The fact you say people may lose it because you may have "a bad [hairday]" says so much about you. Which is: an inconsiderate ass hole looking for glory/karma points.
I gave it a go back in 2000 .. I've never learnt so much so quickly and had loads of fun and hair pulling moments. One tip, when you get your system up and running to "init 3", modprobe your soundcard driver and spin up "Orbital - Halcyon" .. If you're a fan of the Hackers film that is ;)
I never done anything else with my build at the time, but I did join the Arch Linux community which is a distro based on LFS with a package manager. So I effectively went from knowing very little about Linux to being a package maintainer for a distro over the course of a weekend.
NNTP is alive and strong. Google groups includes most usenet groups for example. Yeah, most ISPs don't give out free access any more but just google for "news server access".
Being a curious one, I had a look round your site as listed in your profile. You say have a Nexus One, yet your personal site, Watch.Steve, releases the tutorials in "iPhone + Apple TV" format and the filenames have iphone in there.
Just an observation ;-) Prompted mainly by the strange pointless dig at the Nexus One which had no relevance to the conversation or OP.
"Apple designs for #2. No other mass-consumer products company puts as much attention to detail into the fit and finish of the box—let alone the out-of-box experience."
I'm sorry but no they do not put as much attention to detail into their products as you would think. They didn't even have multitasking in the iPhone until recently! And what was the antenna problems all about?
All I see is just enough attention to detail to make people go "wow, shiney." and that's it.
Have you checked out Hacker Evolution? Might be a good source of ideas. It also strikes me that £20 may be a tad much to ask for an interactive fiction text game.
Good idea however your site has no news, contact info etc .. nothing apart from an overview of the product and links to paypal .. add some info about yourself at least and I'll cough up £11.99.