What grinds my gears

As the song goes, "do you have the time to listen to me whine?" So yeah, this post isn't about some grander world-wide issue, or politics, or anything, just a personal grievance that happened to me recently, which might come out as a bit whiny. Or a lot whiny. But heck, I created this blog to vent my frustrations. Some months ago I was watching a Twitch stream. I'm not going to name any names, but this is one of the most prestigious, renowned and respected streamers on a particular field (which is where the "elitism" part comes in later), and I had been regularly following his streams for quite a long time (well over a year). At one point people in the chat started talking about something related to American politics. Nothing too serious, heated or controversial, but a somewhat serious topic nevertheless. The streamer asked people to stop talking about politics. I was in the middle of writing something about the subject being talked about, and kind of ...

Some time ago I read a news article about a person here in Finland who one day noticed that a rather large sum of money had been transferred to his bank account, from someone he didn't know. Rather than do what a normal rational person would, ie. try to find out what had happened or, at a very minimum, wait to see what would happen to that money, he immediately and quickly spent all that money on stuff, well aware that it was probably some kind of mistake. Not very surprisingly, it was indeed a bank transfer mistakenly made to the wrong person, the police got involved and he was sued in order to get all that money back. (If he had simply waited to see what happened, the bank would have corrected the mistake, and obviously no repercussions would have happened to him. But since he went and spent all that money, he got in a huge amount of trouble with the law.) This kind of story isn't actually unique. You can read this kind of things happening from time to time. I have noti...

It has become more and more prevalent in the regressive leftist social justice ideology that any system that rewards and embraces skill, knowledge, talent, efficiency and hard work, in other words, meritocracy, is inherently "oppressive" and "discriminatory" because, according to the ideology, it benefits white people over all other people, even if the system is otherwise absolutely impartial and agnostic to any inconsequential external characteristic of the person (such as sex or ethnicity.) (In actuality, in the western world a purely meritocratic system actually and demonstrably benefits East Asians the most. Indeed, East Asians occupy the highest positions in statistics that measure income and success, well above white people. This is because most East Asians have a culture of duty, honor, studiousness, hard work, giving it all, and completing tasks to one's best abilities and beyond. In fact, social justice warriors are slowly seeing and accepting this fa...

The so-called "horseshoe theory" posits that when you look at the "left/right" axis of the political spectrum, the more you go to the absolute extremes, rather than the two political ideologies becoming increasingly different, they actually start looking more and more similar. (This is visualized by having the "left/right" axis not as a straight line, but a curve where the left and the right start going to opposite directions from the center, but then they curve and become closer to each other the more you go to the extremes. Like a horseshoe.) Well, the extreme left and the extreme right do have a surprising amount of similarities. Both are deeply authoritarian and totalitarian, seeking to control society and every aspect of it with an iron fist. Both want to separate people into groups based on things like race and ethnicity, and to treat people differently, discriminate against them, or give them special rights and privileges, based on which such ...

More and more people are speaking out and trying to raise awareness of the addictive and detrimental effect that social media (which comprises of so-called social media websites like Facebook and Twitter, among others) has on people. And we are not just talking about some conspiracy theorists, or conservatives who oppose all technological progress. Many people working in the industry itself are speaking out. Developers, managers... people deeply involved in the creation and development of these social media platforms. People are glued to their cellphones. In many places, when you look at people hanging out, even in situations where they would normally, in the past, have been having a conversation among themselves, or paying attention to what's happening around them, are instead twiddling with their cellphones. In some places it has got so bad that even people walking on the street will be staring at their cellphone, sometimes causing danger to themselves and others. (Some cities ...

As I have written many, many times in past blog posts, I find it baffling and curious how religiously some people have defended virtual reality and the VR headsets, no matter how much of a relative commercial failure they have been. One of the aspects of this quasi-religious attitude is to counter cold hard facts and numbers with feelings and emotions. What baffles me is that still , to this say, the attitude has not changed for many people. In a recent YouTube video made by someone discussing the new Nvidia RTX cards, and whether they will ever become successful or flop, I wrote a comment making a comparison to the PC VR headsets: I wrote that the RTX might suffer the same fate as VR headsets because of the similarities. The VR headsets were a commercial failure because of their exorbitant launch price. Nobody is going to purchase a piece of hardware costing over $700 for such a niche use, especially since the library of triple-A titles is abysmal. This might become the fate of th...

