Tuesday, September 22, 2020

Tumultuous With A T


My store has had a tumultuous year so far. Our sales are up 23%, with net income up 230%, which is easy to do when we were at a negative net income a year ago at this time. The San Francisco Bay Area is on fire, thankfully only figuratively. The Bay Area would be the world's 19th largest economy, if it were tracked that way. I just want to crow about how well we're doing, how well everyone here is doing, so this post doesn't sound like a pity party.

We have transitioned nearly our entire staff this year, a staff that averages a turnover every three years. It has been a huge hit to our institutional knowledge, which means training has been a huge expense. Training means overlapping, unproductive shifts, and it's is our single largest expense this year, when you also include the tremendous wage inflation we've got here in California (at the bottom tier of employment). Starting wages for part timers are going up a dollar a year, but it's not fast enough for many, who criticize us for not having every job starting at a living wage (likely in the $20+ range). We'll get there Felicia, just give it a minute. Enthusiastic new staff are a strong reason for that 23% growth, most of it really, so you get what you pay for.

I will refer to 2019 as my Year of Entropy, assuming my store makes it out alive. Besides expensive staff transitions, our drink cooler died ($2,000). One of our two, multi ton air conditioning units gave up the ghost a couple weeks ago, requiring a new compressor ($3,000). By the end of the year, we'll need two new computers, including a replacement of our six year old POS system which will need the POS software and hardware reinstalled ($5,000). Overall, add these expenses to the usual entropy of plumbing problems and CAM increase and it's about $20,000 out of pocket.

We're still a profitable business. About half that profit goes towards construction loans, so I feel we're investing in the business each month when those checks get processed, even if nothing new arrives. I'm thankful to have windfall profits in a year with crazy high expenses. Imagine having flat sales and all these expenses start beating you down. It's why the threat of failure never goes away for small businesses, never reduces the chance of closing no matter how many years you've been in business. 

Are new expenses hitting us while we're on an upward trajectory or downward? It becomes a simple calculation. Should we cut bait or cast out again? Some of our competitors disappeared this year after doing that calculation. This has added a lot of unexpected energy to our store as the displaced seek new homes. Thankfully there's light at the end of the tunnel. We haven't really been walking in darkness, since it's a profitable business. Having debt while encountering the usual entropy is like walking through a dim tunnel while bats fly overhead and muss your hair. You'll make it, it's just disconcerting.

Meanwhile we'll enjoy a little money thrown at re-branding and selling our updated image. We've had enthusiasm for our new logo, sold some stickers, and talked with people who were unaware of our previous brand identity, which is currently limited to our website and business cards.


Monday, September 21, 2020

Download Just Cause 4 Compressed Version For 5$

Download Just Cause 4 Compressed version for  5$

| Just Cause 4 [ Uncracked ] | FULL UNLOCKED |




 Platform:  PC
 Size: 50.8 Gb
 ژانر بازی : اکشن
 File Type: RAR
 Game Language: English
 Publisher: Tarsier Studios
 Game Price: 5$
.
  Minimum System Requirements:
OS: Windows 7 SP1 with Platform Update for Windows 7 64-bit
Processor: Intel Core i5-2400 @ 3.1 GHz | AMD FX-6300 @ 3.5 GHz or better
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760
DirectX: Version 11
Storage: 59 GB available space





Download links
Direct Link

password: After Payment Is Done

Saturday, September 12, 2020

28Mm Village Sections

New Russian Villages:
I've made up a few Russian village sections for WWII (although they'd do fine for Napoleonic too) These are mostly MDF kits from "Things From The Basement" in the USA with a few more extra bits from the excellent Charlie Foxtrot models here in the UK
Love these...2 cabins, and high fences
All lovely models, easy to construct, and fun to paint. One of the things which attracted me to them was how there are very few lugs on display - most MDF kits have these rather unsightly points where the various bits fit together- These don't- makes them look so much better- I thought it would be more fun to put these together as based village units, to allow a little bit more detailing and customisation. 
Simple Russian barn, but will do for pretty much anywhere
Pigs.....
Couldn't resist this...the little pigsty base is from TFTB, pigs from Pegasus
Small cabin, rough fencing- Warlord Russians!
The bases are all slightly different sizes, but generally about 10' square, big enough to make an impact on the wargames table and to allow the addition of more "stuff" to pretty them up

Larger Villa with small garden
These are for sale....feel free to contact me if you wish for prices etc- I'm going to be making a lot more terrain and buildings over the next few months, if you have a specific request just ask, or keep an eye out here or look for CAC terrain on facebook

Smaller cabin and woodshed by Charlie Foxtrot, Everything else from TFTB. Love the well.


Square Tiling Of A Sphere, Part 2/3

In the previous post I described how I learned about HEALPix because I wanted to try covering a sphere with square tiles for a game map. During that exploration I realized that HEALPix with 12 square regions is similar to cubes with 6 square regions, but HEALPix has some nice properties for numerical calculations such as spherical harmonics. I don't need those properties. Instead, I am looking for something that's simpler to program, so I explored cubes.

Diagram showing the Earth mapped onto a cube
Earth mapped onto a cube

The goal is the same: I want to play a game on a flat top-down tile map (roguelikes, Dwarf Fortress, Factorio, etc.), but these games have one of three approaches to the map:

  1. The map is finite and has borders. You can't move past the border. Most roguelikes fall into this category. SimCity, Dwarf Fortress, and most building games do as well.
  2. The map is finite and but some borders allow wrapping. Civilization allows east/west wrapping (cylinder); Asteroid has both east/west and allow north/south wrapping (torus).
  3. The map is infinite, so it has no borders. Factorio works this way, with a procedurally generated map.

I wanted to explore type 2, but with a sphere instead of a cylinder or torus. The usual approaches to representing a sphere with flat tiles is to use one of the 5 Platonic solids: tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, isocahedron. There are also approaches that aren't based on Platonic solids: HEALPix, Mercator-like projections, Peirce Quincucial, and others.

In the previous post I mentioned that this is a "gamejam" style project. I give myself one week to work on the topic, and then I wrap it up. If I found something interesting I'll write it up, but many times I'll discard the project. Allowing myself to discard projects removes the penalty for making a "wrong turn". This allows me to explore more quickly.

After HEALPix I decided to explore cubes for the next week's project, using cube maps from graphics programming. It turned out not to be so useful. I had made a wrong turn. That's ok! Because each of these is a separate standalone tiny project, I can easily abandon the code and move on.

Flat surface with square tiles, and also that flat surface wrapped onto a sphere
The flat square tile map and also its projection onto a sphere

The week after that worked pretty well. I was able to learn how to render and also represent a square grid map on a sphere/cube.

I wrote notes about square tiles on a cube/sphere, including some animations showing how a cube morphs into a sphere, how a cube unfolds onto a plane, and how there are different ways to project a grid on the sphere.

The next "gamejam" style project will be to generate a map on this sphere.

Friday, September 4, 2020

PUBG MOBILE 0.18.0 APK+OBB Download


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Install Instruction :
  1. Video Tutorial
  2. APK install it on your android device.
  3. unzip data and copy com.tencent.ig folder into android / obb (internal storage)
  4. Enter the game And enjoy
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APK+OBB (1.6 GB)


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