What grinds my gears

Islam has certainly got a rather bad rep due to how many of its adherents have been behaving during the past few decades (both in western countries and within their own countries.) Because criticizing Islam and the culture surrounding and emanating from it has somehow become a taboo, a lot of copious whitewashing has been performed, both by some Muslims themselves, and also "progressive" non-Muslims, to try to raise the profile and status of Islam as a good thing. This takes many forms. One of these is what pretty much amounts to historical revisionism with respect to the contribution of Islam to modern science and technology. Perhaps the most extreme example of this are the claims of Muslim "inventions" that had, allegedly, profound implications in modern science. Arabic people of the first millenium did indeed make some significant contributions to science, especially in the fields of mathematics and astronomy. (What essentially happened was that Greece and ...

Videogame journalism has a great responsibility because they are essentially guiding their readership on which videogames are worth purchasing and which are not. This is real money we are talking about; money that a good majority of their readership doesn't have excessive amounts of. Videogames are not exactly cheap, and many people are using the little they have on them. It is the responsibility of videogame journalists to convey to the reader as neutrally as possible the quality and details of a videogame, to help them make their purchase decisions. Artificially praising a game that does not deserve such praise, in order to entice people to buy the game, is ethically wrong. Doing so for personal gain from the game's developers or publisher is absolutely horrendous (and should be illegal, if it's not already.) But that's exactly what has been happening for quite some time. Most of it is done under the wraps, making it even more condemnable and unjustifiable. Seve...

There are, roughly speaking, three types of DLC available for video games. Firstly, the right kind of DLC. In other words, DLC that expands the original game with new, additional playable content, such as additional levels, for example in the form of a continuation or side story to the main story. Optimally, the original game is a full story all in itself (and can, thus, be fully enjoyed on its own, without any DLC), and the DLC just adds additional extra gameplay to it. The Talos Principle is a perfect example of this. The main game is a complete full game. Later a DLC became available with a smaller side story containing its own additional puzzles. Bioshock Infinite is another example. Secondly, there's lazy DLC. Basically all paid cosmetic DLC is this. Also all paid DLC that only adds minimal and mostly inconsequential elements to the main game (rather than entirely new content that's independent of it), such as eg. new weapons. There's usually no reason to pay...

Just think about the word "nationalism". I bet that you immediately thought of things like neonazis, racism, the holocaust... But why? Why has that word become such a dirty one? As the saying goes (and perhaps most popularized by a famous speech by Abraham Lincoln), a house divided against itself cannot stand . What does this mean? A society has the best chances of becoming prosperous and successful when all of its members work together, when they all cooperate, when there's a sense of camaraderie among them. Consider the post-World-War-2 Finland for instance. This was a country in economic ruin. Because of the war there was famine and an economic crisis. There was, however, a strong sense of national identity among Finns, a culture of cooperation, of working together for a brighter future. In about 20 or 30 years Finland rose from absolute economic ruin to be one of the wealthiest welfare states in the entire world. A decade or two more, and it became one of the b...

The funny thing about statistics is that you can manipulate raw data to support whatever result you want. Simply use mental gymnastics and excuses to be more selective and inflate results. Take this study , for example, which has been much touted in the media. The study tries to prove that sexism is rampant in online gaming. (Yes, my use of "tries to prove", rather than "concluded" is not an accident. It's quite clear that the authors had a clear goal in mind when they made the experiment.) The experiment was to play online Halo 3 matches with three players: A neutral "control" player that does not send any voice messages, a "male" player and a "female" player, and see how many sexist comments they receive. Of course the amount of sexist comments was extremely low. That won't do. So how can they manipulate the data to inflate that percentage? Well, firstly, and like all good science, let's remove the control from al...