If you are a white man, or if you imagine you were, and you were looking for a new job, and you went to a job interview, imagine that at one point the interviewer told you something like this: "We take matters of proper conduct very seriously. If you behave improperly, say something that upsets somebody, makes them feel uncomfortable, or you berate, belittle, insult or discriminate against someone, we will take swift action and enact stern measures. It may even quickly end in the termination of your job." Then, with a condescending and even slightly smug tone the interviewer says: "But as a white man, don't expect this same protection to apply to you. If you feel that someone else is criticizing, berating, insulting or discriminating against you, don't even bother complaining about it. We will ignore it, and will not do anything about it. As a white man you are a second-class citizen, and you do not have the same rights and protections as everybody else....

In 2015 I wrote a (what I consider one of my best-written) blog post about how feminism poisons everything . I commented how the modern regressive leftist social justice feminist ideology is invading, dividing and conquering community after community, from all aspect of society, including video gaming, sci-fi awards, open source software development communities, and so on and so forth. I have also written about how this is only going to get worse and worse over time, primarily because most American universities have been transformed into indoctrination and training camps. These indoctrinated students aren't going to remain isolated from the rest of society forever, but are going to go back there eventually, and this army of indoctrinated social justice activists is only growing larger and larger by the year, and the effects of this will only become worse and worse with time. This can already be seen. More and more communities and organizations are adopting openly discriminatory...

"Cultural appropriation" is yet another one of those buzzwords that feminist social justice academics have come up with in order to blame white people, control western society, and gain power over people's behavior and thinking. However, an actual genuine case could be made for the concept of "cultural appropriation": When a culture or society takes something from the culture of another country (like for example a work of art or fiction), and changes it somehow for political purposes and political activism, ie. propaganda, without respecting the source material nor where it comes from. In general, so-called localization does not fit into this definition. In some cases localization might go too far, and even be in some ways disrespectful to the original source material and its culture, but seldom can it be considered "cultural appropriation" in the above sense, if it's not done for political propaganda purposes. ("Localization" means...

It seems that there is no limit to the crazy ideas that the "progressive" social justice ideology won't go in order to impose their ideas onto society, to try to control the thoughts and behavior of people. Usually what originally started as a good genuinely progressive, in the good sense, idea is taken to the completely insane extreme over the years, until it becomes a complete travesty and mockery of itself. One prominent example is that of acceptance and tolerance of gender dysphoria and transgenderism. Gender dysphoria is the psychological phenomenon where a person has a strong feeling that his or her gender does not match his or her biological sex. For example, a biological male may have the extremely strong feeling that he is not actually a man, mentally, but a woman. Sometimes these feelings are so strong that it causes these people distress, and makes it hard for them to cope with it, and to live a normal happy life. They just feel like they were born in the wr...

In big part because the vast majority of electronics corporations in the west produce all their products in China, that country has become an electronics giant, not only manufacturing the vast majority of electronics products in the world, but also producing and selling their own (often, although not always, using technology copied from these western corporations.) There are many completely legit corporations in China, which produce good and oftentimes quite high-quality legit products and innovations of their own, with no shady business nor strings attached (well, no more than any other such corporation in the world), including things like cellphones, graphics cards and all other sorts of computer hardware. Their prices and the quality of their products tend to be quite competitive. I myself have a KFA2 GeForce GTX 1080 graphics card, which is manufactured by a company based in Hong Kong (Galaxy Microsystems Ltd), which has been manufacturing such cards for something like a decade...

(This blog post contains zero spoilers of the game Undertale, so even if you are one of the extremely few people who haven't yet played the game but plan to, and don't want spoilers, it's safe to read this.) I'm one of the small minority of people who absolutely and categorically hate, detest, abhor and despise spoilers of any kind, of any work of fiction I'm planning on seeing, reading or playing. The more I anticipate such a work, the less spoilers I want to see. No trailers, no promotional material, no reviews, no synopses. Nothing. (At most I might want to read 100% spoiler-free reviews, but that's it. Even those are quite hard to find given that the standard form of reviewing a work of art is to say something about what it contains.) I'm only ok with minor content spoilers with works of fiction I'm indifferent about (but which might pick my interest if reviews are positive.) I'm, in a manner of speaking, the exact opposite of the other extre...

