What grinds my gears

Social Justice Warriors have for many years now been offended by the American football team Washington Redskins , saying how racist and offensive that name is, and demanding it to be changed. Recently, a poll was made among native Americans about that team name, and it turned out that 90% of them weren't bothered by it. Ok, so controversy over? It wasn't such a huge issue after all? There might have been some cause for concern, but it turns out that it was just overreaction? After all, the people who could have been offended by that name are not offended, so the matter is closed? Haha, of course not! Why should we listen to them? They don't know anything! They are victims, whether they know it or not. Their opinion doesn't matter. This is not a question of opinion (not even of those who are the "victims" of this blatant racism)! At least according to social justice warriors . The article goes on and on how this shouldn't be up to a poll. Yet I am 1...

White shaming and white guilt is getting more and more widespread on university campuses in the United States (and to increasing extents in some other countries). The funny thing is that it seems that nobody is able to give any concrete examples of what the actual problem is, that needs to be addressed. There are lots of hoaxes perpetrated by non-white people (which have been increasing in numbers year after year), but little to show for actual problems. Watch this video of the dean of Portland Community College being interviewed . They are organizing a "whiteness month", which sounds like an entire month dedicated to shaming (and, frankly, soft-oppressing) white people. The interviewer asks again and again for the dean to give some actual concrete examples of racism or other problem caused because of the "whiteness" culture, or white people. Again and again the dean just beats around the bush, alluding to vague problems, without giving a single concrete exampl...

I have written previously in length why Final Fantasy X is one of the worst games I have ever played in my life . Even worse than Final Fantasy XIII. (The tl;dr version is: Everything that FFXIII did wrong, FFX did before it. Every complaint that you may have about the former is true for the latter. In fact, FFX is IMO even worse in almost every such complaint, and it even introduces a couple of its own.) What I find curious, however, is that I seem to be the only person in existence who thinks this. Every person I have talked about it, either online or in person, who has played FFX, defends it. Curiously, none of them seem to be able to give any rational reason why. For example I asked one such person, who I was talking to in real life, to name even one thing that was wrong with FFXIII that was not equally wrong in FFX. The only answer was "the battle system was better in FFX." No, seriously, that was the only answer they were able to give me. I actually took that as ...

Very recently something happened on YouTube that really showcases how broken their copyright system is. Some guy had uploaded a video in 2009 (about some trick in a NES game). In 2016 the creators of the show Family Guy used that video, without permission , on their show. Now YouTube's copyright strike system has taken down that original 2009 video, claiming that its rights belong to Fox (the owner company of the TV series). In other words, Fox effectively stole this guy's video, claimed ownership, and shut it down. As of writing this I don't know if they did it deliberately of whether it was just a fully automatized process, but the end result is still the same: YouTube effectively helped Fox steal somebody else's video. YouTube's copyright system is in dire need of a revamp. As it is now, not only does it allow people to steal your ad revenue , it also allows big corporations to steal your videos and claim ownership.

The standard game mechanic that has existed since the dawn of (J)RPGs is that all enemies within given zones have a certain strength (which often varies randomly, but only within a relatively narrow range.) The first zone you start in has the weakest enemies, and they get progressively stronger as you advance in the game and get to new zones. The idea is, of course, that as the player gains strength from battles (which is the core game mechanic of RPGs), it becomes easier and easier for the player to beat those enemies, and stronger enemies ahead will make the game challenging, as it requires the player to level up in order to be able to beat them. If you ever come back to a previous zone, the enemies there will still be as strong as they were last time, which usually means that they become easier and easier as the player becomes stronger. This core mechanic, however, has a slight problem: It allows the player to over-level, which will cause the game to become too easy and there no...

I have ranted quite a lot about VR, and how I find it a disappointment. I think this article at Tom's Hardware summarizes the reason quite well. And I quote: "Early solutions included using game controllers or keyboard-and-mouse setups to use the traditional control schemes, but that approach made too many people sick, so most developers have scrapped the idea of linear movements done with a controller for VR games." And that's the major problem I have with how VR turned out: Most developers have "scrapped the idea" (of adding VR support to traditional first-person shooter, and other similar genres), and are not going to give me even the chance to try. Sure, this may cause nausea and motion sickness (and sure, it can be a really strong feeling, and it may last even for hours even after stopping playing). But there are actual demonstrable examples of people either not getting sick, or getting used to it. It is perfectly possible to get used to playin...

