What grinds my gears

I have several times in the past predicted that some time in the future, in the western countries, limits will be imposed on democracy (perhaps even to the point that it will be ended completely or, more likely, a system of "faux democracy" will be instituted which keeps up a flimsy pretense of democracy, but in reality is just a full-on oligarchy.) The reason for this is that the modern western culture zeitgeist is going more and more into the direction that "democracy is bad because it allows people to vote for the wrong people and the wrong things." I predicted this mostly because of the quasi-religious multicultural feminist social justice culture that is permeating the western world, and is stronger than ever, an ideology of self-hatred which sees western culture as completely and irreparably corrupt to the core, which must be eradicated. Because reasons. However, a very concrete example of this anti-democratic ideology has surfaced from a slightly differen...

Now that VR has had a bit of time to mature, what do the best-rated VR games on Steam look like? (Now, don't get me wrong. I understand that developing games takes quite a lot of time. For example, it took over a year for the PS4 to have a sizeable library of new big-budget triple-A games. But on the other hand, the Oculus Rift development kits have been available for like 3 years, so developers have had plenty of time to make games, or even add VR support to existing games.) Note that I'm not cherry-picking the worst examples. These are literally the top-rated VR games on Steam as of writing this blog post. (You can click on the images to get slightly larger versions.) The Lab: Valve's flagship tech demo is not exactly bad-looking at parts, but on the other hand, it's pretty crappy at others, like above. (Note that the guy in the picture is not part of the game. That's just video footage of a real person.) I think even the PlayStation 2 had better graphic...

Modern feminism has invented this neologism: "Mansplaining." The irony here is that, while they claim to be all about equality, equal rights, and treating all people equally without distinction, they come up with such sexist terms. What the term does is to belittle and dismiss somebody's opinion based solely on their gender. It gives less value to an argument because of an innate characteristic of the person making it. It's essentially an ad hominem . It doesn't even address the argument being made; it simply dismisses the argument based on who is making it. Or, more precisely, what the gender of the person making the argument is. Which is a textbook example of sexism. Well, I would like to introduce a new term: Feminisplaining. Feminisplaining is any attempt, made by a feminist or social justice warrior, at silencing or dismissing someone's opinion based solely on the innate characteristics of that person, ie. via an ad hominem , without addressing w...

3D games are actually surprisingly old. Technically speaking some games of the early 1970's were 3D, meaning they used perspective projection and had, at least technically speaking, three axes of movement. (Obviously back in those days they were nothing more than vector graphics drawn using lines and sprites, but technically speaking they were 3D, as contrasted to purely 2D games where everything happens on a plane.) I'm not talking here about racing games that give a semi-illusion of depth by having the picture of a road going to the horizon and sprites of different sizes, but actual 3D games using perspective projection of rotateable objects. As technology advanced, so did the 3D games. The most popular 3D games of the 80's were mostly flight simulators and racing games (which used actual rotateable and perspective-projected 3D polygons), although there were obviously attempts at some other genres as well even back then. It's precisely these types of games, ie. flig...

Bethesda very recently announced at E3 that they will be adding VR support to Fallout 4. Yay! My dreams of being able to play one of my favorite games in VR is becoming true?!? Well, no. Not really. You see, they are adding support for the HTC Vive. Using "room-scale VR". Which means a crippled game experience, with your typical "room-scale VR" limitations, in other words, you are limited to just standing around, pretty much confined to a laughably small space, shooting around. The only way to move larger distance is to point someplace with one of the controllers and pressing a button, which will immediately teleport you to that place. Oh, the joy. Oh, and try to have a 2-3 hour gameplay session while standing up. Ouch. My feet hurt just from thinking about it. AFAIK they have not announced whether they will add generic sit-down VR support with traditional controls (ie. just your regular old way of playing the game, just with VR headset and head-tracking s...

Nowadays there is one thing that feminists are excelling at: Creating outrage out of absolutely nothing. How? Well, we have a concrete very recent example (which is not the only one, and will most certainly not be the only one): The new Watch Dogs video game has a black protagonist. A semi-famous internet critic (Jim Sterling) searched high and low for some forum comment about it that could be even remotely interpreted as negative, and wrote a sensationalistic article about how the gaming community is full of racists. And, of course, the rest of the gaming media copied him like mindless drones. Mind you, that forum post that Sterling quoted in his article wasn't even racist. (It was just someone pondering on whether the character design was chosen for political reasons, and wishing that the possible identity politics behind it wouldn't affect the plot of the game too much.) But that doesn't matter, of course. It can be interpreted as negative, therefore it...

