What grinds my gears

The modern social justice cult divides people into groups based on how "oppressed" they are, and assigns more rights, privileges, responsibilities and guilt onto people based on which such group they belong to. At the very bottom of the barrel are, of course, white men (although jews might or might not be even lower, depending on the social justice warrior). White women are just slightly above them, because they are women (and thus more oppressed than white men). White people in general, and white men in particular, are considered the bottom of the barrel in more than one way. Not only do they get no respect, consideration or rights in the eyes of social justice warriors, and not only are they despised, vilified and hated, but to an increasing extent social justice warriors think that white people are pretty much a different species from other people, who are literally, not just metaphorically, genetically predisposed to racism and oppression. It's literally in their DN...

In 2015 Valve implemented the now famous refund policy on Steam: Within 14 days, or 2 hours of gameplay (whichever comes first) you are allowed to refund a game you have purchased, no questions asked. The media and the public lauded Valve for being so consumer-friendly, and one of the very few good and fair corporations out there. It seemed to be a fresh deviation from the corporate greed we are all so accustomed to. What the vast majority of people don't know, however, is why Valve suddenly decided to implement this policy. The reality is that Valve didn't do so because they were thinking what's best for their customers. They did it because they were thinking what's best for Valve. It was purely for self interest. After all, Valve's non-refund policy prior to this change was quite strong. For example, customers in the EU had, in principle, the right to a 14-day refund of any purchases, but there is a caveat in these EU laws that state that a customer may waive...

When a bit over a year ago Donald Trump was elected the president of the United States, leftist social justice warriors, celebrities, and pretty much the entirety of the leftist media, predicted pretty much an era of Nazi Germany for the country. Many social justice warriors, including many celebrities, were literally crying in desperation, and making somber videos and posts about the grim future, and how it was pretty much the end of the world. They quite literally looked like they were jews being led to the showers of Auschwitz. And I'm not even exaggerating; you can find videos made by these people on YouTube, where they sound and look like they are expecting the state police to kick down their door at any moment and take them to concentration camps to be gassed. A year has passed and... well, nothing much, really. Trump enacted, to a varying extent, some of the promises he made during his campaign, such as repealing the affordable healthcare act, and the travel ban from cert...

This is the Aim Controller for the PSVR: Do you know what it looks like it's perfectly designed to emulate (all the way up to its very color scheme)? This: Yet, sadly, Valve will never make a Portal game for the PSVR (much less one supporting the aim Controller). That's because Valve has stopped developing games altogether. (Also, even if they did by some miracle develop a game for it, it would probably be a crippled game, because Valve doesn't believe you can move with a joystick in a VR game.) On a similar note, this is the PlayStation Move Controller (which is fully tracked in PSVR): Do you know what it looks like it's perfectly designed to emulate? This: Yet, so far there isn't a single Star Wars PSVR game where you get to use a lightsaber. Maybe in the future there might be, but I'm not very hopeful.

Suppose you are a completely healthy person, in quite good health and fitness. There's nothing medically wrong with you, and therefore you most certainly don't need any sort of medication or other medical treatment. Would it make sense to deliberately start taking medication that you don't need, and that has severe physical detrimental effects on your body and your health, just because you feel like there's something you don't like about yourself? Many transsexuals take cross-hormones like candy, even though most of them are fully aware of their negative health effects. When you take them for long enough (and not even necessarily for that long), they sterilize you, they increase the risk of several kinds of cancer, and may have a myriad of other long-term detrimental side-effects. And the only reason why they take these hormones is to try to change their appearance to be more of the opposite sex. (Some of them even do it without even planning to have a sex change ...

I'm not here talking about their ergonomics (which are rather horrible), but about an infamous flaw in the Joy Cons, which should have never went into production. The Joy Cons are the two half-controllers that attach to the sides of the Nintendo Switch, and can be detached (allowing them to be used when the Switch is docked, or even when it isn't, especially if using the grip peripheral, or even on their own. Some two-player games even have each player using one of the controllers.) When used detached, they have strap attachments that ought to be connected to them. Most people don't notice it, but the left Joy Con has a "-" symbol at its top, which ought to match the equivalent symbol on the strap attachment. Likewise the right one has a "+" symbol. For an unfathomable reason, however, they can be attached in the wrong orientation (ie. upside down, or on the wrong Joy Con, likewise upside down). An extremely basic principle of engineering desig...

How many times have you seen someone say or write "it's a private company, they can do whatever they want"? I have seen it tons of times, and I'm getting sick of it. Quite obviously a private company can't do whatever they want. I can't even believe this has to be stated because it's so utterly obvious. Can a private company, for instance, hire a hitman and murder people? Of course not. Can a private company, for example, put poison in their products and cause thousands of people to die from it? Of course not! I'm not straw-manning the issue here. That sentiment is often expressed by people when a company does something that's controversial, or something that's unfair towards somebody. People will often defend the company with that sentiment, without any qualifiers, implying that private companies, just by the fact that they are "private", have some kind of carte blanche to do whatever they please, without restrictions or limita...