I have commented in an earlier post how console manufacturers have become greedier and greedier with their online services. During the 7th generation of consoles (Xbox 360, PS3) it was only Microsoft who was greedy: On the Xbox 360, playing online multiplayer games, as well as the vast majority of apps that connect to the internet were locked behind a subscription paywall. (This included all third-party online service apps, such as Netflix and YouTube, and even the system's own web browser, which was completely asinine, given that the browser did not need anything from any Microsoft server.) Meanwhile the PS3 had no paid online subscription of any kind: All online services, online multiplayer games, video rentals and streaming, web browsers and so on and so forth... everything was usable at no extra cost. With the 8th generation of consoles (Xbox One, PS4) things changed. Microsoft loosened the restrictions slightly and actually started to offer some online services at no extr...

I saw an ad for what looked like the Nintendo Switch Pro Controller, for the surprisingly cheap price of 39€ (which is significantly cheaper than its usual price of about 70€.) The name of the product on the online shop was "Wireless Pro Controller for Nintendo Switch", and the controller itself looked like this: Cool, that's a quite cheap price for the Pro Controller... Except... wait... Is that actually what the Pro controller looks like? Feels like there's something odd about it. Let's check what the actual official Nintendo Switch Pro controller looks like: When comparing the two, quite clear differences immediately pop out. Most prominently the "home" button at the top of that first controller is completely different from the one in the official controller. There also seems to be one button missing, and the "plus" and "minus" buttons are shaped and positioned completely differently. The ABXY buttons have a different...

It has become more and more common nowadays for producers of works of fiction to take an existing work (usually not by originally made by them) and make a new version of it, usually some kind of remake, or a medium adaptation (such as making a film version of a book, or a theater play from a movie), and engaging in "blackwashing". This is the act of replacing a character who was white in the original work with a character who is usually black, sometimes something else. The more well-established, famous and beloved that character was in the old works, the more public outrage the change will usually cause (with only few exceptions), especially when the change is done clearly for sociopolitical reasons, and to virtue-signal. The resulting drama usually follows the same pattern: The change is made, clearly for political reasons, the long-time fans of the original work will complain, and the new authors, social justice warriors as well as the same bunch of leftist media pundits ...

Alex Jones has been a really prominent, and surprisingly popular, figure in the United States for several decades. He is like the most stereotypical loud-mouthed angry extreme American conspiracy theorist you can think of, spouting the craziest and silliest conspiracy theories, and always doing it very angrily, loudly and obnoxiously. It's not completely clear how much he actually believes what he's saying, and how much of it is just play-acting. (In a recent lawsuit he, or some of his representatives, claimed that he's just playing a character, that he isn't actually that kind of person in his private life. It's completely unclear whether that's true or whether it was just a desperate defense.) Anyway, pretty much everybody, on all sides, who aren't his fans, have always considered him an asshat clown at best, and a dangerous lunatic at worst. Nobody, besides his fans, has ever considered him a pleasant person of any repute or worth. Even the most chari...

This is all just rumors at this point, but they are the sort of rumors that historically have been tended to be right. Anyway, it appears that at this point AMD has showed no interest in adding hardware raytracing support to their graphics chips and cards, at least for the near future. I suppose they don't simply want to jump on the bandwagon and just copy what their biggest rival is doing, and instead want to wait and see how the technology develops, and how well the gaming industry starts supporting said technology. I think that this might be a somewhat of a small mistake. Perhaps not entirely from the point of view of AMD, but directly or indirectly from the point of view of Microsoft and Sony. You see, for one reason of another (I don't really know why; perhaps because of getting very good business deals) both Microsoft and Sony have partnered with AMD in order for the latter to provide the graphics chips for their consoles. (Both the PS4 and the Xbox One lines of conso...

I have noticed that many critics of the modern social justice ideology, who do not consider themselves conservative, are classifying themselves as "classical liberals". Yet, when you dig deeper into what kind of politics and policies they advocate, I think that in many cases "social liberal" would be a much more accurate description. (In fact, "classical liberal" describes much more closely American conservatism. Nowadays perhaps ironically enough.) Definitions of all these terms are not set in stone and 100% unambiguous. However, in general, I would say that "social liberalism" is pretty much synonymous with "welfare capitalism". A crude (and perhaps on some level slightly inaccurate) way of putting it is that "social liberalism" is "classical liberalism + welfare system" (which is a pretty accurate description of welfare capitalism.) The "social" in "social liberalism" in this case refers to...

