Here's a few things to keep you at an
arm's length from the reality.
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead
An exceptionally nice free open source game. Can be played in
ascii but there also is a tileset that replaces all ascii
characters with easier to intuit images. I think it's called
Undead People. The game is about surviving zombie apocalypse,
but often you die for some random mistake you make. My last
character died because of smoking a joint while studying
mechanics. The book lit up, burning up the kitchen, and him in it.
MapSCII
It's OpenStreetMap in ascii. Just telnet mapscii.me. Zooming
around with this somehow heightens the "mystery" that has been
lost in the modern maps that zoom in all the way into pedestrians
on the streets.
Standard Ebooks
A collection of hand picked and formatted ebooks. There are only
something like 400 of them, so it's a good starter kit for getting
into quality literature. Go to standardebooks.org.
Open Directories at Reddit
These folks dig up servers that people have left open. There's
some online archeology to be done here.
