It really is a lot of fun and a great way to spend an evening. With a big group there's enough time resolving turns to talk and have some drinks or snacks. We had a dedicated person to "run" the game that helped keep it moving.

Due to a whole lotta reasons we don't play anymore and I do miss it.

If you're interested, it looks like you can still get the rulebooks (albeit as kinda high-priced PDFs): https://www.wargamevault.com/browse/pub/16332/SEEKRIEG? I'd imagine these days with 3D printers you could find models for the ship minis and print them at a fraction of the cost of the metal models we used to use, so most of the cost would lie in the books.

They have a name for it: Dead Sea Effect.

They did call her the "Queen of Mean." She was an unrepentant asshole in her own time.

I wrote a program to figure out what day of the week this landed on (assuming it is in fact October 2nd, 151441).

It's a Saturday.

Real downer on the start of the weekend.

That kid in the middle looks harrowed; like every day is an endurance test.

Please don't construe my comment here as a defense of the company; I'm only providing some context here regarding how he may have been hired.

If you've never worked near or in an industry like this, you may not be familiar with "cattle call" hiring. There's basically a standing advert from the company for work at the plant: Show up Monday morning at 05:00 and you can be working the same day if they hire you in. Typically there's a group of 10, 20, or maybe more lined up for a job. Everyone is told to bring a photo ID and a social security card.

The kid in the article looks slight, but at 16 he was probably close enough to adult proportions to look like he could do the work. He'd line up with everyone else in front of a table and eventually have his turn to talk to the manager / hiring officer. They'd take his ID and SS card and write down the info, and ask the required questions for the I9 form, likely filling it out for him and signing off as translator / preparer assistance. Then they hand back the credentials and he waits off to the side.

Once they have enough applicants to fill however many positions they need, they send the remainder home. Everyone is given a timeclock ID number. Anyone working the day shift is taken immediately to the plant, handed PPE and tools, and put to work. Second and third shifts are sent home and told to come back in the afternoon or at midnight.

And that's it. That's the extent of the contact during the hiring process. At the end of the week there's a check waiting for you at the plant office. Next Monday the company repeats the process to fill positions for people that didn't show or quit during the week.

The company has 3 days to submit the I9 form, and if it comes back invalid they must terminate employment. But with stolen identities they likely clear and that's the end of any scrutiny. If you asked that hiring manager on Tuesday to pick out someone he hired Monday morning, he probably couldn't do it.

"Hey, listen, motherfucker!"

I have several Tampermonkey scripts to keep Youtube useable:

Additionally uBlock, and a plugin to alter the number of results per row (so I don't wind up with gigantic tiles/icons on a large monitor).

It's a complete disaster without these. :/

The worst is when they phrase the response as if there was just some slight, funny misunderstanding on the part of the machine; "Sorry, I didn't quite catch that! Did you want to..."

For some reason that one really drives my ire.

According to this, Texas has ~7% of their prison population in private facilities. The national rate is ~8%.

I had one recently that (when changing / creating the password) would allow you paste into the "new password" field but not the "confirm password" field. Super annoying.

I just opened dev tools, pasted it into the "value" property for the control, and kept on truckin'. Just nuts that had to be done though.