What grinds my gears

Brown student protesters complain homework is interfering with their activism. The title itself sounds quite facepalmy, but the article itself reveals a darker aspect of the whole thing: “There are people breaking down, dropping out of classes, and failing classes because of the activism work they are taking on,” an undergraduate student going by the pseudonym “David” told The Brown Daily Herald Thursday. “My grades dropped dramatically. My health completely changed. I lost weight. I’m on antidepressants and anti-anxiety pills right now. Counselors called me. I had deans calling me to make sure I was okay.” This is something that wouldn't need to happen, and is caused solely because of the social justice brainwashing that these college kids are going through. But maybe if it's for a good cause, it's something to fight for, even if it means falling grades and mental health problems? The thing is, it's not: These protests are completely nonsensical. They are...

On June of last year, I wrote a blog post about how I think the development of VR headsets is taken too far , which will increase their price for no benefit. On January this year the Oculus Rift was finally announced for preordering... and surprise surprise, it's hugely expensive . Now one of OR's biggest competitors, the HTC Vive , has likewise been announced for preordering... and it's even more expensive, at 900€. And it's also stock full of useless augmented reality crap that no gamer will use for anything. Will they ever learn? We don't need augmented reality crap! We don't want augmented reality crap! It's useless! It may entertain us for a half hour, but other than that it's completely useless cruft that adds absolutely nothing to what really matters, ie. playing games. You do not play games by walking around your room. You play games by sitting on a chair or sofa. At most you might want to turn your head to look around, but that's it!...

Some people have hobbies that most other people may find strange and sometimes even off-putting. Sometimes it's just something that they might find completely ridiculous or even cringeworthy. The normal reasonable response that they can give to those hobbies is a simple "no thanks, I'm not interested", and let them be. As long as they aren't hurting anybody, they can do whatever they want. What they do among themselves, as long as it doesn't hurt anybody, is their business, and they can be left alone. Who cares? But sometimes the aversion towards a particular hobby goes to absolutely insane levels. It goes beyond "I'm not interested, it's not for me". It goes even beyond "they are crazy, I can't understand how can they do it, or why". It goes to total, absolute, pure unadultered hatred. For example, I have an acquaintance who absolutely loathes furries. It almost feels like an obsession for him to hate them. Sometimes he wil...

So we have burning of art , blatant antisemitism , and advocacy for the termination of constitutional rights . All at the same time. What does that remind you of? As George Santayana once said, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

When looking at the ideas that scientists, especially biologists, had about species and races, especially concerning humans, in the 1700's and 1800's, much of it sounds quite horrible to our modern more knowledgeable ears. Back in those times there was a great deal of discussion in science about the question of how many species/races (the difference between the two concepts seems to be a bit fuzzy back in those days, often up to the point of the two terms being used interchangeably) of humans there are, and what their biological relation is to each other. Much of it sounds really, really degrading and blatantly racist to our modern sensibilities. The prevalent view back in those days was that all living beings could be categorized in terms of development. In other words, some species were more developed and others less developed. All species could be put in a "ladder" according to how developed they were. Worms were pretty down low in this ladder, dogs a lot highe...

During the past decade or two, there has been an increasingly widespread idea among very diverse (and often completely unrelated) groups with regards to food, especially plants. New age spiritualists, a certain type of conspiracy theorists and denialists, vegans, and in some cases even some religious people (especially from some denominations of Christianity), have this concept that "natural" plants are the most healthy and nutritious form of food, while plants that have been modified by humans in some manner, are the cause of most of our health and dietary problems. (The most spiritualist people of course think that we are messing with "Mother Nature", whatever that may mean to them. Even the most pragmatic people think that man-modified plants are somehow "wrong", and that completely natural ones are better.) The big irony is that, quite often, the very plant products that they promote have actually been heavily modified by humans, especially using art...

During the last decade or so, a strange kind of "new age" spiritualism has become more and more popular. (It's in fact such a new iteration on the older "new age" philosophies, that you could call it "new new age" spiritualism.) It's a really strange ideology that makes lots of esoteric claims with literally zero evidence, and these claims are often just outright preposterous, and they have become so bold that they don't even try to masquerade or "sell" these ideas to make them more palatable. They just make the outlandish claims outright. And the claims are almost always really vague and fuzzy, with no explanations or anything. And somehow many people are swallowing them whole. One example of this is a best-selling book called "The Secret". To summarize it in one sentence, it claims that if you want something, you should actively think about it and visualize it in your mind, and that will make that something more likely t...

The copyright flagging system in YouTube is completely broken in its design, and there's forming a massive protest campaign for Google to fix it. Here is one example of how hideously broken the system is: How to steal somebody's ad revenue. It works simply like this: Make a DMCA claim on somebody's video. YouTube will give you several options about what to do about it. One of them is to redirect the video's monetization to yourself. You don't have to actually prove that you own any rights to that video. It's all automatized, and you will get the monetization automatically. The owner of the video can dispute the claim. However, you don't have to do anything about it. If you don't make your claim into an actual DMCA strike, your claim will hold for an entire month. During this month it will be you who receives all the ad revenue from the video. After the one month, the claim is automatically removed. You get to keep the money. No questions asked. No ...

