I let out a long sigh.

This has to be a joke. Something they tell the new guys to jerk them around. "Collect taxes from cryptids" my ass, this is straight up workplace hazing. They even sent Jim along to keep me company - he's probably going to film this for the office christmas party or something. Well... I guess I may as well play along. "So, how am I supposed to contact Bigfoot? Just shout into the woods?"

"Yes, actually. This is where we've found him the past few years, so he's probably still living here. And he prefers 'Mister Squatch.'" Jim's advice doesn't make this feel any less like a prank.

"Mister Squatch? You have to be kidding me... EXCUSE ME? MISTER SQUATCH?" I bellow, "WE'VE BEEN SENT TO CONTACT YOU ON BEHALF OF THE IRS!" I can't believe I'm out here making a complete fool of myself.

And then it happens.

A rustle in the bushes, followed by snapping twigs and shaking branches moving fast through the underbrush. Jim bends down and opens his briefcase - why? Why did he even bring a briefcase to the middle of the woods? Suddenly, the movement in the bushes stops as it reaches a clearing, and I see something massive race towards the trees on the far side. Suddenly, it stumbles, tripping and tumbling as it falls, wrapped in a net.

A net? Where did a net come from in the middle of the woods? And then I see Jim's empty briefcase, and the empty net gun in his hand. Laying in the middle of the clearing is the Bigfoot, and now I have to treat this like it's normal and actually collect his taxes. Before I can even react, though, Jim is starting to untangle Bigfoot. "Look, Mister Squatch, I keep telling you, if you just pay your taxes, we won't have to keep hunting you down like this. You know the drill, pay up or we'll start telling the tabloids about where you live. You remember how annoying that was last time, right?"

"Yeah..." Bigfoot talks!? I'm not even sure if I'm at work right now, or if the CIA guys in the next office over slipped LSD into our coffee again. "I still keep it in the cave by the creek, just take what I owe you and leave me alone."

"Glad we could settle this easily." Jim cuts him free, and turns to me. "Let's go get the money. We've got a lot of ground to cover... Our next stop is in West Virginia. Say, how do you feel about bridges?"

I feel like I need a new job.

I've worked in retail, and... That's not an actual RFID alarm sticker, and it's not just there for the potential theives.

Some manufacturers will actually put an RFID tag on the inside of the box. These tags work exactly like the RFID stickers, and they're deactivated the same way (usually a magnet underneath the store's counter).

This sticker is actually a "chip away" anti-theft sticker. They frequently go on the same products that get RFID stickers, but all they do is tear apart instead of peeling off. They're mostly an internal tool for LP to try to link thefts and fraudulent returns (that number is the store number that it came from). This one just happens to conveniently have "ALARM" printed on it as a secondary feature, letting thieves know that the item will set off the alarm without showing where the RFID tag is.

Edit: I should probably add that they also put them on high-theft non-alarmed items, but they probably didn't get separate sets of stickers.

Flat Earth? Firmament?

Sir, I assure you that the Earth is round... For the Space Lasers move separately from the stars fixed upon the Firmament! Clearly they are hung within the Crystal Spheres which revolve around us! And how could those divine Spheres revolve, were the Earth not round?

It also doesn't really look like a pool on Google maps - it's got sandy beaches, rather than walls with stepped/ramped entrances.

Even when that one opens, I'd argue that OP posted the largest pool, and this is more of an artificial pond.

It's either a typo, or a lot or sass for a PopSci article.

"Look at this huge, unparalleled rise in carbon levels millions of years ago, it's so huge... Psych! We do that every five years! Buckle in, buckaroo, things are about to get bad!"

Wait... Y'all are talking about X-Wing: Rogue Squadron and Star Wars Episode 1: Battle for Naboo, right?

I owned those windows ports!

They worked great back in the day - I had such a blast with them that I begged my parents to get me a shitty Logitech joystick! If you want to check them out, it looks like Rogue Squadron is only $10 on Steam; and Battle for Naboo seems to be abandonware, but it seems to be hosted on a lot of "better spread than dead" game sites.

I think there may have been a tragic misunderstanding... It looks like they were using X as a placeholder, rather than the noun that Elon wants it to be; but the sentence construction could have been clearer.

Something like "I think X is wrong, but I want it to be legal for me to do wrong things Y and Z" might be a bit closer to what they were going for.

If you're into hard sci-fi and you're looking for a good read, they actually dropped a pretty good recommendation with that reference at the end - Larry Niven does a great job of blending real-world theories like Dyson spheres and advanced propulsion drives, with some of the more far-flung standards of the genre like an intra-planetary teleportation grid.

IIRC, the reasoning was that spawn rates were lower than they had intended, and they were bringing them up to the intended values - I think they said that a solo player was actually getting 1/6 the spawns of a four player group, instead of a quarter.

Actually... Yeah, that's a really good point.

I had a nerf football as a kid that had fins on the back end - no matter how badly you threw it, the fins would help straighten it out and make it fly a bit better. Something like that would have probably fixed a lot of the "unpredictability" issues with this.

After the "kill two billion bugs" order got finished in a few hours, I was genuinely surprised to log in a couple of hours ago and find only a few percentage points on both planets... But that won't last long, there were about 10x as many players on the airburst launcher planet as there were on the anti-tank mine planet.

I like the idea of having it as a ship upgrade, but even as a fairly new player, being able to see the lanes seems like it would be helpful in deciding what planets to drop on.

Maybe that upgrade could sort of be a part of the tutorial? Like, you learn what samples are, pick up a few (maybe five-ish), and then the first time you open the ship upgrades, it walks you through buying your first module with the conveniently low-priced "Galactic Positioning System Premium Subscription" or something of that ilk. That way, it could sort of kill two birds with one stone, teaching newbies how to do ship upgrades while giving the map a bit more functionality.

(Edited for grammar)

"...And this is the fire selector lever. It changes fire modes between 'ouch,' 'owwww,' and "AAAAAAAAAAAGH.'"

That makes a lot of sense, actually. I also saw "fully electric" and immediately thought of electric/hybrid/ICE cars, and my brain went straight to "hold up, did I miss the fully functional diesel-powered humanoid robot?"

Nah, it looks like it was sarcasm. "Unalive" and "commit sodoku" are both sort of combination meme/euphemisms, in the same way that we might have said that someone "an heroed" a little over a decade ago.

Ah, that makes sense. I read "below" as being relative to the blade, not the photo, and I was looking in entirely the wrong place.

Those divots you weren't sure about - you're talking about the ones around that little nub at the bottom of the blade (does that count as a tang?) that get hidden within the knife when it's open, right? It looks like they might be there to give the zen pins a little bit of extra clearance when it's latched in the open position, while the nub keeps it from over-rotating.

They're so close, yet so far away - when the Gregorian calendar replaced the Julian calendar, they actually did move the start of the year from April 1 (right after the spring equinox) to January 1.

...Everything else they said was about as wrong as it could be, though.

I don't want to be a downer, but... The rats probably aren't high if they're just eating weed. Buckle up, y'all, time for a stoner science lesson:

THC is present in cannabis in two main forms: THCA and Delta-9 THC. Throwing around those delta numbers can seem scary given all of the unregulated Delta-8 in illegal states, but it's really not. THCA breaks down into Delta-9 THC naturally with time and heat, through a process called decarboxylization... Which is great, because THCA isn't psychoactive, while Delta-9 THC is. Because of this, smoking a joint or eating a properly made edible will get you high, but eating an entire ounce is just having a terrible salad.

You're fine - I grew up in a rural state, and I thought they were super rare until I lived in a city where the public transit system gave them as change.