What grinds my gears

My previous blog post gave me a bit of a nostalgic feeling when thinking about video games in physical media. Who purchases those on this day and age anyways? Ok, they are still very common on consoles, but on the PC side they are becoming more and more of a rarity. I myself haven't purchased a PC game as a physical disc in years. But I do have quite a lot of them. Not nearly as much as avid collectors, but somewhere in the ballpark of 150-200 in total (this includes all games I own as a physical copy, for all systems, not just PC games. From those perhaps about 75-100 are PC games.) Here are a few of the more iconic, more recent PC games I have a physical copy of: Probably not many people own these as physical copies. Of course I have been buying video games for quite some time, so it goes way back. And waaaaay back: In fact, Tomb Raider III was the first PC game I ever purchased. That's the original disc. I wonder if it would even work anymore. Of cours...

A couple of decades ago the video game business was rather simple: A game developer offers a complete full-size video game on physical media, you buy one copy of that physical media, and that's it. You have the full game; you play it; you are happy. At most there could be some patches to fix bugs, which you could download and apply. (After technology became advanced enough, the game could automatically patch itself! No longer did you need to go to the developer's website and download an .exe file and run it manually to patch the game. Yeehaw!) Then digital purchasing and distribution of games became viable. While purchasing games on a physical media is still alive and well to this day, it has become less and less relevant over the years due to the convenience of simply purchasing the game online and have it playable as soon as your rig can download it. What's better, the digital version is oftentimes cheaper than the physical copy (or, at the very least, downloadable vers...

" How Britain celebrates Christmas in 2017: Armed guards, concrete barriers and metal detectors spring up around festive markets due to terror attack fears " "Armed police, large concrete barriers and stop and search checks carried out at festive markets across UK" This is what the British police currently looks like: Welcome to open borders, unrestricted immigration, and the joys of multiculturalism. Just hope that the joys of multiculturalism don't explode too close to you. Or that the bullets from those automatic assault rifles will be able to stop those jihadi trucks. And by the way, there are still between half and one million economic migrants entering Europe every single year, with no signs of it slowing down. So happy multiculturalism everybody.

Science ought to be objective, neutral and unbiased, examining just the facts and drawing conclusions from those facts, whatever those conclusions might be, without biases or agendas. If the facts overwhelmingly indicate thing X, then that's it. No ifs, buts or maybes. That's not the situation in all cases, however. Sometimes things like cultural norms, stigmas and taboos hinder scientific research, no matter how objective that research might be. As a hypothetical example, suppose that the IQ of a million white people and a million black people is tested, using an extensive unbiased IQ test that has been demonstrated to be completely independent of culture, upbringing and educational background (ie. those things do not affect the results of the test). The test is performed properly as a double-blind test with controls, and is as much automated as possible, to remove all possible bias from the people doing the research. Now, suppose that the results show a quite significan...

In a previous blog post, The Finnish constitution vs. the United States constitution , I compared the two constitutions and how they are applied in each country, and described how weak and powerless the Finnish constitution is, and how relatively freely it's ignored by judges and officials. There are still even more differences than what I wrote there. In the United States, the constitution is, in fact, enforceable law. Meaning that officials can be sued by individuals for unconstitutional behavior. In other words, an individual can sue a government official (such as for example a sheriff) for an action that's against the constitution. A recent case in the United States is a perfect example of this. A sheriff in Georgia has been indicted after a jury awarded 3 million dollars to 900 students, after the sheriff ordered his deputies to perform an unlawful body search of those students. The sheriff was sued explicitly for violating the 4th Amendment rights of those students....

Consider the following news article title: The twist? The woman was arrested for fraud allegations, not for having the sticker. (She cannot be arrested for having such a sticker. It's not illegal.) The genius in the article title is that it is, technically speaking, 100% correct. The woman did have a "Fuck Trump" sticker on her truck, she was jailed, and the sheriff did threaten her with charges. Those are all true statements. Moreover, the title isn't actually, and technically speaking, making any connection between those claims. It's not claiming that one happened because of the other. But of course the title heavily implies the connection, and it's exactly the impression that the reader gets. The author of the article has plausible deniability ("I never claimed that one thing happened because of the other"), but it's still quite clearly designed to imply the connection, and to give the impression that there is a connection. I ...

Meet Denise Young Smith, Apple's diversity chief. She's being harassed by an angry mob online. Not only that, but she's being fired from her job because of that outcry. A black woman is being oppressed, harassed online, and fired from her job. It seems that the social justice warriors were right after all. I might have to revise my views on society. Perhaps the social justice warriors do have a point after all. There indeed is oppression of minority people. If a company like Apple is letting a black woman go as a result of her being a target of online abuse, there is no other conclusion. This is a real travesty. Oh... wait... Who exactly is doing the online harassment? A bunch of white nationalist neonazis? A bunch of American rednecks? Members of the KKK? Internet trolls? No. None of those. It's actually the social justice warriors who are the ones engaging in harassing her online. Wait. Weren't the social justice warriors supposed to defend minorit...

