What grinds my gears

Islam has certainly got a rather bad rep due to how many of its adherents have been behaving during the past few decades (both in western countries and within their own countries.) Because criticizing Islam and the culture surrounding and emanating from it has somehow become a taboo, a lot of copious whitewashing has been performed, both by some Muslims themselves, and also "progressive" non-Muslims, to try to raise the profile and status of Islam as a good thing. This takes many forms. One of these is what pretty much amounts to historical revisionism with respect to the contribution of Islam to modern science and technology. Perhaps the most extreme example of this are the claims of Muslim "inventions" that had, allegedly, profound implications in modern science. Arabic people of the first millenium did indeed make some significant contributions to science, especially in the fields of mathematics and astronomy. (What essentially happened was that Greece and ...

Videogame journalism has a great responsibility because they are essentially guiding their readership on which videogames are worth purchasing and which are not. This is real money we are talking about; money that a good majority of their readership doesn't have excessive amounts of. Videogames are not exactly cheap, and many people are using the little they have on them. It is the responsibility of videogame journalists to convey to the reader as neutrally as possible the quality and details of a videogame, to help them make their purchase decisions. Artificially praising a game that does not deserve such praise, in order to entice people to buy the game, is ethically wrong. Doing so for personal gain from the game's developers or publisher is absolutely horrendous (and should be illegal, if it's not already.) But that's exactly what has been happening for quite some time. Most of it is done under the wraps, making it even more condemnable and unjustifiable. Seve...

There are, roughly speaking, three types of DLC available for video games. Firstly, the right kind of DLC. In other words, DLC that expands the original game with new, additional playable content, such as additional levels, for example in the form of a continuation or side story to the main story. Optimally, the original game is a full story all in itself (and can, thus, be fully enjoyed on its own, without any DLC), and the DLC just adds additional extra gameplay to it. The Talos Principle is a perfect example of this. The main game is a complete full game. Later a DLC became available with a smaller side story containing its own additional puzzles. Bioshock Infinite is another example. Secondly, there's lazy DLC. Basically all paid cosmetic DLC is this. Also all paid DLC that only adds minimal and mostly inconsequential elements to the main game (rather than entirely new content that's independent of it), such as eg. new weapons. There's usually no reason to pay...

Just think about the word "nationalism". I bet that you immediately thought of things like neonazis, racism, the holocaust... But why? Why has that word become such a dirty one? As the saying goes (and perhaps most popularized by a famous speech by Abraham Lincoln), a house divided against itself cannot stand . What does this mean? A society has the best chances of becoming prosperous and successful when all of its members work together, when they all cooperate, when there's a sense of camaraderie among them. Consider the post-World-War-2 Finland for instance. This was a country in economic ruin. Because of the war there was famine and an economic crisis. There was, however, a strong sense of national identity among Finns, a culture of cooperation, of working together for a brighter future. In about 20 or 30 years Finland rose from absolute economic ruin to be one of the wealthiest welfare states in the entire world. A decade or two more, and it became one of the b...

The funny thing about statistics is that you can manipulate raw data to support whatever result you want. Simply use mental gymnastics and excuses to be more selective and inflate results. Take this study , for example, which has been much touted in the media. The study tries to prove that sexism is rampant in online gaming. (Yes, my use of "tries to prove", rather than "concluded" is not an accident. It's quite clear that the authors had a clear goal in mind when they made the experiment.) The experiment was to play online Halo 3 matches with three players: A neutral "control" player that does not send any voice messages, a "male" player and a "female" player, and see how many sexist comments they receive. Of course the amount of sexist comments was extremely low. That won't do. So how can they manipulate the data to inflate that percentage? Well, firstly, and like all good science, let's remove the control from al...

It's possibly because of some recent games I have played, such as Cho Dengeki Stryker and very especially the absolute nightmare that was Final Fantasy X (read that latter blog post if you haven't already, for my rant in excruciating detail why it's one of the worst games I have ever played in my life), but I have somehow lately grown to hate video games with too many cutscenes and, especially, too much text dialogue. For instance, I'm currently playing a DS game named Inazuma Eleven 2: Firestorm . I had played the first game of the series, and I found it interesting. It has a rather novel idea. It's essentially a more or less traditional JRPG, except that battles are in the form of football matches (rather than your traditional JRPG battles). When said like that it might sound a bit crazy, or that it wouldn't work, but it actually does quite well. The game is quite ok, except for one thing. You guessed it: Too many cutscenes, and way too much text in thos...

Imagine an ultra-liberal leftist gay rights activist group that has existed since the 1950's. This is a group that has been fighting for gay rights for over 60 years. What would it take to make such a group to not only oppose a gay parade, but in fact call for it to be legally banned? A normal gay parade that does nothing more than all the gay parades that have existed for decades. What could possibly be higher in the "pecking order" of social justice, so much higher that even a long-time leftist gay rights group is calling for the criminalization of a gay parade? What could possibly make these activists go against their own principles, and overturn everything that they have fought for? Islam. That's what. Islam is, it seems, the highest tier of the "social justice ladder", so to speak. It doesn't matter how intolerant its adherents may be, they will always be above all other minority groups, and all those other groups, no matter how oppressed, must ...