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Another day, another dungeon, a a long update, and it's time to look at some of the shops in Minetown.
The first one is Izchak's lighting shop. Not particularly useful unless he happens to have magic lamps. You're not allowed to bring pickaxes into a shop, or be invisible - the shopkeeper will block the entrance. They won't do anything if you manage to get inside with one of those two things, though (e.g. with teleportitis). The white and yellow ( icons indicate candles and lamps, respectively. But there's a [ that's out of place.
Naturally, it's a mimic, and it almost kills me. Luckily I have Magicbane which is extremely effective at ruining an enemy's day. The damage is relatively standard, but it has a bunch of ancillary effects... like scaring enemies, canceling them (removes their passive abilities, super handy) and stunning them. If the mimic hadn't gotten scared by Magicbane it would have killed me.
Running around in Izchak's shop, I somehow find out that one of the lamps I'm carrying is an oil lamp, and the cursed one is magic. If I can uncurse and then bless it I'll have an 80% chance of getting a wish. I want that wish - it will give me levelport.
I find a box and start using it as a stash. Engraving Elbereth into the floor makes enemies not go on that square, as long as there's something on it like an item or my wizard. It can get smudged out though, so I write it twice just in case.
The scroll of magic mapping I used earlier told me it would be a good idea to check out the bottom right, and it was - I got a spellbook! No idea what it is yet, though. There's also a walled-off dot just up and to the left of me. I'll dig that out in a bit and see if it's just a glitch.
A general store. I buy all the potions of water so that I can bless them on an altar later, and name a ring so I can identify it as a certain type later. Unidentified items in NetHack in shops have price ranges that tell you what item it might be - scrolls like genocide and punishment cost more than identify, for example. I buy the ring anyway because I have enough gold.
Curse checking.
We got ourselves another cursed amulet, the ring we picked up wasn't cursed, and... I think that spellbook was invisibility but I stashed it 
We also get the shit kicked out of us by a black unicorn. If you're invisible they won't stay a knight's move away, which is problematic when they deal almost half our health and are much faster than we are.
I blank my sickness spellbook and try to write identify. It doesn't work and wastes marker charges. Bugger.
Fuck you give me my spellbook. We now have identify, which eliminates any need for identify scrolls. Wizard is the best 
The 71% failure chance sucks (we have no divination skill), but the spell has a 1 in 5 chance of identifying our whole inventory.
As demonstrated 
Those amulets are some bullshit, though.
I almost die to a soldier ant. However, it turns out the spellbook I picked up wasn't invisibility, but taming. I had no idea that was a thing you could get in a spellbook, but it turns out it's one of the strongest spells in the game. I'm not complaining., or at least I wasn't until it ate a tengu corpse, which can give teleport control, which I need to stop teleporting everywhere with teleportitis. At least I'm alive.
I found a ring in that spot near the bottom left! I guess magic mapping has its uses. Did I mention you can get that in a spellbook? Wizards!
annnnd it's useless 
On the next level down, I run into food an ogre. Magicbane can probe enemies and tell us what's in their inventory, and their stats. My money was on this ogre using his wand to drop down a level, but he doesn't.
Finally a good amulet, life saving. I don't intend to die, though.
More spellbooks! 
The spellbook is invisiblity (largely useless since we can get permanent invisibility elsewhere) and another shitty amulet.
Sloppy play means I walk right into a black unicorn. Being a lucky idiot means I was wearing a crutch around my neck.
thank merciful fuck this thing was friendly, they're an endgame monster. This one was friendly because there's a polymorph trap and all the monsters were jumping into it - this one was a dwarf or a gnome originally.
A genocide scroll is good to have. I don't need to wipe out that arch-lich, luckily.
Some identify casts later, and I can cast identify with no chance of failure. WIZARDS.
Although I am still limited by how much magic power I have, that won't be a problem forever.
I eat a corpse and gain cold resistance. Useful to have.
Invisibility is a pain in the ass because I don't know where I am in this screenshot.
Heading down, I get ambushed on the stairs. I don't want to fight four things at once because all of them are faster than me and I would die before I thought to run away. I don't have my amulet of life saving any more either, so risk isn't a great thing here.
Intrinsic speed is ours! Everything's coming up Milhouse.
A bag of holding! Milhoused again. This saves me a trip into Sokoban, which is an optional side dungeon that I'll be doing anyway, so really it doesn't save me a trip at all.
A gray stone can be either a touchstone (tells you if things are gems or glass - useless since we have the identify spell), a flintstone (actually worthless), a loadstone (weighs a lot, curses on pickup and can't be dropped - very bad) or a luckstone (luck doesn't expire, very good). I kick it to make sure it isn't a loadstone, then pick it up and ID it.
Luckstone! More Milhouse!
The way luck works is that you have both positive and negative luck, which are two separate things that combine to form your total luck. Every 300 turns, if either of those lucks are positive, they tick down towards 0. If you have a luckstone, they don't tick down. Blessed will tick down bad luck but not good luck, cursed the opposite, uncursed blocks both.
Now that our luck won't time out, I throw identified gems at an aligned unicorn to gain 5 luck per gem. This rockets our luck up and will greatly help in writing scrolls and spellbooks.
I got what I wanted out of the Mines, so it's back to the regular dungeon. Really need to get around to uncursing that lamp.
This is a shop, but the door is locked. Or it was, until I unlocked it with a lock pick. I also neglected to screenshot the door being locked and the contents of the shop - it was a potion shop and I got some potions from it, namely some extra potions of water and holy water.
Dipping the hell out of that magic lamp so I can bless it and maybe get a wish. For whatever reason I didn't immediately do that, just dipped it to uncurse.
Sokoban! I'll get around to this later, but it's essentially a series of puzzle rooms based on the actual game Sokoban. The end reward is either an amulet of reflection or a bag of holding; I already have the bag, so need the amulet, and therefore the end reward is almost certainly going to be the bag 
Identify in action and that ring I picked up in Sokoban is TELEPORT CONTROL It's hard to emphasis just how much of a pain in the ass teleportitis was to this point, but now that problem is solved.
A succubus. Leveling up in NetHack is best done by bringing a printer to her house repeatedly until she asks you to stop. It also raises your stats.
She starts beating me up, so I use charm monster to make her friendly. Too bad goons are too disgusting to do that in real life 
Can't talk to a succubus if you got something from her within a random amount of turns from 1-100. If it's something bad, there's no cooldown. I spent a lot of time chasing her around to try to level up - I need to hit level 14 before I can get my class artifact, which removes all my power problems.
Many things happening in this last screenshot. First off, I convert a chaotic altar to neutral. If there's a priest present they become hostile if you do this, but luckily this is just an altar and not a temple. The next important thing is that I killed an invisible stalker, then ate its corpse while I was temporarily invisible, and became permanently invisible as well as gaining see invisible. Bit by bit, I'm getting the intrinsics and spells I need to break this game over my knee.
Next time, I might try to write myself some blessed scrolls of charging to recharge my magic marker, then a spellbook of remove curse to turn this game from a mild challenge into a complete joke.