Yelling at voters doesn't help, neither does educating them.
These things only affect individuals, and there's hundred of millions of voters out there, in a constantly shifting cohort.
You may as well try to bail out the rising tide with a teacup. You can expend unlimited resources on the task, and you'll achieve precisely dick.
It doesn't matter how wrong people are, how stupid people are, or how fucked-up their reactions to things are. You cannot effectively change that at scale, except via constant, persistent social engineering over years or even decades.
If the opposition is offering free pizza, then it doesn't matter how much healthier and better your free salad really is. Don't waste your time on trying to convince people, don't waste your energy on it, don't waste your emotions on it. People are going to choose the pizza, and you damn well know it.
If you want them to take your offering instead, you need to come up with something that hundreds of millions of people will think is tastier than pizza.
Now sure, you can try and sell people the idea that the pizza guy doesn't wash his hands after taking a shit. You can put up giant posters of the cockroaches crawling all over the stall, and sure you might make a dent.
But when the alternative looks like a bunch of dry bitter rabbit food to them, no matter how tasty it actually is, you're fucked.
You need to address the actual concerns of the voters (no matter how stupid), and you need to show them that you're addressing them, in a way they'll actually notice and appreciate.
Not 'ought to'. Will.
What it needs is some angry people who will get up on their hind legs and fight for the working classes. It needs people who are loudly and visibly sick of the status quo, tired of the bullshit and ready to rip the face off anyone who gets in their way.
Not the fucking charity-auction Moira Schitt ghouls schmoozing up to $LARGE_CORPORATION while laughing about the dirty poors, or smirking about how bombing Palestinian children is the only moral choice.
(Seriously, Trump ought to hire Matt Miller and Vedant Patel - they did more to undermine the Dem campaign than anyone else. The optics were an unmitigated disaster.)
"Am I out of touch? No, it's the voters who are wrong"
You talk about this kind of thing ahead of time, duh.
Eggplant. I tried cooking it until just tender, like zucchini - and it was nasty as hell; I never got it and never wanted to.
Then I encountered some actually properly cooked stuff in a pasta dish when eating out and ohmygod.
Mush? Slime? How long was she cooking them for, for god's sake?
Saucepan. Lots of boiling salty water. Cut an X in the bottom so they cook more evenly, then drop them in for just 2-3 minutes until barely tender. They're amazing, and they actually taste like themselves.
By all means complain about overcooked vegetables, but you don't need to fry everything in bacon fat to make it taste good.
Consider how you'd go about exploiting the opposite case.
If people will always vote for the slightly-less-worse candidate, then you only ever have to be slightly-less-worse than the opposition. You can sleaze right up to them and be almost as corrupt and evil as they are, so long as there's just a little bit of extra sleaze sticking out that you can point to as the worse alternative. And you can farm the shit out of that, because then the other side never has to improve either - it's an anti-competitive duopoly, where they both agree to only compete over surface details, not their overall horribleness, leaving them free to sleaze right up to the fucking-monster end of the spectrum.
Presumably a percentage of people refused to enable that behaviour, and said that slightly-less-genocide is a bridge too fucking far.
They made it plain from the outset that if the dems wanted to play chicken on this, the dems would lose. That they were not to big to fail, that daddy wouldn't bail them out this time; put down the bombs or you're getting kicked out for real.
The morally-correct choice would have been for the dems to stop supporting genocide, especially with so much at stake.
There's this huge narrative that's been consistently pushed that the actions of politicians are beyond accountability, sent down from on high like acts of god, and that moral responsibility lies only with the voters; that it's meaningless even imagine any obligation for the ruling class to try and be good enough to vote for.
You know, the way the fossil fuel lobby found ways to shift the blame onto the consumer instead of themselves. The way the opioid manufacturers did the same. The way the gun manufacturers did the same. The way plastic manufacturers did the same fucking thing as well. We'll act however we fucking well want to, and if you don't like it, that's literally your problem.
