DeathOnAStick

DeathOnAStick is a NetHack player. He (we assume here that DoaS is male) is probably most famous for his year-and-a-half-long game on nethack.alt.org, from 2004-04-17 to 2005-11-27. He spent much of this time polypiling rocks into gems and collecting pet giants to carry the bags of gems for him, since there were so many.

This is where the tale takes a sad turn. After killing the wizard of Yendor on dungeon level 1 gave him a potion of gain level from the death drop. Casually drinking it without fully identifying it first, he found out it was cursed.

Upon reaching the Plane of Earth, he desparately checks his inventory, and indeed he is carrying no gems. At this point, he apparently left his computer for some time. We can only speculate on what he was doing, but banging his head off a wall may have been involved. After 38s (which felt much longer at the time), he returned. A few of his entourage of giants had been close enough to be dragged into the Planes with him, but unfortunately they were either killed off or left behind at the inter-plane portals. The only gems DeathOnAStick had at his ascension were 2 dilithium crystals.

Update: DoaS returned to NAO on 2006-08-11, and has been playing many more games. He was last seen arranging rocks in small piles and zapping wands of polymorph at them.