Lawnmower Boy

Hermit will not be available for the rest of the afternoon, as he is out being beaten with a stick.

Dude. Comment thread trolls harbour a genocidal ("near?" LOL) hatred of everyone. That doesn't mean that they're out there burning homeless camps down. That kind of thing tends to happen when there are campfires. Also, you have to let it go. Externally-directed anger is a very common form of mania, the also very-common "upswing" component of bipolar disorder. Because that anger is very difficult for sufferers to explain to themselves, they usually push buttons until they get a response that justifies their anger. In other words, they're going to keep on keeping on until they get a rise out of you. This is why millions and millions of people give the same advice, all the time, when this comes up: Don't read the comments.

Whereas in the bright old days before democracy, the treasury was shared out amongst the rich. The way things are supposed to be!

Then the movie has to be an incoherent mess, too. Because respecting the fans.

And now for something completely different. This is another of Fortune magazine's old perspective-shifting regional maps. The perspective centres the arid interior of the Great Basin. (An alternative version of the Pacific Slope, set in Marin County, filmed in Campbell River.) If Dragrike is on the central coast of British Columbia or points north, it's off the edge of the map on the right, in which case it's a place for the PCs to be from, rather than an adventure setting. So, my bad. On the other hand, the vision I get is the Hall of the Merchant's Guild, towering four stories above Yerba Buena Cove at Market and Mongomery. A group of likely lads and girls, far from home, have come to take arms against the Empire, which is once again threatening the City State. The City Fathers, though, are dismissive. The Emperor's dark standard has been planted in an terraced mound of mud mixed with the blood of countless sacrifices at Sacramento, and the armies of the Empire are gathering to it. They will try, once again, to penetrate through the mountains, and be stopped by the rangy ranchero cavalry, or through the water maze of the inland delta, while the arrows of the City's longbows fall amongst them. No need for axe-armed barbarians from impossibly-distant northern forests. So, instead, they consider offers: a caravan, by land, from Astoria in the north all the way to unimaginably distant St. Louis across the sea of grass; or, by sea, to the tropic island kingdom of Hawai'i. Little do they know that, in accorandance with a vision sent town from the shimmering sky, either cargo will contain a tiny, golden statuette, without which no Dark Emperor can be crowned, stolen from the Imperial Palace itself, which can only be disposed of by taking down through the endless depths of some cavern somewhere to the depthless bottom level, where there's a door to Hell itself to throw it into. (Note to self: Need Hawaiian skin for the random encounter monsters, in case the PCs take the ship option.)

Not to mention our own little slice of Norway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagensborg

What? Los Angeles is broken, now? ...Though it is a shorter trip to throw the One Ring into . . . Is there a volcanoe in Spokane? Because there should be.

This movie is dead to me!

Look, America, I know you were in a hurry this morning. An early appointment, slept in, forgot to buy milk for breakfast. There's lots of good excuses for missing your meds this morning. I get it. I'm not judging. All I'm saying is, you have to go home, sit down, and take them now.

A different perspective: my preference for map making is a nice projection of the Pacific Slope: California to Alaska. File the names off, put in your commercial city states, your impregnable castles, your key, strategic cities, your high lands of the free clans, fjords of the northern raiders, your land of shadows and your Dark Empire where you like 'em. We've not had the chance to have all that stuff in our history, so it feels like I'm righting a historic wrong.

I was exported to Texas for processing.

All the reviews are good? That settles it! This movie is going to suck. At least for me, because my tastes are just so refined. I know, I know. It's a burden I bear.

This email is to confirm that you have donated your 2015-2016 tax refund to the National Endowment For The Perverted Arts. Click here* to change your donation. *Look, if you actually clicked on that link. . . .

My employer posted 120 job openings for the Vancouver operating districts at the beginning of the last quarter. We filled 17.

Fortunately, it turns out that the Nile had binged on a jar of pickled beets the night before. "I don't know," the second-largest river in Africa was reported to have said. "I was binge-watching Archer. Sometimes, you just get a craving. Plus, there was nothing else in the fridge."

Just spent five minutes looking for my employee self-services website. (It turned out to be futile, because either I can't remember my password, ot it's expired. No worries, I'll just reset it at work. What else would I do there, anyway?) --Most impressive result: Typing "Employee Self Services" into the search bar of the company home page returns no hits.

Ahem. About this "making" new sexy, deadly bodyguards. Because I've heard stuff about how this is done, and seen some instructional videos, and would like links to further my Internet education. (Preferably involving colostomy bags.) What?

I've poked at it, and while I lost my enthusiasm for the project along the way, I have to say that it delivers. It's an interesting setting and a fine bit of rules crafting. It could use more supplements, but what RPG setting couldn't?

Private probation companies are a . . . bad . . . idea? I'm beginning to question reality itself.

So. Hot.

So the Jewish members of the team don't have to be lofted by their intimate piercings. Got it. (Extremely not safe for anything link.) I kid, I kid. . .

Something something Aquaman. "You're not very smart and you make poor decisions."

Uruk Expansion.

Actually, I'm going to disagree with that. Archimago has an <i>awesome</i> hook as a master villain. He's dead. Joined the choir invisible. Pushing up daisies. He's not coming back. Considering what he did, and who he was, it's a miracle ("miracle"?) that his soul is beyond the reach of his patrons, and his plans made sure that that wouldn't change. Those plans, though. The obligations they incurred, the prices yet to be paid. That's what the heroes have to be concerned with.