It's possibly because of some recent games I have played, such as Cho Dengeki Stryker and very especially the absolute nightmare that was Final Fantasy X (read that latter blog post if you haven't already, for my rant in excruciating detail why it's one of the worst games I have ever played in my life), but I have somehow lately grown to hate video games with too many cutscenes and, especially, too much text dialogue. For instance, I'm currently playing a DS game named Inazuma Eleven 2: Firestorm . I had played the first game of the series, and I found it interesting. It has a rather novel idea. It's essentially a more or less traditional JRPG, except that battles are in the form of football matches (rather than your traditional JRPG battles). When said like that it might sound a bit crazy, or that it wouldn't work, but it actually does quite well. The game is quite ok, except for one thing. You guessed it: Too many cutscenes, and way too much text in thos...

Imagine an ultra-liberal leftist gay rights activist group that has existed since the 1950's. This is a group that has been fighting for gay rights for over 60 years. What would it take to make such a group to not only oppose a gay parade, but in fact call for it to be legally banned? A normal gay parade that does nothing more than all the gay parades that have existed for decades. What could possibly be higher in the "pecking order" of social justice, so much higher that even a long-time leftist gay rights group is calling for the criminalization of a gay parade? What could possibly make these activists go against their own principles, and overturn everything that they have fought for? Islam. That's what. Islam is, it seems, the highest tier of the "social justice ladder", so to speak. It doesn't matter how intolerant its adherents may be, they will always be above all other minority groups, and all those other groups, no matter how oppressed, must ...

There's a small subsection of modern feminism that has got into their heads an extremely strange and outright incomprehensible idea. They are pushing for the notion that women had a much larger role in medieval warfare than they really had. I can't really understand what the idea or goal is here. They will resort to the same tactics as conspiracy theorists do. In other words, they will (most usually) take medieval paintings and other art, isolate them from their context, and cherry pick them in order to support their narrative. This narrative being that women had a large role in medieval war (during the entirety of the Middle Ages), there were significant amounts of female warriors, etc. They will take, for example, a medieval drawing depicting a woman fighting with a sword, or a drawing of an entire army of women, and will present this as "evidence" that women soldiers and warriors were prevalent. If you ask an actual historian, however, you often get the actua...

What is "social justice"? To understand this, let's first ponder what justice , or more precisely, what the ideals of "justice" (in the legal sense) are in our modern society. There is one symbol that has been used for a long time to symbolize justice: Lady Justice: This is an image with a large amount of symbolism to it: A blindfolded woman holding a sword in one hand, and scales in the other (representing truth and lie.) Lady Justice being blindfolded has great significance. Many people might not understand (or they may even misunderstand) what "justice is blind" means. However, it means that justice is (and should be) applied equally to everybody without looking at who those people are. In other words, rich or poor, famous or unknown, male or female, white, black or any other ethnicity, it doesn't matter: The law is equal for everybody, and is applied equally. You don't get a lighter sentence because you are, for example, rich; you d...

I once watched a video of a talk by a public YouTube persona on a conference, where he talked about feminism (defending feminism, that is. The audience was basically completely pro-feminism.) He mocked critics of feminism in several ways, and one thing he said was "they say that feminism has gone too far", with a dismissive tone of voice. The audience laughed. How ridiculous! What a stupid thing to say! He is by far not the only feminist that ridicules the claim. But feminism has succeeded in turning some of our fundamental ideas of basic human rights upside down. For example, there was this case (which I commented on an earlier blog post) about the man who had passed out in a party, a woman committed oral sex on him while he was unconscious and without consent (in other words, pretty much raping him by definition), and later accused him of rape. The man was expelled and investigated. Why? He "had sex" with a woman and didn't explicitly ask her for consent...

There are thousands and thousands of different martial arts varieties in the world. However, I could roughly categorize them into four categories, based on quality and effectiveness: "Pretend" martial arts, that exist mostly for show, but which are pretty much ineffective in practical situations. "Sport" martial arts, which are often "simplified" versions of past martial arts, distilled as a sport (rather than an actual self-defense mechanism in practical situations). "Practical" martial arts, which do not exist for sport (and often even abhor participation in competitive events), but which nevertheless are too "traditional" and too rule-bound to be all that effective. "Dirty fighting". I'm not using this as a derogatory term, but as a term to mean "doesn't obey any rules". I'm not going to name any concrete examples (even though I could), because that's only going to piss off some readers who ...