Glitch abuse is one of the quintessential techniques in speedrunning, in order to be able to complete the game faster than normally. Or, more precisely, glitch abuse has become a quintessential technique. It has not always been so. For example, in the early years of Speed Demos Archive (which started as a collection of Quake and Doom speedruns, but later opened to all games), out-of-bounds glitches were banned. The same rule applied in its then-major rival site, Twin Galaxies. It was deemed back then that glitching the game so that the player can go out of bounds, skipping most of a level, or even the entire game, was unfun and bypassed not only the level or game, but also the skills required to complete the game in the normal way. Of course one of the major hurdles in such a ban was a matter of definition . With some games it was relatively unambiguous what counted as an "out-of-bounds glitch" and what didn't. With other games, however, it became fuzzier and fuzzi...

I have written before how Poland seems to be the only EU country that has not gone completely insane, and actually has the balls to say "no" to economic migrants, and to the EU, even at the threat of sanctions. It seems that Poland is also the only European government that actually listens to its people. The reason why Poland has said "no" to immigrants is because 75% of the citizens said "no" to immigrants, and the government complied. Of course the other European countries don't like this at all. Recently Poland held a normal annual independence celebration, with something like 75 thousand people participating in it on the streets. Much of European media are calling it a "nazi demonstration". Seriously. Poland was invaded by nazi Germany, and suffered a big amount of loss because of it. The celebration in question is a normal one held every year, and lots of people participate in it, including war veterans who fought against the nazis...

When the European Union was being advertised to European citizens, it was guaranteed that it was merely an economic agreement between the member states that would make travel and trading easier, and that's it. Each country would retain its independence and sovereignty. The fears that many had that the EU would become a nation all of its own, with each member state pretty much losing their independence and own government, is unfounded. Or so they said. Some of the signs of a country's sovereignty are having its own currency, its own supreme government and justice system, its own constitution, and its own army. The currency thing has long been gone, of course. The EU has become the top legislative entity controlling every member state, dictating the policies of all countries, and sanctioning countries that do not follow them. (With what authority? Who knows. But goes to show the what the status of sovereignty is). The EU tried to enact its own unified constitution for all mem...

The current leftist-feminist social justice cult ideology is often called with the moniker "regressive left" (as a counter-point to their own claims that they are "progressive"). But what does that mean? What's so "regressive" about it? I think this article is the perfect example of what it means, titled: This looks like something you could have perhaps seen in the 1950's America. Even as-is. As a society we have made great progress in the past 50 years, but the "progressive" left is trying very hard to drag us back to the era of open blatant racism and racial discrimination. But wait, perhaps I'm just ripping a headline out of its context. Maybe the article is exactly how ridiculous such a statement is, and criticizes people who would think like that? Or perhaps it's just a parody? No. It's serious. The article says, for example: "As against our gauzy national hopes, I will teach my boys to have profound d...

So there's this satirical publication called The Onion that makes up outrageous stories to trick people, and they published a story about Facebook planning to ask people to send them nude photos of themselves, in order to combat "revenge porn", and people left and right are falling for it, and... wait... What? It isn't a satirical article made up by The Onion? It's real? Facebook actually is doing that? It's really hard to believe, but all major news networks are writing about it, including USA Today , CNBC , The Guardian , The Telegraph , CNN , Fortune , and the list goes on and on and on. Maybe they all fell for the same prank? But if they did, I can't find any evidence it's so. Usually if you make a google search for something, you'll probably quickly find if it's real or not, even if it's being parroted by major news networks. Some article or press release denouncing it as a hoax. But I can't find anything. For all I know,...

In their misguided eagerness to... I don't even know exactly what... perhaps take some kind of odd "revenge" against men, I suppose... feminism has diluted in an ever-increasing manner the concepts of "rape" and "sexual assault" to the point that they mean almost nothing anymore. To give an illustrative example, consider these two cases: 1) A man brutally rapes a woman completely against her will, beating her almost to death, and repeatedly forcing himself onto her, leaving long-lasting physical and psychological trauma that will severely impair her life for years to come. 2) Somebody feels a bit nervous and uncomfortable the first time they have a sexual encounter. They are willing at first, but get a bit nervous as the thing progresses, but go with it anyway. Weeks/months/years later they think back at that first-time, and they slightly regret it. To progressive feminists, both are "sexual assault". I'm not kidding. And I didn...

