What grinds my gears

You may already have guessed what this screenshot is from from the title of this post, but if not, take a guess: That's right, it's the RAM usage column of Windows' task manager. Do you notice something particular about it? That's right, not a single process is taking less than 1 MB of RAM. And mind you, I was not running any programs when I took this screenshot, with the exception of Skype (which is that 144 MB hog) and task manager itself. (And mind you, I just restarted Skype a few minutes before taking the screenshot. It's not like it has been running for days. This is the minimum that it takes.) Why, oh why does everything in Windows take up so much RAM? Everything, and I mean everything , takes several megabytes of RAM. Heck, I can't find a single Windows program that would take less. Perhaps Minesweeper? After all, it's one of the most rudimentary games in existence. Nope. A whopping 51 MB. Notepad? Ok, it's a text editor, but it...

Anita Sarkeesian is, essentially, the face of the modern feminist movement of depicting video games as inherently sexist and misogynist to the core, painting both the video game industry and gamers as lowlife scum who hate women and consider them nothing more than sex objects. Sarkeesian has been enormously successful in this task, destroying most of the credibility that video gaming has painfully gained during the past decades, devolving it back into the "stone age" of video gaming (from the non-gaming public point of view), where gamers are lonely sex-starved nerds, and games are little more than just digital porn to satisfy them. And on top of that, she has got rich by playing the victim when gamers have protested against such an egregiously stereotypical and false depiction. (There's basically nothing that gamers can do to fix this. If they wouldn't protest, all those false claims would go uncontested. If they do protest, she plays the victim and is showered with ...

It's often said (and it might be true) that currently the video game industry is larger (in term of budgets) than the film industry. In other words, a typical large AAA video game production will have a larger budget than a typical blockbuster movie production. In other words, the biggest games have budgets that are over 100 million dollars. Sometimes a lot more. This is great from a gamer's point of view. This means that we are getting some really epic games of absolutely vast size (both in content and in quality). These games really push the limit of what can be done with video games. But the thing is, it may turn out that the video game industry is becoming too large for its own good. Why? Because a game will only sell so many copies. 20 years ago, heck, even 10 years ago, a video game selling 2 million copies was an absolutely humongous success of epic proportions. Nowadays, however, we have reached a point where a video game selling 2 million copies is a disappoin...

I wrote previously how the universities in many countries are changing from bastions of academic freedom and free speech into totalitarian fascist hellholes that are becoming more and more nazi-like. It seems that the more time passes, the worse it's getting. Not only will you become a persona non grata if you present unpopular opinions or criticism of social justice warriors, it seems that we are slowly going into a situation where merely being a white male is enough for you to be an undesirable person. That's right, you don't even have to do anything or express any opinions; simply by existing and being of the wrong race and gender is enough. "That's MRA talk!" Maybe it is. Heck, I hope it is only that. Yet, more and more news is coming out of social justice warriors, especially at universities, being racist against white people for the sole reason that they are white, and nothing else. For example: University Report: A Room Full of White People I...

Treating people not as individuals, but as members of an ethnic group, in other words, classifying people by their ethnicity, and then attributing to all members of that group certain characteristics, responsibilities or achievements, based on the sole premise that they belong to that ethnic group, is racism. You might not think it's racism, but it is the very definition of racism. It's exactly what racism is about. Saying that a person has some responsibilities or deserves some kind of recognition because said person belongs to a specific ethnic group, and because those responsibilities or recognition are inherently attributed to that ethnic group as a whole, is racism. In other words, not looking at the person as an individual, looking at his or her own accomplishments, works and achievements, but instead only seeing the ethnic group rather than the individual, just because that person happens to have a certain skin color, is racism. The whole concept of "cultural approp...

In a working welfare state there usually are many government-owned companies and services that provide some of the most basic services to the citizens, such as healthcare, public transportation, mail services, and so on. The core idea for this is that these tax-funded services are (usually) cheaper to the consumer than the equivalent privately-owned service. After all, they are already tax-funded, so it's in principle a form of wealth-distribution: Taxpayers are funding a service from which everybody, especially the poorer citizens, benefit. This means that even poorer people can afford the most basic of needs, such as healthcare, transportation and mail. There has been a trend in many countries in recent decades to get rid of these government-owned basic services, and sell them to private organizations. This goes against everything that I wrote above. It goes against the very core of a welfare system, where the government looks after the well-being of its citizens. This goes...

I have a relatively common name and surname here in Finland, and I was lucky enough that I got a Gmail invite pretty soon after it launched, so I got an email address with purely my name and surname (ie. without any numbers, additional letters, or other such extraneous characters). This is extraordinarily rare with Gmail nowadays, especially if you have a common name-surname pair, because they are naturally all taken long time ago. There's one minor "problem" with this, however. (Not really a problem per se; it's more amusing than annoying, if anything.) And it's that I semi-regularly receive emails intended for other people with the same name as me. I'd estimate that on average I get about one email per month like this. These emails are often official in nature, and include things like insurance documents, school diploma certificates, product or service offers (that are clearly in response to a request by the original person) and so on and so forth. Almo...

So, we live in a representative democracy, which means that there are representatives in the parliament who we voted there to run the country for our best benefit. The question is: How should voting people for parliament work? A naive approach is to simply allow people to vote for any candidate that they want, and put a certain amount of the candidates with the most votes on parliament. This might sound like a good system at first, but in fact it really isn't. It has many problems. It may work when voting for a single person who eg. becomes the president of the country, but it doesn't really work when voting for a parliament consisting of over a hundred people. Why? To understand why, suppose there are 100 parliament seats, and there's a "superstar" candidate who holds a certain political view, and who the majority of citizens, eg. 75%, vote for. The rest of the citizens vote for candidates who hold the opposite political view. So now there's one repres...

As a continuation of my previous blog post on "rape culture" , there is another form of it that has raised its ugly head during the past few decades, and which is highly destructive and detrimental. It literally destroys lives. Feminists claim that "rape culture" in our society means that rape accusations are not taken seriously and often dismissed. This is a rather strange claim to make, given that reality is pretty much the exact opposite: Rape accusations are usually taken too seriously, to the far extreme. As a relatively recent high-profile example, read the case of a Columbia University student whose life has been effectively destroyed because of a persistent rape accusation, even though investigation has cleared him of all charges. This case is far from being unique. This isn't even a question of whether he's actually guilty or not (he most probably isn't, but that's not my main point). It's a question of how our modern society han...

The term "feminism" has effectively become a synonym for "extremist political social marxism" because of so many loud and visible extremist feminist actions and opinions. These are the feminists that are actively shutting down academic freedom in the universities of many countries, effectively reversed the burden of proof in rape accusation cases at many places (ie. the accused will be considered guilty unless he can prove his innocence, which is rather hard to do in rape accusation cases; and no, this is not an exaggeration), who rather freely harass men who are completely innocent (even after they have been proven to be completely innocent), disrupt peaceful meetings, sometimes violently and sometimes even breaking the law, who express all kinds of misandrist opinions and actively advocate blatant discrimination against white men for the sole reason that they are white and men (such as forbidding them from applying to leading positions in certain organizations), ...