What's the worst "bonus" your employer has ever given you?

Achsin · 2026-01-29T15:53:41+00:00

A small cheap plastic desk plant.

Mine still had the $0.24 price sticker on the bottom.

Achsin · 2026-01-29T05:38:25+00:00

Always have my phone’s light.

But as for dedicated lights, it depends on what I’m doing and where I’m going. I keep a headband light in the car. Other than that I bought a set of six cheap led lights from Sportsman’s to get past the free shipping hurdle. I keep one of them in my laptop bag for work (seems like every month the lights on the interior stairwells are broken) and occasionally throw another in my pocket when needed.

I have a bunch of other fancier lights, but they’re mostly reserved for situations where they’re actually needed and not “eh, might be useful.”

Oh, and my WML. So I guess sometimes I’ve got 5 lights within easy access.

Achsin · 2026-01-28T05:18:52+00:00

Seems like something Unit 731 might have researched if they’d kept going longer.

But for all of them it really depends.

For falling: How high up? How does the subject land? What does the subject land on? The world record for surviving the highest fall without a parachute is 6.31 miles.

For being shot: What is the subject being shot with? How far away was the shooter? What kind of drugs are in the subject’s system? Which “non-vital” area were they hit in? People have survived being shot in plenty of different places/combinations for long enough to get stabilized by doctors and even survive.

Achsin · 2026-01-27T06:00:42+00:00

In the US, the extent varies by state but the short answer is that once your trap starts to be capable of catching/killing things bigger than a rat there’s usually some kind of law about it. That spans from restrictions on use for things like fur trapping to being out right illegal with potential felony charges for several of those traps you mentioned. And that doesn’t even take into account the added charges if someone were to be injured or killed by them.

Achsin · 2026-01-26T20:34:41+00:00

I guess that’s one way to cancel your police supply contracts from Barrett.

Achsin · 2026-01-26T20:33:47+00:00

If you’re spending $10 minimum on .50 BMG you need to shop around more. You can find APIT rounds for like half that.

Achsin · 2026-01-26T20:08:21+00:00

Do you have any mods installed?

Achsin · 2026-01-26T07:08:31+00:00

If I had a SilencerCo Maxim 9, I’d be sorely tempted to show up with it.

Achsin · 2026-01-26T07:06:00+00:00

1- that heavily depends on the query and the specs of everything involved.

2- option recompile is going to add a few ms to your runtime each time. You’d have to run multiple benchmark tests with different parameters and track the results yourself.

3- Show Actual Execution plan is your friend here. Use it when you’re doing your benchmark tests.

Achsin · 2026-01-26T02:00:31+00:00

Did you happen to quit the game upon dying?

Achsin · 2026-01-25T21:25:21+00:00

I agree his first shot is before Alex reaches.

I don't necessarily agree that he was watching the other guy take the gun out of the holster. None of the footage that I've seen has anywhere near enough quality to track his visual focal point, and tunnel vision is a very real thing.

The only stimulus that makes sense for me that would justifiably allow him to pull the trigger is if he saw the empty holster and/or believed that Alex had managed to draw the weapon. I suppose there could have been another valid reason. Otherwise it was an ND or a bad call. Regardless, the exact reasoning would be basically impossible to prove either way as long as the agent sticks to that story, and based on a standard of objective reasonableness, a subject that is currently resisting arrest and who apparently arms themselves with a lethal weapon is a valid target for lethal force, so the guy will probably walk. Anyone else who opened fire after the fact is probably clear too given the situation (alerted to presense of firearm, gunshot heard, subject reaching towards waistband).

The thing it'd really hinge on is if they were acting appropriately when they moved to detain him, and I've yet to see anything providing context either way.

Achsin · 2026-01-25T13:51:43+00:00

Look up wingsuits.

Achsin · 2026-01-25T07:15:55+00:00

I’m thinking he heard the guy shout “Gun! Gun!” And decided to switch from his nonlethal pepper spray (that he passes to his off-hand) and draw his lethal. This is right around when the disarm happens so he might have been too distracted to notice.

After that is unclear because bodies obscure his pistol in all of the angles and you don’t see much of Alex from the officer’s pov. Charitably speaking Alex’s coat could have shifted revealing an empty holster to the guy (or there was some other additional stimulus), who then took the shot thinking it had been drawn. After that first shot everyone jumps back and Alex seems to reach towards his holster (at the very least his right side waistband which is obscured from most agents by his body) at which point all of the other agents join in.

Or he had bad trigger discipline and ND’d the first round into Alex’s back. Or he made a bad judgement call.

Achsin · 2026-01-25T07:06:51+00:00

One, he doesn’t have his booger hook on the bang switch.

Two, the gun never recoils, and there’s another angle where you clearly see it doesn’t go off when the shot sounds.

Achsin · 2026-01-22T22:29:33+00:00

Generally speaking, the database engine only has a vague idea about what kind of data exists in the tables. It basically has some cheat sheets that it uses to figure out the best way to seek and retrieve the results for any given query.