(Not something that grinds my gears. Just some fan hypothesizing.) At the beginning of Portal 2, the computer voice first tells the player that "you have been in suspension for fifty days" (with the "fifty" being said with a completely different, automatic-sounding voice). Then later it says "you have been in suspension for nine... nine... nine... nine... nine..." etc. Every single fan theory I have seen always speculates how long the time has been between the two events. They speculate that it has been 9999999 days, or hours, or whatever. That makes absolutely no sense. It's quite clear that a) an algorithm is (in-universe) used to pronounce the number, and b) said algorithm was malfunctioning because of the state of decay of the facility, trying to pronounce some number starting with 9, but ending up in an endless loop with that first digit, like a broken record. Otherwise it wouldn't make any sense why it first says properly "fifty...

Have you ever noticed this pattern about Valve's games? Team Fortress, and Team Fortress 2. Dota, and Dota 2 Left 4 Dead, and Left 4 Dead 2. Portal, and Portal 2. Half-Life, and Half-Life 2. And when they wanted to make a continuation to that last one, did they go with 3? Of course not. They made Half-Life 2: Episode 1 , and Half-Life 2: Episode 2 . If they ever make a continuation to the series, I bet it will be named Half-Life 2: Episode 2: Part 2 . And it will run on Source Engine 2 , of course.

If you go, for example in the United States, to any grocery store and ask them why they don't donate their excess food to charity, that they are otherwise just throwing away, 99.9% of them will tell the same reason: They can't because of the fear of lawsuits. They fear that if somebody gets food poisoning, they will be sued. However, the thing is, the so-called Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Act of 1996 was created precisely for this purpose, ie. to protect benefactors from liability in these cases, and to promote the donation of excess food. And, in fact, there has not been a single case of a lawsuit in the United States because of this reason, ever. Not a single one. Yet the myth persists, and is probably not going to die ever. And millions of tons of food are thrown away every year while at the same time millions of people starve. And the United States is not the only country doing this. Humans are idiots.

The current feminist narrative is that the media, especially video games, is rife with sexism against women. And many people believe it without question. But let's think about it for a bit. Consider all of the movies, TV series, books and video games you have ever read, seen or played, where violence is depicted, and consider these aspects: How many of the victims of the violence have been female, and how many of them have been male? In the cases where the genders of the victim and the perpetrator are not the same, in how many cases has it been a man who is the perpetrator and a woman who has been the victim? When the perpetrator has been a man and the victim has been a woman, in how many cases has the story depicted the violence as something justified or positive? In how many cases has it been depicted as the perpetrator being a monster of a person, a disgusting criminal, or otherwise a completely despicable person? When the perpetrator has been a woman and the victim a ma...

Freedom of the press is one of the most important core principles of a free modern society. It's sacrosanct. Censorship of the press is, in fact, one of the key features of totalitarianism. That's why censorship of the press is abhorrent. The press has always been the voice of freedom. The press has never shied away from scrutinizing, investigating, uncovering, exposing and even sensationalizing events, but for fame and profit (and, to be fair, sometimes even for a good cause, and because of journalistic principles.) If people want to hear it, they will write about it. If it sells, they will write about it. Nothing is too holy, too taboo. People have the right to know, and the press is one of the major forces exposing the things that are wrong in society. The press has also always been a major force in sensationalizing, exaggerating and even distorting things just for publicity and profit; this of course isn't always a good thing, but it shows that the press never shies a...

