What grinds my gears

If you have been reading this blog you might know how much I have ranted about my disappointment about VR, and why I fear it might turn out to be a complete commercial flop and a niche technology (with the same ultimate fate as the Kinect and the PS Vita). That's not to say I didn't want a VR headset. Of course I have always wanted one. I have been wanting one for about 4 years now, and that desire has never diminished. The major reason why I haven't purchased one has been the exorbitant price (and the abysmal library of triple-A games.) Recently I finally got myself a PSVR, because there was a decent deal in an online store here. I commented about it in my previous post . I have now played several games with it, including Farpoint, Robinson: The Journey, Until Dawn: Rush of Blood, and Tumble VR (besides, of course, a dozen or so free demos and apps.) In my past posts I have made several claims about VR, without actually having experienced it myself. Now I have. So, h...

It has always been a joke that the politically correct term for black people is ever-changing. The old term becomes "racist" (somehow), and the new one is now the "politically correct" one. Well, it appears that the current "politically correct" term for non-white people is "people of color". For example, Anita Sarkeesian, in one of her most recent videos, calls all non-white people "people of color". That's including Chinese and Japanese. (She specifically shows examples of Chinese and Japanese, and refers to them as "people of color".) Well, I have a question for Anita: What, exactly, is the "color" of Chinese and Japanese people? Uh-oh... We have a problem here, don't we?

For some reason I cannot really even begin to comprehend, it appears that most people are completely unable to see if the aspect ratio of a live video (such as a TV show or movie) is incorrect. And I mean even if it's way, way, way incorrect. Like when a 4:3 video is stretched horizontally to fill a 16:9 screen (which means that the video is compressed vertically to 75% of what it ought to be). I don't know if they indeed have a brain malfunction that makes them completely incapable of seeing the problem, or if they just refuse to admit they see it due to some strange psychological phenomenon. In either case they will claim to their graves that the glaringly obvious stretching of the image doesn't bother them at all (again, for a reason that I cannot even begin to comprehend). I myself am what could perhaps be called hypersensitive to a wrong aspect ratio. If some video footage has even slightly the wrong aspect ratio, I very quickly notice it, and it bothers me. For ...

Recently a man in Canada beat his wife for half an hour with a hockey stick. He pulled her hair, hit her in the face, and threatened to kill her. She had to be hospitalized. The man pleaded guilty in court. Can you guess how long his jail sentence was for this brutal crime? Perhaps eight years? That could sound about right. But no. Perhaps eight months? Sounds perhaps a bit on the low side, but might still be barely acceptable. And no. Perhaps eight weeks? Would sound way too short for such a heinous crime. No. Eight days. That's right. Eight days of jail. That's quite a strange amount of leniency in a country whose government prides itself for being feminist, and whose prime minister not only proudly declares this, but just can't shut up about feminism. But perhaps the man's name reveals the reason for the incredibly lenient punishment: Mohamad Rafia . Way to go, "feminist" Canada. You are the true defender of women against spousal abuse.

I have owned a (New) 3DS for a couple of years now, and a regular DS for a couple of years before that. I have always found it really unergonomic and uncomfortable to use. The positioning of the left stick and the d-pad is not very ergonomic, and requires some uncomfortable thumb contortion. (Perhaps the worst case scenario is having to use the left shoulder button and the d-pad at the same time. It might not sound like that much of a deal, but it really is quite uncomfortable.) Some months ago I realized that there exist grip attachments for the 3DS, and they are actually really cheap. I purchased one that looks pretty much like this: The grip attachment makes it a hundred times more comfortable to use, and I'm not exaggerating a bit. It might not be absolutely perfect, like it were a modern controller, but it's still a hundred times better. I wouldn't go back in a million years. So far three acquaintances who own a 3DS have seen me playing with it. What kind of c...

Like everything that the modern social justice cult is promoting, "cultural appropriation" is one of those things that not only is envisioned by the social justice totalitarian regime, but is becoming more and more prevalent as legislation (due to the social justice religion being incomprehensibly virulent, and infecting government after government, and law-maker after law-maker). "Cultural appropriation" means that white people are not allowed to do or use anything from non-white cultures. Of course such rules only apply to white people, as always, because social justice is deeply, deeply racist, and only blames white people for everything, and wants to relegate white people to subhuman second-class citizenship with less rights than everybody else. The same rule doesn't apply between non-white people. And, very specially, it of course and naturally doesn't apply to other people "appropriating" white culture. When these social justice warrior...

I once saw a YouTube video (which I can't find anymore) of the rather strange experience of a guy teaching English in a school (I think it was a high school) in Japan. The guy was born in the United States, and one of his parents was American and the other Japanese. Naturally he was always interested in visiting and perhaps working in Japan. Since he was a university graduate on the subject, and had all the necessary qualifications, he decided to seek for a job there as an English teacher. In the video he goes to lengths explaining the experience, but I'm going to summarize the interesting bit here: In the school where he first got the job, the principal (a native Japanese) was strangely antagonistic against him. She would keep demanding lesson plans far beyond what was reasonable, she would assign him unreasonably many teaching hours, she would often go to his class, in the middle of the lesson, to berate him for something, in front of the students, and so on and so forth....

The PSVR has a (rather incomprehensible) technical drawback when it comes to the PS4 Pro and a 4k display. The PS4 Pro has an HDMI 2.0 output connector, which allows it to use an HDMI 2.0 capable 4k display at that resolution, at 60 Hz, in RGB mode (which means essentially a completely lossless picture). Also if the 4k display supports HDR, it requires HDMI 2.0. The PSVR, however, degrades this scenario to HDMI 1.4, because the processing unit box that sits between the console and the display has only HDMI 1.4 connectors. This means that if the PSVR processing unit is in use (which is necessary for PSVR to work), then the 4k display cannot be used in RGB mode, nor using HDR. The display will still be used on 60 Hz, but in YUV420 mode (if the display supports it), which has degraded color quality (essentially it's a lossy image, where there is less color information, causing less vibrant colors, and some color artifacts). The following diagram illustrates the exact situation (...

