What grinds my gears

Anita Sarkeesian made another video series, "Ordinary Women", for which she, of course, e-begged for a hefty sum of money. $200 thousand this time. When she started the fundraising campaign, the videos had actually already been shot, and the campaign was for "post-production". The series is about famous historic women. So, where did the $200000 go? Maybe each episode is a full 1-hour documentary about a particular famous woman from history? Or, at the very least your standard 22-minute format? No. The episodes are 3 to 5 minutes long. Ok, then maybe there are lots and lots of episodes? Like 50 or so? That would explain why so much money is needed for "post-production". No. There are 5 episodes. So five episodes, each 3 to 5 minutes long. Surely the visual effects are awesome, with that money? Once again, no. There are some graphics and extremely simplistic animations which you can do with basically any professional video editing software that c...

Some time ago I created a new blog about things that don't grind my gears, but are neutral or positive. This "what grinds my gear" blog gets about 20-40 views per post on average, which is ridiculously little. However, that other blog is getting about 0-2 views per post, which is even worse. So this post is a promotion of the other one. These are short summaries of the new posts I have made there, if you are interested: Which chess endgame is the hardest? I examine a few classical chess endgame positions and ponder which one might be the hardest to win for a human player. Turning 3D off on a 3DS: The devil is in the details. A funny anecdote of how I had been using my 3DS for a year before figuring out how to turn 3D off completely. Xbox One S: Too late? Written when the Xbox One S was just released, I wonder if its features should have been in the original Xbox One for them to matter. The downside of single+multiplayer combo games. Why I think that games th...

This post is not about social justice warriors who hate white people (especially white men). While they are great enablers of anti-white racism, this is nevertheless not about them. It's about some black people who are deeply, deeply racist against white people. And I'm completely serious about that. Just imagine the absolute worst kind of racist you can think of. The kind of racist that's not only prejudiced and discriminatory, but actually thinks of those other races as actually and literally inferior, in the physical and biological sense, even non-human. That kind of racism. There are some black people out there who seriously and literally think that white people are not actually human, and that all white people, every single one of them, is innately racist (the sheer irony is palpable.) In other words, their brains are hard-wired to be racist. They literally think of white people as sub-human; not just as an insult, but actually biologically non-human. They think t...

Reductio ad Hitlerum (a wordplay on " reductio ad absurdum ") is a semi-humorous term coined in 1951 by Leo Strauss. It describes an attempt to invalidate someone's argument, position or opinion by making a connection to Hitler or the nazis. (In other words, that opinion or claim is undesirable or wrong because the nazis (at least allegedly) also held that opinion.) It can also be used as the end of a slippery slope argument (in other words, that the opinion or position, if allowed or accepted, would lead to something that the nazis did.) Godwin's Law is a semi-humorous observation made in 1990 by Mike Godwin, which states that the longer a heated online discussion or flamewar continues, the more likely it is that somebody will bring up nazis into the conversation (most often in the form of accusing others of being like them.) While both involve the concept of nazis, they are not really the same thing. The latter might involve the former, but not necessarily. (...

I have noticed that there's a pretty good method for finding out if a Wikipedia article is politically biased and drives a given sociopolitical agenda (something that a true encyclopedia should never do, given that such an encyclopedia should always maintain absolute neutrality): Look at the lede of the article and see how much it "poisons the well" with regards to the topic in question with minor minutiae that doesn't really belong there. The "lede" is the introductory part before the table of contents, and "poisoning the well" is the dishonest technique of introducing people to a subject in a biased manner, with a clear agenda to make the reader/listener form a biased opinion based on incomplete information about the subject. (This can be done by eg. emphasizing things that support the agenda out of proportion and, conversely, de-emphasizing or even completely skipping things that would go contrary to that agenda.) "Poisoning the well...

Pokémon Go is a free-to-play mobile game that has taken the world by storm. Millions and millions of people have been playing it actively for months. Wherever you live, every now and then you'll see somebody playing it on the street. There are videos out there of literally hundreds of people playing it at a given place (seemingly because there's some rare pokémon in the vicinity or something). And the thing is... I don't get it. I have tried it, of course, but I just don't get it. The entire game consists (barring the menus) of two screens: The map, and the capture screen. And that's it. Sure, it's somewhat cool that the map is the real map of the place you are, and it updates in real time as you walk around, using GPS, but the gimmick gets old pretty fast. It's only barely more interesting than your average run-of-the-mill GPS app. But perhaps the capture screen is more interesting? Maybe here you will have a team of up to six pokémon, and you ...

