What grinds my gears

Similar to " 24 Questions Black People Have For White People " (which I answered in that previous blog post), there's a new buzzfeed video titled " 36 Questions Women Have For Men ". The level if idiocy has not decreased by a whole lot. But I'll bite. #1: "How does it feel to be the same sex as Donald Trump?" How does it feel to be the same sex as Sarah Palin? What a completely retarded question. #2: "Why do you hate rom-coms?" WTF is that? Had to look it up. You mean romantic comedies? I don't hate all of them. I find most of them boring, uninteresting and shallow. So what? Do you mean that you like every single movie genre in existence? Or are there some that you find boring and uninteresting on average? #3: "Why do you sit around and make women talk about men in movies, when ya’ll easily just sit around and talk about boobs, for hours?" I'm baffled by this question. I kind of understand the first hal...

Feminists and other social justice warriors (is there a difference? not really) always keep repeating how they are for equality and equal rights, over and over and over. Yet time and again they demonstrate how they are not for equality, nor understand what the word means. Just as a minor example, consider what happens if the ethnicity of an established character of a work of fiction is changed in a newer installment. Let's put aside the question of whether this is a good thing to do. For the sake of this example, we don't care. Fine, an established character's ethnicity is changed in a newer installment (or a spinoff, or a live-action adaptation, or whatever.) The principle of equality would mean that it makes absolutely no difference what the original and new ethnicities are. White to black, black to white, Asian to white, black to Asian, white to latino... If we consider our society truly equal, and if we hold the principles that all people are equal, then it shoul...

One of the concepts of the progressive feminist religion is the idea of "gender fluidity". I'm not going to delve into whether this is supported by psychology and how much, but there is one thing I would like to talk about. If you search enough, you will find tons of YouTube videos where teenagers rant about being "gender fluid", and proper pronouns (with a myriad of completely ridiculous made-up pronouns) and so on and so forth. I posit that at least 99% of these people are not "gender fluid" (even if we fully accepted, for the sake of argument, that that's a real thing.) Teenagers are by nature rebellious. Their hormones are raging, which makes them want to rebel against their parents, and against social norms. So what happens when the "cool kids" keep bombarding these rebellious teenagers with a message that traditional gender roles are nothing but an artificial social construct, and that there are no genders, and that you are...

One of the tenets of modern progressive feminism, a view strongly held by a significant portion of the movement, is that stereotypical masculinity is a very negative trait, is "toxic", and causes all the problems in our world. They argue that this is why "every man is a potential rapist", and why "rape apology", "rape culture", "misogyny", oppression of women and so on is so "prevalent". They strongly posit that boys should be taught from a young age away from this "toxic masculinity" (and that doing this would somehow magically solve all the "inequalities" that feminists think there exist in our society.) I would like to present the opposite view, in defense of stereotypically masculine traits. I would posit that our society wouldn't even exist without them, and they are very important. (These traits can, of course, be taken to unhealthy extremes sometimes, but removing them completely, if that were ...

Disclaimer: All of the below is pure hearsay. It is not based on hard evidence, but on testimonials of individual people. People can lie and make stuff up. People can troll just for the fun of it. That being said, I am quite convinced that it is at the very least partially, if not almost completely, true. There are a few big game companies who are absolutely notorious and infamous about how tyrannical and oppressive they are towards their employees. Perhaps the most notorious one is Electronic Arts. However, they are by far not the only one. (Ubisoft has also gained notoriety on this front in later years, as another example.) Have you ever thought how some of these companies can publish a dozen or so triple-A games with humongous production values every year? How they can more or less meet deadlines, even though projects of this size are notorious for always going way over timelines and budgets? One way they do is to push their employees to the absolute limit. Up to a point that ...

Let's briefly recap who Anita Sarkeesian is: In 2012 she created a kickstarter project to raise money to make a video series about sexism in video games from a feminist perspective. She promised something like two dozen videos within a year, or so. She pledged for some tens of thousands of dollars. She got over 160 thousand. The way she misrepresented both video games and gamers in her videos angered quite many people, and spawned a lot of criticism. Anita Sarkeesian, like so many big-name feminists, took the opportunity to play the victim. Perhaps the most prominent and most successful ploy was when she cancelled a speech due to a non-credible "bomb threat". Because of this act, she was donated over 300 thousand dollars in a very short period of time. She is, possibly, the person who has been given the most money for canceling a speech in the entirety of human history. So, she pledged for some tens of thousands of dollars. She has been donated approximately a half mi...

