What grinds my gears

The video game Concord has become infamous for being, quite possibly, the biggest video game failure of all time (at least as of writing this, ie. unless it somehow manages to make a successful comeback). That's because it had a budget of several hundreds of millions of dollars, took 8 years to develop, and was completely shut down (and all purchased copies redeemed) in less than two weeks from launch. Its budget and the timeline of its complete shutdown make it, by far, the biggest flop in the entire history of video games. One would think that with a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars, and 8 years of development, that it would be some kind of absolutely massive video game. Vast open worlds, extensive intricate narrative with hundreds of hours of voice-acted dialogue and motion-captured character animations, enormous amounts of assets, awesome visuals... Yet it's not. Or, rather wasn't. It was just a relatively small multiplayer arena shooter of the same kind as for...

In the United States (and some other countries) there exists the legal concept of a "settlement": When one party sues another one for some kind of crime or wrongdoing, the two parties can negotiate a (legally supervised and enforceable) settlement before going to court. In other words, rather than going through all the legal process of going to court, they can settle the case out-of-court (although still under the court's supervision and agreement). This usually involves coming up with an agreement where eg. the injured party gets some kind of compensation (usually monetary one) and legally agrees to not pursue the case further. (There may be be all kinds of other things agreed by either or both parties, depending on what kind of case it is.) This kind of arrangement has all kinds of benefits: It saves time and money on court proceedings, freeing up the courts for other matters, and often the two parties come to a mutual agreement among themselves rather than a third part...

Since 99% of the political posts that I write in this blog are highly critical of the modern far left and their ideology, one might easily get the impression that I'm a staunch "far right" ultra-conservative American Republican. Well, I'm not. There are many things I don't agree with American conservatives. And just to demonstrate that, here's one example: I was recently watching some YouTube video (by a right-leaning conservative) that discussed the threat and danger of the American government taking over, restricting and censoring all the big social media platforms, to silence dissent. Unsurprisingly in the comment section there were several comments along the lines of: "Thank God we have the Second Amendment." I selected one of those comments and asked the author how exactly their beloved Second Amendment would help stopping the American government from censoring and restricting social media. How exactly is the author envisioning that happening? W...

For a few years now I have been having this pet peeve of mine of some people out there being in this kind of quest to artificially force the use of the "they" pronoun as the gender-neutral singular third-person pronoun. Mostly my gripes have been about the youtuber and math popularizer Matt Parker, who contracted this disease some time in late 2019 and has never really stopped it (engaging in it sometimes to extreme egregious levels, sometimes to much lesser extents.) Time and again when I think that I have seen the most egregious form of trying to push this "they-pronoun fetish", someone (Matt Parker or someone else) just succeeds in surpassing all previous expectations. For example, when I thought that Matt Parker couldn't outperform himself in this front, he surprised me by using "they" to refer to a computer program (rather than the perfectly fine and correct "it"). But to surpass even that level of cringe, some time ago I watched a vid...

Suppose that you own a home in the United States, and there's quite expensive furniture and equipment (eg. music studio equipment) there. Also suppose that the police is chasing a criminal, and said criminal, fleeing the police, breaks into this home of yours when you aren't there, and the police follows him in order to apprehend him. While breaking into your home and searching for the criminal, the police destroy doors, windows, drywalls, cause extensive damage to expensive furniture as well as all the expensive equipment and electronics. They also shoot your two dogs dead, that happened to be in your home. The total amount of damage is absolutely enormous. Fixing and replacing all the destroyed doors, windows, walls, furniture and electronic equipment ends up costing you literally hundreds of thousands of dollars. In fact, so much so that you can't even afford it, and you go bankrupt and homeless. You have to sell your home in order to pay your loans, and even after that ...

For literally centuries companies, especially those engaged mostly in "office" type work, worked pretty much in the same way: The company would have office space and all employees would arrive there in the morning, do 8 hours (give or take) of work there, and then go home. This was how things worked a hundred years ago, 50 years ago, and even 10 years ago. The Covid-19 pandemic, which started to make the news in the first half of 2020, changed things radically, though. That's because a good majority of such companies took it extremely seriously, and most of them took very quick action and, whenever possible and feasible, outright demanded that employees do remote work from home rather than come to the office. In fact, many such companies, especially IT companies, quickly implemented a very strong rule that coming to the office was outright forbidden unless absolutely necessary. The timing couldn't have been more serendipitous because in 2020 working most IT jobs from ...

