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?

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.

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.

while picking up some paperwork. AAARGH.

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?

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...

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?

dear god I love this game

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?

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.

1. Put a hefty tax on all properties that aren't owner-occupied.
2. 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.

It must be a tsunderestorm