Both social justice warriors and the media at large have during the last few years made a huge deal about online harassment. It's approximately the worst thing in this world (only behind, possibly, physical rape of a woman.) It has actually got to a point where the media depicts the internet in general, and online gaming in particular, as some kind of warzone where you just can't exist without a constant barrage of harassment. And of course all (male) gamers are misogynist sexist harassers. Obviously. There is, however, a big double standard in this whole thing. You see, when the harassment is done by social justice warriors and the target is somebody who they don't like (ie. usually someone who is critical of them), this somehow goes under the radar, and nobody really cares about it. The social justice warriors don't talk about nor pay attention to it, the media at large doesn't talk about nor pay attention to it, and overall there seems to be some kind of stran...

I recently watched a video criticizing a propaganda video make by MTV about "Black History Month". (The MTV video in question implies that without black people we wouldn't have today things like cellphones, video game consoles or pacemakers, which makes absolutely no sense. But that's not here nor there.) That made me think that personally I vehemently oppose, on principle, any "Black History Month". I oppose it exactly as much as I would oppose a "White History Month", or a "Latino History Month", or anything of the sorts. Why? Because I'm an individualist, not a collectivist. And I'm an individualist because I believe in equality and fundamental human rights. I consider that anybody who both adheres to collectivist ideas and claims to uphold equality and human rights to have completely contradictory views, because they are incompatible things. As an individualist, I believe that every person should be judged as an individu...

There are thousands and thousands of websites out there with an enormous amount of content. Much of that content is pretty much professionally made, oftentimes even by a large company with many full-paid employees. But how can such companies afford this, given that such websites are (at least in the vast majority of cases) completely free to be browsed? Are they doing it just for fun, PR or self-advertisement? Sometimes yes. However, very often the answer is the third-party advertising. One wouldn't think that just having some ad-banners, popups and nag screens would be all that profitable, but apparently it is. Seemingly advertisers are ready to pay surprisingly large amounts of money to have their ads on a website that has millions of visitors. Sometimes these sums are large enough to pay the salary of a small team of people. The more people see those ads, the larger the profit for the website. Logically, the website will try to draw in as many visitors as possible. And when ...

Some time ago I wrote a blog post about my opinion on girls-only school (and other similar) events , pointing out how they inadvertently give girls the exact opposite message of what is intended. One concept that events like that rides on, a concept that's quite popular among progressive feminists, is that boys and men are a lot more competitive, while girls and women are much more social, amicable, cooperative and conflict-free. Which ostensibly would mean that a group of women could work together much more harmoniously and free of conflicts and problems than a group of men, or a mixed group. After all, the women are not competitive, and instead are very social and would thus be much better at communicating and cooperating, and there would be no infighting getting in the way of doing a good job. Right? Wrong. Let me present you a counter-example: A producer launches a women-only TV company, which soon crumbles due to severe infighting and constant conflict . You see, wom...

Any person who buys a game on Steam can write a review about it, and give it a "recommended" or "not recommended" verdict. Likewise, and perhaps even more usefully, people can vote on any review, on the question of whether they found that review helpful or not. The idea is excellent. In this way, at least in theory, the vast community of Steam users can help bring informative and helpful user reviews to visibility, while bad and unhelpful reviews will sink to the bottom. The problem is that people are not actually voting on whether the review was informative and helpful, but whether they agree with the review or not. I have noticed that it seems that if somebody disagrees with the "recommended / not recommended" verdict of the review, they are very likely to thumbs-down the review, completely regardless of its actual contents. In other words, even if the review is extremely informative and brings useful information to potential buyers of the game. N...

One of the biggest steps that progressive feminism is attempting to take in order to succeed is to control the narrative. "Controlling the narrative" means that in all possible avenues, be they real-life or, especially, online, only the progressive feminist perspective is given any visibility, and all dissenting opinions and criticism is silenced, censored and banned. They have found a perfect way of achieving this: Masquerade their attempt at censorship as "fighting against hate speech and harassment". After all, no public avenue and social media platform would dare to oppose such a sentiment. Thus all such avenues and websites are in increasing numbers adopting new "anti-harassment" and "anti hate speech" policies. The problem? They are putting the progressive feminists in charge of deciding what exactly counts as "harassment" and "hate speech". Twitter is but the latest website to do exactly this . Facebook, Google an...

The black students at many universities in the United States are spewing this kind of rhetoric (direct quote from a video): "This university owes us everything. This was built on the back of my people, and I owe you none of you guys anything. We own white people nothing." This complete horseshit, and blatant opportunism and, ultimately, greed. Firstly universities in the United States were not built "on the back of [black] people" (ie. implying that without the contribution of black people, which in this context is implied to mean slaves, the universities wouldn't even exist.) The oldest universities in the United states were built in the 1600's (the first one being Harvard University, founded in 1636.) The slave trade did not become prominent until the 1700's and 1800's. Slavery in the United States may have had an economic impact on the country. But how much of it did it have, and how much did universities benefit from it? It's pure s...

