What grinds my gears

One very common phenomenon is that whenever there's something hard to explain in a photograph, most people just attribute it to "photoshop". This is, in fact, the lazy answer to every such picture. It's always "photoshopped". People are really lazy in their skepticism and are, in my opinion, missing out lots of interesting research that could be done into such photographs. Sure, there are tons and tons of images out there that have been manipulated, but that's not always the true explanation. Sometimes the real explanation is much more interesting. In many cases the photograph is actually completely genuine and unaltered, but does not depict what it might look like at first glance. A very good example is the so-called "time-traveling hipster" photograph: This photo was taken in 1941 (at the re-opening of the South Fork Bridge in Gold Bridge, British Columbia). The man looks very out-of-place compared to all the other people around, way...

One game genre that I loved back in the 80's was the text adventure. Sadly, this kind of game is basically completely dead, and nobody makes them anymore, which is a real pity. I miss those games so much. Yes, I know perfectly well about so-called "interactive fiction" games, which are being done by hobbyists to this day. While they are close (they are text-based, and all input is done by writing commands like "go north" or "take apple"), these are not, however, the kind of text adventure I'm talking about. No, I'm talking about graphical text adventures. Most typically the upper half of the screen is a picture of the place, and the lower half is dedicated to text. Every room has its own picture, and the graphics are not purely decorative, but actually convey information and can change. For example, there may be a tree in the picture, which is not mentioned in the default textual description of the room. You could then write "examin...