What grinds my gears

Anita Sarkeesian made another video series, "Ordinary Women", for which she, of course, e-begged for a hefty sum of money. $200 thousand this time. When she started the fundraising campaign, the videos had actually already been shot, and the campaign was for "post-production". The series is about famous historic women. So, where did the $200000 go? Maybe each episode is a full 1-hour documentary about a particular famous woman from history? Or, at the very least your standard 22-minute format? No. The episodes are 3 to 5 minutes long. Ok, then maybe there are lots and lots of episodes? Like 50 or so? That would explain why so much money is needed for "post-production". No. There are 5 episodes. So five episodes, each 3 to 5 minutes long. Surely the visual effects are awesome, with that money? Once again, no. There are some graphics and extremely simplistic animations which you can do with basically any professional video editing software that c...

Some time ago I created a new blog about things that don't grind my gears, but are neutral or positive. This "what grinds my gear" blog gets about 20-40 views per post on average, which is ridiculously little. However, that other blog is getting about 0-2 views per post, which is even worse. So this post is a promotion of the other one. These are short summaries of the new posts I have made there, if you are interested: Which chess endgame is the hardest? I examine a few classical chess endgame positions and ponder which one might be the hardest to win for a human player. Turning 3D off on a 3DS: The devil is in the details. A funny anecdote of how I had been using my 3DS for a year before figuring out how to turn 3D off completely. Xbox One S: Too late? Written when the Xbox One S was just released, I wonder if its features should have been in the original Xbox One for them to matter. The downside of single+multiplayer combo games. Why I think that games th...

This post is not about social justice warriors who hate white people (especially white men). While they are great enablers of anti-white racism, this is nevertheless not about them. It's about some black people who are deeply, deeply racist against white people. And I'm completely serious about that. Just imagine the absolute worst kind of racist you can think of. The kind of racist that's not only prejudiced and discriminatory, but actually thinks of those other races as actually and literally inferior, in the physical and biological sense, even non-human. That kind of racism. There are some black people out there who seriously and literally think that white people are not actually human, and that all white people, every single one of them, is innately racist (the sheer irony is palpable.) In other words, their brains are hard-wired to be racist. They literally think of white people as sub-human; not just as an insult, but actually biologically non-human. They think t...

Reductio ad Hitlerum (a wordplay on " reductio ad absurdum ") is a semi-humorous term coined in 1951 by Leo Strauss. It describes an attempt to invalidate someone's argument, position or opinion by making a connection to Hitler or the nazis. (In other words, that opinion or claim is undesirable or wrong because the nazis (at least allegedly) also held that opinion.) It can also be used as the end of a slippery slope argument (in other words, that the opinion or position, if allowed or accepted, would lead to something that the nazis did.) Godwin's Law is a semi-humorous observation made in 1990 by Mike Godwin, which states that the longer a heated online discussion or flamewar continues, the more likely it is that somebody will bring up nazis into the conversation (most often in the form of accusing others of being like them.) While both involve the concept of nazis, they are not really the same thing. The latter might involve the former, but not necessarily. (...

I have noticed that there's a pretty good method for finding out if a Wikipedia article is politically biased and drives a given sociopolitical agenda (something that a true encyclopedia should never do, given that such an encyclopedia should always maintain absolute neutrality): Look at the lede of the article and see how much it "poisons the well" with regards to the topic in question with minor minutiae that doesn't really belong there. The "lede" is the introductory part before the table of contents, and "poisoning the well" is the dishonest technique of introducing people to a subject in a biased manner, with a clear agenda to make the reader/listener form a biased opinion based on incomplete information about the subject. (This can be done by eg. emphasizing things that support the agenda out of proportion and, conversely, de-emphasizing or even completely skipping things that would go contrary to that agenda.) "Poisoning the well...

Pokémon Go is a free-to-play mobile game that has taken the world by storm. Millions and millions of people have been playing it actively for months. Wherever you live, every now and then you'll see somebody playing it on the street. There are videos out there of literally hundreds of people playing it at a given place (seemingly because there's some rare pokémon in the vicinity or something). And the thing is... I don't get it. I have tried it, of course, but I just don't get it. The entire game consists (barring the menus) of two screens: The map, and the capture screen. And that's it. Sure, it's somewhat cool that the map is the real map of the place you are, and it updates in real time as you walk around, using GPS, but the gimmick gets old pretty fast. It's only barely more interesting than your average run-of-the-mill GPS app. But perhaps the capture screen is more interesting? Maybe here you will have a team of up to six pokémon, and you ...

