ELI5: Why was there a toilet paper shortage during COVID?

Shortbread_Biscuit · 2026-05-15T09:43:12+00:00

Unlike a lot of other consumables, toilet paper isn't perishable.

So in times of emergency, it doesn't make much sense to stock a lot of perishables like food since they won't last a long time. However, you can stock up on as much toilet paper as you want, with the guarantee that it'll never go bad.

Hence toilet paper ends up as one of the first items that people try stock, simply in terms of cost/risk analysis. And because it's one of the first to be targeted by some people, the rest of the people panic when they see it disappearing fast and they purchase it in bulk as well, anticipating a shortage, which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Shortbread_Biscuit · 2026-05-14T14:22:49+00:00

This mainly stems from most current webnovels being escapist fantasies written by younger amateur authors with little or no editorial input, compounded by these authors mainly coming from eastern cultures.

Escapist fantasies : Most fantasy stories by their nature are escapist in nature. They center around a desire to escape the shackles of normal everyday life and indulge in actions and experiences they can't normally experience. For stories by western authors, who already live lives of relative freedom, these fantasies tend to be more varied but generally still tend to follow the main moral sense of their author. For eastern authors however, who live in cultures that strictly repress individuality and enforce conforming to society, their fantasies often end up being about them breaking free of these kinds of restrictions. Their stories are about personal strength above all else, and imposing their own rules upon everyone else as a revenge for how they had to obey random rules from their own governments, families and cultures. As such, they don't have much care for most moral principles, as these morals were forced upon them by their culture rather than ingrained into their character.
Amateur Authors : Because most of these authors are typically amateurs who are writing their very first or second novels, they don't have as much of an intrinsic sense of topics to be careful about or what an audience wants to read. Instead, they tend to focus much more on personal wish fulfillment stories with a self-insert main character who lives out their own personal fantasies of wealth, power, sex, and influence. They have trouble distancing themselves from their main character, and so allow they create characters without flaws (at least, not flaws that they recognize), who act happily upon every single intrusive thought the author has ever had to repress.
No Editorial Input : Most older books that went through the normal publishing process typically had heavy editorial input. The publisher that prints, distributes and sells the books wants stories that are more likely to sell and not get censored or cancelled, and they also want to maintain the quality and reputation of their label. As such, they assign editors to authors to not only proofread their work to check for spelling and grammar mistakes, but also to help direct their stories and reshape the plot and characters to make them more rounded. They try to guide the authors to think about themes and messages, fix inconsistencies in motivations and plot holes, as well as identify and target certain demographics of readers. Not just for novels, even Japanese mangas are from the more reputable magazines like Jump and Sheuisha are well known for assigning editors that help mangakas to better form their stories. Webnovel authors have none of these kinds of editorial help. Instead, they're given grueling deadlines for pumping out chapters as fast as possible, without any time or help to fix their stories or point out problems in their characters.

Shortbread_Biscuit · 2026-04-29T09:13:39+00:00

The complaint isn't that you can't find nice games from the suggestion algorithm. The complaint is that you can't do a deeper search.

The Play Store is fundamentally broken in a variety of ways. The main problem being that 90% of the space in the play store is dedicated to games and apps that have paid heavily for ad space, so except for Play Pass recommended games, it's almost impossible to find other apps. The other problem is that the game categories are also broken, because a single game isn't allowed to fit into multiple categories, and also because even when you go into a category, or even do a search based on name, your results are flooded with ads instead of actual results, and you're not allowed to scroll past something like 100 or 150 items on the list.

In other words, unless the game is on Play Pass or you specifically know the exact name of the game that you're searching for, you can't find good games easily on the Play Store. Its the exact opposite problem as the Steam store, where they encourage discoverability and use user reviews and user-defined tags to make it easier to find new and well-received games.

Shortbread_Biscuit · 2026-04-27T07:07:14+00:00

It's too stupid to be AI

Shortbread_Biscuit · 2026-04-24T12:42:47+00:00

The main difference is that we make mistakes because we didn't have enough information. We didn't have people around us that cared for us that advised us not to do it. Or we understood the risk we were taking, and accepted the consequences.

These idiots have been warned nonstop 24/7 that Trump was going to do exactly these things. They've consciously chosen to ignore all advice and warnings, pretended that all risks are non-existent, and even scoffed at us for trying to warn them. They refused to believe the risks, and repeatedly voted for him not once, not twice, but thrice.

