What grinds my gears

There are many common psychological phenomena that I find interesting, from a semi-academic perspective. One of them is the sheer difficulty that some people seem to have in accepting the notion that 0.9 recurring (ie. the decimal representation of a number with "0." followed by an infinite string of 9's) is exactly equal to 1. Both decimal expansions represent the exact same number. Some people will go to incredible lengths to try to argue why they are not equal, up to trying to invent new mathematics, and new kinds of numbers, just to forcefully try to make them unequal. (With very little success, of course, because invariably these are people with very little experience and understanding of mathematics, especially math related to the set of real numbers, and their decimal representations.) There are a few quite simple counter-arguments to their assertion that the two decimal representations are not the same number. For example, if 0.9... is not equal to 1, then by ...

Justin Trudeau's antics aside, there's a rather funny (or sad, depending on your perspective) thing happening in Canada right now, related to illegal immigrants. You see, according to current Canadian laws, if you arrive, from the United States, to an official US-Canada border crossing seeking refugee status in Canada, and you don't have a valid reason to get it (most often because the United States is legally considered a safe country for refugees, so there is no international or national legal precedent for anybody to seek refuge in a neighboring country), you are simply denied access and turned back. And that's what's mostly done, because the border officials generally uphold the law. However, there's this funny loophole in the law. If you then walk 500 meters to the side and cross the US-Canada border illegally, now you will automatically get refugee status in Canada, and you will be taken in. You will not get turned back immediately, as you were at the...

Some people have this notion that when people play video games, they imagine themselves as being the protagonist, the character that they are playing. Thus, they conclude, people feel left out and marginalized when the playable character is completely different from themselves. They also think that in games where you can customize your playable character, people will make it look like themselves as much as possible. Even if we give this notion the benefit of the doubt (ie. that it's being held completely genuinely and honestly, rather than it being self-serving and claimed for political purposes), I don't really understand where it's coming from. Even in the most honest cases it's just a huge misconception. In pretty much the entirety of video game history playable characters have basically never represented the player him or herself, and this has never bothered anybody. People do not identify themselves as actually being the playable character, as in imagining ...

Some days ago Trump gave a speech in which he was talking about the problems of unrestricted immigration in Europe, and one example he gave was about something that happened "last night in Sweden". Of course the media, and the regressive leftists, immediately jumped onto this and started ridiculing Trump for inventing a terrorist attack that didn't happen. It was all over social media, YouTube and even some newspapers. But the thing is, that "terrorist attack" thing was a complete invention of the media. Trump didn't actually say anything about any terrorist attack. Here's an exact quote of what he said: "You look at what's happening, last night, in Sweden. Sweden! Who would have believed that Sweden! They took in large numbers, they are having problems like they never thought possible." There is no mention of any terrorist attack. Trump later clarified that he was talking about a documentary about Sweden and the problems they are ha...

Naruto is/was a long-runner anime series, based on / adapted from (like so many other anime) a manga series. It became really popular in the west (and possibly also in Japan), at least for a time, and became the almost ubiquitous example of "Japanese anime" for most people, even those who never watch anime nor have ever even seen a single episode of Naruto (a status that very, very few anime series get.) Perhaps one of the strengths of the series was that it had a bit of something for everybody. At times it was just a "kids' cartoon" with wackiness and simple, sometimes even crass, humor. At other times it had spectacular battles of epic proportions. At times, however, it could be really deep and touching. After all, it started as the story of an orphan boy who was shunned and avoided by almost everybody in his town, for no reason of his own (the actual reason being that an extremely powerful and dangerous evil spirit had been sealed within him by his father...

I don't think it's necessary for me to go into detail into the Wall Street Journal vs. PewDiePie debacle, because you can easily find all those details with a simple Google or YouTube search, but the gist of it is this: Not one, not two, but three journalists from WSJ, for a reason known only to themselves, decided one day to go on an absolute character-assassination campaign against the internet celebrity PewDiePie. They took small clips from six of his videos, removed completely out of their context, and wrote a hit piece published in the journal about him being an anti-semitic nazi. (One of the examples was so egregious that they took a clip of him pointing at something, and made it look like he was making a nazi salute.) What's even more egregious, not content with just slandering him in a published article, they went and actively contacted YouTube and Disney, his major sponsors, and slandered him, making them severe ties with him. The Wall Street Journal is a reall...

When the VR headsets were released almost a year ago, I presented in some forums my disappointment that basically no existing games were getting VR support, and that even those few that had announced support had quietly cancelled or abandoned it. My disappointment was answered by a really angry mob of early adopter fanboys who insisted over and over and over that VR just "doesn't work" with traditional games because it causes immediate and heavy motion sickness and "projectile vomiting". My insistence that while it may have that effect, it's something that one gets used to, was met with ridicule and patronizing comments. They insisted over and over that I would just have to forget about existing games and game genres, and that VR would need and usher an entirely new and separate form of gaming, completely incompatible with any existing genre. Even back then there existed third-party mods to some games, such as the original Doom (using a modern updated en...