The new VR headsets have, a bit surprisingly for all parties involved, stumbled across some hurdles which, at least for me personally (and some other people), are warning signs that they might end up flopping after all, regardless of the hype surrounding them. These warning signs include: VR, unlike was expected for a very long time, "doesn't work" for almost any traditional form of video gaming, especially not for traditional first-person shooters (which was for a very long time the original main genre expected to be enhanced by VR). What they mean with "doesn't work" is that most people get nausea if using VR in a traditional video game, and this problem is deemed to be so bad that most developers have outright completely abandoned the idea of adding VR support for traditional games. You will not be getting any such games for VR from the vast majority of developers (unless there is a shift in attitude in the future). There is only a very narrow set of g...

BBC turns down trainees because they are WHITE: Job applicants stunned to be told corporation only wants people from 'ethnic minority backgrounds' "When people applied they got generic email saying it is closed to whites" The funny thing is that even if we take the opportunistic feminist definition of "racism", ie. "prejudice + power", this is exactly that kind of situation: Those in power, ie. a huge megacorporation hiring people, discriminating against applicants based solely on their race, with the applicants themselves having no recourse against it. The other funny thing is that this kind of discrimination is illegal in the UK, and BBC should know this perfectly well. AFAIK it's yet to be seen if the law will be enforced here, or if political correctness will, once again, trump the law.

I commented earlier how the Wikipedia article on gamergate is astonishingly biased agenda-driven unilateral propaganda, to a completely ridiculous extent. Said article has been 100% appropriated by social justice warriors, who seem to have an irontight grip on it, and will not let it go, no matter what. This presents some serious problems. Most people take Wikipedia way more seriously than they should. This includes journalists, politicians and people in charge. Wikipedia has an amazing power to influence people's opinions due to how popular and trusted it is. In other words, Wikipedia is a frighteningly powerful tool for propaganda. Thus if a biased movement controls Wikipedia, it controls the entire narrative pretty much. What makes this even more frightening is that there is basically nothing that can be done about it. As long as it doesn't technically and outright break the law, there is little to no recourse to do anything about biased propaganda articles that have be...

Germany is a country that's deeply, deeply ashamed of its past, of what Nazi Germany did. The slogan used in almost all Holocaust memorials is "Never Again". Most symbolism, gestures and speech that are deemed pro-nazi are illegal in Germany. If you were to, for example, make the nazi salute on the street and shout "death to the Jews!" and "Adolf Hitler", you would get several years of prison, literally. Except if you are a Muslim . Groups of Muslims all along Europe, including Germany, are openly and viciously anti-semitic, and will commit acts of harassment and violence against Jews, deface their property and tombstones, and like in the video above, shout anti-semitic and pro-nazi chants. With complete impunity. It seems that "never again" does not apply to Muslims, not even in Germany. They are untouchable.

Not something that irks me, just something I found interesting. The song "Lambada" by the pop group Kaoma, when released in 1989, was one of these huge hits that people started hating almost as soon as it hit the radio stations, mainly because of being overplayed everywhere. Back then, its composition was generally misattributed to Kaoma themselves. It wasn't until much later that I heard that was actually just a cover song, not an original one. However, it's actually a bit more interesting than that. There are, of course constantly hugely popular hits that turn out to be just cover songs by somebody else eg. from the 50's or 60's. This one doesn't go that far back, but it's still interesting. The original version, "Llorando se Fue" was composed by the Bolivian band Los Kjarkas in 1981. It's originally in Spanish, and while the melody is (almost) the same, the tone is quite different. It uses panflutes, is a bit slower, and is o...

I wrote in February last year how the Wikipedia article on Gamergate is really shameful biased unilateral propaganda . Since the social justice warriors just can't get over it, the article has been actively edited since, and has become even worse. Even the summary at the beginning of the article has become longer, and a stronger tirade campaign against the movement. "Assault" and "murder" are some of the new, stronger words introduced since the last time I looked at it. I mentioned in that previous blog post how the word "threat" appeared 31 times, and the word "harassment" appeared 55 times in the article. Those numbers have now increased to 54 and an astonishing 95 times. It now even appears in two section titles. I would be almost ready to bet that no single noun or verb in the English language appears that many times in any article in the entirety of Wikipedia. It's quite clear that this Wikipedia article is pure full-on unil...