The Game Awards is an annual awards ceremony for video games that has been running from 2014. It's a kind of successor to the Spike Video Game Awards , which had started in 2003, and which had received an increasing amount of criticism for being little more than corporate advertisement of video games, among many other criticisms. The Game Awards was supposed to be a kind of fresh start, cutting out all the bullshit and concentrating solely on what the whole show is supposed to be about, ie. video games. Yet, once again, commercialism and other such BS seems to have been raising its ugly head, in only three years. Critics point out how the first installment was ok, the second was already showing worrying trends, and now the third, most recent one, has pretty much succumbed to most of the same problems as its predecessor, being less about actual video game achievements and more about showmanship and ad-ridden propaganda. I'm not going to go into all the details because I...

The so-called "Dakota access pipeline" is a planned construction project to build an oil pipeline from North Dakota to southern Illinois. Since the spring of 2016, native Americans have organized a protest against this construction project because of its impact on the environment. In later months, the native American leaders of this protest movement have expressed their disapproval of young white liberals (ie. rich spoiled mid-to-upper class regressive leftist) coming to the protest sites to "support" the movement, taking advantage of the temporary services built there, trashing and polluting the environment with very little regard, and then after a week or so just leaving without cleaning up after themselves, leaving all their trash and waste behind for the natives to clean up. Which is the sheer irony of what they are doing. They are "protesting" for an environmental cause... by coming to the site, throwing their trash and their excrement around, hav...

The "Oculus Touch" (which means the Oculus Rift with the new controllers) is going to launch very soon. And with "over 50 launch titles" to offer! Woohoo! As a side note, I have been wondering from the very beginning of the whole "room-scale VR" crap why nobody is making the one game that would be pretty much perfect for that technology: Golf. Oh, sure, there's a "golf" game among those "50 launch titles"... except it's not traditional golf, but some weird mini-golf sort-of. And, surprise surprise, it looks like absolute crap: I mean, seriously. These are barely PlayStation 2 level graphics. I know I have complained about this before , but it never ceases to amaze me. And I'm not even kidding. Just as an example, here's a screenshot of a PlayStation 2 game: Even the PlayStation 2 manages to look better than most of this VR crap. But I digress. Back to the main topic, which is the idiocy that's all th...

One of the (many) core tenets of modern feminist social justice ideology is the social constructionism hypothesis. This is the claim that all behavioral and social differences between genders, in personalities, in attitudes, in preferences, in societal roles etc. are a pure construction the environment, of the society that we live in. In other words, for example, some professions are very male-dominated because we have been raised to think of them as being manly jobs, and vice-versa. Likewise men are more stoic and aggressive because of upbringing, and so on and so forth. The opposite of this hypothesis is the view that, while upbringing obviously does have some effect on behavior, personality and preferences, much of it is nevertheless biological, rather than cultural. Men prefer certain jobs, and certain activities, and have certain types of personalities, on average, because they are naturally inclined to it, rather than having been "taught" to be like that. Studies ha...

The HTC Vive, the Oculus Rift, the Razer OSVR, and the Pimax 4K: The PSVR: Notice one key difference between those other VR headsets and the PSVR? All those other headsets are like ski goggles, pressing against your face. In fact, they all have those elastic straps that quite literally and explicitly press the visor against your face. And this is not just theoretical. Many reviews point out how using the headsets for long periods of time will leave press marks on your face (like a "wolverine mask"), and may become uncomfortable after long periods of time. Another common complaint is that it can press against your nose, causing pain in the long run. Contrast that with the PSVR. Rather than being like a ski goggle, it's like a headband, like a helmet, that you wear on your head, and the visor hangs freely from the headband, rather than pressing against your face with force. The frontal part of the headset's weight presses against your forehead, on a rather...