When watching YouTube videos about the new VR headsets, especially the Vive, I have sometimes commented, and responded to other people's comments, with some skepticism about the possibilities and future of VR, as I have done in this blog. I essentially say that while yes, the tech demo experience may be awesome, I have my doubts about what kinds of games can really be implemented, especially for "room-scale VR". (Room-scale VR has severe limitations that really restrict what kind of games you can make for it.) I often ask people how many 50-hour big-budget triple-A games they really think will be made for room-scale VR, and what kind of future it can have, if it has a poor triple-A game library. Almost invariably many people respond to it with what could effectively be called religious drivel. Rather than addressing what I wrote, or answering my questions, they often instead go on and on rambling about how "awesome" the room-scale VR feels. Many count how many...

How many times have you seen a puzzle game being promoted by telling how many billions of possible combinations it has, as if that were some kind of indication of difficulty or complexity? I have seen it quite many times. The fact is, however, that the number of possible combinations is an almost completely useless number. It tells pretty much nothing about the complexity or difficulty of the puzzle. Moreover, increasing the number of combinations (eg. by adding more pieces to the puzzle) seldom correlates to increased difficulty or complexity. To understand why, consider this hypothetical simplistic "puzzle": There is a bag of 10 tiles, and each tile has a different number on it. Your task is to take all the tiles out in a random order and put them into a line. Now you have to rearrange the tiles one by one so that they will be in increasing order, from the smallest number to the largest. You'd agree that this is a rather trivial and easy task. Not very difficult ...

When the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift published their first final versions of their headsets almost at the same time, there were enormous amounts of hype surrounding them. You could see advertisements everywhere (eg. Vive ads were constantly splattered on Steam's front page), and every single internet reviewer in existence was making videos about them. Of course I haven't been following the VR circles closely. I'm just a gamer who frequents Steam and semi-regularly watches YouTube gaming channels and reviews. But it seems like the hype has pretty much completely died out. Steam isn't advertising VR on their front page anymore (even the "Steam Hardware" ads, which have been there pretty much constantly for like a year, show the Steam Controller as its flagship product, not the HTC Vive; and I have yet to see a single VR game advertised on their front page), and it has been a rather long time since I last saw any YouTube reviewer talk about VR (either the head...

There are many things that modern feminists are morbidly obsessed about. One of them is rape. In their minds not only is rape the worst possible crime in existence, by a wide margin, but it is also everywhere all the time, and every minor thing in existence is now "rape". They just can't stop talking about rape. They are absolutely obsessed with it. For this reason they go on and on and on about "consent". They are pushing (often successfully) all kinds of policies and campaigns to define and enforce stricter and stricter definitions of "consent". It has, in fact, gone so far that "consent" has become completely meaningless. It doesn't even matter what feminists think is "consent". For all of their rambling and raging about it, and what it is, and how it should be given and so on and so forth, none of that matters in the least. Why? Because in the modern feminist zeitgeist a woman can withdraw "consent" at any p...

In the 80's game developers were making games for really cheap, often with shoestring budgets, or basically no budget at all. Even the largest game companies had relatively limited budgets to create games. Such games were often created by a team of just a few people. It was really rare for a game to be created by more than ten people. Sometimes some even very good games were created by one single person (who, obviously, needed to not only be a good programmer, but also be a somewhat talented graphics artist and musician; more often, though, these three roles were separated to (at least) three different people, but that's about it.) Nowadays most triple-A games have budgets surpassing even those of Hollywood blockbuster movies (ie. in the hundreds of millions of dollars). Team sizes are often comparable to those of movie productions, meaning that oftentimes there are literally hundreds of people involved in the creation of such a video game. This includes things that were ju...