The PlayStation Vita has sold less than 10 million units worldwide. All in itself that might sound like a pretty decent amount, but it's dwarfed when we consider what the normal numbers for handheld consoles actually are: The PlayStation Portable sold about 82 million units, Vita's biggest competitor the Nintendo 3DS has sold 58 million units, and the original Nintendo DS a whopping 154 million units. In this light the Vita, which has sold a tenth of its competitors, and even its own predecessor, is arguably a failure. And that's not all. The system is arguably also a failure, even a bigger one, in terms of its game library. The game library for the Vita is pitiably small. And we are talking about all games available for the system here. The triple-A game library for the system is significantly smaller still, to an almost ridiculous level. It's hard to sell a console that has no games for it. And this is a vicious circle because developers won't make games for a ...

To feminists rape is essentially the worst possible crime in existence. They also have the strong notion that our culture does not take it seriously enough, and that there even is a "rape culture" that dismisses rape accusations and disbelieves victims. They promote stricter and stricter laws against rape (and are likewise promoting pretty much the reversal of our most fundamental judiciary system, ie. considering the accused innocent by default until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt.) Thus, one would think that feminists would be extremely furious when someone makes a false rape claim. Such false claims only fuel the (alleged) rape culture and only gives weapons to critics, and they erode the believability of actual victims of rape. False rape claims are a huge disservice to their goal of making rape a more seriously taken crime. False rape claims unjustly hurt other people (the accused directly, and all actual victims of rape indirectly), and it erodes everything tha...

Frozen is not only Disney's highest-grossing animated film, it's the highest-grossing animated film period ( according to Wikipedia .) But why? I really don't understand. I think that the film is highly, highly overrated. Let's just compare it to Disney's second-highest-grossing film, The Lion King. (I'm not counting Pixar movies as "Disney", even if Disney currently technically speaking distributes them. Even then, only Toy Story 3 would be higher than The Lion King.) The Lion King actually tells a profound, memorable story. It establishes characters well, and they are also likewise memorable. It's a well-written film overall. If somebody were to see the film for the first time, and then a few weeks later you would ask them to describe the story, and for details of what happened in the film, I'm certain that they could go to great lengths in their description. Compare that to Frozen. If you did that same test, I'm all but certain t...

Europe is taking a completely ridiculous amount of immigrants using the excuse of them being "war refugees", even though everybody knows that only a small part of them are actual refugees from Syria. There have been reports that in some countries less than 10% of the "refugees" are actually from Syria. I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers are similar in most countries. The mass immigration could very well be described as an invasion. We are talking about millions of "refugees", most of which are not. Germany alone has taken over a million of them. And the thing is, there is no end in sight for this madness. Europe keeps going and going and going, taking more and more "refugees" every single day. We are talking about thousands of "refugees" every day. And it goes on and on and on, and they just aren't stopping. We are actually reaching the point where "refugees" are actually been taken secretly, without tellin...

"Mary Sue" is an archetype of fiction (usually used unintentionally by the writer). The term is used mostly in a derogatory manner. It's, essentially, a character without flaws. A character that's just a bit too perfect, and seemingly can do no wrong, essentially makes no mistakes, and shows no weakness. Basically always a "lawful good" character that's nice to everybody. Writers, even experienced ones, sometimes mistakenly make one of their major characters like this, perhaps in a misaimed attempt at making a likeable character that can be admired and rooted for. A hero of sorts (even if the character never does anything of great importance or performs literally heroic acts.) Sometimes the character is physically weak, but essentially a saint and philanthrope who loves everybody and is always kind and helpful. Sometimes the character is an actual action hero, an ace, who kicks villains' collective asses and always saves the day. A hero to be admir...

One thing I noticed when answering the " 36 questions women have for men ", and in retrospect what I have noticed also before, is that many feminists have, as part of their "toxic masculinity" dogma, the notion that men have been raised to shut down and hide their emotions, and that they are just pretending and faking it when they are stoic. That they are afraid to show emotion for the fear of ridicule or something. As women, especially feminist women who have been taught the "toxic masculinity" dogma, they seem incapable of understanding that not everybody is like them. I'm quite stoic myself. I don't easily show emotion. No, I'm not faking or pretending. No, I'm not afraid to show emotion. That's just how I am naturally. I don't need to shut down anything. That's just how I am. It's my innate personality. I don't need to fake it or pretend anything. This is actually very common to most men. Of course there are e...

There's a story going around about the subject of why communism doesn't work. The story is most probably apocryphal, but it goes approximately like this: A university professor gets tired of his progressive students going on and on about the virtues of Marxism and communism, so he decides to put it into practice: He tells them that from that moment forward all test will use communist principles and therefore test results will be distributed among all students equally. In other words, every student will get the average of all test scores. The students agree with this. Tests are scored on a 0 to 5 scale. When the next test is over, every student gets a 3. The students that did not work hard for the test, and their test got just a 1 or a 0, were happy. The students that worked hard on the test, to get a 5, were upset for only getting a 3 instead. This caused demotivation in the hard-working students. Why work hard on the next test when they would get a lower score regardless...