What grinds my gears

Some spoilers ahead! While I won't be spoiling every single detail of the movie, I will not judiciously avoid all spoilers either, so if you haven't seen the movie and want to see it without knowing anything about its contents, you might want to avoid reading this blog post until after. I am a huge fan of the Terminator movie franchise, and I consider particularly Terminator 2 not only the best movie in the series, but in fact one of the best action sci-fi movies out there. I have seen that movie probably a dozen times by now. (Perhaps somewhat ironically, I'm not a huge fan of the first movie, something that most avid fans would consider heresy. I just find the first movie too low-budget, too low-quality, too "early 80's" (in a bad way), too cheesy, and too full of inconsistencies and annoyances, to be all that enjoyable. Sure, many people take all that as precisely what makes the movie so charming, but I don't, really. I mean, it's not a bad movie ...

Disney announced recently that they would not be including a previously planned "trans" scene in an upcoming episode of the Pixar animated series Win or Lose . Unsurprisingly, far-leftists threw a hissy-fit, accusing Disney of "erasing" trans people, and "not allowing them to exist". Sigh. Just because a TV series or movie does not explicitly state some personal characteristic is not "erasing" anybody nor "not allowing them to exist". If you see a movie and, let's say, nobody states being an architect, for example, does that mean that the movie is "erasing" architects and "not allowing them to exist"? Of course not. Or a TV series never explicitly mentions, say, stamp collecting. Does that mean that the TV series is "erasing" that hobby and "not allowing it to exist"? Obviously not. Just because a piece of media does not explicitly mention some characteristic does not mean that it's set on...

I have written many blog posts about the absolute disgrace that's the American police and their police culture. American cops literally consider their own safety more important than the safety of citizens, which makes them absolute pathetic cowards, and there are many, many examples of this (one blog post about this here ). Way too many times they also assault, injure, maim, paralyze and even kill people who have done nothing wrong (an example blog post ). They also have an astonishing ID fetish, often going to absolutely insane lengths to get the ID of a completely innocent person who has done absolutely nothing wrong (such as, for example, dispatching a whopping 7 police cruisers and 9 police officers in order to get the ID of a completely innocent bystander , and nothing else, in a completely non-threatening non-dangerous situation where no crime of any kind has happened or is even suspected of having happened. They just wanted his ID, that's it. It goes beyond insanity. Co...

All the way since the early 1980's and even much earlier there was, at least in many parts of the world, this widespread notion that some movie producers had at least considered inserting a form of subliminal advertising into the movie reels that they were sending to movie theaters, in the form of showing an advertisement picture (eg. for a brand of soda, or whatever) during one frame of the movie, eg. every 24 frames, ie once per second. The widely believed claim was that since the picture was only shown for one single frame, it would go too fast for anybody to consciously notice, but the subconscious would notice it, especially since it was shown repeatedly once per second during the entire movie, and thus it would create a subconscious craving for that particular product in the viewers. This notion was so widely believed that, in fact, many countries outright passed laws banning this from being done. The funny thing is that many people believed that claim, ie, that you wouldn...

I recently wrote a blog post about the recent video game Concord , which is not only arguably the biggest failure in the entire history of video games (because it took 8 years to develop, cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and was completely shut down in less than 2 weeks, all purchases refunded), but was even more of a failure than at first seemed. How so? Well, Sony, the company that had purchased and thus owns Firewalk Studios, the development company that created the game, envisioned Concord to not only "revolutionize gaming" but in fact become their flagship franchise, the video game franchise that would be most associated with Sony. Where "Mario" is the flagship franchise of Nintendo, and "Final Fantasy" the flagship franchise of Square Enix, "Concord" would be the one for Sony. They planned it to not only be an entire series of games, with new entries coming out for the foreseeable future, they wanted this flagship franchise of theirs...

A far-leftist bigot working for the game developer company The Initiative got recently some flak for several completely unhinged tweets that he has posted attacking "gamers", in other words, his very core audience, the people he is helping to develop games for. Among several other such tweets he has posted these: They repeat the same strange narrative and lie that far-leftist bigots have been repeating for well over ten years now: That "gamers" hate female main characters in video games, and whenever a game is announced or published that has one, the "gamers" throw a hissy-fit and temper tantrum and start furiously attacking the game online. This is such an obvious untruth, such an obvious lie, that it's just incomprehensible why they just keep repeating it over and over and over. This very thing has been going on for over ten years now, and is not showing any sign of stopping, no matter how obviously false it is. Where was the backlash and anger when ...

I have written earlier about the video game Concord, which is arguably the biggest flop in the entire history of video games, surpassing every other (in)famous failed video game by a large margin, by any metric you may want to use: It took about 8 years to develop, cost several hundred million dollars to make (the 400 million dollars figure is the most commonly cited), and it was recalled by its publisher, Sony, less than 2 weeks after launch, all purchases refunded. Reportedly the game had sold a few tens of thousands of copies by that point (which is a small fraction of the typical sales numbers of such high-budget games, which are in the millions, and obviously nowhere even near enough to even break even), and the maximum number of concurrent players on Steam was something like 600, which is abysmal (in contrast, typical video games of this kind of budgets get hundreds of thousands of concurrent players, sometimes even millions). With a budget in the several hundreds of millions of ...