A Grumble About Technological Progress So our company recently went to "computer assisted ordering." It's not a computer writing resupply orders based on sales movement; but, rather a computer "helping" us by generating an order which the department managers then revisit and revise. If they can. For a number of reasons, I suspected that there were going to be problems of implementation. I said so: but I will be the first to admit that I am a negative and cynical person with a skeptical view of "technological progress" in this latter day, and I admitted that I could easily be wrong, and would wait to see the results. I am also, thanks to extreme labour shortage, a sometime evening manager, and sometime department manager. It's a small department, thank Heavens, the "repack." I think it's standard practice in our industry for distribution to include a warehouse where items are repacked for distribution. This will include general merchandise such as houseware, medications and cosmetics; but also, for example, baby formula and spices. Basically, the idea is that you probably don't want, say, an entire box of six 1kg bottles of garlic powder, and these are opened at the warehouse and the individual items sent to the store in totes. (Those gray, plastic bins that you see at the drug store.) The baby formula and spices and such are "repack." Though if there was ever a time when all the items from the "repack" warehouse came in totes, it is long since past. Nowadays, the order contains all sorts of odds and ends, in boxes, loose, and in totes. "Computer-assisted ordering" consists of tracking items through the tills. So what'st he problem? It is that we are expecting the cashiers to individually swipe every item to build an accurate inventory, which is a bit much to ask of a green cashier in a hurry when a new mom with a cranky baby dumps two dozen pouches of miscellaneous baby food pouches on the belt --and also tricky from the point of view of anticipating sales. Take an extreme example. Saint Patrick's Day comes but once a year, and there's a run on green food colouring dye. That is, if Saint Paddie's happens on a weekend, and not a Thursday, and especially not if this particular Saint Patrick's Day comes a week before the centennial of the Easter Rising. (That's my excuse for getting hung with some green dye this year, anyway.) It'll be a long time, if ever, that our "expert system" can predict that there will be a run on green food colouring when Saint Patrick's Day falls on a weekend, but not so much on a Thursday, for example. Actually, a long time --several centuries, in fact-- before an expert system can predict this! "Give it time," they say. Centuries are not unreasonable for a single item; in the main, we just want to predict that the on-sale tortilla chips will sell more. Which is also hard, unless you are in the habit of telling the computer when the outside vendors of tortilla chips have their sales. Hold the notion that computer-assisted ordering is hard in your mind, and move on to a new tranche of Technological Progress. A new, and more automated, warehouse. The repack order doesn't go out every day. Traditionally, there are two orders a week, rotating through the districts, so that the staff at the warehouse are kept busy through the week. For example, in my district, the orders used to come Wednesday and Sunday. Then we moved the start of the ad back from Sunday to, eventually, Friday. This made it hard to order, and we moved the Wednesday order to Thursday. Still a bit tricky, because you had to order for the week (the order was due by Thursday afternoon, when the sales stickers were hung overnight Thursday-Friday. Since the Sunday order was due Monday, you effectively lost an entire weekend's sales if you weren't able to hold the ad in your head while writing the order on Thursday morning. And that's hard!) Fortunately, big stores, like mine, get a second order, the day after the first of the week. This is thought of as a "clean-up" order, and is basically intended to avoid overburdening the stores on a single day. However, it was written Friday, after the ad was hung. Yay! So we've moved to a new warehouse. And, because reasons, we've had to adjust the order schedule. It now goes, for our district: Thursday, Friday, Saturday. (This might have to do with rural Canada slowly dying on the vine, or with our selling divisions and buying divisions, of late.) To be clear here, we now have three orders a week, and they come on consecutive days at the beginning of our sales week. Hunh? So, this Friday, I was working with the order. Included were ten cases (120 pieces) of a big box of contact lens solution. 120 x $19.99 retail. Hunh, again? I went to the invoice: it was an "automatic substitution due to pack change." That is, the product used to come in single pieces, and now comes in cases. The software translated the order in pieces to the order in cases, and somehow did it wrong, so that instead of 10 boxes of contact solution becoming one case, 10 boxes became ten cases. So that's bad. Our store (and any others that happened to need that particular product that Friday) just became the new warehouses in charge of this product. It's going to be inflating our inventory numbers forever, and no-one else will get any. ...On Saturday, we got another five. I check the order. The computer was perfectly aware that we now had two years worth of the product on hand. I checked the rest of the order. All of the items that came in on Friday had been duplicated. (We only got four cases of contact lens solution because the warehouse was out.) In other words, the Thursday-Friday-Saturday turnaround is too short for the computer system to update before generating the next order. It's not just contact lens solution, either. Some cashier seems to have swiped a single Cranberry-almond meal replacement bar a dozen times, instead of doing all the flavours, so I got an entire box of them, when only a single one had sold. Fine: I managed to sneak them into the back of the display and corrected the inventory. That's how the system is supposed to work. But it was too late to stop another case from coming in the next order! And it continues: store brand jello comes in large boxes for small sales, and goes into relatively limited space. (These things are far less well correlated than you'd think.) Now I have an entire case of store-brand raspberry jello to store for the next however long it takes to sell. All of this applies to dozens of stores, which are very quickly getting choked with slow-moving merchandise, while the number of items out of stock at the warehouse grows and grows. We're now below 75% fill rate on our orders. I hope that that is largely because of the warehouse change, but if it isn't, we're going to reach a point where we have nothing to sell because all of the stock has been distributed, and is being stored in ingenious, inacccessible ways in the wrong stores. Technology will save us!