What grinds my gears

Assume that you don't feel well and go to a doctor. After much study and experimentation, the doctor presents a diagnosis of cancer. He shows you the scans and the results of the tests, he explains in detail what kind of cancer it is and what stage it is in, and suggest a treatment that has a good prognosis. You then go to a second doctor who knows nothing of this, and he performs a lot of experimentation and comes up with a very similar, if not identical, diagnosis, and a very similar treatment suggestion. Then you go to a third doctor, and the same thing. You keep repeating this with 99 doctors in total. Some minor details may have slight differences (such as the estimation of the advancement of the cancer, or minor details in the suggested treatment), but overall they all give pretty much the same diagnosis and the same solution. They all show you the scans and the results of all the other tests for you to see, and you can corroborate that they are all pretty much the same. ...

Metacritic is a website that aggregates scores given by critics of different media, such as movies, TV shows and video games. Its purpose is for people to easily and quickly see what the consensus of critics at large is of a given piece of art. They do this by taking the score given by a critic or publication and scaling it to a 0-100% scale, and then calculating a weighted average of all such scores. The problem with this is, however, that the numbers are often rather meaningless, and don't necessarily really reflect the actual quality of the work (either in general, or personally for you in particular). Giving a score to a piece of art is in itself often a rather meaningless thing to do. Not least because the scale itself is highly subjective and dependent on the publication or even individual critic. For example, in a scale from 0 to 10, some people might consider 5 to be "average" (ie. not excellent, not horrible, but ok; still very watchable/playable), while ot...

When the United States of America attacked Iraq in 2003, the rest of the world, especially Europe, just loved to hate the USA. There was tons of bad press, protest marches and so on. I couldn't stand the hypocrisy of those protest marches in particular. For example here where I live there was a (needless to say completely futile) protest march against the invasion of Iraq, which disrupted normal traffic. I found this especially hypocritical because there were no such protest marches eg. during the Rwandan genocide or when Russia attacked Chechnya in 1999. But when it's the USA who's invading a country, then people love to hate it, and organize protest marches because it's trendy and it gives them a feeling of having the moral high ground. I detested this hypocrisy so much that I actually flung to the other side, ie. I started liking the USA. After all, I knew (and still know) lots of Americans online, and they are on average really smart and good people. The USA ha...

Since basically the dawn of time there have been two major annoyances I have had with almost every first-person shooter game: Firstly, reloading. I hate reloading as a game mechanic. I understand that having to reload adds a certain level of realism and challenge to the game. The problem is that when a game mechanic is more frustrating than challenging, it becomes questionable whether it's a good game mechanic at all. You wouldn't believe how many times I have died because the playable character runs out of bullets and starts reloading right during a crucial moment. You wouldn't believe how many times this has happened right when just one or two more shots would have killed the enemy. And of course reloading takes forever in the heat of battle. And yes, I do reload manually whenever I can. In fact, I reload as much as the situation allows me. But that doesn't help in a very difficult fight where there simply aren't any pauses that would allow reloading. Bas...

Steam is Valve's content distribution system. Or in simpler terms, a centralized way to buy games online. Steam filled an almost empty market niche at the right place at the right time, and it has got immensely popular over the years, and has become almost a monopoly on that front. While competing systems have emerged later, they have hard time reaching even a tiny fraction of the popularity of Steam. In the very beginning Steam was used by Valve exclusively to distribute their own games. (Steam also worked as an anti-piracy system.) However, after some time they opened it to other vendors as well, although at first they gave high priority to third-party games using Valve's own Source game engine. However, they soon started allowing any games to be distributed through Steam without such biases. Initially Valve had really high standards of quality for what they would and wouldn't accept to be distributed through Steam. On the plus side this ensured that most if not all ...

While the PlayStation 3 was in no way a failure, it nevertheless had a rough start. The Xbox 360 had a full year head start and was quite a success, so the PS3 had very tough competition on that field. On top of that, Sony made too fancy of an attempt at making the console efficient by using an exotic and obscure processor design which was not supported by any game engine at the time. It actually took several years for game engines to fully take advantage of the peculiar architecture of the PS3 (and even then many game engines never reached its full potential). In other words, while the PS3 can, in the end, be considered a successful console, it had a very rough start and it took it several years for it to catch up with its biggest competitor. One could estimate that the console was almost doomed because of this, but in the end everything turned out well. It seems that now the roles are pretty much reversed with the next-gen consoles, ie. the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One. While ...

Feminism has been historically an extremely important social movement that has achieved a great deal of social progress in terms of equality and justice. Of course every social movement has its fringe radicals, but those usually get largely ignored. The internet era, however, gives these fringe sub-movements a loudspeaker to spread their messages, which in some cases may cause what would have been a forgotten ideology to become almost mainstream. A form of feminism I'll call "new feminism" (for the lack of a better term) is a modern variant of feminism that basically borders on conspiracy theories, seeing "sexism" and "patriarchy" everywhere, and making mountains out of molehills, treating minor issues as if they were great injustices that will destroy our society as we know it. (I suppose that since feminism has in large part achieved its goals, ie. equalizing the law to be gender-neutral, the modern feminist is left little of actual importance to c...