What grinds my gears

If someone even just mentions the name Donald Trump in your presence (in real life or online), regardless of the tone or why he was mentioned, do you immediately feel the compulsive need to butt in and say something negative about the man? If someone mentions merely something that's commonly attributed to him and his presidency (for example the infamous tariffs), do you likewise feel the compulsive need to butt in and disparage the man (even if the original comment was not actually critical)? Do you frequently start saying or writing negative comments about Trump even in conversations that had nothing to do with him? If the topic of conversation deals with negative traits in people in general, do you often feel the need to mention Trump (even if the conversation had absolutely nothing to do with politics)?  Do you readily and eagerly believe every single negative thing claimed about Trump without doing any fact-checking or corroboration that the claim is actually true? Do you immed...

Because the modern western world just loves to self-flagellate and declare all western countries, especially the European and North American ones, as pure evil incarnate, British colonialism has, unsurprisingly, got a really bad reputation and is considered one of the biggest crimes against humanity, perhaps only surpassed by American slavery (and even that just barely). It's curious that only the UK gets that widespread reputation even though Portugal, France, Spain and Italy were also huge colonizers in that same era (and in many aspects in fact even worse, when it comes to the treatment of natives.) Especially Portugal was really prolific on that department, even rivaling Great Britain in terms of the size of their territory and their control over it. Thus, it's a bit odd that only the UK is being mostly maligned on this front. (Spain and France get a bad rep for colonizing North America, but that came later.) But one has to ask: Was British colonialism actually such a horre...

For decades Bioware was one of the largest and most renowned game studios in the world, creating some of the most memorable and lauded game franchises, such as Mass Effect, Baldur's Gate, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Dragon Age (before the travesty that was the latest installation, that is.) Then, at some point during the last ten years, like so many other western game studios, it got invaded and infected by far-leftist activists of the worst kind. The exact kind of people who openly and brazenly mock and insult their very customerbase because they don't like "gamers", and who killed franchise after franchise with their politics. Former employees have also revealed that, like so many other game studios, also Bioward had become an absolute nightmare and hell to work in because of all the far-leftist activists and busybodies who were more interested in enforcing their politics in the workplace and injecting their politics into the games than actually crea...

There's a scene in the TV series  Better Call Saul  where Mike goes to a group therapy session where the participants have experienced traumatic events, loss of loved ones or other tragedies, and he exposes one of the participants as a pretender, a liar who frequents such sessions and makes up completely fictitious sob stories about a non-existent dead wife. A lot of therapists and people who run these group sessions will attest that such a thing is not just pure fiction, but it does indeed happen in real life, and it happens a lot. In other words, people who go to such sessions and just make up completely invented sob stories, or at the very least greatly embellish what they have experienced (or, perhaps, tell someone else's experience as their own.) I suppose in many, perhaps most, cases this is a form of "Munchausen syndrome". In other words, the person making up fictitious illnesses or tragic events in order to garner attention and sympathy. And what better enviro...

Grand Theft Auto 6 is one of the most anticipated video game sequels of all time (perhaps only second to Half-Life 3, which unfortunately will actually never be made, at least not as originally planned, as has been clearly indicated by Valve.) This is largely because of the astonishing popularity of its predecessor, ie. Grand Theft Auto 5 (which is currently the second best-selling video game of all time, which is pretty remarkable and astonishing, when you think about it.) In fact, it's so anticipated that waiting for it has become an outright popular meme (often of the form "we got (something unusual) before GTA6".) Many people, however, have raised concerns about the possible leftist political messaging and content that the game might contain. These concerns are actually not recent; they get back several years. The concerns have only intensified with the published preview trailers. There are some indications that Rockstar Games, the game studio developing the game (and...

I have written before about absolutely insane laws in the United States that feel  extremely  wrong and unjust. The following two examples of American legal practice are not at that level of total insanity, but they still feel a bit iffy with regards to one's sense of justice. 1) Imagine that you work for a company as an accountant and treasurer, and while doing your job you engage in some shady illegal behavior, embezzling company money, falsifying bookkeeping to try to hide your theft of company money, and so on. This, of course, is very illegal. However, when you get caught, you simply quit your job in that company and... that's it. Nothing happens to you. The company stops pursuing the case and just lets you go free. No consequences. Or imagine that you are a nurse working in a hospital, and while doing your job, you start secretly poisoning patients. Highly illegal activity. But when caught, you just quit your job there and... again, that's it: No consequences. The ho...

Only You (And You Alone) is a famous and very beautiful 1955 song by The Platters. Because of how popular, famous and memorable it is, unsurprisingly it has been used in quite many movies, TV series and video games, such as for example Deadpool&Wolverine, the Fallout TV series and Far Cry 5. And, in at least one sense, that has pretty much ruined the song. If you go to almost any YouTube video for the song (especially the official one), 99% of the comments will be nothing but completely stupid references to those games and movies. One particular example I found particularly sad was a comment made by an elderly widow who wrote a really emotional and touching comment about how her husband would sing the song to her, and how much she misses him. And what do you know, almost every single reply to that beautiful emotional comment is nothing but idiots making stupid references to those movies and video games. It's extremely tactless, inappropriate and infuriating. Here we have a swe...