Just like young-earth creationists, social justice warriors love to play with words, and deliberately make equivocation fallacies. There's this mantra that "there's no such a thing as an illegal person". It's essentially nitpicking on the term "illegal immigrant", and interpreting that expression as meaning that the person himself is, somehow, considered "illegal". The intent is to argue that there are no illegal immigrants, because people can't be "illegal". This is one of the stupidest arguments ever. The term "illegal immigrant" is just a shorthand to describe the status of an immigrant who has no legal right to stay in a country. It's not saying that the person himself is, somehow, "illegal". It's saying that what they are doing is illegal. (In this case, what they are doing is entering or staying in the country without legal permission to do so.) It's no different from saying that a perso...

Especially a decade or two ago, and probably to this day, many game developer companies had job positions for people to almost exclusively (in some cases perhaps even completely exclusively) do playtesting of their games being developed. In other words, you do nothing but play the game and find bugs. Especially back in the day, perhaps even today to many, this sounded like the absolute dream job: You would get paid to do exactly what you love: Play video games. And, unlike eg. streamers or other online video content producers, you didn't need to be entertaining or anything like that, to gain an audience. Just play video games all day long, and get paid for it. Of course the actual reality of the job was, and is, much harsher than that. If you want to ruin playing video games for yourself, then by all means apply for such a job. The naive vision of the job is that you get to playtest the almost-finished game, and just report any bugs you stumble across. In reality, what you g...

It's still has to pass the approval of the United States congress, but the FCC has already voted to repeal the net neutrality principle. If it passes in congress as well, the future isn't looking very bright. What are the possible consequences of net neutrality being removed? Expect all of the internet services you are using to become more expensive. It's very possible that your very internet service itself will become more expensive (especially if you are using a smaller ISP, which needs to pay larger ISPs for their services). And it probably won't matter if you don't live in the United States. Your ISP will be forced to charge you higher fees, even if they wouldn't want to. Expect more and more online services that are now free to either go behind a paywall, become more expensive, or just cease to exist. Expect, for instance, all games on Steam to become more expensive, if Valve is forced to pay money to ISPs to avoid severely crippled bandwidth. The sa...

Approximately one year ago the United States presidential elections were at full swing, and the leftist media was predicting a landslide victory for Hillary Clinton. Chances up to 99.9% were cited. A news reporter predicted that Trump would lose by such a wide margin that it would make history, and it would be a devastating blow to the Republican Party, and perhaps change it forever. Everybody on the left, especially the media, considered the voting to be just a useless formality, given how clear the winner was. But, of course, the media doesn't elect presidents. The people do. Trump's victory was so, oh so sweet. It still gives me an immense sense of glee seeing those news reports from a year ago, when that reality dawned on them. Hillary Clinton gave her concession speech the next day after the election results were announced. It is my understanding that this is the first time in history (or at least the first time in a long, long time) that such a thing has happened. U...

Most games do not implement any sort of copy protection system. Piracy is rampant, and in most cases it takes less than a day from publication before pirated versions start circulating the internet, but these developers just live with that sad fact. Some games do implement some type of copy protection system. Some are more effective than others. (For example, one particular game by Ubisoft, if I remember correctly it might have been Splinter Cell 2, or perhaps 3, had a copy protection mechanism that was so effective that it literally took hackers over a year to crack it, and distribute a pirated version. The common "knowledge" that copy protection systems are pretty much useless isn't always true. That game got a full year of legitimate sales before a single pirated version was available.) When a copy protection system is "clean", in the sense that it just affects the game itself, and tries to stop it being illegally copied without affecting the operating sy...

Those who never owned an Xbox 360, or those who did, but were never really interested in, nor followed all the hype that Microsoft created around the Kinect, might find it a bit surprising, given how little impact the Kinect had on video gaming, but this device was absolutely massively advertised and pushed by Microsoft back in the day, with borderline outrageous promises and hype. And we are talking about massive promotional campaigns. The original slogan for the Kinect was "You Are The Controller". The initial narrative, prior to the Kinect's launch (and a bit after that), was that the traditional controller was a "barrier", a very limited form of control that severely limited possibilities. According to the marketing campaigns, "Kinect will change living room entertainment forever". Microsoft's promotional demonstrations at E3 2009, and several subsequent ones, promised absolutely incredible real-time interactivity. (Given that the actual...