Here is a concise statement of why I oppose progressive feminism. Progressive feminism seeks to silence, censor, ban, stifle and criminalize dissenting opinions and criticism, and opinions and views that feminists do not like. This goes blatantly against the constitution of basically any country that has a constitution, and against the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (article 19). Progressive feminism seeks to hinder and stop people from peacefully assembling in order to discuss views and opinions that feminists do not like. This goes blatantly against most constitutions and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (articles 19 and 20.1). Progressive feminism seeks to reverse the burden of proof with certain crimes (in other words, it seeks for the accused to be considered guilty by default, and the burden of proving his innocence to fall on the accused.) This goes blatantly against the most fundamental principles of our justice system, against most constitutions, and aga...

On June of last year, I wrote a blog post about how too much development on useless features of virtual reality headsets can ostensibly be detrimental because it will increase their price for no tangible benefit. I concluded the post with: I appreciate that they are taking their time and want to make it right the first time, rather than publishing half-finished products and using the consumers as beta testers. However, I do not appreciate them spending time, effort and money on useless features that will only make the device more expensive for no benefit. Well, the long-awaited Oculus Rift is finally here! Or at least you can finally preorder it! For 599 USD. And with tons of useless crap bundled with it. Such an Xbox One controller, a custom pair of controllers (that will work only with games that directly support them), tons of IR sensors that allow you to walk around the room, a remote control... and who knows what other useless crap that you will play with for a half ho...

The 1984 movie The Terminator by James Cameron was a big hit in the 80's. While sci-fi movies with killer robots was nothing new (them going back probably at least to the 50's or even earlier), this was a movie that got really popular, and which transcended other sillier movies of the genre. It was gritty, it was thrilling, and it's an integral part of not only the 1980's cinematography but also culture. Probably everybody knows the basic premise (and with this kind of movie it's probably rather useless to warn about spoilers): Nigh indestructible and unstoppable killer robot travels back in time from the future in order to kill the mother of the leader of the human resistance. The resistance also sends back a soldier, Kyle Reese, to protect the woman from the terminator. The film is stock full of grand scale chase sequences, and enormous amounts of violence and explosions (iow. it's one of the most iconic action thrillers of movie history.) The killer robo...

Do you know who in our society are the biggest rape apologists? Progressive feminists. Whenever a group of Muslims rapes women, as sure as the Sun raises in the morning, the progressive feminist mob will hurry to make up excuses for them, mitigate the gravity of the crime, shift blame away from the perpetrators, and veer the discussion away from the actual crime as much as possible. In other words, they will act exactly like they claim that our western society does when dealing with rape. Feminists are nothing but a bunch of hypocrites. They are the masters of rape apology and rape culture.

I have noticed a trend in some web series: The series is started by a very talented individual who does typically reviews of something (such as video games or movies). Because this person happens to be really talented and entertaining at it, they get a really big fanbase, and their videos start getting hundreds of thousands, if not even millions of views. In other words, they become internet celebrities. With celebrity comes money. And with money comes higher production values to the videos. It usually starts with better recording equipment, ie. better cameras, microphones, editing software, lighting, and so on. But once those are top notch, and the money still keeps pouring in, the production values are increased in other ways. Such as props, costumes, sometimes even hired people to act as secondary characters. And, of course, more complex scripts. And this is were sometimes the project starts falling apart. Or perhaps not falling apart per se, but the series starts becoming less ...

Bought a Steam Controller, and here are some first impressions. As you might know, originally the Steam Controller was designed to be more like this prototype: Direction controls were to be handled exclusively with the two touchpads, and the four standard ABXY buttons were to be arranged like in that prototype, close to the touchpads. At the center of the controller it was envisioned to be a touchscreen with freely configurable content; the same idea as with smartphones. The standard "start" and "select" buttons were probably going to be at the bottom, as in the above prototype. The final retail version, however, is a bit different (probably having gone through dozens of different iterations, based on actual testing): The three most prominent changes are the removal of the proposed touchscreen, the addition of a traditional thumbstick, and the rearrangement of the ABXY buttons in a more traditional pattern. (The touchpads are also larger, as is the contr...