What grinds my gears

From time to time I like to make predictions for the near future about society. Here's one: Some time in the near future, social justice warriors will start converting to Islam en masse . Perhaps islamists have not yet caught on, or taken full advantage of it, but in general the regressive left, the social justice warriors, simply cannot say "no" to Muslims. But when they finally do catch on, islamists ought to have a relatively easy way to pressure SJWs to convert. The logic will go something like: "Do you hate Islam?" "No, of course not!" "Do you think there's something wrong with Islam?" "No!" "Well, if there's nothing wrong with Islam, why aren't you a Muslim?" What can the SJWs respond to that? How can they argue to an islamist why they aren't converting to Islam? After all, they are too afraid to offer any sort of criticism of Islam, or say anything against them, for the fear of being labe...

The title is, perhaps, a bit too extremist for what this post is actually about, but blog post titles ought to be relatively short, and it's hard to summarize the subtleties in a short sentence. Many hard-core PC gamers are eager to laugh off the PS4 Pro as a 4k gaming device, and consider a top-of-the-line PC a clearly much better choice. However, owning a PC with somewhat similar specs to the PS4 Pro (i5-2500K overclocked to 4.2GHz, GTX 970, 16 gigs of RAM), I have to say that in many cases the PS4 Pro may actually be the better choice when it comes to 4k gaming, unless you want to spend something like 2000€ on a PC. How so? The reason is not because the PS4 Pro would somehow be more powerful than a top-of-the-line PC (after all, its graphics chip is somewhere around the Radeon RX 480 in prowess, which is approximately equivalent to a GTX 970, possibly a tiny bit less). The PS4 pro might barely fulfill the minimum specs requirements of a "VR ready PC". No, the r...

So, both the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive have been on the market for over a year now. I think it's time to look at some sales figures. It appears that neither company is directly publishing exact sales figures (I wonder why), so these figures are based on estimates by analysts, but I think they are probably at least in the ballpark. But before we go to those figures, let's get some perspective by looking at sales figures of other gaming hardware, for comparison. The PlayStation 4 was released in November of 2013. In the United Kingdom alone it sold 250 thousand units within 48 hours. In the United States that number is over a million. Overall, by the end of December of that year (ie. one and a half months later) 4.2 million units had been sold worldwide. One year later that figure had climbed to 18.5 million. (As of January of 2017 the estimate is 53 million.) The Xbox One was slightly less popular, but still sold like hotcakes. It was likewise published on November of...

I have written previously about how the Games Done Quick marathons have become highly "sterilized", bureaucratic, "sponsor-friendly", commercial, and outright authoritarian, which has garnered criticism from many people. However, some people present even more criticism about the whole thing, and not only about the events themselves, but more particularly about the Prevent Cancer Foundation, to which the AGDQ marathons raise money for. During the marathons the presenters and speakers keep constantly reminding how "100% of the donations go to the Prevent Cancer Foundation." Many people criticize this statement as, at the very least, borderline misleading. Notice how the statement does not say that 100% of the donations go to cancer prevention and research done by the PCF. It says that they go to the PCF. There is a difference. Since the PCF is a non-profit organization, they have to publish in detail what they spend their money in. For example in th...

I have been writing quite a lot about my disappointment in VR, and how it seems to be failing badly, and much of this is repeating the same points, but anyways... Recently Microsoft announced that their next console, "Project Scorpio", will have no Kinect port. In fact, they did the same with the Xbox One S. Moreover, they have also stopped giving Kinect owners USB adapters for the Kinect for free. Most commentators agree that the Kinect is dead for good. Neither Microsoft nor anybody else is making games for it anymore, nor have been for years, and it's quite clear that Microsoft has zero intention of supporting it anymore, except for legacy reasons. It's a dead piece of technology that was very niche in the first place. (Perhaps the only reason why there are so many units out there is because for about a year it was a mandatory peripheral for the original Xbox One. You couldn't buy one without the other.) This reminded me of how similar VR is to the Kinect, ...

There are a few feminist activists, who try to be comedians. At least one of them even tried to make a series about it (I think it was on Netflix). They all fail spectacularly. They, naturally, attribute it to misogyny, patriarchy, oppression and what not. However, that's not the reason why their "comedy" doesn't work. The actual reasons are several. For starters, and perhaps most importantly, they don't understand that mockery is not comedy. Mockery might be funny to (a portion of) likeminded people, who might laugh at the targets of the mockery, but to the general public it's just not funny. If you look at good comedians, there are several essential characteristics, and common traits, to their comedy. For one, it's often self-deprecating ; in other words, the comedian is making fun of him or herself. And it's always light-hearted, not overly self-indulgent, whiny or "emo". A good example of such comedy is a joke by one of the most fa...