What it says on the tin.

This is kinda crazy, but I got to thinking about how often managers will tell us not to discuss how much we're paid among our fellow coworkers.  This is supposedly to keep workplace conflicts to a minimum, but as some have pointed out, it's really to keep people from having an excuse to demand raises.

So.

What if we just put it out in the open?

For everyone to see.

Literally.

Not just your coworkers, but your customers as well.

Hang a sign around your neck that shows what your company pays you.  Not a weekly or monthly sum, because that doesn't indicate how much overtime you wind up working in order to make ends meet.

Your actual hourly wage.

The thing is, I don't believe people out there understand just how prevalent wage slavery is.  Yes, it's known that there is general discontent... but I don't think people are getting how bad it is out there.

Imagine how someone who makes six figures a year would respond if they went around, doing their errands, and they saw all these signs with figures like  $8.50/hr, $9.75/hr or even waitstaff wages like $4.50/hr.  And these people aren't stupid.  They know what the cost of living is like in their cities.  They will be forced to stop and consider: "How is it possible that someone can make ends meet with so little?"  And, "How can these people be making so little when I'm paying such a premium for these goods/services?"  Yes, where *is* your money going?

A meal or two at a McDonald's easily covers one person's wages for an hour.  A single lunch or dinner rush is enough to cover the entire crew's wages for the day.  So where is the rest of the money going?  It sure as hell ain't the cost of the food - that's pennies on the dollar.

So why don't we force people to confront the question: where *is* their money going?

Republicans demote Liz Cheney, critic of Trump's 'Big Lie,' from leadership role

Analysis: Why we just witnessed a pro-Trump purge in the Republican Party


The party that claims to be conservative just demoted one of their most conservative headliners because she told the truth about Trump.


So, when's the renaming of the Republican Party to the Trump Party taking place? He does like having his name on everything he owns, so it's only a matter of time, right?

This will let the text be styled with whatever the user has set for a monospace font in their browser, whether it's Courier New or not. Ideally I'd say that Sans Serif, Serif, and Monospace should be at the top of the list, but if it auto-sorts that may not be possible.

It's hardly a major issue, but since I'm picky about fonts and don't allow pages to specify their own it matters at least a little, to me, and if there's one thing I know about the internet it's that you're never the only one.

"Bloody knockback mechanics!"

For a long time now I've been struggling on how to format this as I'm fairly scatterbrained at times and not very good at telling stories like other folk are, something I will be forever envious of *grin*. That aside I've been wanting to info dump some history about Terr from CoH since doing it through story isn't really viable for me. So instead I'll toss up information here akin to a character sheet because when it comes down to it he started off as a homebrew P&P character dating back to mid 90's.

Current plan is this first post will be dedicated to how the character first came to be and a bit of relevant information bout how the system/world worked to explain why some of his abilities work as they do, up to this point everything that he can do and has access to all leads back to this system, in my mind he had an upgrade path so to speak that I've worked with making mental notes during my years of CoH how i can integrate what I feel he would have learned over the years of being there and the timeline reset.

With that out of the way lets start with the name, unsurprisingly it uses my first name as he was a self insert of sorts as me and my old friend did that sort of gaming alot with his homebrew systems. I was real fortunate back then that I had such a creative friend when it came to game system generation. The last name came from my love of the 80's series Knight Rider. I adored the series in the 90's when it would be on the air fairly frequently and I thought Terrence Knight sounded cool so ran with it. Since he was my avatar at the time he was also my age of 15-16 when he was isekai'd by Gate.

Gate, think of him the main MacGuffin behind Terr's life being dumped upside down. An eccentric character with Reality based powers whom achieved godhood and a high rank of divinity at that so once ascended he could affect things on a universal scale. Main spheres of influence he had was Teleportation, Reality and lightening. Not evil by any extent of the imagination he wasn't entirely sane either and when you have that much power and influence and suddenly far more than a human lifespan on your hands..you tend to get bored. Closest equivalent might be somethin like 'Q' from Star Trek. He is the entity Terrence refers to when talking about 'something or someone deciding I'd be a pawn for amusement'. At this point he doesn't know the entity's identity and its keeping all information well masked, but its the source of him being dumped off on CoH universe and plucking him out of the doomed Batillion timeline and sending him back, its also a source of his directional issues and certain other skills.

