There’s civilized humans? Where?

OP what the hell is wrong with you

That’s never a question you have to ask of a 4channer.

everybody walk the dinosaur

Well shit. Every new thing I learn about the country I live in makes it shittier.

IANAL, but I think /r/legaladvice might say in a case like this that once you’ve communicated to your landlord that the AC is busted, you should move into a hotel until the AC is fixed, send bills for reimbursement to the landlord, and refuse to pay more than your regular rent charge. Theoretically, the courts should back you up. (Unless, again, AC isn’t considered a big enough deal to make your place uninhabitable in the eyes of the law locally.) Though also, if you don’t have enough money on hand to just go stay at a hotel, reimbursement may not be good enough to justify that plan for your particular case. I dunno. Might be worth researching your options more, though.

Edit: LilB0kChoy has some relevant info in another comment, however, that makes it seem less likely that you’d be able to use the law in your favor here. :/

True story?

I don’t know about other places, but in the U.S., generally if your house is fucked to the extent of being kindof uninhabitable (and I’d think no AC would qualify – though maybe depending on local climate, that might not so much be seen as the case?), your landlord would have to get it fixed or pay for a hotel stay until it was fixed.

Or maybe in your case, it’s more of a condo situation where you don’t have a landlord.

Or maybe I’m off base thinking a lack of AC in July would qualify as sufficiently uninhabitable to require your landlord to be responsible for an alternate dwelling.

Honestly, a policy of “no free-of-charge software installed on workstations except FOSS” might improve security a bit and probably without doing all that much damage to the day-to-day workings of the company.

For that matter, if my employer instituted a policy of “no software except FOSS”, my own particular job probably would be a surprisingly small adjustment. As long as they were willing to do the work to set up infrastructure and/or let us switch to FOSS alternatives that require third-party server providers as necessary. About all I can think of that’s installed on my work machine that’s proprietary is:

• Zoom
• A paid corporate VPN client
• A random program that I use to authenticate to Kubernetes clusters in use where I work (so I can use Kubectl)
• Chrome
• The Client Management software my company uses (the software they use to remotely administrate the company-provided machines – force install shit without telling you, spy on you, nag people who have computers that aren’t actually used to return them, wipe your computer if you report it stolen, etc)
• And, of course, bios, proprietary firmware blobs, etc

Beyond that, I honestly can’t think specifically of anything else proprietary installed on my work machine. My personal computers have far less proprietary software installed than the above list.

Who said anything about one-time use? I had in mind a one-time-use item (an “oh shit, we’re in a tight spot and need a big emergency ‘abort’ button, even if even that option is risky” sort of item) when I gave it to them, but I definitely wouldn’t have made what they came up with a one-time-use item. (Unless they rolled relatively low on the process of engineering the gun in the first place, in which case I might have been like “yeah, you’ve got something that you think will probably work like maybe once, but you’re not confident it would work more than like once or twice without failing catastrophically”.) Probably a roughly infinite number of uses. (Unless they, like, propped it on a rock and left it “on” over a long rest or whatever.)

I figured they had an “ocean” worth of water. (Well, as I mentioned in another comment in this thread, I think it would be reasonable to make it well less than a literal ocean, but still, a fuckton.) And they’d be firing in like less-than-6-second bursts. They’d have to shoot that thing a lot of times to exhaust its water stores enough to start losing pressure.

And, just to be clear, what I had in mind was a very narrow and high-pressure stream that would do a shit-ton of… I dunno, slashing(?)… damage to enemies. Maybe even cutting holes through one guy and doing damage to the guy behind that guy if the enemies happened to be lined up (or if the PC wanted to orchestrate that). But such a powerful weapon would need drawbacks, I’d think. Like maybe a minus to the dex roll to hit? Or even disadvantage on the roll to hit. Plus the whole pushes-the-shooter-back thing would be interesting in some situations. (Could even be used strategically. Even if you missed, maybe this would avoid attacks of opportunity because you didn’t move out of melee range. You were pushed by the force of the water? Maybe?)

(Also, to be fair, I’m thinking in 5e rules here and the original campaign in which I introduced this item was PF1e. Anyway.)

Anyway, what I’m getting at is that I never had one-use in mind for what they came up with. And it sounds like you might have thought I was saying its only effect would be to push the shooter back or something. Not at all what I meant.

First, my plan was definitely to make my version of the item not literally produce an ocean’s worth of water. Just enough to make a tidal wave big enough to wash everyone out of roughly the biggest dungeon I was likely to put in that campaign. (Hell, it would also be reasonable that part of the force propelling the “tidal wave” would be magic, not actually just the force of a huge quantity of rushing water.) And, yes, there would be dex saves involved to avoid taking damage from bashing into doorjams and such.

Second, it is magic, right? If it was under an ocean’s worth of pressure, it wouldn’t remain intact even if undisturbed. It’d easily burst. Who knows how it actually works. One fairly obvious choice would be that it contains a pocket dimension full of water that empties into the user’s current plane when broken. (Or maybe it draws water from the elemental plane of water.) Maybe the water visible in the container is strictly cosmetic. Maybe drilling a hole would make a tiny puncture in the boundary between the driller’s plane and the pocket(/elemental) dimension. Maybe that planar puncture would be present on the outer surface of the bottle rather than inside where it would put a lot of mechanical force on the structure of the bottle.

