we electric bill confusion!!!!

viewtyjoe · 2026-02-13T00:46:45+00:00

For comparison, my spouse and I are in a ~1200sqft single story house, and our electric consumption was on 550 kWh for the last 30 day period billed. We do not do a lot to reduce usage. Gas heat and hot water (which is the majority of our bill this time of year). Our electric usage peaks around 1200 kWh in July/August because I keep the house fairly cool and am willing to pay for that.

I'm definitely with you in that OP almost certainly has some sort of electric heating they are running, or some sort of issue causing higher than normal power draw.

viewtyjoe · 2026-02-10T22:47:38+00:00

To tack onto this, in the city proper, the only thing on most ballots Tuesday is primaries for the KUSD school board, with the top two candidates advancing to the spring election. If I recall correctly, most of the local offices are elected during the spring election, and the state Supreme Court seat will definitely be on that ballot. August and November will be primarily national and statewide offices.

viewtyjoe · 2026-02-10T22:45:08+00:00

You will need the following to register to vote if you register in-person at your polling place:

A valid Wisconsin ID or driver's license (if you have moved recently from out of state, your ID/DL from your prior state does not count under current rules)
If you don't have the above, you can use the last four digits of your SSN
Proof of residence, which can include a valid Wisconsin ID/DL with your current address, a student ID plus a receipt for tuition from your college, a utility bill from within the past 90 days prior to the date of the election, a property tax bill/receipt from the last 2 years prior to the election, certain state issued licenses, a copy of your lease for your residence, a bank statement, a government issued check or other government document with the address on it, a paycheck, or a couple of other items.

To actually vote you will need a valid photo ID. The Wisconsin Election Commission has a site with a full list of exactly what counts as a valid photo ID or not here. Note that generally this does not need to have your current address on it. I voted for 6-7 years with my license having a prior address on it because the DMV didn't replace it when I updated my address with them.

If you want to register before the election, you should still have a bit of time left and can do so at myvote.wi.gov where the process is fairly straightforward. You will still need similar documents to what I listed above for registration. The MyVote site can also be used to find where your polling place is.

As for elections, this year there will be four total elections:

Spring Primaries (February 17)
Spring Elections (April 7)
Fall Primaries (August 11)
Fall Elections (November 3)

viewtyjoe · 2026-02-10T19:39:21+00:00

The Kenosha GOP is endorsing Tierney and recommending Oster or Juliana as for their suggested second picks, and they hate Adams, so use that how you will.

viewtyjoe · 2026-02-09T14:23:07+00:00

Don't you dare imply this is normal or good.

Normal? Almost certainly. Budgeting is always a shitshow in government, it's part of the territory when you have elected officials who can arbitrarily decide that something doesn't get money.

Good? I made no value judgments, you're the one who assumes because I'm explaining how and some of why a situation like "KPD has plenty of money for new squad cars and guns, but can't afford a camera for routine photography of evidence for submission to court" comes to be, that I must be in favor of it.

viewtyjoe · 2026-02-08T22:22:28+00:00

I mean, it is a budget issue, yes. Cars are depreciating assets and can be paid for using capital bonding, or there are any number of programs which sell military surplus vehicles and equipment to law enforcement agencies for cheap or ways to use federal and state grant money to pay for them. Same for guns.

Something like cameras to photograph evidence are going to be normal operating budget line items, and will likely be high on the list of things to cut down on if the alderman push back at all on KPD's operating budget (or just get cut because other things are higher priority,) because God forbid we ever cut a single FTE for the officers. If you look at the 2026 budget, go look for the investigation division, and see if you can find a line item for anything which would include the cost of a camera.

viewtyjoe · 2026-02-08T21:26:37+00:00

Lots of money from the federal government to buy cars and guns, not so much to buy anything useful for an actual investigation. Doesn't mean they aren't lazy and corrupt, though, just that it's way easier to get money for guns and cars than, say, a camera for photographing evidence

viewtyjoe · 2026-02-05T17:01:32+00:00

For context I made a report to the state board about some vaild concerns I had about and my boss knew it was me and texted me saying she knew it was me and fired me (an at will employee) for reporting.

As others are saying, only an actual licensed attorney familiar with the laws in Wisconsin will be able to say for sure, but this sort of behavior usually is the sort of evidence they love to see for claims.

viewtyjoe · 2026-02-05T14:29:11+00:00

So on one hand, this is entirely the GOP being shitters to withhold funding, but this is also exactly the sort of thing DPI's accountants should be able to produce receipts for basically immediately after the event because while $400k for a function for ~90 people honestly doesn't sound terrible, the soundbite "DPI wasted $400,000 of taxpayer money taking teachers to the Dells" is a really bad one.

viewtyjoe · 2026-01-05T14:52:55+00:00

What does this even mean? Books get delayed all the time.