I think that both the "Black Lives Matter" and the "Gamergate" movements are excellent examples of how utterly biased the current left-leaning regressive media is, at large. At least 99% of the media presented the absolutely unilateral biased narrative that Gamergate is this fuzzy indeterminate hate movement by male gamers against women in videogaming. By large they either ignored or ridiculed the claim by actual people in the movement that it's actually a customer revolt against corruption in video game journalism. (Criticism against the "progressive" feminist social justice ideology that seems to have largely invaded said journalism may also have been a significant motivation for the movement, but in this case it's not motivated by misogyny in any way, shape or form either. It's a protest against censorship of video games, and against the tirade of condescension and insults that the video game journals had thrown at the average gamer, their...

For many years I have been watching horrified how far the modern feminist social justice ideology is going, and what kind of negative effects it has on the world as large (such as censorship, limiting basic human freedoms, intimidation, harassment, persecution, sometimes even from officials), but I have been able to largely do this as a distant observer from here Finland. Surely my country is a modern progressive (the right kind of progressive, not the regressive social justice kind) society that just laughs off that madness that's happening at distant lands far away? Nope. The ideology is so incredibly virulent that it's already metastasizing Finnish education at all levels. First the ministry of education announced that they will be teaching social justice to grade schoolers, almost directly copied from the same program in Australia. The whole shebang. Whites are privileged, there are like a million different genders, terminology like "cis"... The entire thing....

Fidel Castro was a brutal totalitarian dictator of Cuba who oppressed the citizens of Cuba for almost 60 years. For all that time, consistently, Cuba ranked as one of the countries with most human rights violations. Firing squads, imprisonment of political dissenters and journalists, you name it. Castro's regime impoverished the country, while Castro himself was a multi-millionaire. He ruled the country with an iron fist. When news of Castro's death surfaced, Cubans who had escaped political persecution to the United States, and pretty much lived in exile there, marched the streets in celebration. They expressed their sincere relief that one of the darkest moments in their country's history was finally, at some level, over, and that perhaps now their country will begin the long and arduous march to human rights and liberty. Surely world leaders would have sympathized with these political exiles? Certainly a word of hope, a wish for a new brighter era for Cuba was widely...

The "big lie" term was coined by Adolf Hitler in is book Mein Kampf , and refers to the propaganda technique of (an authority figure) telling such a huge lie that the audience just accepts it because they cannot fathom such an authority figure telling such a blatant lie, and thus assume that it must be true. A more popular form of this, put forward by Joseph Goebbels, is that if a lie is repeated enough, it becomes true (in the sense that people at large will simply start accepting it as true without question; it becomes true in their minds, even against evidence of the contrary.) This is actually understandable from a psychological perspective. We are pretty much hard-wired to believe in things that everybody else believes. If everybody around us believes something, without question and without criticism, without alternative views, we tend to take it for granted as well. This especially if we have been raised in such an environment all our lives. It requires an unusual k...

There was an article written by a social justice warrior (which link I have lost and can't be bothered to google) talking about why the libertarian principle of equality of opportunity is a really bad thing. Even unconstitutional. It proceeded to describe "equality of opportunity" pretty much as "equality of outcome", which is one of the major criticism that egalitarians have about the modern social justice ideology. One example it gave of enforcing "equality of opportunity" was that if a person is born in a rich family, then his money would need to be taken away and distributed equally among the poorer people, to give everybody the same opportunities and not have somebody have an unfair advantage. This is so wrong at so many levels. For one, that's quite directly what equality of outcome is, not equality of opportunity. But at the most fundamental level it's a complete misunderstanding of what the principle of "equality of opportunit...

Some time ago a YouTube user nicknamed Apollo Legend made a video about " the death of speedrunning ". In this video he's not saying that speedrunning is becoming less and less popular, but that the organization has, in his view, become stagnant, and that there is little progress in terms of organizing speedruns (eg. speedrun races), poor leadership, and so on. On a rather different tangent, and quite unrelated to that particular topic, I wrote a comment to that video that in my view speedrunning of some particular games seems to be completely dead. And I mentioned Half-Life 2 speedrunning as the quintessential example. What do I mean by this? Well, here's an essay on that subject: Firstly, we have to define what we mean by "speedrunning". In essence, it's playing a game from beginning to end as fast as possible. To reach the ending of the game in as a minimal time as possible. Of course it's not that simple. Some ground rules need to be set,...

