating points. Meanwhile, all the good players were speedrunning dozens of ascensions while I was trying to survive this attempt, and so by the time I finally finished, I had a score no competent player could match! NetHack is also one of the few modern games my homemade computer is capable of running. Time to give version 5 a try!

@NZChineseGenealogy@mastodon.nz I haven't performed the research personally, but my father and uncle gave interviews as part of the Chinese Poll Tax Heritage Trust book projects, and my grandfather and his brother were founding members of the Kwong Cheu Club in the 1920s so I've seen some of the story in the surviving records. Thanks for the Easter Sports Tournament support and best wishes to all involved!

@NZChineseGenealogy@mastodon.nz My grandmother, Wong Lui Shee, was one of those 256. She and her two children left Hong Kong for Sydney aboard the SS Dandar in 1939, then completed the journey to Auckland on SS Awatea to reunite with my grandfather. (Awatea was soon after commandeered from civilian operation into military service, before being sunk by the Luftwaffe in the North African campaign, where my other grandfather was fighting with the 21st NZ Infantry Battalion. As you might infer, everybody I described survived, and afterwards my parents were born.)