What grinds my gears

Only You (And You Alone) is a famous and very beautiful 1955 song by The Platters. Because of how popular, famous and memorable it is, unsurprisingly it has been used in quite many movies, TV series and video games, such as for example Deadpool&Wolverine, the Fallout TV series and Far Cry 5. And, in at least one sense, that has pretty much ruined the song. If you go to almost any YouTube video for the song (especially the official one), 99% of the comments will be nothing but completely stupid references to those games and movies. One particular example I found particularly sad was a comment made by an elderly widow who wrote a really emotional and touching comment about how her husband would sing the song to her, and how much she misses him. And what do you know, almost every single reply to that beautiful emotional comment is nothing but idiots making stupid references to those movies and video games. It's extremely tactless, inappropriate and infuriating. Here we have a swe...

As I have written before , flat-earthers cognitively live in a strange and bizarre world which is akin to the Bronze Age with modern technology. In other words, even though we have super-advanced technology that can, for example, measure distances to the nanometer accuracy, locate your exact position on Earth to the millimeter accuracy, measure the strength of gravity at any given point to parts-per-million accuracy... we still don't know how far for example Cape Town is from Buenos Aires, much less what's beyond the sky, or how the universe works beyond just a few kilometers up, and all that scientists do, just like the philosophers and religious leaders of the Bronze Age, is make completely wild unjustified guesses about that stuff and, for some unfathomable reason, all the millions of scientists from all around the world, from different countries, cultures, backgrounds and sociopolitical beliefs, believe one unified guesswork belief system with no doubt, no skepticism, no co...

Particularly in certain states of the United States the "trans" ideology has invaded the medical profession so deeply and profoundly, very much including all therapists and psychologists, that it's literally impossible to actually get help if some has some form of "gender dysphoria" and would want some help with it. "Gender dysphoria" is not a complete fabrication and invention of the modern far left. Some forms of it do actually exist as a psychological issue, and this has been documented in medicine for probably at least a century. The most common age bracket of people who suffer from some form of it is teenagers and to some extent young adults. There are many forms of it, but it's actually relatively normal among teenagers sometimes: A teenage girl might have huge self-confidence issues and feel like she is not like the other girls at school, especially the popular and beautiful ones. Because of these insecurities she might be very shy and intro...

The Trump administration has once again recently declassified a bunch of US military documents about "UFOs", and some people are going crazy about it, claiming that it confirms that UFOs are real, they are physics-defying alien spacecraft, and that the military has confirmed their existence. Yet, what does this evidence consist of? A lot of written reports, and blurry footage. That's it. That's all we got. That's all the military got, for all we know. And, indeed, all of the photos and video footage of alleged UFOs always show blurry blobs. It's never sharp in-focus footage showing clear small details. Do you know  why  all the UFO footage is always blurry? Because when the footage is not blurry, when it shows the object in question in sharp intricate detail, it's always very evident what it actually is. That's why. So it's a kind of "natural selection" process: When the footage is sharp, clear, in focus, showing intricate detail, it just...

Five years ago I wrote about the question of whether the Western World is going to disappear just like the Roman Empire . For quite a while now this "soft empire" of sorts that we have, the so-called "Western World", and especially Europe in particular, has felt too big, too powerful, too stable to ever fall, to ever cease to exist, to ever crumble into pieces and become a disjointed set of small warring states, most of them either totalitarian or run by pure anarchy, accompanied by a complete economic collapse and the ensuing death of millions of people. Europe in particular seems too successful, too rich, too strong, too stable for that to happen. Yet, we have many precedents for this in history. No better example than the Roman Republic, later Roman Empire. It lasted for about a thousand years, was the largest superpower on the entire planet, controlled the majority of the known world, and had a military, governmental and economic power that no other nation could...

As of late, you are experiencing massive monetary losses in your gaming business, throwing hundreds of millions of dollars on completely mediocre projects that end up failing. By this point your losses have likely surpassed a billion dollars, and all you have to show for it are a few crappy games that nobody wants to play and everybody is laughing at. You should reflect a bit about why that is. Start by looking back in time, some 15-or-so years. Many major game studios were publishing several gigantic triple-A games per year, most of which received great acclaim, huge sales, and which are considered some of the best games ever made. Not one game in five years, but two or three games each year. And the kicker? Each of these games took somewhere around one to two years to develop and had a budget that was a fraction of your multi-hundreds-of-millions of dollars budgets. And we are not even talking about some big publishers subsidizing several independent smaller development studios. We a...

From some time maybe in the 1970's or 1980's to some time in the early 2000's, and to some extent to this day, a strange notion started spreading in Finland. And that was the notion that people should not waste tap water needlessly, and only use as much as was needed and no more. Don't leave water taps running for longer than necessary, don't flush the toilet unnecessarily, and so on. In fact, water saving toilets became extremely widespread during that time, with two flush levers: One to use a smaller amount of water and another to use a larger amount, and instructions on when to use which. The thing is: Being conservative on how much tap water is being used makes sense in many countries where water is scarce and being wasteful about it is detrimental. However, Finland is not one of those countries (and neither are most of the northern and central European countries, or Canada, and many other similar countries). In Finland (and other Nordic Countries) water is not ...