Wizard's Attic

Wizard's Attic was an American role-playing game wholesaler and fulfillment house servicing small publishers.[1]

History

Wizard's Attic was formed in order to act as a fulfillment house for Chaosium.

Aldo Ghiozzi's Wingnut Games was one of Wizard's Attic's consolidation clients, and in 2002, Wizard's Attic's business was starting to falter and clients like Ghiozzi were starting to see their payments dry up. [2]:93 Just as Wizard's Attic was trying to get out of the consolidation business, Ghiozzi decided to move his small company Impressions Advertising & Marketing into the field.[2] Impressions used Wizard's Attic as its original base of consolidation operations, so Eric Rowe set aside a corner of the Wizard's Attic warehouse for Ghiozzi and his first three clients – Citizen Games, Troll Lord Games and Wingnut Games – and shipped their products as required.[2]:93 By the end of 2002, when Wizard's Attic was shutting down all of its business except for fulfilment, Eric Rowe of Wizard's Attic gave 80 consolidation customers to Ghiozzi.[2]:93 However, by 2003 Wizard's Attic was about to get locked out of its remaining warehouse in Kentucky and the product of all of Ghiozzi's clients was there, so Ghiozzi flew to Kentucky to rescue nine palettes of merchandise, which were shipped to Chessex, who became Impressions' new shipper.[2]:93 In 2004 OtherWorld Creations's production came to a halt when both their distributor Wizard's Attic and the d20 market collapsed.[2]:418

According to Sebastian Deterding and José Zagal, the collapse of Wizard's Attic left "many small publishers with huge financial debts from unpaid revenues and copies of their games that were never returned".[3]

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gollark: Git stands for GIT Is Tremendous.
gollark: The stages of git clone are: Receive a "pack" file of all the objects in the repo database Create an index file for the received pack Check out the head revision (for a non-bare repo, obviously)"Resolving deltas" is the message shown for the second stage, indexing the pack file ("git index-pack").Pack files do not have the actual object IDs in them, only the object content. So to determine what the object IDs are, git has to do a decompress+SHA1 of each object in the pack to produce the object ID, which is then written into the index file.An object in a pack file may be stored as a delta i.e. a sequence of changes to make to some other object. In this case, git needs to retrieve the base object, apply the commands and SHA1 the result. The base object itself might have to be derived by applying a sequence of delta commands. (Even though in the case of a clone, the base object will have been encountered already, there is a limit to how many manufactured objects are cached in memory).In summary, the "resolving deltas" stage involves decompressing and checksumming the entire repo database, which not surprisingly takes quite a long time. Presumably decompressing and calculating SHA1s actually takes more time than applying the delta commands.In the case of a subsequent fetch, the received pack file may contain references (as delta object bases) to other objects that the receiving git is expected to already have. In this case, the receiving git actually rewrites the received pack file to include any such referenced objects, so that any stored pack file is self-sufficient. This might be where the message "resolving deltas" originated.

References
  1. Tinsman, Brian (2003). The Game Inventor's Guidebook. Krause. ISBN 0873495527.
  2. Shannon Appelcline (2011). Designers & Dragons. Mongoose Publishing. ISBN 978-1-907702-58-7.
  3. Deterding, Sebastien (2018). Role-Playing Game Studies: Transmedia Foundations. Routledge. pp. 44–45. ISBN 1317268318.
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