Oh no, you can't hold us accountable now, it's the worst possible time. It's too soon to have this conversation, how can you be so insensitive, can't you see there's a highschool full of dead kids?
Somewhere, sometime, people have to say enough. And they did.
The conditions required for fascism to flourish have been building up since the freaking 1950s.
Labour laws getting systematically stripped, unions getting crippled, corporations exploiting workers like fucking battery hens. Wages stagnating for decades, social programs stripped bare, people starting their careers with a lifetime of crippling student debt, Corporations and investors pricing housing completely out of reach, education systematically defunded, ongoing militarization of the police into armed gangs accountable to nobody, weird creepy fetishization of the military pushing unconditional support for increasingly brutal and cynical invasions and regime-changes, apologia for and allegiance to fascists like Netanyahu...
it's literally everything that Cyberpunk 2077 was parodying, for god's sake.
People are poor, they're exploited to the bone, they have no secure income, they're drowning in debt and can't afford housing. They feel un-represented by the government, they have fuckall education, the corpo media piped into their home keeps telling them that immigrants and deviants are the cause of all their problems, they're constantly shown how their government bombs hell out of Evil Brown People overseas and that this is a good and righteous thing, so they want more of it at home. They hark back to a mythical Good Old Days they're constantly told about when things weren't as bad and brown and/or LGBTQ people weren't a thing (or could be freely lynched) and women weren't so uppity, and they want that back; let's try that last part and the first part will surely come with it.
You get these people, you show them a political outsider who says screw all the rules and bureaucracy, I'm going to take charge, sweep all the red tape out of the way and do all the things you know you want...
Of course they'll get sucked in.
And of course it doesn't matter that their figurehead is worthless and incompetent and clearly evil.
It's not about results, it's about emotion. People are fed up, worn out and sick of the way things are.
Trump and his degenerate shitgibbons promise to trash everything, and hurt the people their followers believe are the problem. And that's deeply emotionally satisying.
If you spend the whole time sucking up to fascists, people are just going to cut out the middleman and elect one to run the place.
I mean he did kill Hitler, that's got to count for something.
As a fellow Australian, I don't understand why you're surprised.
"Hold your nose and vote for the lesser evil" may be pragmatic, but it doesn't get people emotionally engaged. It doesn't get you infectious enthusiasm and passion. It gets you reluctant, dejected compliance, and that simply does not catch fire.
On the other side you have nothing but emotional engagement; god knows it's not a rational or pragmatic choice there. Trump does nothing but pander to hatred and cruelty and fear and the power fantasies of gullible idiots, and it fucking works. Cheap shallow emotional satisfaction, no matter how stupid an idea it is. You know, like junk food and binge drinking and cigarettes and pokies; things that people know full well are ruining their lives, but they continue to seek them out regardless.
If the dems ever want to win, they will have to make the progressives fall in love with them, and you don't get that by backing genocide unconditionally, you just don't.
They didn't get the oh-god-yes, just a not-no, and that does not equal consent.
Well, Democrats can rest easy knowing that Palestinian children will continue being murdered.
I hope it was worth it.
That they're held on a work-day, to disenfranchise those that can't take the day off.
Where's your Western Civilisation now?
"Americans".
Fucking devastating.
Not counting music, I assume - I have a gazilion artists I love if anyone's interested.
As for actual Content with a capital C:
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PhilosophyTube Extremely interesting, well-researched and entertaining presentation of a wide range of philosophical and sociopolitical topics. From the UK.
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Shaun Ditto, though with a different angle and a Northern accent.
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Contrapoints Ditto, but American and quite a bit more... theatrical. Quite a strong focus on gender and transgender issues; check out her video on J. K. Rowling for one of the best treatments of the topic.
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Dr. Geoff Lindsey - Linguistics and phonology stuff, deep dives into pronunciation, fascinating as fuck.
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Middle Eats Really damn good middle-eastern cooking channel, no-nonsense presentation.
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Brian Lagerstrom - Baking / cooking - good recipes, sensible treatment.
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J. Kenji López-Alt of Serious Eats fame - damn good cook, nice guy.
