What grinds my gears

The American left has for many years now claimed that there's a "cult of personality" around Donald Trump, among his voters and followers. Someone pointed out a rather astute and telling observation about this. At many recent political rallies by Kamala Harris, when you listen to what the crowd is chanting, it's "Kamala, Kamala, Kamala!" What does the crowd typically chant at Donald Trump rallies? Do they chant "Trump"? No, they chant "U.S.A, U.S,A, U.S.A!" So, which one has a cult of personality again? (It's also quite telling what these people at the opposite ends of the divide consider most important: The candidate, or the country?)

I have written previously in this blog about the interesting psychological phenomenon that can be seen in many YouTube videos, especially those recorded in the United States (but in no way restricted to that country), where people will come to the YouTuber, who is recording with a camera in his hand in some public place, and question him about it, sometimes quite aggressively so, telling him that he has no permission to record them, and sometimes even alleging that it's outright illegal to do so. Some people may get so utterly upset about it that they become outright aggressive and even physical, and may outright attack the person, who is doing nothing more than standing in a public place with a camera in his hand. Sometimes the police is called (and especially in America it varies a lot what the police does, but quite often if the guy is just standing on a traditional public forum, like a sidewalk or a public park, they don't do anything, because that's clearly not illegal

Passengers, released in 2016, is a sci-fi movie starring Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt. The premise (and first half) of the movie is very interesting and intriguing, and could have ended up being a really good sci-fi movie, but ends up being a horrendously unethical movie. What makes a movie "unethical"? What makes a movie unethical is how it portrays unethical evil actions by one or more of the characters in the movie. It's not a question of whether the characters, even the main protagonist, do evil things. That's completely normal storytelling and to be expected. The villains and antagonists often do evil unethical things as a matter of course, to create conflict and for the protagonists to overcome and defeat. Some more daring stories are not that straightforward "good vs. evil" and it may even be that the main protagonist of the story is the one doing a completely unethical evil thing. Maybe it was a mistake, maybe it was a lapse of judgment, maybe

The video game Concord has become infamous for being, quite possibly, the biggest video game failure of all time (at least as of writing this, ie. unless it somehow manages to make a successful comeback). That's because it had a budget of several hundreds of millions of dollars, took 8 years to develop, and was completely shut down (and all purchased copies redeemed) in less than two weeks from launch. Its budget and the timeline of its complete shutdown make it, by far, the biggest flop in the entire history of video games. One would think that with a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars, and 8 years of development, that it would be some kind of absolutely massive video game. Vast open worlds, extensive intricate narrative with hundreds of hours of voice-acted dialogue and motion-captured character animations, enormous amounts of assets, awesome visuals... Yet it's not. Or, rather wasn't. It was just a relatively small multiplayer arena shooter of the same kind as for

In the United States (and some other countries) there exists the legal concept of a "settlement": When one party sues another one for some kind of crime or wrongdoing, the two parties can negotiate a (legally supervised and enforceable) settlement before going to court. In other words, rather than going through all the legal process of going to court, they can settle the case out-of-court (although still under the court's supervision and agreement). This usually involves coming up with an agreement where eg. the injured party gets some kind of compensation (usually monetary one) and legally agrees to not pursue the case further. (There may be be all kinds of other things agreed by either or both parties, depending on what kind of case it is.) This kind of arrangement has all kinds of benefits: It saves time and money on court proceedings, freeing up the courts for other matters, and often the two parties come to a mutual agreement among themselves rather than a third part

Since 99% of the political posts that I write in this blog are highly critical of the modern far left and their ideology, one might easily get the impression that I'm a staunch "far right" ultra-conservative American Republican. Well, I'm not. There are many things I don't agree with American conservatives. And just to demonstrate that, here's one example: I was recently watching some YouTube video (by a right-leaning conservative) that discussed the threat and danger of the American government taking over, restricting and censoring all the big social media platforms, to silence dissent. Unsurprisingly in the comment section there were several comments along the lines of: "Thank God we have the Second Amendment." I selected one of those comments and asked the author how exactly their beloved Second Amendment would help stopping the American government from censoring and restricting social media. How exactly is the author envisioning that happening? W

For a few years now I have been having this pet peeve of mine of some people out there being in this kind of quest to artificially force the use of the "they" pronoun as the gender-neutral singular third-person pronoun. Mostly my gripes have been about the youtuber and math popularizer Matt Parker, who contracted this disease some time in late 2019 and has never really stopped it (engaging in it sometimes to extreme egregious levels, sometimes to much lesser extents.) Time and again when I think that I have seen the most egregious form of trying to push this "they-pronoun fetish", someone (Matt Parker or someone else) just succeeds in surpassing all previous expectations. For example, when I thought that Matt Parker couldn't outperform himself in this front, he surprised me by using "they" to refer to a computer program (rather than the perfectly fine and correct "it"). But to surpass even that level of cringe, some time ago I watched a vid