What grinds my gears

The "ufology" movement gained traction and interest between the 1960's and 1980's, but then faded into a somewhat fringe status and its popularity among the wider public waned until almost nobody was really interested in it, despite a few sporadic attempts at popularizing the phenomenon again. The 2020's saw a hugely renewed surge in popularity due to news stories about several declassified military training video footage seemingly depicting unexplained phenomena, which prompted several members and ex-members of the military to come out in support of the concept that these are extraterrestrial vehicles whose physical capabilities are well beyond what we currently are capable of (if not outright physics-defying). Even more fuel was added to that fire just in the recent months (as of writing this) when an (alleged) former high-ranking government official who (allegedly) worked in the most secret parts of the airforce made an interview where he claims that the United...

Quite often middle-aged and old people reminisce of the past and say how much better things were then than they are now. They have nostalgia for more innocent times, for simpler times, for safer times. Quite often there's a heavy amount of nostalgia filtering in this, as people tend to remember the good things about their childhood and ignore (or even be unaware of) the bad things. It's one form of "somewhere else is better than here" (ie. "the grass is greener on the other side of the fence") thinking, but instead of location it's time. Of course there are many things today that are better than they were eg. in the 1970's and 1980's, even though many people who grew up back then reminisce of those times and are very nostalgic about it. But are there some things that were genuinely better back then than they are now? Well, let me present one thing that I think was genuinely better. This is a screenshot of an older phonebook: Notice something part...

I happened to stumble across some youtube video where a leftist commented on some kind of video of a discussion of some journalist and a bunch of Republican Trump voters. Putting aside all the typical deceptive and defamatory talking points made by the author of the video himself, it was the comment section of the video that caught my attention. Here are some of the comments in that comment section. See if you can detect a pattern, an underlying theme (click the image for a full-sized version): "scary", "what scares me", "absolutely terrifying", "horrifying", "completely horrified", "truly frightening", "truly scared", "scares the Hell out of me", "they are scary"... And those are just a small sample. While it's not an uncommon expression to say how "scary" it is that eg. some people are utterly stupid or uninformed, I believe that in this case it's more than just merely a colloq...

Check this screenshot from the movie The Matrix: Am I crazy in thinking that the cubicle looks cozy? Quite clearly the movie is trying to depict the character's workplace as bleak, depressing and sucking the life out of you. (Notice the unrealistically dim lighting for an office at work hours, the very dark shadows, the muted colors, the very austere furnishing and complete lack of any decorations.) Yet, somehow, the movie fails to convince me. Maybe I am crazy in thinking that that cubicle looks almost cozy, like it would be quite comfortable to be in for hours on end, to work there. Cubicles in offices used to be quite more prevalent in many countries in the past (especially the 80's and 90's) than they are today. In fact, in many countries it seems that cubicles are being explicitly avoided, in favor of an open office design with very few if any partitions. I get the feeling that nowadays in most places the traditional office cubicles are considered undesirable and some...

Dave Plummer is a software engineer who formerly worked at Microsoft, for several decades, and was quite a star developer there. He is the author of many of the most important and influential Windows features and programs, such as the original Task Manager application, the disk formatter, zip folders, and many others (either as the original author or as part of a team). Needless to say, he is arguably one of the best and most influential software engineers out there, whose code is running in millions and millions of Windows systems out there and who shaped the operating system. He has a YouTube channel, and watching his videos gives a picture of a very intelligent and smart person who can express himself very clearly, who is fully aware of everything that's happening, who can perfectly well understand what's asked of him and who can respond to everything intelligently. And, no doubt, he was quite adept at his job at Microsoft, as he worked there for decades and was one of the m...

When you think about it, it's actually fascinating that we are currently witnessing events that are completely unprecedented in the history of humanity (at least at this scale). What's scary is that these never-seen-before events are absolutely destructive and are leading us to a much worse world. This is the first time in the history of the United States (and, possibly, the history of most free democratic western countries) that one of the political parties running the country is trying to stop an upcoming presidential candidate from running by repeatedly prosecuting him by abusing the legal system. Yes, this is literally the first time in the entire 247 years that the country has existed that anything like this has happened. No presidential candidate has ever experienced this in the history of the country (nor in the history of most western countries.) This is literally history in the making. This is also the first time in the entire history of the country that totalitarian f...