Normally in forums, social media sites, online chats, comment sections and so on, spammers, trolls, vandals (who usually try to disrupt the conversation with copious amounts of flooding), abusive people, etc. are quickly banned. Their account gets suspended or restricted so that they can't post anymore (either for a period of time, or permanently), or just outright removed. Shadow-banning goes a step further than this. Rather than just inform the perpetrator that he can't post anymore because he has been banned, or even that his account doesn't exist anymore, the backend software hides this information from the perpetrator and makes it look to him like everything is normal. All of his posts appear to him as normal, as if he wasn't banned at all. They just don't appear for anybody else. Nobody else can see what he's posting. One idea behind this is that this way the perpetrator will not notice that he has been banned, and thus will not try to bypass the ban (...

In sociopolitical thinking, individualism is the fundamental notion (invariably espoused by constitutions and human rights agreements) that every person should be treated equally as an individual person, and judged solely on personal merits, achievements, qualifications, opinions and actions. People should not be treated differently based on physical traits of that person that the person cannot help (unless the reason for differential treatment can be rationally justified, for example for medical reasons, such as giving special treatment to people with physical disabilities in certain situations, to help them get or achieve things that they normally would have difficulties with due to their physical disability.) How this is usually worded (in things like human rights declarations) is that every person should be treated equally, and have the same rights, regardless of characteristics like age, sex, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, country of origin, and so on and so forth. One ex...

I have commented several times that Trump protesters make all kinds of claims about him, how he's racist and islamophobic, and hates gays and Mexicans, and what not, but when asked about specific details, about something specific that he has said or done that would warrant such accusations, the protesters often can't give any. I think this video by the youtuber Nuance Bro is the absolutely perfect example of this: ANTIFA November 4th Protest To Remove Trump/Pence . It's almost hilarious how he asks protesters why they are there, and then asks for specific examples, and when they can't give any, they start refusing to answer any more questions. A few even outright admit, when asked tough questions, that "I have not done the research". I think that says it all.

I love watching speedruns. Quite often when I have played a game through I will search for the current world record speedrun of it, to watch it (which most often than not can be found on speedrun.com). Sometimes (of course not always, but way too often), however, I find the video recording of the speedrun pretty much unwatchable. So much that I can't even watch the video. One thing that can make the video almost unwatchable is abysmal video quality. As in, a video encoding bitrate that's way, way too low, making the video full of artifacts. The worst examples I have seen have so many compression artifacts due to low bitrate that at points it actually becomes hard to distinguish what's happening. I do understand that in at least a few cases it may be due to the technical limitations of the computer and/or internet connection of the speedrunner. Not every person has a top-of-the-line super gaming PC with the latest bells and whistles, and a super-fast internet connectio...

Finland, as a country, at some level prides itself as being a free constitutional democracy, where people have strong constitutional human rights, and where the constitution itself is good, well-crafted, and something to be proud of. When you dig deeper, however, it turns out that the Finnish Constitution is surprisingly weak, non-authoritative, and even largely nondescript, full of effectively null statements that may sound superficially good, but mean nothing. Freedom of religion and speech I always like to contrast it with the United States Constitution, which has a significantly stronger role in the law-making of that country. One key difference is the very wording of these two documents. For example, consider the wording of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution (emphasis mine): " Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the...

On June of 2016, a Muslim man committed a mass shooting in a nightclub in Orlando, Florida, killing 49 people, and wounding 58. He made his motivations completely clear prior to, and even during the shooting (via a phonecall to 9-1-1). He committed the mass murder because of ISIS and his religion. On October of 2017, a Muslim man plowed into a crowd of people in New York with a truck, killing 8. Once again he made his motivations completely and absolutely clear: ISIS and his religion. These are just two prominent recent examples of similar attacks. The actual number of such attacks is actually staggering. ISIS itself has made their motivations completely clear and unambiguous: They hate the west because they are non-Muslims and engage in all sorts of behaviors that are condemned by Islam. They have published several publications making this completely and absolutely clear, without the shadow of a doubt. Their major motivation is the secularism, liberal values, and non-Islamic bel...

The regressive left in the United States (and pretty much everywhere else) keeps touting how Donald Trump is racist. It always comes up every time they want to attack him. Racism this, racism that, he can't even open his mouth without something racist coming out (paraphrasing an actual quote by a regressive leftist activist.) Yet when asked for examples, they seem to be lacking. There are tons of YouTube videos out there with people asking these regressive leftist activists for examples, and almost invariably they won't give a single example, or the examples they give have pretty much nothing to with racism. (One particular example was rather hilarious, where the interviewer asked a protester directly an example of something racist the Trump has said, and the example that the protester gave was that Trump had said that black people love him, and that's a lie. As the interviewer says in the video, whether that's true or not doesn't make it a racist statement.) Bu...