All kinds of articles (be they journalistic or semi-academic) make all kinds of claims which may be skewed or highly dubious, especially when these claims are related to statistics (eg. about crime rates of certain types, opinion polls, etc.) Such an article can attain the appearance of credibility by citing exact sources for these claims. The more independent sources the article cites, the more credible it appears to be. However, this may be deceptive. It's easy to cite sources, but people seldom go through the arduous task of actually checking those sources. And checking them does not involve simply checking that each of those sources actually exists and makes the claim. You have to check how that particular source got that information, and if it's itself also citing another source, and so on. You have to actually check the entire chain of sources this way to find the origin of the claim. Because, you see, spurious and incorrect claims can gain a lot of false credibili...

The United States is rather infamous for the lack of workers' rights. There are many states (perhaps most famously Texas) where an employer can fire any employee at any moment for any reason without any kind of notice, and there's absolutely nothing the employee can do about it (with, perhaps, the exception that if the firing was done eg. because of racist discrimination, but even then, how do you prove it?) One could make the argument "well, it's the employer's property and there is no moral code that would dictate that the employer must keep people employed; forcing people against their will to employ other people is totalitarianism." The problem is, the total freedom of being able to fire whoever you want for whatever reason you want without any repercussions can be, and is, heavily abused in amazingly egregious ways. This allows employers to basically extort and discriminate against their employees. For example, a boss could tell his employees "...

Many people speak against the whole concept of university fraternities (which exist mainly in American universities, and to a lesser extent in some other countries). Even in the best cases they see fraternities as relics of the distant past, societies that do not fit in the modern cultural zeitgeist, societies that are elitist, secretive and exclusive, and in many cases chauvinistic and even sexist. Many of these fraternities engage (according to these critics) in many detrimental practices such as over-the-top drinking parties, detrimental pranks and other activities, hazing and humiliation of member candidates, and so on and so forth. (Feminists, of course , also accuse fraternities as being nothing more than rape clubs, but taking into account the credibility of the average university feminist, we can safely ignore that part. I'm not saying it has never, ever, ever happened in the history of humanity; I'm just highly dubious of it being even a microscopic fraction of what th...

There has been in recent years a stronger and stronger push for the notion that "house labor" should be more evenly divided between the man and the woman. It's a very common notion that the woman of the house on average does a lot more chores than the man, and this is unfair. (This has gone so far in our society, that there has even been a proposal at the highest levels of the United Nations to do something about this.) There is one fact, however, that everybody is blatantly ignoring here: On average, men do less house chores than women regardless of their family situation. This is because on average men feel less a need to do chores in the house than women do. In other words (and this is the part that's blatantly ignored), a man living alone will, on average, do significantly less house chores than a woman living alone. This may be a product of our evolutionary past, but that doesn't really matter. Regardless of the physiological/psychological reason, it...

There's an extremely pervasive notion in our culture that women are much more prone to be the victims of violent crime (especially by strangers) than men. You know, the notion that women have to constantly fear for their safety when walking alone on the street, especially at night, while men have no such reason to fear. A notion promoted by feminists. Such feminists just love to spout how this is a "male privilege" (ie. that men do not have to fear walking alone at night, while women have to constantly fear.) Yet, when you look at the actual statistics, they depict a rather different picture. For example, a report by the U.S. Department of Justice named " Violent Victimization Committed by Strangers, 1993-2010 " tells a rather opposite story. For instance, this graph in the report is quite telling: It depicts the rate of violent crimes per 1000 persons age 12 or older, by sex of the victim. There are two quite striking features to the graph: Violent cri...

This isn't something that grinds my gears. Actually the exact opposite. This a praise for Microsoft (at least in this particular situation.) While this happened years ago, I just wanted to write about it nevertheless. Some years ago my Xbox Live account was hacked (I have no idea how). I didn't have many Microsoft Points there (something like less than 5€ worth), but obviously that's something that had to be fixed immediately. So I called the Microsoft/Xbox support number here in Finland. I was quite pleasantly surprised. The helpdesk person on the other end was extremely professional and experienced. She did not ask a single unneeded or stupid question, but instead went straight to the point and asked only the most relevant questions. She understood perfectly everything I said right away, and knew exactly what should be done, and what to ask, and gave clear instructions without even a hint of being patronizing or anything like that. The call was just a couple of minute...

