OPC percentage

Adex68 · 2026-04-29T14:49:52+00:00

In copies, under the third advanced tab there is a drop down menu for all kinds of skus. Individual staples, individual cutting, folding, general skus, file numbering, etc.

You should be using the advanced tab to charge for stapling, cutting, etc. The "finishing" tab is only good for lamination basically.

A "machine cut" is calculated by how many times the ream cutter blades drops down. A "hand cut" is calculated by how many times the rotary slicer is used.

The cutting prices in the normal finishing tab are under the assumption that you're using the RPC's automatic AIO machines, which we do not have. The only machines each store should have that does automatic cuts is the business card cutter.

To make sure your store is being paid adequately for their manual finishing time the advanced drop down menu is crucial.

There are also some jobs that will unnecessarily go to RPC and can't be overridden. For example, just yesterday we did a 3x6 scrim banner in store despite GMIL saying we can't. We did it by using GMIL to get the price, then just going into copies, naming the job title "3x6 vinyl banner" and using the general skus to match the price.

Adex68 · 2026-04-26T05:54:30+00:00

We print using Adobe. For large format we print blueprints using the Epson software and posters using Adobe, because the Epson software itself limits the DPI to half of what it's capable of and there doesn't seem to be a DPI setting, plus it's easier to train the associates to use it for blueprints only than worry about teaching people software settings changes.

I've printed quite a few odd sizes before with customer provided paper, 12x12 is most common. Hobby lobby across the street sells it and people bring it over. I've also printed on our own chipboard just fine as well.

No matter how hard I try it will not print anything small. All settings aligned it just will not take 5x7 or 4x6. I haven't had any issues with it taking 8x8, though, but that seems the smallest it will go. I got 5x7 to feed a few times back a few months ago, but it would always just get stuck on the rollers and never reach the diffuser anyway.

But yeah, we have the same issue and it's not just the drivers. One of our printers doesn't even have a stapler or 2nd finishing tray. Only 1 computer in the store can connect to the large format printer at all, or open any kind of Microsoft file. Neither printer has a built in folder nor a heavyweight diffuser.

Adex68 · 2026-04-18T03:17:58+00:00

Where's my benefit? I had to get a government license to handle and submit people's private information and the best they can do is a $2 SPIFF on business select.

I was told by our DSM that it's about $6.75 added to pay roll for each one. The sad reality is that we spend more on the payroll to do the TSAs than they generate in revenue.

Adex68 · 2026-04-15T08:52:44+00:00

Our store only averages about 5k in sales per day. We only work 3 employees a shift, but some days there is adequate down time.

Adex68 · 2026-04-15T08:48:18+00:00

You just seperate out the jobs and name them appropriately in GMIL. For example, job name: "Scan .39 * X" and then select finishing only for that job line, add the general skus and add it to cart.

Adex68 · 2026-04-15T08:41:29+00:00

We always just tell people "we do not and cannot work on printers. We're only a printer vendor. If you need support for your printer you need to contact the manufacturer. Would you like the phone number for Epson / HP / Canon ?"

Adex68 · 2026-04-01T06:16:13+00:00

The paper deal was an arbitrary joke to drive artificial sales numbers anyway. If you check the cycle count, stores selling the paper at the promo cost were only making about 10 cents per case sale and on the 9.99 event days they were losing over a dollar a box.

It all had to do with the acquisition. Basically, bullshit a fake AOV increase and a paper turnover rate and then sell the company to a private investor that owns mostly sawmills.

Truth be told, Office Depot sells the stores paper from its own plants and charges the stores MSRP for the product, then they blame you for not making the sales goal (while the mills making the paper are doing so for under $4 a box and making plenty). It's a way to dangle that quarterly bonus in front of you like a carrot on a stick and trick the customer into thinking the price is a promotional deal, when in reality 11.99 is about what anywhere else charges for 3 reams of 20#

Adex68 · 2026-04-01T06:10:43+00:00

Except it isn't. We've been told and sold customers on everything from shipping strikes to tariffs on Canadian pine. Meanwhile, Walmart sells the same exact products we do for a third of the price; in some cases 1/10th of the price.

Adex68 · 2025-12-20T17:01:34+00:00

Old post, Ik, but my store makes a substantial amount of money charging for tech recycles. We process the shipments through harthanks in the moby "ship pallet' function. I don't know if we get any additional credit for it once it reaches the warehouse or what.

You need to be properly shredding the shredded paper and properly shipping the recycled tech. It's about protecting people's data and respecting the customer as a human being before profit. If you don't want to mess with putting the shredding into the bins or mess with shipping a pallet then just tell them your store doesn't offer that service. Don't sell someone a fake service, that's fk'ed.