Modern social justice cultists repeat the mantra that gender is just a "social construct" (a few of them even claiming that biological sex itself is such a thing). Gender is not just a social construct, of course, but even if it were, the question arises why it's a bad thing. They always use that term, "just a social construct", as if it were an undesirable thing to get rid of. But why? As a social species, almost everything related to interactions between people in our society is a "social construct". Crime and punishment are social constructs. We, as a society, invented both things, and are "artificially" applying it to ourselves. It's the reason why the vast majority of people, when they for example want something, don't just go and take it from someone else. It's the reason why people don't just go to a store, take whatever they want, and walk off without paying. Even in the mildest of cases, at the very minimum, it...

The media at large, as well as myriads of organizations, corporations, institutions, and sometimes even governments, take social justice activists way too much seriously than they should. They don't seem to understand one crucial thing about those activists: They claim to represent the interests of several groups of people, but nobody elected them to represent them. Those activists did not ask anybody, nor were they appointed by anybody to represent them. The activists have all appointed themselves into that role, without asking anybody. Activists are speaking on behalf of large groups of people who were never even asked if they want those activists speaking on their behalf, or whether they agree with their views, opinions, methods, or proposed "solutions" to the "problems" they see. If, for example, some group of neonazis were pretending to talk on behalf of, let's say, all white people, the majority of the media, even the regressive leftist media, unde...

Black racists will often accuse other black people of "acting white". There's even a rather old moniker "oreo" to describe this ("black on the outside, white on the inside"). Black people who "act white" are deemed as some kind of race traitors, because they don't "act black" enough, and thus are traitors to their "own people" and their "own culture". But what exactly is "acting white"? It's actually hard to get concrete answers. Deducing from everything I have seen, when they accuse black people of "acting white", what they mean is somebody who (typically) gets a higher-degree education, ie. goes to school to study hard and get a degree (and typically does not participate in any political activism), gets a good-paying job corresponding to his knowledge and education, performs that job diligently, using all of his knowledge, education, qualifications and experience, is perhaps prom...

One common wisdom, which many zealots seem to not understand, is that when you demand limiting people's freedoms, those limitations will eventually come back at you. If you demand censorship, that same censorship will be eventually applied to you. Modern regressive leftist feminists want to both keep the cake, and eat it. They demand tougher stances on "hate speech", harassment, derogatory comments, and anything that anybody would consider offensive and demeaning. But, as always, don't want this exact principle to apply to themselves. (After all, when you have the moral high ground, you can do no wrong, you can do whatever you want, and your own rules, which you are trying to impose onto others, do not apply to yourself.) So what happens when they successfully drive a social media platform like Facebook to ban people who make derogatory comments about other people? Well, what do you know, they get banned themselves for making derogatory comments about men . And of...

Captain Disillusion is one of my all-time favorite YouTube channels. He specializes mainly in analyzing and debunking online videos depicting seemingly extraordinary events (such as UFOs, ghosts, viral videos presenting belief-defying acts of skill, and so on.) He does this by acting a fictitious role, often with copious amounts of humor. The production quality of his videos is quite high (and have got better and better over the years). His videos are very informative, enlightening, and entertaining. He doesn't publish videos very frequently, but every time he does, it's a real treat. To my recollection, during the whopping 10 years he has been making YouTube videos, he has never delved into politics, or made any sort of sociopolitical comment, or taken any stance, or any sides. Of course I have only watched his videos and nothing of his other online activity, but at least deducing from his YouTube channel, he has been keeping away from making political comments of any kin...

Many countries and cultures have really pervasive beliefs and superstitions that live on, as strong as ever, regardless of all the evidence of the contrary. For example there's a belief, believed by a good majority of people, and repeated by the media year after year, that sleeping with an electric fan turned on in the same room can be dangerous, even lethal. This belief seems to be pretty much isolated to that country alone, but it's still strongly believed by a good portion of the population. (I don't know if the origin of this myth is known, but it's easy to assume that at some point somebody was found dead while sleeping, perhaps for unknown reasons, and there was an electric fan running in the room, so somebody, or the media, made hasty conclusions, which spread like wildfire.) A much older, and much more widespread quasi-superstitious belief in many countries (especially in southern European countries, and many continental American countries, both north and sout...

Given how horrendous the situation in Sweden is, with massive amounts of crimes, including rapes, committed by immigrants, and dozens of literal "no-go zones" dominated by immigrant gangs, where the police literally doesn't dare to go unless in the utmost of dire circumstances, and where ambulances also dare not go because of the fear of the safety of the ambulance personnel, and given how massive the propaganda and censorship is in Sweden with regards to all this, I always assumed that Sweden would be the first European country to become, effectively, a police state followed by becoming an Islamic totalitarian hellhole. However, it appears that Great Britain might be even worse. The British police forces are seeing their budget being cut year after year , and the size of the police forces becoming smaller and smaller each year. Yet they still have the resources, budget and time to fight the most horrendous of criminals in existence: Trolls, and people speaking their ...