For quite a while now I have been wondering what will happen if a male criminal, like a rapist, claims to be a woman. Will he be sent to a women's prison, or a male one? Well, it appears I finally have my answer: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6139305/Transgender-prisoner-rapist-identifies-woman-admits-sexually-assaulting-fellow-inmates.html

Many years ago we went with a group of friends to a trip to China and Thailand. Especially in Thailand I immediately noticed quite a drastic difference in terms of food culture compared to Finland: More precisely, portion sizes in local restaurants were really small. Almost laughably small. Back then I didn't appreciate the significance of this at all, but over the years I have come to realize its importance. It appears to me that the eating culture in Thailand is quite different than it is in Europe, and especially America. People don't eat much. They eat tasty food, not tons of food. In fact, I don't remember seeing even a single overweight local during our time there. Not one. Obesity appeared to be quite a rarity there. This is quite in contrast with Finland. If you look at people on the street, at least half of them are visibly overweight, and a good portion of them are clearly obese. (The difference between "overweight" and "obese" is that the ...

It has become quite evident over the past decade or so that so-called social media (which consists of websites like Facebook, Twitter and so on) has way too much unruly power over society, and way too little in way of responsibility and accountability. These social media sites have been explicitly and deliberately designed to be as addicting as possible, especially to young people, and have become great influencer in terms of opinions and social movements. Study after study has come out warning of the negative side-effects that social media has on people, especially young people, as it's detrimental to the healthy development of normal real-life social skills and social interaction between people. At the same time, these technologies have advanced so rapidly that law is dragging behind, and not catching up. As social media websites have become a more and more ubiquitous form of communication between people, the need for some sort of Bill of Rights for people on social media has ...

The modern regressive leftist narrative is that white people and white countries are racist and oppressive in the worst possible ways. Conversely, these regressive leftists either ignore, keep quiet about, or outright deny any such behavior and attitudes in any predominantly non-white country, such as African and Middle-East countries. Yet, if you start digging enough, you'll find that the culture in some of these countries (not all, but some) is astonishingly horrendous. Yet the media tends to not make a very big fuss about it (thus giving the illusion that it doesn't happen, or is very rare.) When the FIFA organization announced that the 2022 World Cup would be held in Qatar, some news organizations must actually be commended for raising to public awareness the multitude of human rights violations of that country, including but not limited to what essentially constitutes de facto slavery. You see, in many countries in the Middle-East, including countries like Qatar, Le...

Nvidia has been one of the major and few innovators in the field of consumer-grade hardware-accelerated real-time graphics, traditionally and still used mainly for video games, but in increasing manner for other (mostly number-crunching) applications as well (such as video rendering, AI-learning, cryptomining, and so on.) Nvidia's flagship line of products has been for quite a long time the GeForce GTX series of cards. However, the development of this line of cards has been, in some way, slightly stale for some time. Arguably the last major innovation in this line was the GTX 600 series, introduced in 2012, which introduced a significant amount of new hardware features (such as G-sync, hardware support for video capturing, and 4k resolution support, among others.) Since then, the improvements have been mostly on making the cards faster and have more RAM. Now Nvidia is trying to take the next huge leap forward with their new RTX 20 series of cards, and actually introduce a compl...

I recently wrote a blog post about misconceptions people have about public photography , most prominently displayed in so-called "First Amendment audit" videos on YouTube. These are videos where people, mostly in the United States, simply go to public places to film and photograph, and see if security guards, police officers and just people in general, respect their constitutional right to film in a public space. The most common places where some kind of interaction will happen is with big industry (such as oil refineries), corporation headquarters, post offices, federal buildings, police stations, military bases, harbours, and so on. The most typical engagement is a security guard coming and telling these people that filming is not allowed, and when the auditors disagree (you can film whatever you can see from a public place, including any private or federal property visible from there), the security guard will typically call the police. What then happens with the police v...

Time after time social justice warriors will attack a company about some complete non-existent controversy, and time and again these companies placate to them, apologize to them, and try to make amends. Yet, all of that is in vain, and completely useless. In fact, it's detrimental. There are some things that companies should learn about social justice warriors, and the sooner they learn, the better. First, and by far most importantly: Social justice warriors are not your customers! I can't stress that enough, since it seems to be a lesson that so many companies still don't understand. When some social justice warrior notices something that she can use to virtue-signal and feign offense, she will make a social media post, and if it gets noticed, it will spread through social media to a large amount of other eternally-offended social justice warriors who will join the outrage mob. Most probably almost none of them had ever even heard of that company, or whatever pro...