The Final Fantasy series used to be the ubiquitous quintessential highest-quality JRPG game series in the 80's and the 90's (alongside the Dragon Warrior series by Enix.) But at some point Square Enix just lost the ball completely. Thus we get a Final Fantasy game that goes contrary to almost everything that makes JRPGs so enjoyable: Mind-numbingly linear and short levels that are completely contrary to the idea of a (J)RPG and are even more linear than most FPS game levels, no overworld, no free exploration, abstract scenery that's only loosely tied to the story, an overabundance of cutscenes, irrelevant and inconsequential NPC's, no freely-explorable towns, and the removal of almost every archetypal JRPG element. I'm, of course, talking about Final Fantasy X. What? You thought I was talking about Final Fantasy XIII? Well, that one was like that too, but it seems that Square Enix started this trend much earlier than that. Everything that FF13 did wrong, FF...

This is a very minor issue, but... Automatic checkpoints (and sometimes even auto-saving) as opposed to manual saving have become more and more prevalent in video games. Oftentimes the fact that the game is saving at a checkpoint is made quite prominent visually, while other times it's not. One extremely common feature of these games is that when you try to quit the game, it will give the warning "all unsaved progress will be lost", or some variant of that. This warning always sounds much more ominous and important than it really is, especially if has been like 5 seconds since the last checkpoint. The thing is, in many such games the game doesn't actually make it clear at all what exactly will be lost by quitting now. It always gives the ominous and somewhat scary warning, but doesn't indicate in any way how much will be lost if I quit now. This is especially egregious with those games that don't make it very clear when they last saved. (Th...

Consider this sentiment: Basic human rights are not up to vote. This is a very easy sentiment to agree with. After all, we shouldn't be, for example, exterminating all black people or all jews even if the majority of the population votes for it. That would be a horrendous crime against humanity. That's completely true, indeed. However, there's another side to that coin. Namely: How do we determine what are "basic human rights", and what are those "rights" that are up to vote? When you think about it, the question becomes a lot more complicated, doesn't it? Moreover, how do we stop this sentiment from being abused for a political or ideological agenda? If you have a political or ideological agenda, and you are politically powerful enough (eg. "you" form the majority of the government and/or the press), what stops you from declaring a particular idea a "basic human right" and thus above criticism, public opinion, and vote (...

Consider this question: Is it morally right if insurance companies took a person genes into account when determining that person's insurance fees? (For example, a genetic propensity for certain diseases would be grounds for higher insurance payments.) When this question came up, my first instinct was: Of course it's immoral! But then I started thinking more about it. Why exactly is it immoral? To understand why this question is relevant, consider the following: Insurance is an optional service provided by some private corporations. (Insurance provided by a government using taxpayer money is a different issue, and depends a lot on the country. Some countries do not provide such a thing, and even in most countries where the government does, it does so only for an extremely narrow set of things.) This is, essentially, a service that wouldn't have to exist. It's a service provided optionally for those who want to use it. Insurance companies always take a risk when t...

One relatively common principle in most modern justice systems (and oftentimes not even so modern, since the principle has probably been around for quite some time) is that for many/most crimes first-time offenders get a lighter sentence than repeat offenders. The idea behind this is, essentially, to give people a second chance, to learn their lesson and to become better. People are young and inexperienced, they act foolishly and without thinking, they act impulsively, they don't fully realize the consequences of their actions, they may be a bit arrogant and full of themselves and do things that they shouldn't really be doing. Getting caught and going through that legal process, essentially and hopefully, "scares them straight". Being caught and tried for a crime, with all the police investigation, lawyers and all that stuff, and especially the prospect of being possibly found guilty and fined or even put into jail, can be really stressing for someone who has neve...