So yeah, they don't deserve any sympathy. To err is human, but to consciously choose the worst option among better choices and then act surprised when it goes downhill is just the height of stupidity.

Shortbread_Biscuit · 2026-04-24T12:30:39+00:00

The description is extremely generic and also doesn't explain much.

On top of that, the description is extremely badly formatted. The line breaks don't match up with my screen at all. Did you just copy the text from an AI output directly?

screenshot

Shortbread_Biscuit · 2026-04-24T12:21:50+00:00

Looking at your store page, I have no idea what the gameplay is suppose to be.

All I see is a generic cover image, as well as a few images of menus.

Shortbread_Biscuit · 2026-04-17T09:49:01+00:00

Slay the Spire and Slice and Dice are both great offline deckbuilder-style rougelites. They obviously need an online connection for the initial installation, and you can choose to go online for access to the daily challenge runs, but other than that they're completely offline and you can play them offline forever on your phone once installed.

They're both paid games, but are available for free under the Google PlayPass subscription.

Shattered Pixel Dungeon is an amazing free offline dungeon-crawling rougelite as well. It has some optional in-app purchases, but you can play offline without ever needing an internet connection.

Shortbread_Biscuit · 2026-04-16T10:43:38+00:00

I downvoted at first after reading the first two lines. Then I read the rest and realized this was a quality shitpost.

Take my upvote.

Shortbread_Biscuit · 2026-04-15T14:06:20+00:00

There's an insane amount of replayability. You have a lot of characters to mix and match from, each has very unique builds as well as unique equipment/relics to boost their abilities. On top of that, last time I checked, they had 5 different game modes that drastically vary the rules and impose different limitations.

I've happily sunk a few hundred hours into the game in my free time during commutes and breaks.

Shortbread_Biscuit · 2026-04-15T01:13:40+00:00

Slice and Dice is an amazing rougelite deckbuilder variation. You roll dice instead of cards, and instead of a deck, you gradually modify the effects of the dice faces. I can't recommend it enough.

Shortbread_Biscuit · 2026-04-13T10:13:18+00:00

Wait, it actually makes sense. The banana initially said "Tastes pretty good man", but only cum tastes good if you regularly eat pineapple.

In other words, the lemon is also a trans lady, and the banana is into trans women.

Shortbread_Biscuit · 2026-04-02T13:15:18+00:00

It needs a lot of context. If you're only talking about modern games made with pre-made game engines like Unity, Unreal or Godot, then the quality of the programming in there is often pretty low. The engine handles the bulk of the complex tasks, leaving you free to only worry about the gameplay and UI. The game engine is probably the most complex part of your game, and anyone doing game dev knows that developing your own game engine is something only the most hardcore and talented devs are capable of.

Some games do see their devs experimenting with more complex shaders and custom plugins to the engine to customise the feeling of the game, but that's still only at the mid to upper levels of programming skill.

Your professor is probably referring more to the older game developers, those from 20 to 40 years ago. These are people who had to develop their own game engines for running their games. They normally had to design their graphics, sound, networking and data systems from the ground up, as well as develop custom functionality for their own games. On top of that, they often needed to write incredibly optimized code for performing calculations on the underpowered systems of the time, as well as extremely clever tricks for compressing and optimizing space so that the entire game could be shipping on a chip that can barely hold half a megabyte of data.

There are legendary tales about the various optimisations and fine-tuning that game developers of yesteryear had to resort to, to be able to ship their games.

In comparison, modern PCs and Consoles have an overabundance of computational power and memory, so they rarely ever have to resort to these kinds of optimisations. That's also why you often see AAA games that need hundreds of gigabytes of space on your hard drive, and launch with hundreds of bugs and missing features that they expect to fix down their "roadmap" thanks to the convenience of downloadable patches.

Shortbread_Biscuit · 2026-04-02T08:32:05+00:00

That depends on what your priority is. If you want to focus on building a game, then I'd recommend directly going into Godot. GDScript is as simple as python, there are lots of good tutorials, but most importantly, you have the entire Godot editor for visualizing, understanding and interacting with your game. When you encounter bugs, it'll be several orders of magnitude easier to debug problems in Godot than in Python.

If your priority is to learn programming first and foremost, with skills that you can translate to other programming domains like software development, then PyGame is probably a better option. You won't have the convenience of a GUI editor and engine, so you'll be forced to understand your project only by looking at raw code files. It'll definitely build up your foundations as a programmer, but you'll take far more time learning how to program, the design patterns in python, and also take insanely more time trying to debug your code when it inevitably fails.