Many feminists love to throw the derogatory term "mansplaining" in order to try to discredit or mock what a man is saying. In the vast majority of cases they are not using that term correctly, with its original meaning, and instead just opportunistically using it as a blunt weapon against people who disagree. Note: I'm here using the original definition by feminist academics of the term "mansplaining", without even taking a stance whether that's a good term to use or not, without even going into politics or personal opinions. A man disagreeing with a woman (or anybody else) is not "mansplaining". A man presenting his own opinion about a subject to a woman is not "mansplaining". A man presenting an opinion in general is not "mansplaining". Heck, even a man outright explaining something to a woman is not "mansplaining" regardless of context. What the term "mansplaining" was coined to describe is a situation w...

In most constitutional free countries there's usually a very strong principle that government officials and law enforcement must always strictly follow the law. In other words, some rogue government worker or institution cannot just make up their own rules and laws at a whim that affect normal citizens and start enforcing them. For every rule that's being imposed onto citizens there must be a statute that can be cited. If there is, for example, a sign that mandates something from every citizen that enters the premises, it should at least theoretically be possible for that sign to contain the exact statute (by code, section number, etc) that supports said mandate. This can often be seen in many governmental spaces that are heavily restricted, such as for example military bases or the restricted areas of airports: There will usually be signs that eg. categorically forbid entry without permission, with the relevant statutes being cited. This makes sense: In a representative democr...

Totalitarianism is a form of government that is dictatorial, has one single political party in power which owns and controls every single aspect of society from the top down, controlled with an iron fist, and where political opposition and criticism is banned and heavily punished. Modern far leftism, especially in the United States (and to increasing lengths in many other western countries), fits this description to a T, at least from an ideological perspective. They might not yet have complete power over any country (although a few are quite close to this), but at least when it comes to their ideology, their principles, their doctrine, and what they have been extremely strongly working towards during the past couple of decades, they are one of the most if not the most totalitarian ideologies in the history of humanity. Modern far leftism wants complete and total control of society. Every single aspect of it. Politically, if they had their way, they would form a single-party governme...

It seems that, at least as of writing this, the upcoming game by Ubisoft, Assassin's Creed: Shadows, is a gift that just keeps on giving. It's actually incredible how one game is almost solely responsible for a complete meltdown and, possibly, even crash, of a giant game studio. (Ubisoft is one of the largest dedicated game studios in the world, with several tens of thousands of employees. Ie. a company that exists solely to develop video games, ie. not counting megacorporations that do tons of other things like Microsoft or Sony.) Of course it's not just this one game that has caused a major crisis in that company, as there are several other reasons as well (the other one being their recent Star Wars game not selling even nearly as well as they hoped, and although it reportedly sold a million copies, still probably being an overall loss because of its enormous development budget.) However, it arguably is the game that started the avalanche that's now threatening even ...

Quite a long time ago I was sitting in a bus when someone wearing headphones sat besides me. The music emanating from those headphones was so incredibly loud that it hurt my ears. I'm not kidding nor exaggerating. It was literally uncomfortable sitting there because of how loud the music was. Music coming from headphones worn by someone else... I can only imagine how loud the music was for that guy. Either he was half-deaf, or he currently is, of that I'm quite certain. I always disliked people listening to music with headphones at public places. They put themselves in danger first of all. If for example a car approaches from behind, they can't hear it. And the most annoying thing is if you ever need to speak to such a person. Recently I got thinking that I don't remember seeing such people anymore. Quite literally. The more I try to remember when was the last time I saw someone wearing headphones in a public place to listen to music, the more convinced I become that it...

Recently a lot of discussion, controversy and outrage has happened with the question of whether clients "own" the video games they purchase, and how much power the publisher has on the clients' right to those games they have purchased. Quite infamously a lot of outrage was caused by some game company executive (I think it was Ubisoft) stating in an interview that gamers should get accustomed to the idea of "not owning" their games. This is actually a bit of a complex topic and there's a lot of misconceptions and vagueness about the entire question of "ownership" of video games (and, in general, of all intangible property). When you go to a grocery store and you buy an apple, for example, then you quite explicitly and literally own said apple, no question about it. It's yours, 100%. After you have legally purchased it, it's now your private property, you have full rights to it, and you can do whatever you want with it (including, for example...