As I have written before , flat-earthers cognitively live in a strange and bizarre world which is akin to the Bronze Age with modern technology. In other words, even though we have super-advanced technology that can, for example, measure distances to the nanometer accuracy, locate your exact position on Earth to the millimeter accuracy, measure the strength of gravity at any given point to parts-per-million accuracy... we still don't know how far for example Cape Town is from Buenos Aires, much less what's beyond the sky, or how the universe works beyond just a few kilometers up, and all that scientists do, just like the philosophers and religious leaders of the Bronze Age, is make completely wild unjustified guesses about that stuff and, for some unfathomable reason, all the millions of scientists from all around the world, from different countries, cultures, backgrounds and sociopolitical beliefs, believe one unified guesswork belief system with no doubt, no skepticism, no co...

Particularly in certain states of the United States the "trans" ideology has invaded the medical profession so deeply and profoundly, very much including all therapists and psychologists, that it's literally impossible to actually get help if some has some form of "gender dysphoria" and would want some help with it. "Gender dysphoria" is not a complete fabrication and invention of the modern far left. Some forms of it do actually exist as a psychological issue, and this has been documented in medicine for probably at least a century. The most common age bracket of people who suffer from some form of it is teenagers and to some extent young adults. There are many forms of it, but it's actually relatively normal among teenagers sometimes: A teenage girl might have huge self-confidence issues and feel like she is not like the other girls at school, especially the popular and beautiful ones. Because of these insecurities she might be very shy and intro...

The Trump administration has once again recently declassified a bunch of US military documents about "UFOs", and some people are going crazy about it, claiming that it confirms that UFOs are real, they are physics-defying alien spacecraft, and that the military has confirmed their existence. Yet, what does this evidence consist of? A lot of written reports, and blurry footage. That's it. That's all we got. That's all the military got, for all we know. And, indeed, all of the photos and video footage of alleged UFOs always show blurry blobs. It's never sharp in-focus footage showing clear small details. Do you know  why  all the UFO footage is always blurry? Because when the footage is not blurry, when it shows the object in question in sharp intricate detail, it's always very evident what it actually is. That's why. So it's a kind of "natural selection" process: When the footage is sharp, clear, in focus, showing intricate detail, it just...

Five years ago I wrote about the question of whether the Western World is going to disappear just like the Roman Empire . For quite a while now this "soft empire" of sorts that we have, the so-called "Western World", and especially Europe in particular, has felt too big, too powerful, too stable to ever fall, to ever cease to exist, to ever crumble into pieces and become a disjointed set of small warring states, most of them either totalitarian or run by pure anarchy, accompanied by a complete economic collapse and the ensuing death of millions of people. Europe in particular seems too successful, too rich, too strong, too stable for that to happen. Yet, we have many precedents for this in history. No better example than the Roman Republic, later Roman Empire. It lasted for about a thousand years, was the largest superpower on the entire planet, controlled the majority of the known world, and had a military, governmental and economic power that no other nation could...

As of late, you are experiencing massive monetary losses in your gaming business, throwing hundreds of millions of dollars on completely mediocre projects that end up failing. By this point your losses have likely surpassed a billion dollars, and all you have to show for it are a few crappy games that nobody wants to play and everybody is laughing at. You should reflect a bit about why that is. Start by looking back in time, some 15-or-so years. Many major game studios were publishing several gigantic triple-A games per year, most of which received great acclaim, huge sales, and which are considered some of the best games ever made. Not one game in five years, but two or three games each year. And the kicker? Each of these games took somewhere around one to two years to develop and had a budget that was a fraction of your multi-hundreds-of-millions of dollars budgets. And we are not even talking about some big publishers subsidizing several independent smaller development studios. We a...

From some time maybe in the 1970's or 1980's to some time in the early 2000's, and to some extent to this day, a strange notion started spreading in Finland. And that was the notion that people should not waste tap water needlessly, and only use as much as was needed and no more. Don't leave water taps running for longer than necessary, don't flush the toilet unnecessarily, and so on. In fact, water saving toilets became extremely widespread during that time, with two flush levers: One to use a smaller amount of water and another to use a larger amount, and instructions on when to use which. The thing is: Being conservative on how much tap water is being used makes sense in many countries where water is scarce and being wasteful about it is detrimental. However, Finland is not one of those countries (and neither are most of the northern and central European countries, or Canada, and many other similar countries). In Finland (and other Nordic Countries) water is not ...

