What grinds my gears

Every year, literally thousands of new video games are published. Even if we discard completely sub-par amateur trash, we are still talking about several hundreds of video games every year that could potentially be very enjoyable to play. It is, of course, impossible to play them all, not to talk about it being really expensive. There are only so many games one has the physical time to play. So how to choose which games to buy and play? This is where the job of video game critics comes into play. If a game gets widespread critical acclaim, there's a good chance that it will be really enjoyable. If it gets negative reviews, there's a good chance that the game is genuinely bad and unenjoyable. A good chance. But only that. And that's sometimes the problem. Sometimes I buy a game expecting it to be really great because it has received such universal acclaim, only to find out that it's so boring or so insufferable that I can't even finish it. Sometimes such game...

There is an interesting article at vox.com about the Brussel's attack, and how radical islamism and jihadism has risen not only outside, but also inside of Europe itself. The gist of it is that we have allowed a situation where there are essentially immigrant/islamic ghettos within our cities, the people in these ghettos are forming isolated communities that have a very separationist mentality, and they are radicalizing themselves. They are being preached by radical islamists into hating the west, the very countries they live in. This is one of the reasons why so many terrorist attacks are actually committed by jihadists who are citizens of the country, sometimes even second or third generation (ie. they were themselves born, or even their parents may have been born, in the country, and thus they are natural-born citizens.) Not all terrorist attacks are committed by foreigners coming from the outside into the country for the express intent of committing the attack. The problem is ...

Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada, prides himself for having appointed a Cabinet of Canada with "equal representation", which means that half of the members are women and half are men. This was not just coincidence, but his political agenda for years, and his full purposeful intent. But consider that from 184 current MP's, only 50 are women. In other words, the Cabinet has not the same male-female representation as the parliament. Which means that many of the members of the cabinet were deliberately chosen due to their gender, which means that other potential candidates were discriminated against. To my knowledge, Trudeau has never claimed that the Cabinet was chosen purely based on merit and expertise; the only message that Trudeau has ever given is that the Cabinet was deliberately chosen to have 50-50 representation (implying that expertise and personal merit was only a secondary factor.) When you elect, or don't elect, people based on their gender ...

Social justice, especially in the United States, is becoming more and more radical and extremist, and more and more like a fundamentalist cult. Just read the Campus Reform website for tidbits of the most insane things they are doing. These people have already become so radicalized that their protests and demonstrations are becoming more and more violent by the day. In fact, many of them outright harass and even commit acts of physical aggression already. It will be only a matter of time before they become so radicalized that they will start committing actual acts of terrorism. The kind of terrorism that leaves dozens, if not even hundreds of people dead. Mark my words. It will inevitably happen. It may be a mass shooting, or a bomb, or something similar, but something like that is likely to happen sooner or later, committed in the name of social justice. If Donald Trump happens to be elected president of the United States (I have no idea at this point if he will, but I think he ...

I have already written about how they are taking virtual reality headsets too far , and how they are thus too expensive and too full of useless cruft . Recently I have noticed a third drawback of concentrating their efforts to much on the augmented reality crap: Many people now think that the augmented reality part is the only way to use the VR headsets, and writing about the negative aspects of that. It is, in fact, being compared to the infamous Kinect for being a similar gimmick (requiring a lot of space, rearranging your room, causing accidents and so on.) The problem is that they are hyping the VR headsets with their AR capabilities. In fact, they are over-hyping it to the extreme. These AR hype videos make for cool and at the surface exciting demonstrations... but it has also had the side-effect that now many people think that's the only and main way of using the VR headsets, and are turned off by the prospect of it being too inconvenient. They don't have the spac...

I have written previously about the difficulty of translation and localization . Appropriate translation/localization of works to another language can be a surprisingly difficult and arduous job. However, sometimes companies go too far, for several possible reasons, and just botch the whole thing to unacceptable levels. Translating something to another language, from a purist point of view, is to reflect in the target language as accurately as possible what was said in the original language. The more closely the translation matches in meaning the original, the better. And, rather obviously, absolutely nothing of the original should be added or removed, unless it's absolutely necessary and there is no other option. (In some rare cases it may be outright impossible to translate something accurately, and conveying the exact meaning would require extensive amounts of ancillary explanations, which may be completely unsuitable for most media.) Purists, who want an accurate translatio...

Again, not something that grinds my gears, but in a way another entry in this "the genius of (some game franchise)" two-parter (the first one being about Pokémon games .) I have previously written about id Software , and wondered what happened to them. They used to be pretty much at the top of the PC game developers (or at the very least, part of the top elite). Their games were extremely influential in PC gaming, especially the first-person shooter genre, and they were pretty much the company that made the genre what it is today. While perhaps not necessarily the first ones to invent all the ideas, they definitely invented a lot of them, and did it right, and their games are definitely the primary source from which other games of the genre got their major game mechanics. Most action-oriented (and even many non-action oriented) first-person shooter games today use most of the same basic gameplay designs that Doom and especially Quake invented, or at least helped popularize....