The game system: Perks and Flaw based point system for character creation similar to some other pen and paper games. Used for initial stat distribution and buying character/class abilities as the game wasn't entirely freeform using classes with their own skills which could evolve and branch off to get sub abilities depending on the situations TK went through. I could purchase things that were not initially part of a class at extra cost but only if my friend decided it made sense at the time or was cool enough. Because of the setting and the fact it was just me and him Terr ended up fairly monstrous because he wasn't part of a party of characters so as a solo character he evolved to be fairly overpowered by the world's standards by the time he finally moved on. I've joked that he's akin to a shounen character and every shounen protagonist has -something- as a claim to fame, for Terrence its probably his Instinct skill. I'll go into further detail bout that when i get around to that particular section. (Cue Ultra instinct jokes here)

The world he was dropped off in first and where he lived before being transported to Primal Earth was a high fantasy world, fairly high powered at that where gods were a very real thing along with religious factions and all that jazz. First important note here is anything involving souls was heavily taboo and any being caught meddling or harming a soul was marked for execution as all the deities took souls seriously. Not to say it didn't happen but it very rare and secretive, and due to such restrictions countermeasures against such was very rare to the point of near nonexistent. This played an important part in Knights story due to what class was forced upon him.

Second part and a more 'gamey' aspect is how the very world itself enforced the rule of ownership. As it sounds owning an object, land, or even people in the case of slavery and such was enforced, thievery as punished through various means be it bad Karma, pain, curses or instant death depending on whats was being taken. A repetitively minor object that a person may not have owned long or didn't have much value to the person would only cause a minor repercussion. Attempting to steal something like a family heirloom that's been there for generations would have very brutal consequences. Of course that is entirely circumvented by just killing the owner and effectively inheriting the possessions, older magical or supernatural beings have a stronger link to the natural world and in turn the rule of possession was further enforced. Stealing from a dragon? Doesn't happen unless you wanna be a corpse by its hoard. Kill it and inherit the hoard and of course all the dragon parts that could be butchered and sold or used for magical objects.

Probably enough for now, I just needed to kick my ass into finally putting -something- up since its been bothering me for months now to do something like this heh.

Edit:didn't realize I had accidentally made a emoji in the system segment. fixed.

My father's ASUS laptop just got updated-and-bricked by Windows. Again. He's getting fed up.

What's the best Linux for end-users who are used to Windows nowadays?

Old thread is here.

(05-07-2021, 11:09 AM)robkelk Wrote:

(05-07-2021, 08:04 AM)Bob Schroeck Wrote: By the way, has anyone alerted Miraheze staff just in case they're targeting other wikis?

Not I... and I know there's at least one other Miraheze wiki that uses a lot of Commons images, so they might be a target as well.

Not in North America, mind you... but it is possible.

CBC Analysis: A bipartisan consensus on climate change? The U.K. suggests it's not a pipe dream

I'm adding "what's nearby" maps to the wiki pages for the various residences, and discovered that Aria House doesn't have a listed address. (Neither did the buildings in Ottawa, but I already knew where they were.)

Just where is Aria House?

Without, you know, actually asking Labster, I decided to do some investigative work.

• Channeling Mana says they have to cross Pacific Avenue to get to the canals, which puts the building closer to the beach than Pacific Avenue is.
  
• The wiki page for Kaleido Stage says "it's a longer walk on the pier than it is on land" between Kaleido Stage and Aria House. That puts Aria House somewhere between 25th Place and Fleet Street.
  
• The building is four storeys tall, but the first storey is all parking.
  
• Akari's Perfectly Ordinary Day has some of the girls going out for dinner - items ordered are pizza, a margarita, fish tacos, a hamburger, and loaded potato skins. Near as I can tell from the menus available from the links on Google Maps, it looks like they went to The Venice Whaler... which doesn't narrow down the location at all, since it's right at Venice Pier.
  

A copypasta of a post on another forum --- originally titled 'What computer will you have ten years from now' --- a long run back.