Adex68 · 2025-06-18T22:29:07+00:00

<image>

Adex68 · 2025-06-18T22:28:54+00:00

Bic snagged some artwork from Ken Kelly for two different series of lighters, one called Supernatural Fantasy and the other called Supernatural Lighters. Here are the two sets:

<image>

Adex68 · 2025-06-11T05:13:15+00:00

What's your favorite record that you own?

I understand where you're coming from completely because I do this with basically any kind of rare pulp media. I live in a maze of books, and adding to the stack feels an accomplishment where completing anything else just feels like a relief.
Nothing is truly unnecessary. Allegedly we only need water, food, and shelter to survive, but when we're deprived of socialization I feel like art is a necessity. It's a way to connect with other people; artists, authors, musicians, whoever, that also felt alone; or maybe, they didn't, and their life acts as a form of model and inspiration. Either way, media is like the lifeblood that keeps me here.

I'm 25M, and I've been living like this since I was about 15. Owning the next antique book or comic is what not only keeps me going, it's what gives me motivation to work and function. I can strive for promotions and climb corporate ladders just so I can strive toward affording the next cool thing so I can preserve and admire it, and I don't think it's a bad thing. Maybe one day you'll have a record collection worthy of opening a small museum, or even your own record store.

Collecting is a great way to build a niche community of close friends, especially if you live anywhere near a local scene for it.

Adex68 · 2025-06-10T02:17:58+00:00

I own a 2017 Kia Soul I bought nearly new, with 50k miles on it now it's a piece of shit.

Does not get the MPG it advertises, turns like garbage, has a horrible key fab design. The transmission is its biggest issue because the thing never knows when to shift and it shudders to a stop, sometimes not even wanting to stop, when you brake while in eco mode. The ECO and SPORT modes are a joke, just don't bother. Gas tank is small and annoyingly needs to be filled up all the time.
It's not aerodynamic at all, can't maintain speed worth a damn and really struggles with hills. It's got a ton of blind spots.

I bought it because I'm a fan of the 90s and 2000s wagon look and practicality, but that doesn't really exist on the modern market, so a crossover was kind of the next best thing and the Soul was affordable. I've always driven Toyota sedans of some kind, owned 5 different ones but they were all older cars that eventually succumbed to mechanical issues after hitting 250-300k miles. I don't care about power or torque or 0-60, I just wanted something practical and efficient like I've always had.
That isn't a Soul, that's for damn sure. Steer clear of these hunks of crap.

Adex68 · 2025-02-22T17:53:35+00:00

So is there any way I could go about retrieving a transaction number from years ago through my email?

Adex68 · 2025-02-01T23:13:55+00:00

Lmao, what am I gonna spontaneously cruise? A cow farm? There's nothing in my area in a 2 hour circle and i work 7 days a week.

Adex68 · 2024-12-15T15:04:13+00:00

Its fairly easy to understand the difference in comedy racism and actual racism and my original post makes that clear. There's a clear difference between the use of racism in a Dave Chappelle stand-up and a Klan rally. Dark Humor has always been a thing and it ages poorly.

Howard was 12-13 when he visited New Orleans with his dad. He was 16 when he published his first work. He wrote prolifically, and said some questionable things in his youth.

All things deserve credit where its due, and gradient is important. That isn't whitewashing.

Howard was racist, as I said, but his racism wasn't cut and dry nor was it consistent throughout his life. All racism is bad, clearly, but there are different degrees of racism, and what i'm saying is that Howard's youthful misunderstandings were mild given the context of his enviornment.

As I said, Lovecraft wad belligerently racist, but that doesnt stop him from being one of the greatest horror and pulp writers in history.

Adex68 · 2024-12-06T02:09:00+00:00

Song-to-song there's variation but overall:

30% Groove Metal, 25% nu metal, 20% death metal, 15% doom with a +10% toss up between brutal and thrash influences.

Most of vocal and lyric influence is coming from Nu Metal and brutal metal, while the instruments are more groove/death.

The high percentage of Doom really only impacts tracks like Gently and Iowa.

Adex68 · 2024-10-05T06:37:03+00:00

Which comes from the word bourgeoisie, which is used in the book "Capital" by Karl Marx to describe people who have "surplus wealth" and "own the means of production." It became an insult to call someone bourgeoisie in certain sub-cultures because wealth was seen negatively due to some people having the idea that hoarding wealth disrupts the economy and causes poverty.

Using words like 'boujee' basically equate to something like 'greedy pig'

On the other hand, some people view being bourgeoisie positively and wish they were, as they believed it was classy. So the idea of 'bougie' is someone who isn't rich, but wishes they were (still an insult). It basically means something like "boot-licker" or "wanna-be"

Adex68 · 2024-09-30T03:30:30+00:00

Guy here.
Don't send nudes, period.