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Tom Bates Creator of Nigel and Marmalade. Dumb, stoopid, awesome.
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Adam Millard - The Architect of Games - video essays on gaming
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Noodle - very funny animated video essays on gaming
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Ice Cream Sandwich - stoopid funny little cartoons about dumb shit.
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Jaiden Animations Animated little essays about stuff, she must be protected at all costs. See for instance Things about Relationships I wish someone told me about.
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Tom Scott has finished up his Things You Might Not Know series, but there's like a decade of them and they're amazing. Little investigative videos on everything from programming to wasp farming. You need to watch all of them.
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Taylor Tries Videos on juggling. I have the hugest talent-crush.
As someone who's been on forums of every stripe since the goddamn 80s, I can say with a great deal of experience that all good internet communities have just one single rule: "Don't make us ban you."
Anything else just invites edgy trolls and rules-lawyering.
Now don't get me wrong, guidelines are good and necessary. Give people an idea of the kinds of thing you do and don't want to see, and the way you will generally act in turn, because managing expectations is important.
But the moment you make hard-and-fast rules that you're obliged to follow, people will make a point of bending you over them with edge cases and not cuddling afterwards, just because they can. They think denial-of-service attacks are just as hilarious against human systems as they are against software ones, if not moreso - or they do it to assert control as part of one personality disorder or another.
If you play their game, you will lose.
You need to have an admin-discretion clause, and not feel bad about invoking it whenever it's the right thing to do.
Of course, this can lead to tyrannical asshole mods - if you have a mod team, you need to keep a close eye on it to prevent shitty personalities taking over in that domain. As the person that the buck stops with, if you can't trust yourself with it, then the place is going to hell anyway.
eliND: scary movies
Probably a neurodivergent thing to some degree, but I don't know how literal people are being when they talk about being scared during/after watching a movie about scary things.
I can totally get picking up second-hand anxiety from on-screen portrayals, similar to picking up second-hand embarrassment or cringe.
But to my mind that's very different emotion from fear, and I don't quite grasp being afraid of something you understand is fictional, or what precisely persists after the movie is done.
I mean sure, jumpscares can be startling in the moment, but I don't get walking around with elevated threat-perception outside of the very narrow context of suspending disbelief, which is what people seem to describe. Threat of what?
Do people actually worry that the axe murderer is going to walk out of the TV and kill them in their beds? Is it just hyperbole when they talk about being afraid during, or especially afterwards? What do people actually experience?
Yes it's a stupid question, but I'm wired up funny and have no ground truth here.
For bonus points, I don't get sad at sad movies either: oh no, they stopped drawing the deer. But what really fucks me up is sudden vindication, and I don't know what to call that emotion.
As an accessible example: Inside Out. I didn't blink at Bing Bong dying, but when Joy finally realised what Sadness was for, and that she wasn't just a useless burden... I have very few defenses against whatever the hell that emotion is. What is it, exactly?
I love diablo-likes, but they're also really annoying.
I've been playing the things since Diablo I; I love the concept and the gameplay loop, but the game-design issues they run up against, and the mechanics that get implemented to address them... irritate the crap out of me over time, and I want to talk about that.
I think the paradox at the core of it all is that the gameplay loop is basically Stardew Valley in Doom clothing.
It's not a hunting game, it's a gathering game. Walk through this area, and harvest all the objects. Explore every part of the map, rip up all the weeds, look for hidden goodies under every fallen log.
The satisfaction you feel ripping through a wave of mobs isn't the satisfaction from triumphantly pounding your enemy's skull into a pile of bloody ashes and limping away, it's the satisfaction you get from ripping off a really big crackly sheet of tree bark in one go. You could probably reskin the whole thing into an apartment-cleaning game and it would still work.
And that would be fine in and of itself, but it probably wouldn't sell many copies - so they dress it up as Epic Monster Combat, and that's where the problems begin - layers and layers of obfuscation to hide the seams.