Many feminists like to spout that there is no such thing as "reverse racism" or "reverse sexism". For once, I happen to agree. However, I don't agree with that statement for the same reason as they do. "Reverse racism" and "reverse sexism" make exactly as much sense as "reverse murder", "reverse theft", "reverse rape", "reverse arson" or "reverse jaywalking". It's nonsensical. There is only murder, theft, rape, arson and jaywalking. In the same way there is only racism and sexism. There is no "reverse" anything, because that's completely nonsensical. A woman can be as much of a sexist as a man. A black person can be as much of a racist as a white person. (And, in fact, many social justice warriors are overtly and obnoxiously sexist and racist, but that's another topic.) What feminists mean that "there is no such thing as reverse sexism or reverse racism" i...

When Rise of the Tomb Raider appeared on the Windows Store, people noticed several limitations imposed on the game (whether by design or by accident, nobody probably knows). Among the worst ones: The game forces vsync. The major problem with this is that, seemingly, this doesn't allow the game to use g-sync in capable monitors (because it requires for vsync to be turned off in the game). In other words, the g-sync capability of your monitor (if it has it) becomes useless. No fullscreen mode, only borderless window mode. (With some graphics cards this has an impact on performance.) No overlays possible. This means no Steam overlay, no MSI Afterburner overlay, no GeForce Experience overlay, no ShadowPlay. It also means no Steam Controller configuration is possible. There is no executable file on disk for the game. This means that anything that watches for such an executable being launched can't be used. This includes things like custom mouse settings (such as Logitech Gamin...

One of the main grievances of progressive feminists is that there's too little female representation in all kinds of positions and jobs. However, have you noticed that they only mention prestigious and easy jobs? Politics, upper management and CEO's, university faculty, science researchers and so on and so forth. How many times have you seen a feminist root for more female representation in other male-dominated fields, like coal mines, sewage maintenance, garbage disposal, farming, construction, and so on? It seems to me that they are only concerned about female representation when the positions are prestigious, well-paying, clean and easy. Why is that? Food for thought.

I noticed something funny, and illuminating, when browsing the Apple App Store. One game had this kind of rating: In other words, 2.5 stars (which is even stated as text as well). This would indicate that the ratings are split pretty evenly. 50% approval rate. However, the game had four 1-star ratings and two 5-star ratings. 1 star is the minimum rating, and 5 stars is the maximum. Wait... That doesn't make any sense. That's not an even split. There are significantly more 1-star ratings than 5-star ratings (in fact, double the amount). That's not even close to an even split. Four people rated it at 1 star, and only two at 5 stars. Is the calculation correct? Well, the weighted average is (4*1+2*5)/(4+2) = 2.333 ≈ 2.5 (we can allow rounding to the nearest half star.) So the calculation is correct (allowing a small amount of rounding). It is indeed 2.5 stars. The graphic is correct. But it still doesn't make any sense. How can 4x1 star + 2x5 stars give an...

To the "progressive" social justice warriors, especially video game journalists, the word "gamergate" has become pretty much the equivalent of "nazism", or pretty much like "communism" to the ultra-conservative Americans. That latter comparison seems to be even more apt, given how ridiculous the fear of communism was in the United States especially in the 50's and 60's. People often would use the word to attack their opponents and people they didn't like, accusing them of being communists. It seems that "gamergate" has become this for progressive social justice warrior journalists. Whenever members of the gaming community express an opinion that the journalist disagrees with, the journalist can simply add the word "gamergate" to their refutation to immediately belittle and dismiss said opinion, and get an enormous echo chamber of other social justice warriors to support them. It's like a magic word; just add ...

The "wage gap" myth is getting more and more widespread year after year, thanks to the heavy promotion by big-name feminists and the sensationalistic media. Government official (including up to heads of state), big corporations, small corporations, banks, the media at large, and millions and millions of people are in increasing numbers swallowing this myth. Some of them go so far as to actually "do something about it", which ironically usually means breaking the law of the country by gender-based favoritism and discrimination (such as giving extra money to female employees for the sole reason that they are women and nothing else, even if that's outright illegal in the country.) Yet, even though the myth is getting more and more widespread, I have yet to see a single piece of actual, concrete evidence of this. I don't mean general statistics. I mean actual concrete examples: Pointing out an actual company that actually pays female employees less than men pe...

