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Kulthea Chronicles and Elanthian Herald 01/18/2016 01:55 AM CST

It occurs to me that I found and converted these into readable form last year, but never announced it anywhere after putting them on the Wiki. They are the official newsletters between 1994 and 1996. They were published in a long dead file format, I painfully converted them page by page into PDFs.

If there were more issues of either I have never seen them, and for one of them I could only find a pure text copy. The 1995 gap would cover things like the Estrion events and perhaps the Shadow Valley release, and the gap from 1996 into 1997 was whatever it was we were doing on AOL. Teras Isle, Icemule, and so on.

https://gswiki.play.net/mediawiki/index.php/List_of_newsletters

- Xorus' player

>A monastic lich points a skeletal finger at you and exclaims, "Your soul is forfeit!"

FIREPHOENIX

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Re: Kulthea Chronicles and Elanthian Herald 01/18/2016 09:56 AM CST

I was able to find you and say how awesome these were but others hopefully repeat the awesome sentiment on them!

Thanks again for doing these.

PFLATS

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Re: Kulthea Chronicles and Elanthian Herald 01/18/2016 05:37 PM CST

Been reading the work you've been doing on the Wiki and just wanted to throw out a thanks! It's cool stuff.

VUWH60A

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Re: Kulthea Chronicles and Elanthian Herald 01/18/2016 06:19 PM CST

Ditto, and thanks to all involved with the wiki!

Askip

INIQUITY

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Re: Kulthea Chronicles and Elanthian Herald 01/19/2016 03:56 AM CST

Thank you. I've been on an easter egg hunt on the wiki lately. I suddenly realized there were a ton in The Graveyard I had missed (or at least vaguely knew were there but had not specifically pinned down yet), because there is a knock-on effect where you rapidly find a whole bunch of them once you spot the thread.

The "too many coincidences" theory of truth is mostly suited to conspiracy theories, but there isn't much choice when you're trying to find hidden meanings.

- Xorus' player

>A monastic lich points a skeletal finger at you and exclaims, "Your soul is forfeit!"

KRAKII

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Re: Kulthea Chronicles and Elanthian Herald 01/26/2016 11:33 AM CST

Wow. Awesome job, Xorus.

In that list, it looks like you are missing GS3 Newsletter v1 e11, February of 2000. I just double-checked and confirmed that I don't have it, but is it correct that there is a gap there?

GS4-WYROM

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Re: Kulthea Chronicles and Elanthian Herald 01/27/2016 10:46 PM CST

Late to this, but great work here!

~Wyrom, APM

>>They call him Wyrom, not afraid to get dirty; work all day, in game by 5:30; loresongs eloquent, item embellishment, double speed development... ~Silvean

INIQUITY

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Re: Kulthea Chronicles and Elanthian Herald 02/07/2016 10:42 PM CST

<<In that list, it looks like you are missing GS3 Newsletter v1 e11, February of 2000. I just double-checked and confirmed that I don't have it, but is it correct that there is a gap there?>> - KRAKII

I'm not sure what the story is with that one, they did not skip a number for May or November of that same year.

Maybe the 12 was just a typo? It is possible we have all of the newsletters in one place now.

<<Late to this, but great work here!>> - WYROM

Thank you, Wyrom!

- Xorus' player

>A monastic lich points a skeletal finger at you and exclaims, "Your soul is forfeit!"

DAID

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Re: Kulthea Chronicles and Elanthian Herald 02/08/2016 11:54 AM CST

>They are the official newsletters between 1994 and 1996. They were published in a long dead file format, I painfully converted them page by page into PDFs.

Wow. What kind of format was this, and how did you have a way to open them?

It's pretty amazing to see stuff like this. You sit here thinking, oh yeah in the 90s we had the internet, the WWW, so it must have been similar to now just with a modem and...oh wait we made digital newsletters nevermind.

Check out who's dying any time! https://twitter.com/GSIVDeathLog

>Daid: Pretty sure you have a whole big bucket as your penny jar. You never have only two cents. :p

INIQUITY

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Re: Kulthea Chronicles and Elanthian Herald 02/08/2016 05:29 PM CST

<<Wow. What kind of format was this, and how did you have a way to open them?>>

They were .DP files that required a program called Common Ground Mini Viewer to open. I was able to find the installation executable on the Wayback Machine, except it does not work in modern Windows operating systems. (It was not enough to use the program saved in my file archives, because without the installation it does not recognize its own files.) I was able to make it work with a Windows XP virtual machine, but there was still no way to copy any of it.

So, I went through each file page by page making screenshots, gluing them back together in Paint. With the image files I combined them into PDFs, then used text recognition to make the files searchable.

- Xorus' player

>A monastic lich points a skeletal finger at you and exclaims, "Your soul is forfeit!"

OBSERVER

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Re: Kulthea Chronicles and Elanthian Herald 02/08/2016 06:59 PM CST

Wow. Impressive effort, Xorus. Good on you.

DAID

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Re: Kulthea Chronicles and Elanthian Herald 02/09/2016 11:13 AM CST

imagemagick and pdftk might have been useful to speed up the process. Still, an impressive effort!

Check out who's dying any time! https://twitter.com/GSIVDeathLog

>Daid: Pretty sure you have a whole big bucket as your penny jar. You never have only two cents. :p

KRAKII

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Re: Kulthea Chronicles and Elanthian Herald 03/08/2016 01:04 PM CST

"imagemagick and pdftk might have been useful to speed up the process." -- Daid

I love me some pdftk.

It's my command-line of choice when automating the assignment of master- and user-level passwords in the generation of PDFs to distribute to clients.

INIQUITY

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Re: Kulthea Chronicles and Elanthian Herald 03/09/2016 05:22 AM CST

I would have had to learn how to use them first, so I am not sure how much time it would have saved me overall. The PDF part was fast.

The screenshot process itself was bad enough. Zoomed in close enough for the page to be legible required scrolling.

- Xorus' player

>A monastic lich points a skeletal finger at you and exclaims, "Your soul is forfeit!"

GemStone IV · Old Legends and Tales