In order not to feel tedious and grindy, there needs to be a sense of progression; your standard power-fantasy stuff, where the challenges increase, you improve to meet them, rinse and repeat. In practice this equates to a varying number of clicks-per-mob. You start out needing three clicks to defeat a mob, over time you get better gear and go down to two clicks, level up and drop to one click, and woah I'm so powerful. But oh no! A new area with bigger scarier mobs! They take three clicks, even with my new powers!
But of course you'd see through that straight away, so they put numbers on everything. You see bigger and bigger damage numbers as you level up, so it keeps feeling more impressive. For a while, at least.
But that only lasts so long before you start to feel played for a chump, so slap on more and more layers to hide the lines, and make little mini-metagames around navigating them. Trouble is, those minigames really aren't very fun.
Scattering a dozen different stats and resistances across half a dozen gear slots is just a box-packing game. You want to get the best possible numbers for each attribute, but they're clustered randomly across all the different items, so you need to evaluate a butt-ton of different combinations in order to get the best coverage. I'm guessing that's going to have some kind of shitty NP-hard algorithmic complexity, so you're basically doing the travelling salesman problem in your head. Wheee. (ok but seriously this has to map to a named problem that someone's analyzed already... any ideas?)
And hey look, there's the insanely complicated perk tree of PoE, or the similarly confusing devotions from Grim Dawn. Again it looks like they're confusing complexity with richness, and making optimization too confusing to do without third-party tools or even less fun, following a published build. (for god's sake, if we're going down that route, let us plug the final build in at the start, then auto-level towards it)
Item sets! Because there's nothing like grinding for weeks until your corneas dry out, filling up endless stash tabs with partial sets that you'll level out of before you ever complete; it's so much fun. Crafting recipes, same deal, and even worse, meta builds that rely on unique items that are impossible to reliably SSF, so you spend your whole game grinding for trade.
And on and on, there's so many symptomatic patches to delay the eventual ennui, but no fixes to the fundamental design issue that causes it. You can't just take them away and replace them with nothing, or you'd be bored in minutes. But building up to completely jaded after a couple of weeks once you start playing the engine rather than the game is also pretty crappy.
How do you make the fighting feel like fighting instead of watering cauliflowers, or else how do you make crop-harvesting feel badass? How do you create a sense of progression beyond mere stat inflation? How do you do a rich slew of possibilities without creating spaghetti hell that ends up only having six basic metas at the end of it? How for the love of god do you make combat feel intense without blanketing the entire screen in particle effects? Could someone design a system where every build can be effective if you adapt your playstyle to suit?
I dunno, It just feels like the genre is still only half-invented, and waiting around for someone to do it properly.
Thoughts?
Why isn't everything mouldy?
So, fungal spores are literally everywhere, and the requirements for fungus to thrive seem to be trivially low; give it a moderately humid environment and it'll grow on a bare concrete wall ffs eating god only knows what; the dust from the air maybe?
Well, and the great outdoors is full of slightly damp places, many of them downright soggy most of the time - and absolutely rife with organic material to snack on.
Where's the bottleneck? Why isn't the world a choking fungal hellscape?
Maybe Deja vu is when someone reloaded a save
Actually this would be a neat mechanic in-game: everyone around you nopes the fuck out at the sight of you, especially if you killed them previously.
They don't know and they don't understand, but things are very firmly Not Ok.
Partly the cost of failure, possibly a strategic tool.
Chilli crisp, but for herbs?
Presumably either a terrible idea or already a thing, not sure which.
I'm thinking crispy-fried-aromatics-in-oil, Mediterranean edition. Garlic, eschalots (aka scallions), thyme/rosemary/etc, vast quantity of parsley, peppercorns, lemon zest, fine-diced rye sourdough.
Jar of that in the fridge, use it like chilli crisp but for white-people food.
Is this a thing? Should it be a thing?
US regional accents: Saul Goodman and Michael Scott
So, uh, stupid question, but I'm not from the US.
Do Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) and Michael Scott (Steve Carell) share a specific accent? If so, what is it?