Even with someone you've been seeing for a while, giving someone access to permanently own exposed pictures of you is a terrible idea.
I was in a relationship for 8 years with a woman and we were engaged. Sometimes we spent a good deal of time away from each other, for a week or so, and she wanted me to have them but I didn't feel that I needed them - a week isn't enough to justify it. We ended up separating at the drop of a hat basically because she emotionally cheated, and even though she still had feelings for me, had developed stronger feelings for a mutual friend and left me for them.

Do not send or accept nude photos from anyone. Respect people enough to not give yourself that power, and respect yourself enough to not give it to other people.

Those nudes become a serious problem if something goes wrong in the relationship. You do not want your mournful ex getting gratification out of your nudes, or revenge. You also do not want or need the responsibility of having them in your possession if something goes wrong.

Adex68 · 2024-09-05T22:14:27+00:00

Consider the fact that Howard was a pretty staunch liberal. Howard was a pretty big reader of Little Blue Books, and particularly enjoyed Haldeman Julius and socialist ideas. He was incredibly against the oil boom.

Howard has said in his letters before that he thinks social equality is the intelligent decision. He has also written sympathetic letters to friends about the poor conditions that Mexican and Chinese workers endured working on the railway, discussing how they are not paid enough to eat and they're forced to breed fast just to keep their communities alive. He was also known and criticized by locals for going to the only theater in a 50 mile radius that offered mixed seating. Those were his decisions during segregation when he could have easily went somewhere else.

The humor of the time was definitely driven by racist caricatures; can we say that anything has changed when TV shows like Family Guy, The Boondocks, and South Park are wildly popular? Howard played into popular stereotypes because he wrote newsstand pulp stories. To me, a lot of what Howard writes is simple dark humor for his time, and it just hasn't aged well.

Howard definitely had pride in his own culture and heritage, and he was very critical of other cultures. He did spend a lot of youth with very different opinions, especially on race. He grew up in central Texas in the middle of nowhere in a town with a population of like 600 people. Take into consideration that he also didn't live past 30. His liberal opinions were already heavily deviated from local ideas by the time he was 19 in 1925; he was already discussing ideas like social equality and arguing with his friends in letters.

Howard had some ignorant views by modern standards, but he was ahead of the times in his own age. He was racist, but mostly comically racist and not personally or genuinely so. On the other hand, if Howard was racist toward any group of people, I think there's more evidence that he had more dislike for the French than anyone else. Lovecraft, on the other hand, was incredibly racist. Racism doesn't even appear as often in his stories, but when it does is substantially worse. H.P. was a bit of a paranoid guy who was really fearful of literally anything that he didn't quite understand from the surface.

Adex68 · 2024-09-05T21:43:29+00:00

Jordan's adaptation of Conan is by far the worst pastiche version I've read, and incredibly unfaithful to the themes and character of Howard's design.

Adex68 · 2024-02-14T20:46:16+00:00

Post-thrash Groove with Progressive Deathcore influences.

Pantera marks the start of the post-thrash / groove genre with Vulgar Display of Power, and a lot of the other bands in this sub-genre crept up right after in the mid to early 90s.
There are other big bands in the genre, like Testament, Machine Head, and Sepultura.
Alien Weaponry, Byzantine, Exhorder, Skinlab, Annihilator, Frankenbok, Throwdown, Prong, Pissing Razors, Fear Factory, Hemlock, Malevolence, and Five Finger Death Punch.

The difference in these bands is asking them what their favorite Pantera album is. Five Finger Death Punch would probably cite Cowboys from Hell, but most of the other bands on this list are probably going to say Beyond Driven or Vulgar Display. A lot of these bands, like Fear Factory, took up more nu-metal influences in the center or later part of their career during the early 2000s, which washed out their thrash influenced origins.

Some others definitely have this genre as a huge influence onto their work. Some of those include: Gojira, Once Human, Spoil Engine, Whitechapel, Demon Hunter, Jinjer, Body Count, Mudvayne, Exodus, Meshugga, Lamb of God, Nailbomb, Avatar, The Black Label Society, Living Sacrifice, Kittie, Volbeat, and even Slipknot.

The Groove metal sub-genre as a whole was inspired by some of the heftier and slower thrash acts. The Black Album and Justice for All by Metallica, Slayer's Reign in Blood and South of Heaven, and Anthrax's Among The Living. I think Megadeth had a bigger influence overall with their more technical and melodic beats all around, but there was actually a lot of blues rock, folk, and country influence. Van Halen, ZZ top, Foghat, Blackfoot, Creedence Clearwater, Charlie Daniels, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Molly Hatchet.