If there's one country that has embraced modern feminism, to the most absolutely ridiculous extents, it's Sweden. Other countries like Canada and Australia are working really hard to get there, but Sweden is by far in the lead on this front. That is, the lead on absolutely ridiculous mentally retarded feminist ideas. Take, for example, the brilliant idea that the way that snow has been ploughed in Stockholm is sexist, and needs to be "gender equal" . Why is it sexist? Because ploughing has been prioritized to first plough the busiest and most important roadways. I especially love this part of the article: Inspired by authorities in the municipality of Karlskoga, Helldén explained that snowploughs in Stockholm typically target areas frequented by men, such as the roads Such as the roads... Anyway. They now implemented a more "gender equal" priority to snowploughing, which of course in feminist parlance means that places frequented by women (such as d...

Creationists have all kinds of misconceptions (and distortions, and straw-men, and even outright lies) about the theory of evolution. But this post is not about them. It's about common misconceptions that non-creationists, even those who fully accept the theory, often have about evolution. The "evolutionary ladder" This is a very old myth about biology that goes back hundreds of years, well before Darwin. In fact, Darwin's books about evolution argued against this (instead proposing an evolutionary tree , where all species are on an equal level at the ends of the branches.) The idea is that there are rather discrete "steps" to evolution, and different species are at different levels on this "evolutionary ladder". At the top are, of course, humans. Below them are apes and monkeys, and so on and so forth, neatly classified in terms of complexity and evolutionary progress. This leads to the thought of "taking the next step" in evol...

The modern feminist social justice ideology is, at its core, deeply misandrist. In other words, it just hates men. Almost every complaint and claim they make is about something related to men and how they are somehow a problem. At the same time, they will never, ever, acknowledge any fault that's prevalent in women and rare in men. "Toxic masculinity" is but one of the several such topics they have come up with. It's mostly misaimed, based on exaggerations, fabrications, and barking up the wrong tree. Well, I could just as well use the same tactics to come up with the concept of "toxic femininity" to attack women as a whole. Like this. (Note: I obviously don't think like this. I'm making this up as a demonstration of how you can come up with such rhetoric, using facts mixed up with exaggerations, fabrications and fallacious conclusions.) Toxic femininity is the phenomenon that women, at large, are raised in our society to be overly emotional,...

Donald Trump's election as the next president of the United States, and the reaction by the regressive left to it, has really shown how completely devious and abhorrent the regressive leftist ideology is. A reporter of the CNN network said in a televised interview that at some point at the beginning of the presidential campaign, CNN showed full unedited speeches by Trump. And that this was a "mistake". It's quite public knowledge, and has been for quite a long time, that biased journalists will often engage in censorship and even dishonest editing in order to drive a certain agenda (eg. a political one.) Of course journalists seldom want to admit to using such underhanded dishonest tactics. Except, apparently, when the subject is an undesirable person. Then it seems to be completely ok to censor and edit. Then it seems that the honest showing of full unedited footage is a "mistake". And they don't seem to have any qualms about openly stating so. Mo...

After Trump's victory in the American presidential elections, blogs and YouTube were filled with crying social justice warriors. Some of these videos are just hilarious. Others are really scary (such as the one by the infamous Anita Sarkeesian, where she talks exactly like a dangerous cult leader. It's astonishingly dark and scary.) One of the most infamous YouTube feminists, Laci Green, also made such a video. She says in that video: "We let this happen." No. You didn't "let this happen." You made this happen. It didn't happen regardless of your efforts. It happened precisely because of your efforts. (And by "you" I'm referring to the entire regressive leftist cult.) The Democratic Party (ie. the "liberals", ie. the "left") in the United States has been largely appropriated by the modern feminist social justice ideology. Not all supporters of said party are social justice warriors, but quite a significant po...