They both get that same distinctive tone in their voice when excited; is that a thing from somewhere, or do they just kind of sound alike as humans?
Is it generally safe to walk through a field of cows?
City boy checking in.
So, this one time out on a hike in a semi-rural area, the trail opened out on a grassy riverbank kind of place, and there were a dozen or so cows between me and the path onwards.
Now, I mostly grasp which end of a cow the grass goes in, but that's about my limit; I have no real idea how they operate IRL.
I ended up carefully edging my way past them and gave them as much space as I possibly could, and got extremely stared at by all of them, who probably thought I was nuts.
Just out of curiosity - how careful did I need to be? Can you just like walk through the middle of them, or would that be asking for trouble?
How does affective empathy work with anger?
As I understand it there's two main kinds of empathy: cognitive and affective.
Cognitive empathy is the ability to perceive and understand the emotional states of others, and affective empathy is actually sharing those emotions yourself.
I do the former, but the latter doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
Like, if I see someone being sad, it's possible that I'll be sad or angry that they're in that situation, but those will be my feelings about what's going on, not theirs.
But for those of you who inherently feel-what-you-see, how does this work with, say, anger?
If you see someone being terribly angry, do you feel angry yourself? If so, who do you feel angry at? If you see a fight going on, do you hate both participants?
If someone is angry at you, are you also angry at you?
I guess this applies to any targeted emotion, but anger is a good example.
What is that sound effect in the House M.D theme music?
Yes it's old, I know.
In this opening theme, that deeply unsettling fuzzy vibrato tone.
I'm sure it's copying some kind of hospital sound effect, like an old-tech intercom tone or a warning buzzer, but I just cannot fucking place it. I know I know this sound.
It's driving me nuts. Can someone please tell me what it is? Bonus points if you can link to a recording.
Does anyone speak hairdresser? I need help communicating.
M49, I tend to go a bit long between haircuts which is on me, but I seem to have a really hard time explaining that I want short hair, like 20mm / 3/4"
I usually ask for a #2 clipper on the back and sides, (which works fine), then take as much as they off the top so I can still brush it straight up, preferably too short to grab onto.
Basically a cigar butt with eyes, shut up it works for me.
Even indicating with thumb and finger, this somehow gets interpreted as just barely trimming the tips off and painstakingly shaping the surface, barely affecting the overall quantity of hair.
How's that for length?
What no, get in there with fire and the sword, wreak devastation, I want all of this gone.
:carefully trims another quarter inch off:
It's not just one guy, not just one place, so I am obviously using wrong and misleading words.
How do I ask for the thing I want?
Could a bird propel a skateboard by flapping its wings?
That is to say, could they get enough forward thrust to push themselves along, without taking off? Maybe with like a little perch to hang onto...
Roleplaying evil characters
So, I almost never play evil characters in most CRPGs - despite the potential fun to be had - and recently I've been thinking about why.
I mean, lawful good is the most boring alignment, evil NPCs can be an absolute hoot (exhibit A: Astarion), stealth murdering villagers for lulz can be entertaining, so why am I always such a freaking goody-two-shoes when it comes to actual plot decisions?
I think a lot of it comes down to lame and crudely-drawn motivations for the evil option in each case.
Your options in most games always seem to boil down to callous, greedy or spiteful: haha no / fuck you pay me / I just blinded your child lol.
And those just aren't satisfying. Especially when you're starting out and forming your character's persona and network, you're pretty much powerless, dumped in a situation where you're casting around for allies and can't afford to burn your bridges.
Running around just randomly being mean to folk like some poster child for Troubled Youth and the need to be Tough On Crime is just... stupid. There's some crude sadism there, and there's some crude avarice, it gets you minor short term benefits but no long-term ones, it gets you hated but not feared, without any real sense of control. Everyone dies or gets led off in chains with big sad eyes, and there's always the strong implication that you failed.
It just feels like a heavy-handed morality lesson where all the bad people are thugs, arseholes and/or developmentally challenged. Apart from being not much fun to play, it's kind of erasing the harm presented by smarter, more insidious kinds of evil.
