Not quite the same but I used to work at a local, family owned supermarket chain that is now out of business. I started at one of the busiest locations, but after I moved apartments I transferred to another location that was out in the 'burbs. At the first location I worked at, all our equipment was well maintained, stock was reasonable, stuff seemed normal.

At the suburban location, our equipment was all falling apart. The roof leaked. The other stores sent us their overstock and charged it to our departments. I was in the deli, and one day the contracted maintenance guy was there and I asked if he could take a look at one of the meat slicers. He said sorry, corporate told him not to do any work at this location that they hadn’t pre-approved.

My first hypothesis was that this location didn’t make any money, and that’s why they didn’t want to spend to fix it. One day I decided to ask the store manager about it—he was pretty chill and we talked sometimes, so I figured he wouldn’t mind. I said “Does this store actually make any money?” and he said “Well, let me put it this way: the numbers I report to corporate show that every department here, except floral, makes a profit every month. And then the numbers they put out in the quarterly reports show that we’ve never made a profit since we opened.”

“Where does the money go?” I asked.

“That’s above my pay grade,” he said.

I’m convinced someone was embezzling funds. A couple years after I left, the whole chain closed one day with no notice to the employees.

The problem with “body type” is that it is actually a gender selector too, but they don’t tell you that. If you’re body type 1 NPCs refer to you as she/her, and if you’re body type 2 NPCs refer to you as he/him. They needed to add a separate pronoun option, but didn’t, so right now the body type option is just the gender option but pretending not to be.

IME framegen hasn’t meaningfully reduced the open-world hitching. It gets the framerate nice and smooth while standing still, fighting a bandit or whatever… until you walk a bit and the game becomes CPU-limited while streaming in new cells, at which point you noticeably hitch.

The performance in interior cells (including cities) is very good even on Ultra settings.

I suspect that this is one of the compromises they made by keeping the old engine running under the hood, because as DF notes this also happened in the original.

“If our strict measures were not accepted, then our organization could become careless and it could result in eroding the public’s trust,” he said.

They don’t think telling this guy to starve in his old age over $7 will undermine public trust? It’s undermining my trust in this official’s judgment right now!

I guess I don’t live in Kyoto so they probably don’t give a rat’s ass what I think.

I mean, it depends on the edition. In AD&D the damage of fireball increases faster than your HP: you deal 1d6 damage per level and you gain 1d4 HP per level (and you don’t get an automatic max roll at first level), so on average a fifth level caster has 12.5 max hp and deals 17.5 damage on a failed save.

Nowadays with higher hit dice and higher average Constitution scores and potentially larger Constitution-based hp bonuses, it’s more survivable for sure. It also doesn’t expand to fill its nominal volume if cast indoors, so it’s a lot easier to find space to cast it in dungeons without frying yourself.

Edit: This is ignoring the fact that not all mages are equally likely to survive to fifth level; rolling higher HP makes you way more likely to survive to the next level, so I suspect if we surveyed players of fifth level mages the actual average HP would be somewhat higher, with the low rollers having been filtered out by dart traps, lucky kobolds, etc.

It’s been a long time, but it’s supposed to be coming out this year.

Hey, I like puns! I think this one could have been very funny if the thing we were letting sink in was harmless, and not his acquisition of the world’s largest microblogging platform for the purpose of controlling public discourse.

“If you’re a masochist who enjoys being punished for little to no reward, this game is for you,” reads another negative review.

Hot damn, they made this update just for me? I was holding off checking out POE2 but I guess I should.

I was just thinking about this. That 125% tariff on Chinese goods leaves a lot of room for profit if you can circumvent customs, and then undercut legitimate importers.

Calling it a “vulnerability” that someone with full access to an authorized device can use it to authorize another device is crazy. That’s not Signal’s issue, that’s an issue with your device security. The app has to trust the logged in user; if it doesn’t, then even displaying the data could be a breach.

Americans are notoriously terrible at protesting. I was in high school in the '00s and our American history textbook had a sidebar about the 1999 Seattle WTO protests. The bit that stuck with me: a French dignitary interviewed on the scene was unconcerned about the protesters. He pointed to an untouched BMW (or similar luxury car, I forget the exact make). “In Paris,” he said, “That car would be burning.”

Where are you seeing that she stepped on it? The allegation is that she pressed it with her thumb, and she doesn’t dispute that she pressed it on purpose—she was checking the firmness, which is a weird thing to do to a bun but I don’t think it’s worth chasing her down over. If you really can’t sell it with a dent in it, telling her not to come back seems like a proportionate response. But honestly if I were the owner, I’d probably just eat the dented bun and call it a wash.

The owner followed her out of the store and restrained her over ¥180? Where do people even find the energy to turn these kinds of petty disputes into full-blown confrontations?

Revanced still works. If yours stopped working, download the latest patches and make an updated .apk.

Nintendo, I already decided not to buy the next system, you don’t have to keep convincing me!

If you call someone “daddy,” it means you’re having sex and you consider them to be the dominant partner in the relationship (or are roleplaying that for sexual reasons). Your language partner is being a creep.

There is some very old slang, “daddy-o,” which isn’t sexual and would be used with a friend, but using it makes you sound like a jazz musician from the 1940s.

I really like the idea of calling it XFree86/GNU/Linux and then if anyone ever asks “but what about (other contributing software package)?” just tacking it on at the beginning.

Isn’t every baby a meat baby?

Oh damn I think I read this:

The ton of TNT is a unit of energy defined by convention to be 4.184 gigajoules (1 gigacalorie),[1] which is the approximate energy released in the detonation of a metric ton (1,000 kilograms) of TNT.

And immediately brain farted “gigajoule” to “kilojoule.” Thanks!

I think that might be an underestimate. Mass and energy should be conserved, so if the entire black hole evaporates the total energy output should be E = mc². An A4 page has a mass of 6.25g. c is the speed of light, 299,792,458m/s.

0.00625kg * (299,792,458m/s)² = 561,721,986,710,511.025J

The explosion of 1 metric ton (1000kg) of TNT is considered to be equivalent to 4,184 Joules. So 100KT = 418,400,000J. That’s not close at all, we’re gonna need more TNT:

561,721,986,710,511.025J / 4,184J/ton of TNT = ~134,254,776,938 tons of TNT.

Rounding off to significant figures, we’re looking at 134 gigatons of TNT. For comparison, the Tsar Bomba, the most powerful nuclear weapon ever tested, had a yield of 50-58 megatons. That’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,500 Tsar Bombas!

Maybe this paper folding experiment should be performed away from anything that might be damaged by the explosion. Like, uh, inhabited continents.

As pointed out below, I biffed the joules-per-ton-of-TNT thing, sorry!