Is Trill still sitting at the Keep well, refusing to be useful?

Aw, that brings me back. It's so nice to meet another wotmudder in the wild!

Now I want to watch the tournament footage to see if he ever chews gum...

He chews pretty much the whole game

Wouldnt this require collecting (and maintaining) an enormous database of local retailers and their stock? Including duplicates. That seems... non-trivial.

If you built the foundation of the extension, I don't see why B&M stores wouldn't work with you to enable this. Seems like a huge win for them.

No, it is a large loss. They want you to come in thinking maybe you have X, then buy something else while you are there.

That can still happen when you go in to make your purchase. My understanding was that this plugin would merely show you that it was available at the store.

In any case, any sale that wasn't lost to Amazon is still a win for these stores.

But it won't happen when you don't go into the store at all.

Not if the local retailers can themselves expose their products in an API.

You'd still be hitting tens of millions of apis to get their stock lists. In varying formats.

I have a MUD open right now in another window. I still play it because despite the lack of graphics, the freedoms of player interaction are interesting and far beyond whats available in modern open world games.

Attack a same side player? Sure! You might get warranted by the local militia (which may or may not have real players in it), but you can do it.

Pickpocket players? Sure. Change sides mid fight? Yep. Be a spy or mole for the enemy? Chase people down in 'safe zones'? Completely ignore PvP? All up to you.

Another thing i really like is looting. If you die, anyone can grab gear from your corpse. If the enemy get it, you're gear is gone. Theres no perma death in this particular Mud, but losing gear adds stakes to PvP. It also means gear is a real in game commodity, but also people dont get too precious about it. Die in the fight? Reequip asap and get back out there.

MUDs are a class of game that is terribly underrated. I've played on a few different one (mostly toward the RP focused end of things) but I think the whole family of games shows just how effective imagination can be when coupled solely with text descriptions.

I have extremely strong memories from Shadows of Isildur[1] and met my spouse there!

1. http://www.middle-earth.us/

All of your points also exist in Renaissance era Ultima Online. There are a number of custom shards with playerbases that want this exact experience.

Yup! Ultima is another great game from when they were still 'figuring out' open world games, before they became stale.

Same. I keep the previous episode of a show until i get the next, to remind me what shows im watching and where im up to, but typically dont hang onto anything. These days the cost of downloading something again is less than the cost of hanging onto it just in case i maybe want to rewatch (usually years later).

Sorcerer's Stone is particularly annoying i agree. Not like philosophers' stone is an existing mythos highly relevant to the story or anything.

Another that bugged me was Northern Lights -> The Golden Compass. Apparently NL was too abstract for American audiences?

Oh and Harlequin -> The Archer's Tale.

>Northern Lights -> The Golden Compass

According to Pullman that one wasn't really about an attempt at cultural adaptation, the title had been in flux and the US publisher had taken an early name for the upcoming series, "The Golden Compasses", and run with it before he settled on Northern Lights.

Oh thats interesting, cheers

re: The Golden Compass (sic)

Not only did the American editors change the title, but the device in question – the alethiometer, which is not a compass – is made of brass not gold in the original text. The US editors basically changed it to gold to fit their created title.

I never noticed that! Did they really change it to gold?

Moreover, "The Golden Compass" was illustrated with the wrong type of compass.

Just a nitpick on your homepage: link is blue on blue, had to highlight to read.

This is fixed now. Thank you!

I think you've misread the article.

Does that mean that there is a link between age and participants who "misunderstood the instructions, or intentionally subverted the experiment"?

I think they're saying over or under 60 is completely arbitrary when judging only from 'random' answers. It could be over or under a month, or 1000 years, the result would still be 50/50 because the ability to create a sequence that appears random has no link to age.