Bay 12 Games Forum

Got a service award from work for being there 5 years. Could have sworn I've been there for 6, but, eh.

I expected some shitty certificate. They actually gave me a vinyl record. One side is likely unplayable because of a some cheap stickers they put on the grooves. The other has a label indicating the record used to belong to the Musical Heritage Society(and a copyright date of 1980). Somehow, I get the idea that someone at my company literally stole a vinyl record from the library, defaced it, and used it as an award certificate.

Eh... may have not been stolen even it was in a library at some point, for what it's worth. Libraries don't keep everything around, generally. 40 year old vinyls are exactly one of the things that would be offloaded to make space for other stuff their patrons might actually use.

That said, the Musical Heritage Society's just a mail order record label. Unless the record was donated to a library somewhere in between, it was probably ordered or picked up cheap somewhere or another.

... so do you even have a vinyl record player, or...?

Times is the sorta' reliable one, yeah. Post is a Murdoch owned tabloid, more or less. Can't recall with mag, but eh.

? The average is still up 7+, and as near as I could tell from a quick check has actually been trending up the last few days? It's down from a 9+ lead a month or so ago, but it's still pretty strong as American election polling goes and like double the lead from the lowest points I noticed. Some contraction is also pretty bog standard as presidential polling goes, iirc.

Some of the schools in my area re-opened today. Not the cluster of schools nearest me, but electronic sign outside the fence did have the instruction "Cough into your elbow".

Cool. Give it a couple weeks and you can get to see the infection rates in your area ~completely inexplicably~ jump up a bit. Something to look forward to!

Like those big bags of chips that when you open them it you find the bag is 1/3 chips and everything else was air.

Yeah, that's supposedly a packaging thing or... something. I've had it explained to me once by someone that did the work involved, years and years ago. They do it that way to keep things from messing up in transit or production or somethin' like that.

The weight on it is supposed to be accurate, though. Like most things, if you're looking for value you need to be eyeballing price per unit (weight for food, generally) instead of whatever the sticker price is.

Some of it's probably about as close to software as wetware gets, I guess. Others probably wouldn't be, there's still thought/action responses we have basically no control over and can't be easily (or at all without brain damage or somethin') manipulated (other than being triggered to begin with, I guess), iirc.

From what I recall the distinction between hardware and software gets fuzzy when you're talking biological stuff, especially considering there's still a lot we just don't understand well (or at all). Compsci jargon, being developed around stuff we explicitly constructed, doesn't really map super well to talking about brains... so far, anyway.

Ordering from supermarkets online is something a lot of people cannot afford.  Higher prices, plus having to order large amounts at once just does not play well with those on the low-income side of society.

The at-once thing is more of a problem*, but at least where I'm shopping, as near as I've noticed prices are identical. No markup, least for the stuff I actually shop for. Maybe I'm missing some of it, or my memory's deteriorated from not actually going into a grocery store since like... March or something... but at least for the staples I regularly tracked previously, the prices mostly haven't been higher.

*Though the minimum order is only 35 bucks at the nearest place to me offering curbside, and as someone that's been on the low-income side of society literally my entire life, grocery shopping only once or twice a month is how I've saved money. You do larger shopping trips to save on transit costs and time. Definitely do understand plenty of folks have more trouble doing that for various reasons, though. Still. Access to the means to make the order (internet, banking and credit/debit cards, reliable transport to get to the store and back with a substantial amount of stuff) is probably what I'd note as a larger issue.

Contact tracement revealed the vast majority of infections to occur at home and at work.  Pubs and bars only account for a very small percentage.

Hasn't that had a lot to do with the pubs and bars being closed, or at least significantly less trafficked than prior to the plague? The infections occur mostly where there's people, from what I understand.