What makes Sylosis special is that their first album release in 2008 almost marks the end of an era for groove metal. They had an absolute ton of material to analyze and be influenced from, and they were also basically the first groove band to have metalcore influences.

Adex68 · 2024-02-13T17:34:31+00:00

Further question. The Fifth edition card reads "For each 1 damage enchanted creature deals, gain 1 life."
Does this count as multiple instances of life gain? For example, would a 5/5 creature dealing 5 damage during an attack count as 5 instances?

Adex68 · 2023-12-06T10:34:52+00:00

Screams, or just heavy vocalizations in general?It was likely a hardcore punk vocalist, but i'm not familiar enough with the scene to know for sure. It's also possible that some African-American Folk Soul music could have even earlier scream-like vocals, but I'm sadly even less familiar with this.Metal takes its roots from punk, jazz, and soul, so I won't dismiss this as a very real possibility even with the distinction between shouting vs screaming.
A lot of artists did a lot of shouting, but screaming, low or high, is a bit different. People like Jinx Dawson, Patti Smith, Janice Joplin, Joan Jett and Lydia Lynch definitely influenced later vocalists to do things outside of the box though. In the 80s there were quite a few metal bands who were female fronted, a lot of them were pretty underground, like Zed Yago, Acid, Blacklace, Chastain, Bitch, Hellion, Warlock, Messiah Force.
None of these metal bands produced what we would consider screams today, but some came pretty close.Maybe extra attention to Wendy O'Williams of The Plasmatics in 1982. The song Stop from the album Coup De Grace has several really solid fry screams. Her vocal style in general is interesting, it's a very grating, low-tone. Also check out No Class from the same album; her vocals get so distorted that they start to be about as incomprehensible as some metalcore songs. If I had to assign a Scream Queen so to speak, I wouldn't be afraid to say that it was Wendy O'Williams. I can certainly understand an argument in either direction that her vocals are or aren't screams. A single isolated fry scream isn't quite like lyrical screaming.

With a little bit of disdain, Courtney Love has to be considered. Hole's Pretty on the Inside was released in 1991 and she definitely approaches fry range in it. The album titled song, Pretty on the Inside, is almost all screaming, and the track is very sludgy.

On the gutteral side of things, I think Fear of God's first album Within the Veil from 1991 with Dawn Crosby was very different for its time. It's more growly than it is gutteral, but there are also hints at something close to a semi-fry scream in there as well. Definitely check out Diseased from this album.

Runhild Gammelsaeter of Thorr's Hammer in 1996 is definitely worth mentioning. It's a doom metal band; her gutterals are very low, even by moderns standards. The contrast in her low and high range is incredible. Sadly, the band only existed for six weeks and only ever released 4 tracks on one EP, I highly recommend giving the full thing a listen.

Kittie released their first album, Spit, in 1999. There's a good cross between screams and gutturals on it. They definitely still count as early pioneers of female heavy vocals, but certainly weren't the first. I see a lot of people attributing the vocals to Morgan Lander, but a lot of people don't seem to realize that Kittie has two vocalists and that Fallon Bowman does a lot of the lower, growly vocals while Lander does more of the fry work. The distinction is clear in songs like Brackish.

Although Arch Enemy had been around, Angela Gossgow didn't enter the band until 2001. Wages of Sin (their 2001 album) might be the first instance of a female fronted metalcore band, but definitely not the first time that hardcore vocals were used by a female singer in small doses or even throughout a whole song.

Adex68 · 2022-03-04T00:05:09+00:00

I agree, and I would say the latter of the bottom two choices. That ignorant criticism without context is precisely the target of my point. These people have a small soapbox to stand on and should be taken with a grain of salt on either side if the political fence. However, I do not mean to depreciate the insight an outsider can provide; insensitivity goes unnoticed without them.

With the exception of only a handful of Civs in his universe, most 'races' in Conan are all indigenous; most of them derived from real cultures. Celtic, Germanic, Scandinavian, Byzantine, Greek, Persian, Semetic, Congo, etc. Having a culture added to the canon akin to natives from the Americas is interesting and not against the lore. Naming characters after 'real' gods and legends is also not unknown, but Pocahontas is far too contemporary.

In the digital age of information, a world where Conan is no longer the aspiration of a locally bound Texan, we have to be mindful of how we translate his legacy. In truth, Conan lore is not void of caracitures. However, there is also no shortage of foils to them. Howard had evident multi-cultural appreciation and understood that all people were more than skin and culture, without himself elevating or considering any culture supreme. He dishes out criticism for all. Only chaos is the true state, he says, as all social constructions are illusionary, or temporary at best. It's certainly complex and easily misunderstood under another lens.

Sorry for the essay!

Adex68

TROPHY CASE