Being a good guy gets you willing allies, is about personal validation, and feels like success. It gets you the generosity of the people you help, but that's a bonus on top the fundamental win of making the world a shinier better place.
By the same token, being an evil bastard should get you unwilling allies, it should be about power, and it should feel like winning. It gets you benefits you did not earn, but that should be a bonus on top of the fundamental win of tightening the screws on people. That's the actual payoff, but it seems to be the one they always miss.
I think evil playthroughs could be a lot more fun if you had better ways to be evil: blackmail, extortion, sneaky betrayal and brutal revenge. Not ODD, in other words, but NPD. Control, leverage, perfidy. Locking your victims down so they have no choice but to help you, or deceiving them into working against their own interests. Either keep a tight rein on your PR - or let them hate, so long as they also fear.
And another BG3 example: I think the nature of the shadow curse was a misstep, what with the all the grotesque madness and putrid corruption that surrounded it. I think it would have been far more effective as psychological horror, morally corrupt but reeking of purity, so shadowheart would have had believable reasons for wanting to join the gothstapo, and the player could plausibly be sold on it despite everything. But instead the lesson seemed to be that evil is yucky and broken and ew don't get it on you, and that just feels like a missed opportunity to me.
What say you?
Am I an outlier in this? Do the typical offerings feel satisfying to you? Are there games that do relatable, enjoyable evil especially well?
Any actually good extreme-panning / "8D audio" songs?
I'm going to assume you've heard the stereo-panning version of the record player song that did the rounds.
However, searching for more like this, I can only seems to find shitty low-effort remixes of songs with someone swiping the entire audio track back and forth, without timing it to the actual notes of the song or putting distinct elements in their own space or any of the actually cool counterpointy stuff you could do with this.
Has anyone found any that don't suck?
Create a race to the bottom in the rental market
Not sure if this counts as politics or not; let me know.
One major brick in the toilet tank of the rental market is apparently investors just 'parking their money' in properties and leaving them vacant longterm, with an eye to selling them later at an inflated price - with rental income being not worth the hassle.
Some people have suggested a tax on vacant properties to give more incentive to rent them out.
Good idea, but I say we go one better.
- Put a hefty tax on all properties that aren't owner-occupied.
- Give a rebate for renting them out, proportional to the percentage above or below the average rental for comparable properties.
If you charge above-average rent, you get a small rebate.
If you charge average rent, you get a medium rebate.
If you charge below-average rent, you get a large rebate. This could even exceed 100%, using the funding from the other categories.
People chasing the large rebate will drive the average down over time, ate viola, we have a race to the bottom and the consumers reap the benefits.
There's probably a dozen reasons why this wouldn't work, but I like it anyway.
The weather today keeps going back and forth between raining and sunny...
It must be a tsunderestorm
Recs please: cosy-but-stabby SF/F
tl;dr: something with the murderbot / hexarchate / locked-tomb kind of vibe
I'm after something sweet but astringent to bite down on; this is the general tone I'm almost always looking for, and I've mined out most of the obvious seams of the stuff.
I don't mind whether it's fantasy or SF, I just want a chunk of emotional intelligence mixed with harsh conflict - with a modern, progressive take if possible.
LGBTQ-themed stuff tends to be good at this in my experience, but I'm not fussed either way. I'm not after romance/smut for its own sake, but it's fine as part of a bigger picture.
Suggestions?
What's the deal with buying single cans out of a multipack at a bottle shop? (Australia)
As per title. I very, very rarely drink, and I generally just want to buy a single of something for a rare treat, however most beers/ciders/etc are sold in multipacks.
The pricing on the shelf is usually per-pack only, yet sometimes I see random products with single cans/bottles missing, and sometimes random products will have a little section of unpackaged singles, despite not having a separate price showing.
Is it generally OK to split an unopened 4- or 6-pack, or is that as weird and inappropriate as doing the equivalent in a supermarket? What even are the rules around this?