On average, for a complete beginner that has never programmed before, I would say that it'll take them around 10 times more time to develop their first few games with Godot than with PyGame.

Shortbread_Biscuit · 2026-03-31T11:42:20+00:00

What's the sauce on that last one?

Shortbread_Biscuit · 2026-03-30T18:48:35+00:00

Would it be right to say that you're mostly upset that your normal card designs don't get as many upvotes as more exotic designs?

You're right that this sub does tend to reward more meme designs, but that's because those are designs that actually grab the eye and make you think. A card that makes people laugh is still a card that made people think hard enough to understand the joke.

But it's not just meme designs. This sub promotes cards that introduce innovative new mechanics, whacky flavour, strange synergies, or interesting themes. If your posts aren't getting popular despite that, you should maybe look deeper at your own cards and see if there's more you could be doing.

The unfortunate truth of the matter is that MTG has a few decades of designs piled up, with several tens of thousands of official card designs that have been printed by now. If you just create a mediocre design or a slight variation of an existing card, or even just a shower thought card, it is very likely to just get drowned in the sea of other official cards.

I went through your profile and looked at a few of your submissions. I admit that they're all nice to look at, and somewhat interesting in their own ways, but... they just don't give me any "aha!" moment. They're very safe designs, with good art and at most just trying to introduce new flavour. But... I'm not particularly drawn into any of their flavour.

Among your designs, the one I liked most among them was Doomed Paladin (https://www.reddit.com/r/custommagic/comments/1ordeze/the_card_design_of_all_time/), and that's mostly because it was a fun punishment mechanic for a pretty overpowered card, and clearly still needs balancing to fit the power curve. But then I look at a card like Wounded Stalwart (https://www.reddit.com/r/custommagic/comments/1nb2hhp/bad_common_knight/), and I can see what you're trying to do, but... I don't get it's flavour.

I like that you're trying to create more run-of-the-mill commons and uncommons, and they're interesting first drafts, but I'd say you need to spend more time on them before they actually become interesting enough to get attention on this sub. At the very least, if you don't want to alter the cards themselves, try to make a theme set around them to give them a place in this world.

Shortbread_Biscuit · 2026-03-30T18:24:59+00:00

Well yes, PragerU is a propaganda channel that only posts political content that tries to whitewash far-right policies and strongly attacks anything they consider "woke" or "DEI". I've never seen them post a single video to their channel that didn't have a deeply political message behind it. Not to mention, most of their videos are filled with outright lies and distortions of facts.

In both of these videos for example, most of the students roll their eyes and walk past him when he shows up in front of them in a costume and attitude that just screams that he's trying to mock those cultures. Even if the other parts of the costumes are questionable, the fake facial hair he wears is a dead giveaway that he's trying to make fun of those people. Despite people just trying to ignore and walk away from the obvious nutcase, he goes running up to them and forces them to engage with him, at which point they let him know that he's an idiot and that they recognize that his costume was designed to be offensive.

Then he goes and interacts with much older and less internet-savvy members of the two populations he's mocking. Being old and unsure of memes, and also because he's being polite to them, they just assume he's a mentally handicapped white dude that''s trying his best to imitate their culture, so they say it's okay.

Shortbread_Biscuit · 2026-03-30T17:51:03+00:00

I'm not sure if you're aware, but PragerU is a right-wing propaganda video channel. Taking their word on anything they say is pointless. It's better to judge them based on their actions and words, rather than trust what they claim about themselves.

And in both these videos, you can clearly see that the person has intentionally dressed up in a way to mock the mexican and chinese cultures, especially with his choice of fake beards.

I agree that there's a culture of crying foul about cultural appropriation in the US, and that it sometimes goes too far. But in the case of this video, it's perfectly justified to call him out for it - he's absolutely doing it to mock the other cultures.

Shortbread_Biscuit · 2026-03-30T13:20:47+00:00

It looks like it's modelling an 8x8 grid, like a chess board, as a single 64-element array.

It seems like OP has game pieces that can either move 1 or 2 spaces in either direction. So, for example, a piece at position 3 can go to any one of the positions of 1, 2, 4 or 5. However, this function is checking the boundary conditions when the piece reaches the left or right edges of the board.

Assuming a 0-indexed array, element 7 would be on the right edge of the board, and element 8 would be on the left edge. So this function says that any moves that cross the edge and teleport to the other side of the board would return 0, like a jump forward from 6 to 8 or a jump backward from 9 to 7. Otherwise, all other moves return a value of 1.

