Between that and a quote from Crow T. Robot, I salute you, sir.
The only sad thing is that your ascension probably doesn't earn you as much money. I've never ascended or even gotten close, but I hit a point about 10-15 years ago where I realized that beating Nethack amounts to reverse-engineering the spoilers list, a lot of which is arbitrary and capricious. I still play once in a while, but I don't ever expect to win.
I don't know if I've changed or the game has changed, but I don't recall Hack being so unforgiving when I first played it (29+/-1 years ago). Maybe I had more patience back then. Nowadays, I tend to prefer games like WazHack (which also runs on Android) because it is meant to capture the spirit of roguelikes without being quite as tedious and unforgiving. It's a lot of fun, but I miss some of the richness of Nethack. There's just no pleasing me, I guess.
My all-time favorite roguelike was Omega, which was pretty obscure, and hasn't been actively developed (to my knowledge) in well over a decade. I actually ported it to C++ back int he late 90s, but lost my momentum and never finished the project. It's sad, too, because I was probably 90% done. I frequently think about dusting it off again. Omega was almost unique (especially in the late 80s) in that it had a whole world including towns and several dungeons (and even some trips to alternate planes). I came _this close_ to winning Omega back in the day, but could never figure out what to do in the endgame.
For ancient and obscure roguelike fun, I used to play Oubliette back around 1983. It was also pretty unique in that it supported up to 6 characters and implemented the idea of multiple trips to the dungeon with realistic amounts of time required for resting and healing in between such that aging became a factor. It was pretty buggy, but did an amazing amount of stuff in an executable that was all of about 40k in size (with about another 60k or so in data). I figured out the semi-trivial encryption used in the data files with a friend and wrote a suite of Turbo Pascal programs to modify the game files (for instance a utility to reset the ages of your characters so they wouldn't get old and die). We also hacked our way to level 9 with a maxed out party just to see what it was like and experienced a TPK in the first encounter most of the time. I never legitimately got past about level 3 or 4, and I seriously doubt it was even possible to get down to level 9. Fun times.