I wrote in January of 2021 a blog post about what happened to the formerly quite popular conservative youtuber The Amazing Lucas, who apparently at some point in 2019 or 2020 radically shifted his political views. From what I saw, he became essentially an anti-conservative (more precisely, he started heavily opposing and criticizing what he seems to deem American "white" conservatism which, at least back in 2021, seemingly was doing conservatism "wrong"). He also had become significantly more sympathetic to radical leftist movements like BLM. (I also wrote an addendum here .) This was quite a significant change because he used to be for many years one of the most popular anti-leftist conservative youtubers, with well over half a million subscribers (which in this category of YouTube videos is absolutely huge). He, in fact, became so obnoxiously anti-conservative, antagonizing, ridiculing and mocking conservatives, that he started hemorrhaging subscribers by the hu...

When The Super Mario Bros Movie was first announced and the first trailers popped up, it was really hard to predict how popular and successful it would become. Many people presented their doubts, especially because they didn't really like Mario's speaking style in the trailers. Who would have thought how immensely popular the movie would become? It became the most profitable movie based on a video game ever made, by a wide, wide margin, in just its opening week. It's clear that Nintendo had learned their past lessons, and wanted to make this one right, and really give both the former 80's kids who grew up with the Mario games as well as the younger audience what they want. The movie pays great homage to the game franchise, is very faithful to the source material, has an absolutely humongous amount of references to the games, and it's innocent inoffensive fun. There are, perhaps, some very slight deviations or liberties taken compared to the source material. Perhaps ...

At some point the leftist academia coined (or adapted) the terms "internalized misogyny", "internalized racism" and other similar variants to describe a situation where a victim of some sort of oppression has been so brainwashed into said oppression that he or she outright just accepts it as normal and even defends it. Like with so many terms that the leftist academia loves, there may be some more or less valid basis to it, but it usually just ends up being used as a blanket weapon to dismiss their critics, especially those who belong to a "protected" group. In other words, if a woman criticizes the far left and their claims about women being oppressed, what she is saying is just dismissed as "internalized misogyny" (in other words, "you have just been fooled into believing that you are not oppressed, or that the oppression you are experiencing is actually normal and acceptable"). Likewise if a black person presents objections to the le...

I have written about this very subject before, but I think it deserves repeating because male athletes invading women's sports and easily beating them just keeps happening again and again, and there seems to be no end to it. In many instances some of the female athletes are not too scared into silence and acceptance and will actually dare to voice their grievances about the situation. Men are entering their competitions and robbing them of awards and qualifications for further next-level competitions. And these are usually male athletes who are mediocre in men's competitions. It's not like they are some of the top-of-the-world athletes who enter women's competitions and barely beat them. These are men who are mediocre in men's competitions, who go to women's competitions and beat them easily. Quite tellingly, there is no similar problem in the other direction. There isn't even a single example of a female athlete entering a men's competition and easily...

When it comes to critics of the far leftist social justice ideology, the youtuber TL;DR (aka. "teal deer") was one of the bigger and more popular ones, with almost 200 thousand subscribers. (When it comes to this topic, having over 100k subscribers makes you quite big. There are tons and tons of anti-leftist youtubers who have subscriber counts in the tens of thousands, sometimes even just the thousands. 100k makes you a popular youtuber, especially when it comes to critics of the far left.) And he was that popular for a good reason: His videos were well researched and very well presented, and his points were always extremely good. Many of his videos dealt in detail with subjects that most other anti-SJW youtubers just don't bother doing much research about and only comment in passing (as an example, he made several videos debunking the so-called "pink tax", and they were really well researched and very well presented, and an absolute joy to watch.) I cannot cor...

One year ago I wrote about the absolute hedonistic depravity that's "Pride Month" , and how it, quite ironically, achieves the exact opposite of what it claims to be trying to achieve. (In other words, the stated goal is to normalize gay people in society, ie. to give a message that they are just normal everyday people, just like everybody else, and that there's nothing wrong or abnormal about them. And they do this by engaging in a month of extreme abnormal behavior that's not how normal people behave. Extreme hedonistic depraved perversion in public, including in front of children. That's not how normal everyday people behave. That's how predators behave.) Unsurprisingly, the situation has not changed with the last year. It has only become worse, and will keep becoming worse and worse for the foreseeable future, until people have had enough. The public displays of "support" for "pride month" has, year after year, become more and more ...