~1992 Amiga 500
It had a Processor
It had RAM
It had no way of storing programs on it - except for the Floppy Drive
It could speak. It could paint. It played Stunt Car Racer, Thomas the Tank Engine, Advanced Destroyer Simulator, Bart Versus the Space Mutants, Captain Planet, Formula One, and Fighter Bomber among others. It had 3D Graphics.

Long gone. I still miss it.

Gateway desktop thing
AMD Athlon -
128MB of RAM
Nvidia GPU of some description
9GB HDD
-Windows 98 SE
-Was dismantled 10 years ago and scrapped
-The HDD still exists. The keyboard off it was in regular use until it got tea'd for the final time 2 years ago.


What was bought for me in 2005
Toshiba Satellite Pro-L10
Intel Pentium M - 1.6ghz
256Mb of 266Mhz DDR RAM - upgraded to 1GB.
Dedicated intel graphics.
40GB HDD
Started with Windows XP-pro, was upgraded to Windows 7 - and spent a lot of time running Xubuntu linux. 256MB of RAM was shit

It couldn't play games - 3d performance was so shit that it took a whole second to render a frame of a screensaver
Still intact. Hasn't been booted in a while
I found a /b/ folder from this machine still living in my current backup when I migrated to the last thing. Also - a lot of music I ripped on this I still have the 'same' files.
We first got Diallup with this machine. I started college on this thing and failed 2nd year because of it.

What I used in work in 2007 and took home as scrap.
IBM Thinkpad X20
Intel Pentium 3 -- 600Mhz (I think)
192Mb RAM -- likely DDR
30GB HDD
It included a dock-station with a floppy drive and CD drive
It ran Xubuntu. It was light and portable. It was killed by tea.

What I bought in 2008
Dell XPSM 1530
Intel Core2Duo, T9300 - 2.4ghz I think. Penryn
4GB RAM - 667mhz DDR2
Nvidia 8600GT with 256mb GDDR3 RAM (G84M)
320GB HDD
1440x900 display

Still intact - hasn't been booted in a while but did boot properly last time. The display is fucked due to a broken switch - it's stuck off.

It could not play DCS. It barely played STALKER. It did play Left4Dead. It also ran Linux for a lot of its life. The GPU liked to cook itself.

We first got 'broadband' with this machine. And actual Wifi. I finished college on this thing.


What I bought in 2013.
MSI GE70
Intel Corei7 3610qm - Ivy Bridge
8GB RAM - 1333mhz DDR3
Nvidia GT650M with 2GB GDDR5 RAM (Kepler?)
500GB Hdd - which died 3 times
1080p display

It played STALKER, Borderlands, War Thunder, Metro 2033, and Autocad. It ran Windows 7 -> 10

Still 'intact'. The case is held together by zip-ties. The keyboard is fucked, the webcam and mic are fucked, all the USB ports like to short out every now and then, the fan rattles and the PSU puts out radio noise and runs dangerously hot. Still boots on a new battery happily.


What I built in 2014 as a Media centre
AMD A10, 7700k 3.4ghz (Kaveri)
8GB RAM - 2400mhz DDR3
256GB SSD, + 1TB from a NAS and the 320GB drive from the XPS

It played Crysis. Slowly. It played Borderlands the Pre-Sequel. It also handled War Thunder. It runs Window 8 ->10. It also briefly and inadvertently ran a Xubuntu install off the XPS' harddrive without flinching.

It still runs. It doesn't do much work.


What I bought last month
ASUS TUF A15
AMD Ryzen7 5800h (Zen 3)
16GB RAM - 3200MHZ DDR4
500GB NVM2e SSD, with a spare slot that I plan to fill
Nvidia RTX3060 Laptop with 6GB GDDR6 (Ampere)
1080p, 144hz display
Windows 10 .

It'll run DCS at near max settings so long as Antialiasing is left at 2x and anisotropic filtering is left off. I haven't tried much else until I get a bigger drive for it. I expect this will last another decade or so in service.

It's new and already has dust.

In ten years, I expect to have the same bloody laptop, held together by zipties. Lets see how long it lasts in the Mad Max apocalypse.