More and more teachers in the United States have been uploading videos and posts about an extremely worrying trend that they have experienced, and have been doing it for quite some years now. And the phenomenon is the astonishing degradation of literacy, skills and cognitive capacity of the average student. Literacy among students has become poorer and poorer during the last ten-or-so years. Even many high school students are literally incapable of reading and understanding text that's even slightly more complicated. They don't understand most "big words", they don't know what they mean, and often they don't even know how they are pronounced. Give them almost any book that's even slightly more advanced in the literary sense, using even slightly more uncommon terms and concepts, and they are unable to read and understand it. And we are not talking about some advanced philosophy or science, but just regular prose that anybody in their 30's and older can ...

By this point I have watched literally hundreds and hundreds of videos of American cops doing a traffic stop (footage coming from either the cop's bodycam, a citizen's camera, or both.) One pattern almost always repeats, and I will never, ever understand it. Just consider these situations: If the car has invalid license plates, fake license plates, or no plates at all, they do not consider the driver an extremely dangerous armed-to-the-teeth criminal. They just approach the car and speak to the driver with no worries in the world. If the car was eg. speeding, they don't consider the driver armed and dangerous.  If the car has windows that are so heavily tinted that you literally can't see anything inside, they don't consider the driver armed and dangerous. If the driver has no valid driver's license or outright refuses to provide one, and refuses all forms of identification, they don't consider him armed and dangerous. If the driver starts arguing with the c...

It seems like Sony Entertainment just don't learn from their past mistakes, do they? In the recent past they spent hundreds of millions of dollars (a commonly-cited figure is 400 million) and 8 years of development time on the biggest flop of the entire history of video games that has ever existed. In other words, Concord: Hundreds of millions of dollars spent, 8 years of development time, the game completely shut down in less than 2 weeks from publication and all purchases (a few tens of thousands of copies) refunded. Literally zero revenue, no exaggeration. As mentioned in that blog post, one would think that a budget of several hundreds of millions of dollars would mean the game was an absolutely massive open world experience with an absolutely enormous amount of assets and content, an absolutely massive amount of NPCs with scripted lines, a massive amount of quests and missions and so on and so forth. Nope. In actual reality it was just a so-called "hero shooter" wit...

I have written before about some of the most insane laws in the United States: American cops can cause literally millions of dollars in private property damage , and neither them, the city, or any part of the government has to compensate a single penny. It's 100% the person's loss. His property is just destroyed by the cops, and there's absolutely no recourse for the owner. Nothing. It's his loss, 100%. But what if you are involved in a car accident with a police car , and it was 100% caused by the cops and you are 100% innocent of anything, and courts fully judge it as such? Do you at least then get some kind of compensation for the damages and loss of property? Nope. You will not get a single penny. Even your insurance company will not give you a single penny because it was a police car (because of some insane loopholes in their own rules). It's, once again, 100% your loss, and you have no recourse. If you buy a plot of land 100% legally and by the book, and plan ...

Matt Walsh is an ultra-conservative American Christian who has a very big YouTube channel and overall media presence, and who has even produced several quite successful movies about the invasion of modern far-leftism and its excesses. He often makes very good points and is very rational reasonable. "Often" being the most important word there, rather than "always". Because sometimes his rationality and reason is shoved aside by his ultra-conservative ultra-American-Christian activism and propaganda. Don't get me wrong: He is perfectly entitled to his Christian beliefs, and in fact a lot of things he believes in, and believes should be the norm, are much better than most alternatives (including a particular other religion). However, the problems start when he starts engaging in propaganda and outright historic revisionism in order to promote his brand of Christianity and his religious ideals. For example, he is one of those American conservatives who strongly beli...

Last year I wrote about how I have become utterly tired of "prank" videos . Not just the mean and stupid ones, but  all  of them. Including those shown in prime time television (eg. "Candid Camera", "Just For Laughs Gags" and so on.) There's a somewhat similar thing I have also gotten completely tired of in later years, and that's all the "thinking outside the box" type problems. In other words, puzzles, problems, riddles and so on, where the solution requires something that's surprising and wasn't apparent from the setup of the problem in question. You know, the kind of problem where the solution involves a sentiment like "nobody said the lines you draw can't go outside the grid" and the myriads of other similar problems. And that sentiment reveals the very reason why I'm so tired of them: They are intentionally designed to be deceptive. For all intents and purposes they lie by omission: The problem is always se...

In the United States, trial by jury, having a jury of regular fellow citizens in criminal cases, is considered one of the most fundamental core aspects of a free constitutional democratic society with a fair justice system. One of the core ideas with it is that justice is not in the hands of a minority elite, ie. those who are in power, but in the hands of the people. It reduces and avoids tyranny and oligarchies, where the elite ruling class judges and sentences citizens. Not all countries have implemented the concept of trial-by-jury of citizens. Instead, in many countries criminal trials are judged by a panel of judges (and, sometimes, other kinds of legal experts). In other words, a panel of highly educated experienced licensed experts with advanced law degrees and years of experience. While trial-by-jury might sound like a good and fair idea on paper, the recent Lindsay Clancy trial has really showed its main problems and drawbacks. Two of the most prominent problems with regular ...