What grinds my gears

I use the AdBlock+ add-on for Firefox, which seamlessly removes all ads from most websites, which is why I never see ads of any kind on YouTube. I wanted to check a video at 50 FPS, and since Firefox does not support that yet for some reason, I watched it with Chrome. I don't have any ad-blocker there, so I get to see the ads. Now, since YouTube is owned by Google, and all ads are provided by Google, and Google is a rather respectable company, one would think that they would only accept appropriate ads that are formal and in good taste. But what did I get? This: Way to stay classy, Google.

I recently bought on Steam a visual novel type game named Cho Dengeki Stryker . I like the genre when it's well done. I have played several ones, but one prominent example is 9 Hours - 9 Persons - 9 Doors for the Nintendo DS, which is an excellent example of a visual novel that takes great advantage of both the genre and the platform to present a story-heavy game that's interesting to play. Thus I was looking forward to Cho Dengeki Stryker given the positive reviews it has on Steam. This game, however, is different. It's a visual novel. Literally a visual novel. It's not just a game of the genre, but a literal visual novel. In other words, text with images, some animations here and there, and basically nothing else. You simply click the mouse to advance to the next paragraph of text, and that's it. It's fully voice-acted (in Japanese), but it's still just a novel. This was quite a disappointment because this isn't, in fact, a game at all. There ar...

Much of ufology and claims of the paranormal rely heavily on eyewitness testimony. There probably is no book, "documentary", video or website about those subjects that doesn't give plenty of eyewitness testimony as evidence. Many of the proponents argue directly from eyewitness testimony (one of the core ideas being the idea that surely there can't be this many hundreds or even thousands of testimonies with very similar details if there's no truth behind them.) People give too much credence to eyewitness testimony, especially when it affirms what they want to believe. This is so even with people who fully understand and even agree with the results of psychological experiments that show how unreliable it can be. I'll write here a somewhat comprehensive list of reasons why eyewitness testimony is unreliable and, in fact, almost completely useless. (That's not to say that eyewitness testimony is never useful in any context; the point is that it shouldn...

Homeopathy is the belief that if you take a substance that causes symptoms that are similar to the symptoms of an affliction or disease, and then dilute that substance in water enough, then that water becomes an effective treatment for that disease (not just the symptoms of that disease, but the disease itself.) For example, if you suffer from sleeplessness, they believe that if you take caffeine, dilute it into water, and then re-dilute that water over and over until basically every single caffeine molecule has disappeared from it, and then drink a drop of the end result, it will help your sleeplessness. Needless to say, this is just a placebo effect. However, proponents of homeopathy go further and claim that homeopathy can cure actual diseases, such as viral and bacterial infections. (Why would diluted symptom-causing substance do something to the actual viruses or bacteria is anybody's guess.) Ok, so it's a placebo. It's not really dangerous, is it? But it can be...

I have noticed a trend, both online and offline, that people who try to silence other people's opinions and stifle discussion tend to be on the wrong. This doesn't mean that people who welcome discussion and never silence anybody tend to be on the right. In this case it may or may not be so. However, those who try to silence others do tend most often than not be on the wrong. Silencing dissent is a typical aspect of most dictators. Criticism and discussion is discouraged, and most often than not even criminalized. Those who do oppose the dictator are vilified, dehumanized and persecuted. All dissenting opinions and media are silenced as much as possible. In the internet era a minor form of this has emerged. They could be called "mini-dictators". Also they don't like to see or hear criticism or dissenting opinions. They will often do everything in their power to try to silence the opposition, either within their own circles, or even sometimes actively every...

The Moon landing, Kennedy assassination, 9/11, chemtrail, new world order, holocaust denialist and other such conspiracy theorists are deluded, idiots or charlatans, and essentially religious zealots. Many of them are assholes (especially eg. the holocaust denialists), but in the end their delusions are more or less harmless. Sure, deluding people into believing falsities is a kind of harm in itself, but the repercussions of these false beliefs are usually relatively small. At most they can cause people to annoy other people, disturb public peace, spam forums, and other such minor things, but not much else. However, there are two conspiracy theories that are actually very dangerous. We are not talking just about deluding people or making them annoy other people. We are talking about people dying needlessly. We are talking about these conspiracy theories actually killing people who wouldn't need to die otherwise. These are actually dangerous conspiracy theories. They are the AI...