What grinds my gears

My previous blog post gave me a bit of a nostalgic feeling when thinking about video games in physical media. Who purchases those on this day and age anyways? Ok, they are still very common on consoles, but on the PC side they are becoming more and more of a rarity. I myself haven't purchased a PC game as a physical disc in years. But I do have quite a lot of them. Not nearly as much as avid collectors, but somewhere in the ballpark of 150-200 in total (this includes all games I own as a physical copy, for all systems, not just PC games. From those perhaps about 75-100 are PC games.) Here are a few of the more iconic, more recent PC games I have a physical copy of: Probably not many people own these as physical copies. Of course I have been buying video games for quite some time, so it goes way back. And waaaaay back: In fact, Tomb Raider III was the first PC game I ever purchased. That's the original disc. I wonder if it would even work anymore. Of cours...

A couple of decades ago the video game business was rather simple: A game developer offers a complete full-size video game on physical media, you buy one copy of that physical media, and that's it. You have the full game; you play it; you are happy. At most there could be some patches to fix bugs, which you could download and apply. (After technology became advanced enough, the game could automatically patch itself! No longer did you need to go to the developer's website and download an .exe file and run it manually to patch the game. Yeehaw!) Then digital purchasing and distribution of games became viable. While purchasing games on a physical media is still alive and well to this day, it has become less and less relevant over the years due to the convenience of simply purchasing the game online and have it playable as soon as your rig can download it. What's better, the digital version is oftentimes cheaper than the physical copy (or, at the very least, downloadable vers...

" How Britain celebrates Christmas in 2017: Armed guards, concrete barriers and metal detectors spring up around festive markets due to terror attack fears " "Armed police, large concrete barriers and stop and search checks carried out at festive markets across UK" This is what the British police currently looks like: Welcome to open borders, unrestricted immigration, and the joys of multiculturalism. Just hope that the joys of multiculturalism don't explode too close to you. Or that the bullets from those automatic assault rifles will be able to stop those jihadi trucks. And by the way, there are still between half and one million economic migrants entering Europe every single year, with no signs of it slowing down. So happy multiculturalism everybody.

Science ought to be objective, neutral and unbiased, examining just the facts and drawing conclusions from those facts, whatever those conclusions might be, without biases or agendas. If the facts overwhelmingly indicate thing X, then that's it. No ifs, buts or maybes. That's not the situation in all cases, however. Sometimes things like cultural norms, stigmas and taboos hinder scientific research, no matter how objective that research might be. As a hypothetical example, suppose that the IQ of a million white people and a million black people is tested, using an extensive unbiased IQ test that has been demonstrated to be completely independent of culture, upbringing and educational background (ie. those things do not affect the results of the test). The test is performed properly as a double-blind test with controls, and is as much automated as possible, to remove all possible bias from the people doing the research. Now, suppose that the results show a quite significan...

In a previous blog post, The Finnish constitution vs. the United States constitution , I compared the two constitutions and how they are applied in each country, and described how weak and powerless the Finnish constitution is, and how relatively freely it's ignored by judges and officials. There are still even more differences than what I wrote there. In the United States, the constitution is, in fact, enforceable law. Meaning that officials can be sued by individuals for unconstitutional behavior. In other words, an individual can sue a government official (such as for example a sheriff) for an action that's against the constitution. A recent case in the United States is a perfect example of this. A sheriff in Georgia has been indicted after a jury awarded 3 million dollars to 900 students, after the sheriff ordered his deputies to perform an unlawful body search of those students. The sheriff was sued explicitly for violating the 4th Amendment rights of those students....

Consider the following news article title: The twist? The woman was arrested for fraud allegations, not for having the sticker. (She cannot be arrested for having such a sticker. It's not illegal.) The genius in the article title is that it is, technically speaking, 100% correct. The woman did have a "Fuck Trump" sticker on her truck, she was jailed, and the sheriff did threaten her with charges. Those are all true statements. Moreover, the title isn't actually, and technically speaking, making any connection between those claims. It's not claiming that one happened because of the other. But of course the title heavily implies the connection, and it's exactly the impression that the reader gets. The author of the article has plausible deniability ("I never claimed that one thing happened because of the other"), but it's still quite clearly designed to imply the connection, and to give the impression that there is a connection. I ...

Meet Denise Young Smith, Apple's diversity chief. She's being harassed by an angry mob online. Not only that, but she's being fired from her job because of that outcry. A black woman is being oppressed, harassed online, and fired from her job. It seems that the social justice warriors were right after all. I might have to revise my views on society. Perhaps the social justice warriors do have a point after all. There indeed is oppression of minority people. If a company like Apple is letting a black woman go as a result of her being a target of online abuse, there is no other conclusion. This is a real travesty. Oh... wait... Who exactly is doing the online harassment? A bunch of white nationalist neonazis? A bunch of American rednecks? Members of the KKK? Internet trolls? No. None of those. It's actually the social justice warriors who are the ones engaging in harassing her online. Wait. Weren't the social justice warriors supposed to defend minorit...