The American bipartite system is a bit strange. Ie. the "liberals" and the "conservatives." (To my knowledge there are actually other political parties as well, but for some reason I can't really understand, there are effectively just two parties in the United States.) The "liberals" (ie. "the left") seem to hold mostly just your average normal western-world values and political views about human rights, freedoms and the role of the government towards their citizens. The "conservatives" (ie. "the right"), however, seem to be populated with the most extreme archetypal American capitalist and corporatist thinking. The conservatives are not exclusively full of gun-toting regressive rednecks, however. There are some really, really smart and intelligent people, who nevertheless hold deeply conservative values (and pretty much abhor anything that has something to do with liberalism and socialism.) For example, there are some...

In January 24 I wrote about how Anita Sarkeesian announced she was ending the "Tropes vs. Women" video series because of "depression" . I predicted that she would make a comeback when she was going to run out of money, and ask for more money. Well, it took a lot less time than I expected. She is now, only a bit over a month later, asking for another 200 thousand dollars for yet another bullshit project . It seems that she got over her "depression" quite quickly. "But hey", you might ask, "why are you saying she's scamming people?" Well, consider that she initially asked for 6 thousand dollars for her original "Tropes vs Women" project. She got a lot more money than that. According to her tax report from 2014 , she got a total revenue of 411929 dollars. Her "non-profit" (which means "tax exempt") organization does nothing more than YouTube videos. Can you guess how many videos she made in 2014 us...

The new Ghostbusters movie has an all-female main cast (compared to the all-male main cast of the original two movies). That in itself isn't good or bad. However, there are many indications that the film makers are trying to pander to feminists and social justice warriors with this "girl power" casting. (Just make a google image search for "ghostbusters girl power" for one example of this.) Is it working? Are feminists and social justice warriors happy? Of course not. They are never happy. They cannot be happy. They are incapable of being happy. They are always angry. Nothing is ever good enough to them. Of course they are whining and complaining about how the movie is "racist" and whatnot. What exactly did you expect? Capitulating to social justice warriors is useless. By trying to pander to them, you are only drawing their attention, and begging for their ire. It will bite you in the ass. Stop capitulating to them. Stop pandering to them...

In the United States morbid obesity is a real epidemic, with something like 33% of the entire population being obese. (As a side note, there is a difference between "overweight" and "obese". The latter is defined as the person's weight surpassing a certain limit and becoming significantly unhealthy and significantly increasing the risk of all kinds of diseases. And we are talking about 33% of the population being obese , not just overweight.) In recent decades a medical procedure named gastric bypass surgery has become popular there, often recommended by doctors to combat obesity and lose weight. In fact, there is evidence that many doctors prescribe it even too liberally, and without telling their patients of all the risks and consequences. (And, of course, their websites are full of carefully-selected success stories and testimonials.) The thing is, the procedure is both dangerous and may not remove all the existing diseases and risks. In fact, in some ca...

Forcing ideologies onto people by censoring criticism and differing points of view has been a staple of totalitarian regimes during the entire history or humanity. It's no different today. The only difference is that today we have the internet, which allows the dissemination of ideas worldwide a million times faster than before. It also allows criticism of those ideas by anybody in the world, pretty much immediately when the idea is presented. How to distinguish good ideas from bad ones? There's at least one criterion that can be used to see if an idea is a bad one: If it needs censorship to survive. If its adherents promote silencing, censoring and banning of criticism and dissenting ideas. Good ideas welcome criticism and scrutiny. They thrive on challenges. If they can endure the test of criticism, they become stronger and more reliable. If your idea cannot survive criticism, and requires shutting down all such criticism, then your idea is bad. It doesn't matter wh...

There's a strange obsession that humans have with hair. Most people spend amazing amounts of time taking care of their hair and, in many cases, outright obsessing about how it looks. Hair care is a billion-dollar industry. Barbers, hair salons, and hair products are all over the place, everywhere. There's also many cultural stigmas related to hair in many cultures, to some extent even in our modern western one. The most archetypal one is that many women feel shame if their hair is cut short, or they lose it. There are also many traditional views on hair still persisting in our modern culture (although diminishing), such as that women should have long hair and men short hair. I myself am a highly pragmatic person. Function always comes first, aesthetics second. When I'm buying clothes or shoes, the most important aspect in my purchase decisions are comfort and functionality, aesthetics being only very secondary. The same goes for my hair: What is the most functional ha...

Not something that grinds my gears, just some random thoughts. The Pokémon games celebrate their 20-year anniversary this year. There are currently six "generations" of these games; each generation consists one or two complementary pairs of games (each pair is essentially the same game, but with some catchable pokémon being different, and some details in the storyline changed), and a third individual game in some cases. If we count each complementary pair of games as essentially the same game, there are 16 distinct games in total (27 if we count all games individually). This is, of course, only counting the core games, not the side games nor spinoffs (which usually are of a completely different genre and use completely different game mechanics.) Curiously, each of the core games uses essentially the exact same basic game mechanic. From the very first games of generation 1 to the latest games of generation 6. Describing the common aspects of the game mechanics of all th...