The Game Awards is an annual awards ceremony for video games that has been running from 2014. It's a kind of successor to the Spike Video Game Awards , which had started in 2003, and which had received an increasing amount of criticism for being little more than corporate advertisement of video games, among many other criticisms. The Game Awards was supposed to be a kind of fresh start, cutting out all the bullshit and concentrating solely on what the whole show is supposed to be about, ie. video games. Yet, once again, commercialism and other such BS seems to have been raising its ugly head, in only three years. Critics point out how the first installment was ok, the second was already showing worrying trends, and now the third, most recent one, has pretty much succumbed to most of the same problems as its predecessor, being less about actual video game achievements and more about showmanship and ad-ridden propaganda. I'm not going to go into all the details because I...

The so-called "Dakota access pipeline" is a planned construction project to build an oil pipeline from North Dakota to southern Illinois. Since the spring of 2016, native Americans have organized a protest against this construction project because of its impact on the environment. In later months, the native American leaders of this protest movement have expressed their disapproval of young white liberals (ie. rich spoiled mid-to-upper class regressive leftist) coming to the protest sites to "support" the movement, taking advantage of the temporary services built there, trashing and polluting the environment with very little regard, and then after a week or so just leaving without cleaning up after themselves, leaving all their trash and waste behind for the natives to clean up. Which is the sheer irony of what they are doing. They are "protesting" for an environmental cause... by coming to the site, throwing their trash and their excrement around, hav...

The "Oculus Touch" (which means the Oculus Rift with the new controllers) is going to launch very soon. And with "over 50 launch titles" to offer! Woohoo! As a side note, I have been wondering from the very beginning of the whole "room-scale VR" crap why nobody is making the one game that would be pretty much perfect for that technology: Golf. Oh, sure, there's a "golf" game among those "50 launch titles"... except it's not traditional golf, but some weird mini-golf sort-of. And, surprise surprise, it looks like absolute crap: I mean, seriously. These are barely PlayStation 2 level graphics. I know I have complained about this before , but it never ceases to amaze me. And I'm not even kidding. Just as an example, here's a screenshot of a PlayStation 2 game: Even the PlayStation 2 manages to look better than most of this VR crap. But I digress. Back to the main topic, which is the idiocy that's all th...

One of the (many) core tenets of modern feminist social justice ideology is the social constructionism hypothesis. This is the claim that all behavioral and social differences between genders, in personalities, in attitudes, in preferences, in societal roles etc. are a pure construction the environment, of the society that we live in. In other words, for example, some professions are very male-dominated because we have been raised to think of them as being manly jobs, and vice-versa. Likewise men are more stoic and aggressive because of upbringing, and so on and so forth. The opposite of this hypothesis is the view that, while upbringing obviously does have some effect on behavior, personality and preferences, much of it is nevertheless biological, rather than cultural. Men prefer certain jobs, and certain activities, and have certain types of personalities, on average, because they are naturally inclined to it, rather than having been "taught" to be like that. Studies ha...

The HTC Vive, the Oculus Rift, the Razer OSVR, and the Pimax 4K: The PSVR: Notice one key difference between those other VR headsets and the PSVR? All those other headsets are like ski goggles, pressing against your face. In fact, they all have those elastic straps that quite literally and explicitly press the visor against your face. And this is not just theoretical. Many reviews point out how using the headsets for long periods of time will leave press marks on your face (like a "wolverine mask"), and may become uncomfortable after long periods of time. Another common complaint is that it can press against your nose, causing pain in the long run. Contrast that with the PSVR. Rather than being like a ski goggle, it's like a headband, like a helmet, that you wear on your head, and the visor hangs freely from the headband, rather than pressing against your face with force. The frontal part of the headset's weight presses against your forehead, on a rather...

I think that both the "Black Lives Matter" and the "Gamergate" movements are excellent examples of how utterly biased the current left-leaning regressive media is, at large. At least 99% of the media presented the absolutely unilateral biased narrative that Gamergate is this fuzzy indeterminate hate movement by male gamers against women in videogaming. By large they either ignored or ridiculed the claim by actual people in the movement that it's actually a customer revolt against corruption in video game journalism. (Criticism against the "progressive" feminist social justice ideology that seems to have largely invaded said journalism may also have been a significant motivation for the movement, but in this case it's not motivated by misogyny in any way, shape or form either. It's a protest against censorship of video games, and against the tirade of condescension and insults that the video game journals had thrown at the average gamer, their...