On this year's E3 conference (which happened yesterday as of writing this), Microsoft finally revealed their new upcoming version of their Xbox console line, which previously had the working title "Project Scorpio", planned to release on November of 2017. The name of the new console? Xbox One X. Many people were quite appalled and disappointed by that name ("what was wrong with "xbox scorpio"? That would have been an awesome name!"), and many have raised a concern about how much confusion it might cause, because Microsoft's previous minor upgrade to the console line was the "Xbox One S", which sounds very similar when pronounced out loud. This may well cause confusion with eg. parents buying the console for their kids as a Christmas present, if they know very little about consoles, especially about a specific line of consoles. To be fair, "Xbox Scorpio", or "Xbox One Scorpio" (if they want to denote in the name...

I haven't talked much about this particular incident with many people, nor ever written about it, but here it is. Disclaimer: This is not criticism against Ubisoft as a company. It's just a recount of my experience with one particular individual manager at Ubisoft Montreal, who was tasked to interview me. This happened about 12 years ago or so. I had a good friend who was working as a lead developer at the time at Ubisoft Montreal, in Canada, and he had suggested, and I entertained the idea, that I would apply for a job there as well. Since I live in Finland, that would have been quite a change in my life. But I finally decided that what the heck; being a game developer was the dream of my life, and here was a golden opportunity to fulfill that dream. The opportunity was made even easier by the fact of having a connection inside the company, who could speak on my behalf, and if I got the job, would help me settle in. What more could I hope for? So my friend arranged for m...

I purchased the PC I'm currently using several years ago. Alongside with it, I purchased Windows 7. A while back Microsoft offered a free upgrade to Windows 10 to all Windows 7 (and 8) users. (They really, and somewhat obnoxiously, pushed this upgrade onto people, but whatever; that's not the subject of this post.) I took the upgrade, because why not. The offer of the free upgrade was a limited time thing, though. I think it was a year or something like that. As far as I know, they are not offering it anymore, meaning that if you today want to upgrade from Windows 7 or 8 to 10, you'll need to purchase the latter. This got me thinking: I don't actually have a physical copy of Windows 10. It was an upgrade over the installed Windows 7 done through the internet. I only have the physical disk for Windows 7. So what happens if for whatever reason I need to reinstall Windows from scratch? (For instance, the most likely scenario for this is if my hard drive completely br...

Some time ago I decided to disable my browser's ad blocker plugin on channelawesome.com because I wanted to support the site even if it's just a tiny bit. The ads there are not completely on-your-face nor do they hinder browsing and enjoying the site, so why not. However, I later enabled the ad blocker again, because the ads had another negative side-effect. From time to time I browse the list of new videos on the site's front page, and open those I want to watch on new tabs. I might open half a dozen tabs at once, or even more. The problem with the ads is that they are really heavy for the browser to render. They are constantly changing, they play videos, and whatnot. With half a dozen tabs opened, all of them full of ads, the browser becomes really laggy. Just scrolling one page is really laggy. CPU usage is very high. So I enabled the ad blocker and reloaded all the tabs, and what do you know, CPU usage went way down and there is no lag anymore. Scrolling the pag...

If you have read this blog, you'll know how much I have ranted about my disappointment in how VR turned out to be, and how it has all the signs of being in danger of becoming a commercial failure of the same kind as the Kinect and the PS Vita. And of course one of my major gripes about it is the exorbitant prices of the headsets (which are more expensive than your average PC; even one that meets the minimum requirements.) That doesn't mean, and has never meant, that I wasn't eager to get my hands on one of the headsets and try it for myself. It's just that I was not really ready to pay the exorbitant price for a device that at this point is mostly just a gimmick to run a few demos and small indie games, with an abysmal library of triple-A games. A couple of weeks ago there was a deal in an online store here, where they were selling a bundle that contained the PSVR headset, the game Farpoint, and an Aim Controller, for cheaper than the headset alone would cost normal...

During the history of humanity, nations, societies and cultures have risen and fallen countless times. Some have prospered for extremely long time, others were short-lived. Some were rather insignificant, others were the pinnacle of human civilization and progress. The reason for their fall are very varied. Some were conquered by outside forces and effectively destroyed. Others destroyed themselves from the inside due to greed and hunger for power. A few even simply just dissolved pretty peacefully, perhaps because civilization just progressed and society changed. But however many civilizations have such disappeared, I'm not aware of a single one that actively sought to destroy itself, to destroy its own culture and society, and very existence, by willingly and actively bringing other cultures and societies into itself, and actively shunning and squashing its own. I'm not aware of any such society that hated itself so much that it pretty much effectively wanted to commit soci...

Do you know what's a unit of measurement that just hate? Revolutions per minute. Why is it "per minute"? Why a minute? This is the only unit of measurement I'm aware of that uses one minute as its time unit. Who exactly came up with this? The problem is that it's so nondescript. Unless you have dealt with this particular unit of measurement a lot, and have a lot of experience with it, it doesn't really tell much. It doesn't give you a mental picture of how fast something is rotating. If something rotates, let's say, 150 revolutions per minute, how fast is that? How about 2000 RPM? Can you form a mental picture of something spinning at that speed? I can't. One minute is such a long period of time that it's really hard to just visualize it in your head. Of course you can get revolutions per second, which is much easier to grasp as a mental picture, by dividing by 60. It's just that dividing by 60 is not an easy operation to quickly do...