When it comes to digital purchases of PC games, Steam has a de facto monopoly status. There are no viable alternatives to it, and thus you are pretty much stuck with Steam, for good or bad, if you are an avid PC gamer. Having a monopoly status can be a detrimental thing to consumers. Having no competition gives Valve carte blanche to do pretty much what they want. On average Valve is a relatively fair corporation, but on the other hand they also show their uncaring greedy cold corporation side from time to time, which they can do with pretty much no repercussions. It's not like they are going to lose any customers. For some strange reason, several times now, when I have brought up in online conversations Steam's monopoly status, and the fact that they don't have competition and that there are no viable alternatives, some people have protested, and claimed that there are viable alternatives and that Steam does not have monopoly status. Invariably the same bunch of ...

Feminist Frequency is a "non-profit" organization, the brainchild of the infamous Anita Sarkeesian. It has made the "Women vs Tropes" video series as well as the "Ordinary Women" series. I have written previously about the latter, and why I think it's actually just a money-grabbing scam . However, I would actually expand that accusation to the entire organization and everything they do. The organization got over $200 thousand in donations for that series alone, but has received well over a million, maybe even several millions, in donations overall, during its entire existence. Yet it has extremely little to show for it. They have only made about half of the videos in the "Women vs. Tropes" series, even though the entire series was promised by something like 2014. They have made something like one video per three months, or the like. Just as with the "Ordinary Women" series, the videos themselves in no way justify the well o...

The Global Game Jam's Position on the US President's "Muslim Ban" Executive Order. We are against an executive order that seeks to exclude and unfairly scrutinize innocent individuals based on their religion and national origin. Those exact same countries that have been banned from the United States have themselves since quite long banned any Israeli citizens from entering their country. Where exactly is Global Game Jam's statement of protest against this "Jewish ban", which quite clearly exists due to religion and national origin? Nowhere, that's where. Fucking hypocrites.

The excuse, and mantra, that regressive leftist social justice cultists use to justify their violence and oppression of people who simply want to peacefully congregate to express and hear opinions (that the social justice warriors don't like) is that "hate speech is not free speech". What I would like to ask is: Who exactly gets to decide what is and is not "hate speech"? Maybe the government? Democratically elected parliamentarian representatives? Judges? The police? Some other official? No. Them. The social justice warriors themselves are the ones to decide what is and is not considered "hate speech". Nobody elected them to that position of authority, but they gladly assign themselves into that position without asking. And what do you know, by sheer chance it just so happens that pretty much everything that goes against their narrative, all criticism, all dissenting opinion, everything that they don't like, just happens to be "hate ...

I wrote in November of 2012 how Microsoft is the only company providing a platform with an internet connection, where most online services are behind a paywall. Namely, the Xbox 360. The only thing you could do without paying additional fees was to browse the Xbox online shop an purchase games. Everything else was behind a monthly or yearly subscription paywall, including all forms of online gaming, the web browser, video rental... everything. Back then none of those restrictions existed on any other platform, including the PlayStation 3 and the Nintendo Wii (and later the Wii U). With them you could freely play online games, browse the net, etc. without paying anything extra. Then Sony published the PlayStation 4 and, what do you know, they copied Microsoft's idea of putting online gaming behind a paywall. They restricted all online play to PlayStation Plus subscribers only (ie. a monthly or yearly fee that you need to pay). This was not the case with the PS3. The restriction...

The one-year anniversary of the final version of the Oculus Rift is coming soon. Plenty of time for all those huge VR games to have been developed and published (especially given that Oculus Rift development kits had existed for three years prior to the final launch). So, where are all those games? When the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive were published, pretty much everybody was enormously excited about them and praising them to the heavens, and predicting an entire new industry revolving around VR. Everything you could possibly imagine would become possible in VR. It would revolutionize the entire gaming industry. Old-fashioned games would become pretty much obsolete. Criticism was largely ignored and ridiculed by early adopters and fanboys, sometimes even to rather verbally aggressive extents. So, almost a year has passed of the glorious VR generation. Where are all those games? There are like a couple of games that you could barely call "triple-A". By far the vast m...

There are many people in history who have, directly or indirectly, been responsible for massive amounts of deaths. Dictators, cult leaders, military leaders... you name it. But who is the person who is responsible for the largest amount of deaths? Maybe Hitler, who is pretty directly responsible of not only the six million jews killed in the holocaust, but arguably also the 60 or so million people killed in World War II? Perhaps Joseph Stalin, whose extermination of people in Gulag camps and otherwise simply cannot be counted because not everything is recorded, but rivals those of Hitler? Some have argued for a rather different kind of person, for a rather different kind of reason: Their candidate is Thomas Midgley Jr , an American engineer and chemist born in 1889. How can an American engineer be responsible for even more deaths than Hitler himself? This is the single person that can be attributed to have caused the most serious and longest-lasting environmental damage by huma...

Opponents of Brexit, both within and outside of Britain, see it as doomsday for the country. They seem to think that it will cause some kind of economic collapse or regression, and whatever else they can think of. On the contrary, Brexit will quite probably turn out to be one of the best things that have happened to Britain in a long time. At first there might be a bit of economic instability or turmoil (or maybe even not at all!) but, I predict, quite soon Britain's economy will raise quite significantly. When Britain exits the EU, it will have complete carte blanche to make any sort of economic deals with any country it wants, without outside restrictions and control. And this is not just hypothetical. Several countries have already expressed their desire to form economic deals with Britain once it leaves the EU. If they happen, they will probably be really lucrative. Moreover, the EU has no control or say over this. They have absolutely nothing to threaten Britain with. O...