What sticks out in this picture like a sore thumb? That's right: Those power cables. I have never understood why they always position the power connectors like that. When you connect the power cables, it needlessly increases the space required by the graphic card inside the computer case. They could move those connectors just a few centimeters and put them on the end of the card rather than on its side. This way the card wouldn't require any extra space widthwise. But no. For some incomprehensible reason almost no manufacturer does that (although there are a few exceptions). In fact, there are some server cases, especially rack cases, which are designed to have graphics cards in them (usually for computation purposes) which have an extra bulge on the cover of the case for the sole purpose of being able to fit those power cables, which are sticking on the sides of the graphics cards. This is an extra manufacturing process, and it increases the space requirement for the ...

There's this assertion that has become somewhat famous, as many YouTube videos have been made about it, that the infinite sum of all positive integers equals -1/12. Most people just can't accept it because it seems completely nonsensical and counter-intuitive. One has to understand, however, that this is not just a trick, or a quip, or some random thing that someone came up at a whim. In fact, historical world-famous mathematicians came to that same conclusion independently of each other, using quite different methodologies. For example, some of the most famous mathematicians of all history, including Leonhard Euler, Bernhard Riemann and Srinivasa Ramanujan, all came to that same result, independently, and using different methods. They didn't just assign the value -1/12 to the sum arbitrarily at a whim, but they had solid mathematical reasons to arrive to that precise value and not something else. And it is not the only such infinite sum with a counter-intuitive result....

Currently there is a culture war at American universities, where spoiled rich kids have been brainwashed into Marxist social justice (if you don't believe it's Marxist, just search for videos where they are chanting the Communist Manifesto), and are protesting completely imaginary "oppression" that's allegedly happening at university campuses, somehow. I have yet to see any concrete definitions or examples of such "oppression"; the claims are always vague and nondescript. (There is an ever-increasing number of hoaxes being perpetrated, but finding examples of any real racism or other kind of "oppression" is really hard. That's probably why they are perpetrating so many hoaxes.) The solutions being offered are equally vague and nondescript, and don't really address the alleged "oppression". Only very few actual, concrete "solutions" are being demanded. One of them is implementing hiring quotas on university staff b...

One of the banes of mobile game developers is the "fast food" culture of most mobile casual players. This not only means that they will download dozens, if not even hundreds of free games, try each one for 10 or 20 seconds and then delete it if they don't like it in that time, but it also means that many of them will easily give a 1-star (ie. minimum) rating on such games. The 1-star ratings, and the ease by which casual players give them, are a bane of developers. Many (way too many) of them will give the lowest possible rating for the flimsiest of reasons, without giving the game, or its developers, any leniency or chance. One of the worst possible things that can happen is if your game sometimes crashes on launch. You are pretty much certain to immediately get tons of 1-star ratings, right off the bat. (Of course it is genuinely bad if your app crashes on launch, but sometimes this just happens even with competent developers, for quite many reasons, some of them no...

In most European countries there has evolved a mentality that immigration and providing asylum for foreigners is some kind of inevitable duty, an inevitable social service that we just have to provide. Basically that there's absolutely nothing we can do about it. If somebody enters the country, we just have to deal with it "properly", and provide that person with all kinds of free services. And that we just have to take a certain amount of immigrants every year and give them permanent residence, maybe even citizenship. We have some kind of "duty" to do so, and it's something that we simply can't deny or refuse. Says who, exactly? And why us? There seems to be some kind of mentality that since European countries are rich, they have some kind of humanitarian duty that they just must obey. Yet nobody is demanding rich countries at other places to perform the same duty. In fact, it seems that nobody is even expecting those other countries to do so. How...

The trailer for the new Ghostbusters movie has got an enormous amount of backlash. It has been estimated that it breaks the record for the largest amount of dislikes on YouTube for any movie trailer. Because there's a lot of identity politics behind the production of the movie, and it tries so hard to pander to feminists, obviously the defenders (including many journalists) are claiming that it's hated purely because of rampant misogyny. They say that people hate it only because now the lead characters are female. But is that really so? Ghostbusters is a cult classic movie of the 80's. Nobody wanted it to be remade, especially not the people who fondly remember it from their childhood. It doesn't help that the jokes in the trailer are lame, the effects are sub-par for modern standards, and overall it seems highly uninteresting. But it's not like we don't have something else to compare it to. We can take a movie franchise that's even more of a cult...