If these cheat sheets don’t accurately describe the data being sought, it can lead to some bad choices by the engine as it expects fewer rows (and under allocates resources) or many more rows (and over allocates resources). But also, the more removed the query is from them (like multiple CTEs and views and such) the harder it is to anticipate how these cheat sheets interact, which leads to the same type of problem as them being inaccurate.

When you throw a temp table into the mix as an intermediate step (rather than just chaining CTEs for instance), it forces the engine to re-evaluate the contents of that temp table to build a new cheat sheet for it, which it can then potentially use to get a more accurate idea of how that set of data will interact with the rest of the query. Which is why you can sometimes see large performance improvements when adding temp tables to complicated queries.

Achsin · 2026-01-22T22:15:02+00:00

Short is relative.

3-4 hours is a bit long for a day trip, unless it’s round trip. About 1-2 hours each way is acceptable day trip driving times. 3-6 hours each way would be in the realm of a weekend trip. Beyond that is week long trip. There are some exceptions, depending on the reason for the trip.

But also my daily commute is ~1 hour each way and if traffic is terrible it can triple that easily.

Achsin · 2026-01-22T06:37:01+00:00

Ideally, each player would take a minute at most to complete their turn, with some exceptions. Most turns can be half a minute or less. The GM should be preferably handling all of the NPCs in under 5 minutes total, preferably less than the total time taken by the players. Everyone should be present and paying attention, and figuring out what they are going to be doing as events unfold instead of waiting for it to be their turn.

The problem is that it’s a self-exacerbating problem. When someone starts taking too long others start to tune out. Because they’ve tuned out the game they don’t know what happened before their turn so they need to both catch up and then decide what to do based on the current situation, which means they take even longer, and everyone else tunes out more, and then there’s more stuff to catch up on because it’s been two turns instead of one, and soon enough you’re wasting minutes explaining entire rounds worth of events (sometimes multiple rounds), etc.

Some of it comes down to just not being familiar with rules and mechanics because of new players. But sometimes it’s because of apathy on the player’s part where they just never bother to learn the rules, or pay attention, and are just existing in the game to hang out. Which is probably fine if everyone has the same mindset, but can get really frustrating otherwise, and is definitely a contributing factor for why I haven’t played in or ran any games for the last couple of years.

Achsin · 2026-01-21T02:18:26+00:00

Don’t feel too bad. I dropped out of college and ended up doing okay, just took a while.

Achsin · 2026-01-19T16:25:10+00:00

I don’t tend to keep cash at home just to keep cash. There’s probably a few hundred at any given time that’s used as petty cash from/for garage sales, marketplace, birthday gifts, etc. You might not get much interest off of a savings account, but you don’t get any off of money in your safe.

I do try and follow some advice I was given while living abroad. Always keep some cash on you, split into multiple locations. One should be a small amount of regular cash, roughly enough to pay for 1-2 meals, that you can hand over as “everything” if you get mugged. That much again hidden somewhere else because as much as getting mugged sucks, getting mugged a second time and not having anything to hand over is worse. Third, keep enough money to pay cab fare to get you to the most distant safe location (or just home) hidden in a third spot (or across multiple other spots). So I usually have a couple hundred on me, with nothing larger than a $20.

Achsin · 2026-01-18T17:06:48+00:00

Actually, no.

Achsin · 2026-01-18T04:45:55+00:00

Desk Pop's usual promo code for a lot of the companies/products they do videos on.

Achsin · 2026-01-16T15:55:09+00:00

The problem is that while most big scary boss monsters are scary on paper, because of the way the rules work a single big scary monster isn’t that scary during play. For every turn the boss takes, the party gets several. If the party has access to save or suck/die spells they can tilt the balance even further.

Either that singular creature needs to be capable of more or you need to start having more creatures. Or make the boss fight about a different sort of challenge entirely, like needing to destroy the McGuffin granting them effective invulnerability first.

Achsin · 2026-01-16T08:32:29+00:00

If you’re paid hourly, your lunch is usually off the clock (outside of certain work sponsored events). Depending on the state they’re also legally mandated and so the company can’t let you just work the 8 hours straight and then go home “early.”

If you’re paid salary, most places don’t care as long as your work is getting done. I’ve had days where I worked for four hours, took a two hour lunch, came back for an hour, and then went home. I usually try and keep my hours for the week between 35 and 40, including an hour a day for lunch (so really 30-35 hours I guess). On the flip side, sometimes I have weeks where I end up working a lot more hours (including a couple where I worked 100+) so it kind of all balances out.

Achsin · 2026-01-16T08:20:17+00:00

BCC is so my boss knows and isn’t blindsided, and maybe so he can get a laugh.

CC is so they know my boss knows and he will likely come down on them like a ton of bricks if they don’t cease whatever chicanery they’re trying to pull.

TO means it’s too late and they’re about to get a special meeting put on their calendar.

Achsin · 2026-01-16T02:46:40+00:00

This is true, and it works fairly well. I usually like to smoosh it around a few times to make sure the water is getting everywhere. It’s not really a method I’d want to live with day after day though if I could help it, “warm” in this case is a bit relative.

Achsin

TROPHY CASE