Whether Trump's victory of the presidential election of the United States will end up in a global catastrophe will remain to be seen. Personally I highly, highly doubt it; all that fear-mongering is just complete bullshit. Anyway, that's not the point of this post. Trump's victory was important and significant for other reasons. The leftist media, both in the United States and in the rest of the world, was highly biased and partisan in this election. It reached rather outrageous levels within the United States itself. It was basically a constant barrage against Trump, while largely downplaying and even ignoring any fault that Clinton may have had. The leftist media really, really pushed Clinton to become the president. The smearing campaign against Trump was so global in scale that it might even be unprecedented in the history of American (and even world-wide) press. Yet, they lost. And that's why this result was so incredibly important. This loss signals to the...

Can you tell what is the difference between these terms? One of them is not like the others: "Non-white people" "Colored people" "People of color" To the average person they might sound like pretty much synonymous, just three different ways of saying the same thing. But they are not! Two of them are racist, while the remaining one is the "politically correct" term. More specifically, the third one is ok, while the other ones are offensive. At least at this moment. Why? Who knows. The phase of the Moon, maybe? Let's see how long before the third one becomes inappropriate as well. I'm really wondering if social justice warriors will then go back to their old YouTube videos where they use the term and remove them. As with all political correctness, it's pretty much arbitrary and ever-shifting. Again and again I encounter that yet another word is, somehow, "racist", or at the very least "inappropriate". Lik...

Some creationists, when talking about the theory of evolution, will bring up this argument that there are "six meanings of evolution." Namely: Cosmic evolution: the origin of time, space, and matter from nothing in the “big bang” Chemical evolution: all elements “evolved” from hydrogen Stellar evolution: stars and planets formed from gas clouds Organic evolution: life begins from inanimate matter Macro-evolution: animals and plants change from one type into another Micro-evolution: variations form within the “kind” I'm not 100% sure who invented this, but as far as I know, it was most probably Kent Hovind. (His son, Eric Hovind, who just loves to parrot all of his father's arguments and speeches like a robot, also regularly presents this "argument".) The claim isn't true, and is nonsensical. Those names are completely made up by creationists (probably by Kent Hovind) and the first ones have absolutely nothing to do with the theory of evolution....

I have been writing quite a lot about the modern social justice cult. I have also been writing quite a lot about how disappointing VR has been. It was only a matter of time before the two would meet, because social justice wants to invade everything. Oculus announce $10m diversity pledge . What does technology have to do with social justice and diversity? Who knows. But apparently to Oculus "diversity" is so important that they are going to invest a whopping 10 million dollars on it. In an unspecified manner, somehow. Of course "diversity" (scare quotes intentional) in social justice vocabulary means the exact opposite of actual diversity, par for the course for such an Orwellian totalitarian ideology. The word, as used by them, doesn't mean what it means to everybody else. To them "diversity" means that only one opinion is allowed, only one political stance is allowed, diversity of opinions is not tolerated. Technology and technological develo...

As the saying goes, you get what you pay for . And that's often true about food as well. Particularly, quite often if you go to an ultra-cheap pizzeria, the pizzas are really, really flavorless and tasteless. They might have a really, really mild flavor, but overall they often taste like nothing. This is actually a bit of a mystery to me. How do they do that? I'm completely serious: If I purposefully wanted to make such a flavorless pizza myself, I wouldn't know how! Even if I buy the cheapest possible ingredients at the grocery store and make a half-assed pizza, it will taste significantly better than those at most cheap pizzerias. I honestly don't know how to make such a tasteless pizza even if I wanted to. My hypothesis is that these pizzerias don't actually get their ingredients from the same sources as grocery stores do. Instead, they get them for much cheaper from some other sources, and the quality of the ingredients is simply abysmal. So abysmal that...

The internet was a rather different place in the early and mid-90's. If you didn't use the internet back then, you wouldn't even believe how different it was. This very blog service is an excellent example of how the internet has changed over the years. Back in those times, there was absolutely nothing even resembling this. In fact, the technology (in browsers and overall the HTML specification and all other kinds of specifications needed for this) just wasn't there. Back then it was unthinkable to actually have some kind of content editor usable from within the web browser itself. (Web forms did exist back then, which could be used by a user to send data to the server, but they were significantly more primitive than they generally are today.) (And this isn't even going to things that we take today for granted such as YouTube, which nobody could have even imagined in their wildest dreams back then. The necessary technology was simply non-existent. The necessary ...