What grinds my gears

Some creationists, when talking about the theory of evolution, will bring up this argument that there are "six meanings of evolution." Namely: Cosmic evolution: the origin of time, space, and matter from nothing in the “big bang” Chemical evolution: all elements “evolved” from hydrogen Stellar evolution: stars and planets formed from gas clouds Organic evolution: life begins from inanimate matter Macro-evolution: animals and plants change from one type into another Micro-evolution: variations form within the “kind” I'm not 100% sure who invented this, but as far as I know, it was most probably Kent Hovind. (His son, Eric Hovind, who just loves to parrot all of his father's arguments and speeches like a robot, also regularly presents this "argument".) The claim isn't true, and is nonsensical. Those names are completely made up by creationists (probably by Kent Hovind) and the first ones have absolutely nothing to do with the theory of evolution....

I have been writing quite a lot about the modern social justice cult. I have also been writing quite a lot about how disappointing VR has been. It was only a matter of time before the two would meet, because social justice wants to invade everything. Oculus announce $10m diversity pledge . What does technology have to do with social justice and diversity? Who knows. But apparently to Oculus "diversity" is so important that they are going to invest a whopping 10 million dollars on it. In an unspecified manner, somehow. Of course "diversity" (scare quotes intentional) in social justice vocabulary means the exact opposite of actual diversity, par for the course for such an Orwellian totalitarian ideology. The word, as used by them, doesn't mean what it means to everybody else. To them "diversity" means that only one opinion is allowed, only one political stance is allowed, diversity of opinions is not tolerated. Technology and technological develo...

As the saying goes, you get what you pay for . And that's often true about food as well. Particularly, quite often if you go to an ultra-cheap pizzeria, the pizzas are really, really flavorless and tasteless. They might have a really, really mild flavor, but overall they often taste like nothing. This is actually a bit of a mystery to me. How do they do that? I'm completely serious: If I purposefully wanted to make such a flavorless pizza myself, I wouldn't know how! Even if I buy the cheapest possible ingredients at the grocery store and make a half-assed pizza, it will taste significantly better than those at most cheap pizzerias. I honestly don't know how to make such a tasteless pizza even if I wanted to. My hypothesis is that these pizzerias don't actually get their ingredients from the same sources as grocery stores do. Instead, they get them for much cheaper from some other sources, and the quality of the ingredients is simply abysmal. So abysmal that...

The internet was a rather different place in the early and mid-90's. If you didn't use the internet back then, you wouldn't even believe how different it was. This very blog service is an excellent example of how the internet has changed over the years. Back in those times, there was absolutely nothing even resembling this. In fact, the technology (in browsers and overall the HTML specification and all other kinds of specifications needed for this) just wasn't there. Back then it was unthinkable to actually have some kind of content editor usable from within the web browser itself. (Web forms did exist back then, which could be used by a user to send data to the server, but they were significantly more primitive than they generally are today.) (And this isn't even going to things that we take today for granted such as YouTube, which nobody could have even imagined in their wildest dreams back then. The necessary technology was simply non-existent. The necessary ...

I often compare, even consider, the modern progressive feminist social justice ideology to be a religion. It might not be a theistic religion, but it has most of the hallmarks. Like many religions, it's guilt-based (you are sinful by nature, even if you think you are not), and it has its quasi-supernatural beliefs (like the " whiteness " aura that the undesirables have and which has quasi-supernatural properties) and great unseen enemies (the "patriarchy"). There's one curious difference to most other religions, though. Look at various religious people talking about their religion . They talk about how much it brings them joy, and happiness, and fulfillment, and positiveness. And that video is just the tip of the iceberg. In general deeply religious people tend to have personal anecdotes about how unhappy they were before, how many problems they had in life, many of them even going the deep end, and how their chosen religion saved them, how it turned th...

This topic is in essence pertinent only to the United States, and thus you might be asking that why I, not a citizen, but an European, care and why I spend so much time writing blog posts about American politics. Well, I wish I could simply ignore what happens in America, but unfortunately it's not that simple. The United States has an incredible amount of power to influence the rest of the world. And I'm not only talking about the American government and their political decisions, but about all major ideological movements within the country with a very sizeable following and loud voice. It just tends to be that what becomes popular in America tends to want to become popular in Europe (often starting with the United Kingdom) and the rest of the world. If there's some ideological movement happening, like, in Japan, or China, or India, or Brazil, that seldom has any kind of influence or impact anywhere else (except perhaps some neighboring countries that share a close cultura...

There are many videos out there of "chi" "masters" (scare quotes intentional) who defeat assailants without even touching them, just by gesturing at them. Of course these videos invariably show them doing it to their own students. There are also many videos showing them doing it to third-parties, and a few where it's an actual (organized) fight between the "chi" "master" and some actual martial artist. Not very surprisingly, the "chi" always somehow fails to work in these more real situations. (One particular example is quite striking, where such a "master" has a fight with a mixed martial artist, and gets seriously hurt immediately at the start of the fight.) Rather obviously, all these "chi powers" are complete bollocks. But the interesting question I'm tackling here is whether these "masters" themselves are fully aware of this, and are just swindling people, or whether they are actually themse...

If you have been reading this blog, you'll know how greatly disappointed and disillusioned I am about how VR turned out to be. (If you don't want to wade through miles of text where I rant about it, here's a super-condensed summary (you'll have to read the blog posts for the actual arguments and reasoning): Enormously expensive, way out of my budget range. Abysmal game support: virtually zero support in any existing games, almost zero support in new games of existing genres. Room-scale VR cripples game mechanics and gameplay, it's physically straining and unfeasible for any actual gameplay, and I doubt it has a real future. I highly doubt many big-budget 50-hour triple-A games will ever be made for room-scale VR.) But what about PSVR? PSVR seems to lack many/most of the problems I have seen in VR: It's significantly cheaper (although still a bit on the expensive side), it's focused on sit-down VR, and at least at this point it appears that there wil...

Apparently, it seems, this is a "racist stereotype": What's so racist about it, you might ask? Very good question. The fact is that I have absolutely no idea, and it seems that nobody can explain it to me either. It's a black man eating fried chicken. A couple of years ago I heard, for the first time in my entire life, on some YouTube video or something, an allusion to this being somehow an extremely racist stereotype, or something. I had never before heard of anything like this. I asked how exactly is it racist. I got no clear answers. To this day it remains a complete mystery to me. Apparently only Americans know why it's somehow "racist", even though, apparently, they are incapable of clearly explaining why. It just is. Somehow. I have asked this several times over the years, and to this day I haven't got a single clear explanation, or any explanations at all. I don't even know if there is some context within which it's allegedly ...