Third, it would be totally valid for the process of constructing a gun out of it to require quite the skill challenge. Just be like “ok, who wants to contribute to the process of making this gun?” And everyone who wants to pitch in, great. If when they’ve all talked about their plans, if thr process they’ve come up with doesn’t seem like it could reasonably succeed, make it catastrophically fail. Otherwise, make 'em all roll something. Setting the DC high would be totally reasonable. And if they fail, it blows up while they’re attempting to build the gun. If it’s close, maybe they get a gun that works, except that they have to roll a D20 every time they use it and on the third 1, it explodes. (Could be even more wiley. Secretly roll the D20 every long rest after they’ve used it during the “day”. If they happen to examine the gun give an account of how much damage is present based on how many 1s have come up. If one, maybe say “there’s a little bit of chipping near the drill hole.” If two, “a crack runs a good couple of inches from the drill hole down the side of the ampule.” If they don’t actually examine the gun, they might have no idea what’s coming until… On the third 1, it explodes while in the PC’s inventory during the long rest, interrupting the rest and washing them far from where they were. Maybe even separating the party and losing some of their items in the process. There are so many possibilities. What if it was in a Bag of Holding at the time?)

Hell. If an enemy looks at the gun and recognizes the bottled ocean integrated into it, the enemy could use it against them. Maybe target it specifically with crossbow bolts. On a hit, it triggers the by-the-book effect.

I guess basically what I’m getting at is: rule of cool. I obviously didn’t anticipate what the PC’s had in mind for that item until they brought it up. But I would think a good GM would try to find a way to make it work.

Well, my experience was that at first, I didn’t see the forks at all. (That is to say I didn’t recognize them as “forks”. Or even as “things”.) The forks looked like some blurry, nondescript background and the “pepper shapes” looked like foreground items hanging from something unseen off the top. The shapes didn’t look really like anything I could identify. That lasted for a good 30 seconds before, very (very) suddenly, it crystalized and I could only see the forks on a purple background. Really uncanny how rapidly and entirely it shifted. After a good amount of effort, I was able to shift back to the first perception, but it took considerable effort along with looking away and back a couple of times. And once I achieved it, it felt hard to maintain. Very strange experience. Far more so than most “bistable” sort of optical illusions I’ve seen.

There was an arc in the webcomic Girl Genius (highly recommended, by the way) where a couple of the characters were in a tight spot in a dungeon somewhere. Surrounded by bad guys and running thin on options. So one of them pulled out a wine-bottle-sized glass bottle labeled “bottled ocean”. (I might be getting one or two small details wrong, but stay with me here.) He threw it on the ground and a big-ass tidal wave worth of water emerged and swept the characters, along with a bunch of the bad guys, all the way out of the dungeon. It was quite perilous, of course. (There was a chance they could bang into a lot of shit on the way, for instance.) Definitely a reckless move. But it worked, carrying the characters to safety. Risky, but an ace-in-the-hole if you really need it.

I was DM’ing a Pathfinder game at the time, and of course I had to make sure my PC’s got a “bottled ocean” in their inventory.

(My version, rather than stoppered, was fully sealed. Like, an ampule rather than a wine bottle. Still wine-bottle-sized, though. And my version had a label on it that said “bottled ocean.”)

Upon receiving it, they reasoned that if it was a “bottled ocean”, it must be under tremendous pressure. They decided they’d try to construct a “gun” out of it. Mount the ampule in the gun, somehow (very carefully?) drill a small hole in the bottle, and rig a trigger to where they could open the “hole” on command. They figured with the amount of pressure it was under, it would create a stream strong enough to cut through enemies. Like an industrial CNC water cutting machine. Or like that one puppet-master Akatsuki guy from near the beginning of Naruto Shippuden who used high-pressure water jets as a weapon.

They never made good on their threat to try to engineer such a thing. Never used the “bottled ocean” for any other purpose either. But I had to admire their creativity.

Had they succeeded in making such a gun (and it would definitely have involved a pretty high roll), I might have ruled that even if it worked, the shooter would have to roll a… maybe athletics check or be pushed back, say, 5 feet in the direction opposite the direction they fired. (Unless maybe there was a sufficiently strong wall or whatever behind them, or unless they were prone. Maybe make that 10 or even 15 feet if fired by a small creature.)

Edit: Found the specific Girl Genius comic where the “bottled ocean” (or as the source called it, “ocean in a bottle” – I misremembered) was mentioned: https://www.girlgeniusonline.com/comic.php?date=20030827 . That one and the next three or four show how it’s used.

Oh, Jesus. I read “below” to mean it was referring to the number directly “below” the instructions. I didn’t even consider that it could be read another way. Fuck everything about that test.

Who gets to design the test, though?

Six zeroes, right? Five zeroes makes one hundred thousand. Six makes a million. Or am I missing something?

Bad bot

Oh dear. I do hope Putin never figures out how much the U.S. would be divided and weakened on the world stage by the release of such material as that. Releasing those files seems like exactly the sort of dastardly thing Russia might do to overthrow America from its position of having its boot on Russia’s neck and preventing the glorious U.S.S.R. from reforming.

(Sarcasm, if it’s not clear.)

Oh wow. The typo is in the Mediate article. Sorry for doubting you, OP.

This article correctly uses “weak”. I have to imagine the error was Mediate’s part and not present in the original statement Obama’s office made.