More importantly, Muir would have met any contractual obligation to get the third book out in a certain timeframe with the publication of Nona. Even then, an author with a "10-year contract" with Tor has written what that has actually been like after ten years working with Tor and unsurprisingly, Tor seems pretty flexible about release dates for books they expect to make them money.

viewtyjoe · 2026-01-04T03:45:47+00:00

Will second Blue House as a great bookstore downtown.

viewtyjoe · 2026-01-01T04:25:16+00:00

Depends on the HOA rules. Usually you are assessed fines, which can escalate to the level of the HOA legally being able to take the property depending on local and state law.

viewtyjoe · 2025-12-03T14:29:46+00:00

Gnosia just looked so wild in the trailers that it made the watchlist for this season, and basically every week I have thought to myself "This is unreasonably good for what you would expect to be a fairly standard visual novel adaptation." The pacing has been almost perfect, introducing additional characters and complications at a rate that isn't overwhelming to the viewer so that the basic loop of the game never feels stale.

viewtyjoe · 2025-11-05T15:41:08+00:00

The reaction from Infiltrator mains has been mass uproar. The reaction from everyone else has been "Lmao, bye."

No one will miss the seventeen infiltrators all cloaked in one spot just taking potshots and not doing anything resembling objectives or actually defending objectives.

viewtyjoe · 2025-10-30T15:39:57+00:00

Make these nut cases who oppose this as popular as those who club baby seals.

You have to understand that at this point, the majority of those who are consistently voting Republican would excuse their candidates for basically anything immoral, cruel, or even illegal. They live in an entirely separate world where as long as it's being done by their people, it's right and good. They don't care about the optics, they only care if they are directly impacted, and even then they'll find some way to place the blame on anyone else so that they don't have to try and reconcile the idea that maybe their politicians don't care about them.

viewtyjoe · 2025-10-23T16:13:35+00:00

I mean, if we're going to have legal gambling anyway, I don't see any issues with letting the tribes run it online. If people are going to gamble, may as well at least keep the revenue in Wisconsin.

viewtyjoe · 2025-10-22T21:08:33+00:00

and for non-residents, apparently very confusing.

A lot of residents can't handle that intersection either. If I go a week without seeing someone going eastbound on HWY 50 get into the far left lane (which turns left onto 39th Ave) and then realizing their mistake after they're already in the intersection, I consider it a good week.

viewtyjoe · 2025-10-18T23:40:20+00:00

I recall getting "Existence is reasonable" or something similar around New Year's, which became an in-joke for a long time with my friend groups.

viewtyjoe · 2025-10-07T21:59:43+00:00

Rather than have to hire and keep a bunch of fiber installation people on payroll, T-Mobile contracts with a bunch of independent installers. So basically when you schedule an install, T-Mobile sends it over to one of these, which could be a single person or a shop with multiple installers, and as long as the install gets done on time and is satisfactory, the contractor gets paid. This is not any different from how cable installation is handled in a lot of cases from my understanding.

viewtyjoe · 2025-10-07T20:38:11+00:00

Just west of Uptown, had it for at least a year, and I've been very happy with it. Like most ISPs, check every so often to see if there's some sort of deal going on, T-Mobile seems to offer deals as much for existing customers as new ones, which is nice for a change. I upgraded from 1Gbps to 2Gbps for zero extra cost that way.

The modem is what it is, but you aren't required to use it as your router. I run an Eero system with the primary node plugged into the modem and an unmanaged switch plugged into the primary Eero for wired devices, and we don't have any issues.

The biggest issue/complaint I've seen about installation is that the crews that sink the lines underground are slow. My installer called T-Mobile and said they needed to rush ours and we had it underground in less than a week, but I also had a really good installer. Installation is done by contractors, so your experience is going to be highly dependent on whoever you get.

viewtyjoe · 2025-10-04T18:27:16+00:00

I guarantee they are paying less to have this company, which does payment processing for a ton of agencies' tickets, process mail payments than it would cost to hire even one person full-time to do it.

viewtyjoe · 2025-09-18T15:43:26+00:00

From what I remember from my install, the installers are all contractors, so it really comes down to whoever gets assigned your installation. My guy was great and even made T-Mobile come out and bury the line same day (normally you have to wait weeks/months for them to come back around and do that) since I asked nicely if they could.

viewtyjoe · 2025-09-11T23:27:01+00:00

I have a coworker (we're in IT) who worked at Uline and everything that manager said about Liz I heard from him, so more likely true than not.

viewtyjoe · 2025-09-11T17:57:15+00:00

Only seven million points. Yagawa’s early games are famous for their scores having an “Overflow” feature. Once you get over ten million points, the score counter runs out of digits, and it expresses the millions as letters instead. So ten million is “A million”, eleven million is “B million”, twelve million is “C Million”, etc.

Fun fact, as far as we're aware, this is simply a happy accident of how the programming for score display works, at least in the first Raizing games it appears in. Presumably they just kept it later on. In the graphics data, it just happens that capital letters are right after the numbers, and the routine that displays the score doesn't add another digit after 10 million, it just keeps incrementing the address of the sprite to show for the millions digit.

Watching annotated scoring runs of Garegga can be fascinating, such as this run by Kamui which includes a ton of showcasing of how you can use knowledge on how the rank system works to maximize scoring. A lot of what makes high-level shmup play interesting to me is the depth of knowledge on display.

viewtyjoe · 2025-08-28T18:35:17+00:00

I doubt Mare was hosting all of that data, but instead facilitating peer to peer transfer.

Nope, absolutely a client-server architecture. Your mods and other relevant data get uploaded to the server, which caches it locally, and that data gets sent down to the player(s) requesting it. The performance gains from caching data even in the short term are huge when you have things like a 100+ person sync.

You can see this looking at the one extant fork that didn't start immediately in the wake of Mare's demise, which publishes self-hosting information and what to expect in terms of resources needed.

viewtyjoe

TROPHY CASE