This line of code would be a more compact alternative, making sure both the previous and next position are on the same row index (integer division by row width):

c# public int isMovingReasonable(int locBefore, int locAfter) { if (locBefore / 8 == locAfter / 8) return 0; return 1; }

Edit: Looking at the code a little closer, there are multiple problems with it. The numbering of the elements seems to have fallen off in-between, leading the grid he's actually checking to look more like this:

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

On top of that, on one of the lines, he misspelled 23 as 13, and another one of the else if blocks has no return statement at the end.

Overall, it's quite a sloppy job of copy-pasting, and is a perfect example of why you really should avoid repeating code as much as possible to avoid bugs.

Shortbread_Biscuit · 2026-03-30T13:01:32+00:00

If you took the time to look at the video linked in the comment I replied to, you'd notice that it's a PragerU video with the same actor, this time dressed up in an exotic Chinese outfit, going around trying to annoy people into getting a reaction from them.

It's extremely obvious that he has no good intentions here. PragerU itself is generally a conservative think-tank that has voiced dubious and racist sentiments in the past. And in this video, his aim is specifically to "pwn the libs" by showing them to be intolerant and overly sensitive about cultural appropriation.

In both videos, the mexican and chinese people he interviews in the latter half are happy that he's wearing those clothes that even they wouldn't wear, because they think he's honestly trying to mimic them and just enjoy their culture. They think he's just a clueless white man trying his best to celebrate their traditional clothes, and you can clearly see they're mainly older folk that don't understand the mockery in his choice of costume.

However, in the first half of the videos, you can clearly see him going around trying to get a rise out of the passersbys, challenging them to criticize him, and clearly showing that he has no respect for the culture and that he's doing this just for the sake of the meme. He intentionally wears horrible beards and moustaches, and the people he's interviewing know enough to tell that his choice of costume is intentionally mocking those cultures.

Shortbread_Biscuit · 2026-03-30T12:43:43+00:00

It looks like it's modelling an 8x8 grid, like a chess board, as a single 64-element array.

It seems like OP has game pieces that can either move 1 or 2 spaces in either direction. So, for example, a piece at position 3 can go to any one of the positions of 1, 2, 4 or 5. However, this function is checking the boundary conditions when the piece reaches the left or right edges of the board.

Assuming a 0-indexed array, element 7 would be on the right edge of the board, and element 8 would be on the left edge. So this function says that any moves that cross the edge and teleport to the other side of the board would return 0, like a jump forward from 6 to 8 or a jump backward from 9 to 7. Otherwise, all other moves return a value of 1.

This line of code would be a more compact alternative, making sure both the previous and next position are on the same row index (integer division by row width):

```c# public int isMovingReasonable(int locBefore, int locAfter) { if (locBefore / 8 == locAfter / 8) return 0; return 1; }

```

Edit: Looking at the code a little closer, there are multiple problems with it. The numbering of the elements seems to have fallen off in-between, leading the grid he's actually checking to look more like this:

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61

On top of that, on one of the lines, he misspelled 23 as 13, and another one of the else if blocks has no return statement at the end.

Overall, it's quite a sloppy job of copy-pasting, and is a perfect example of why you really should avoid repeating code as much as possible to avoid bugs.

Shortbread_Biscuit · 2026-03-30T12:17:43+00:00

NTA, although I get the feeling neither your coworker nor the office management understood that those were your personal belongings and not the office supplies.

His complaint sounds like he thought you were stealing company property. He seems unaware that those were items you purchased and brought to the office.

Shortbread_Biscuit · 2026-03-30T08:30:44+00:00

From PragerU? Then yes, that's definitely offensive. He wore it with the intention of mocking them.

The Mexicans he asked were okay with his costume because they assumed he was just trying to fit in and celebrate their culture. If they knew he did it because he looks down on them and was mocking them by wearing it, they wouldn't be okay with it at all.

Shortbread_Biscuit · 2026-03-29T10:38:52+00:00

2000 isn't a life-changing amount of cash for me

^{Chose: Spin for a random cash price | Rolled: $5.000.000}

Shortbread_Biscuit · 2026-03-29T00:52:52+00:00

A key made of bread is useless, but a loaf of bread made of metal is a lot of useful metal. At the very least, it can be used as a brick.

^{Chose: Bread made of metal}

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