What grinds my gears

One very common phenomenon is that whenever there's something hard to explain in a photograph, most people just attribute it to "photoshop". This is, in fact, the lazy answer to every such picture. It's always "photoshopped". People are really lazy in their skepticism and are, in my opinion, missing out lots of interesting research that could be done into such photographs. Sure, there are tons and tons of images out there that have been manipulated, but that's not always the true explanation. Sometimes the real explanation is much more interesting. In many cases the photograph is actually completely genuine and unaltered, but does not depict what it might look like at first glance. A very good example is the so-called "time-traveling hipster" photograph: This photo was taken in 1941 (at the re-opening of the South Fork Bridge in Gold Bridge, British Columbia). The man looks very out-of-place compared to all the other people around, way...

One game genre that I loved back in the 80's was the text adventure. Sadly, this kind of game is basically completely dead, and nobody makes them anymore, which is a real pity. I miss those games so much. Yes, I know perfectly well about so-called "interactive fiction" games, which are being done by hobbyists to this day. While they are close (they are text-based, and all input is done by writing commands like "go north" or "take apple"), these are not, however, the kind of text adventure I'm talking about. No, I'm talking about graphical text adventures. Most typically the upper half of the screen is a picture of the place, and the lower half is dedicated to text. Every room has its own picture, and the graphics are not purely decorative, but actually convey information and can change. For example, there may be a tree in the picture, which is not mentioned in the default textual description of the room. You could then write "examin...

Apple was a true visionary when they developed their iPhone platform: Top-of-the-line smartphone with a huge-ass capacitive touchscreen almost the size of the entire phone, with a dynamic software-based keyboard that could be hidden and customized for each application type. Many people, including many other companies, expressed their doubts, but after the astonishing world-wide success of the idea, of course everybody else jumped onto the bandwagon. The next smart move by Apple was to allow users to develop software for the phone and distribute it through a centralized app store. This also proved an enormous success, and some developers saw their applications selling literally millions of copies. A curious phenomenon arose: The price of iPhone games were on the 1-2 dollar range, even when virtually the exact same game would cost at the very least 10 dollars on other platforms (and often even more.) I do not know why exactly this happened, but it did. This became the de-facto stan...

I'm a really avid consumer of computer games, but there's one broad genre of games that I simply cannot stand: Online multiplayer games in general, and first-person shooter multiplayer games in particular. During my life I have played probably over a hundred first-person shooter games. I wouldn't say I'm at the level of a pro player, but quite necessarily I'm quite good at those, even at the hardest difficulty settings. So it's not like I'm bad at FPS games. But if I try an online multiplayer version, it's a completely different story. It's not a set of computer-controlled enemies carefully fine-tuned to give a sensible difficulty level. No, it's human players with years of training. What happens is that I play for something like 10 seconds, and I die. Then I respawn in a random location, play for like 10 seconds, and I die. Rinse and repeat. In many cases I don't even see where they were shooting from. Sure, sometimes I manage to kill ...

I have written about this subject in my old "blog", but it deserves further discussion, as I'm playing their new Final Fantasy XIII-3 right now. In the 80's, and especially in the 90's, "Square" (and later "Square Enix") was pretty much a synonym for high-quality JRPG gaming. If a game had that company name attached to it, and especially if the name of the game itself had the words "Final" and "Fantasy" in it (although this wasn't a requirement), you were pretty much guaranteed to get a top-quality thoroughly enjoyable AAA game that not only would be fun to play, but would be certain to receive accolades and recognition. Games like Final Fantasy 6 (confusingly numbered 3 in its original US release) and Final Fantasy 7 are not only rather universally considered some of the best JRPGs ever made, but some of the best games period. (Any "top 100 best games of all time" list is pretty much guaranteed to have e...

Escape Plan is a 2013 movie starring Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Disregarding the "The Expendables" saga (which is just... utterly forgettable), this is (to my knowledge) the first time that these famous actors make a significant main role appearance in the same film, and it marks some kind of return to the big screen for Schwarzenegger. So it better be awesome! However, while not utterly bad, the film was really meh. The major problem I had with the film is that it promised something it didn't deliver. Both its title, and very prominently its prologue, and somewhat throughout the middle of the film, we were promised a "prison escape" film of the "heist movie" kind. In other words, a meticulously crafted plan to escape an "inescapable" prison, where the viewer is only given hints about the ultimate means of escape, and then during the final escape or after it, all the finer details are shown, and all the actions that we...

(Note: I'm using "pathological" in the colloquial sense, not in the medical sense.) Being in time somewhere is a relatively simple task for most people. Most of people, me included, find it easy to plan ahead in cases where they need to be at a certain place at a certain time, even if this requires some simple logistics. For example, if I need to be at a certain place at 10 o'clock, I can plan my timing ahead of time, by working backwards: Since I need to get there on a bus, I can estimate how long it will take me to walk from the final bus stop to that place. I can also estimate (or check if I don't know it) how long the bus takes from the bus stop near my home to that destination. From this information I know how much earlier than 10 o'clock I need to depart. Of course since buses don't travel whenever I need them, I have to check their itinerary and select one that arrives at my bus stop earlier than that time. Long story short, if I estimate it t...