What grinds my gears

If you have been following the modern far-leftism / anti-leftism sociopolitical war "only" for the last 7-8 years, you might have not even heard of one Phil "Thunderf00t" Mason nor know who he is or what he was known for. In the early days of YouTube antifeminism/anti-leftism, from about 2011 to about 2016, give or take, he was one of the big names on that front, alongside other big names like The Amazing Atheist (another name that more recent anti-leftists probably have never heard of), Sargon of Akkad, etc. In fact, Thunderf00t was such a big name in the anti-leftist community that he became pretty much the Public Enemy #1 of the far left, especially in the atheist community, for some years, so much so that for a time he was under a massive harassment campaign (which ultimately was pitifully weak because of his tenured position as a researcher in a university in the Czech Republic, which made him essentially untouchable.) Yet, today he is mostly unknown in these ...

Some years ago several European countries launched investigations about so-called "loot boxes" in video games. This is because if the contents of said "loot boxes" can be sold to others with real-world money, they may in fact infringe on the lottery and raffle laws of many countries. And, in some countries, they might even be infringing even if the contents cannot be sold for real-world money. Most countries that have lottery laws define a "raffle" as having these characteristics: The customer purchases a sealed product with money. The contents of the sealed product are randomized and may have different monetary values. The product is sealed, ie. it's not possible to know what's inside before the purchase. The contents may potentially have more monetary value than what was paid. Because of these characteristics it is generally considered a form of lottery or gambling, and thus subject to the lottery laws of most countries. The reason why lotteries ...

The Finnish are people who in general prefer to be reserved and quiet, and not to bother others. You might find very loud talking and laughing between drunkards at a bar, but that's about it. And even that's actually surprisingly uncommon. If you eg. travel by bus, or go to a fast food restaurant, you can usually expect relative peace and quiet. Even teenagers who may be there usually use only moderate volume to speak to each other, rarely raising their voice or laughing excessively loudly. Most people speak much quieter than that. Recently I was at a fast food restaurant here when I heard a group of people sitting at some table speak EXTREMELY loudly. Really, really loudly. Like ten times louder than anybody else. You could hear their racket throughout the entire restaurant. After some time they finished and left, and I kid you not, you could still hear them from half a block away, when they were outside. And I mean, I could hear them while I was still inside the restaurant ....

Many critics of the American police forces call them a "gang". The biggest gang in the country. Regardless of how provocative that notion is, it's actually not extraordinarily far from the truth. American police forces consider themselves a "brotherhood". Their own term (as has been seen in some videos and testimonies). I suppose they consider themselves a similar kind of "brotherhood" as the Marines: Every Marine/cop is your brother/sister. I have your back, you have my back. I look after you, you look after me. I support you, you support me. We don't step on each other's toes, we don't stab each other in the back. The brotherhood always comes first: Bros before everybody else. And indeed, there are plenty of well documented cases (even sometimes getting to the news) of a "rogue" cop ratting on the misbehavior, abuse, crimes or corruption of other cops, and quickly becoming ostracized, isolated, harassed, demoted, and even fired....

Some spoilers ahead! While I won't be spoiling every single detail of the movie, I will not judiciously avoid all spoilers either, so if you haven't seen the movie and want to see it without knowing anything about its contents, you might want to avoid reading this blog post until after. I am a huge fan of the Terminator movie franchise, and I consider particularly Terminator 2 not only the best movie in the series, but in fact one of the best action sci-fi movies out there. I have seen that movie probably a dozen times by now. (Perhaps somewhat ironically, I'm not a huge fan of the first movie, something that most avid fans would consider heresy. I just find the first movie too low-budget, too low-quality, too "early 80's" (in a bad way), too cheesy, and too full of inconsistencies and annoyances, to be all that enjoyable. Sure, many people take all that as precisely what makes the movie so charming, but I don't, really. I mean, it's not a bad movie ...

Disney announced recently that they would not be including a previously planned "trans" scene in an upcoming episode of the Pixar animated series Win or Lose . Unsurprisingly, far-leftists threw a hissy-fit, accusing Disney of "erasing" trans people, and "not allowing them to exist". Sigh. Just because a TV series or movie does not explicitly state some personal characteristic is not "erasing" anybody nor "not allowing them to exist". If you see a movie and, let's say, nobody states being an architect, for example, does that mean that the movie is "erasing" architects and "not allowing them to exist"? Of course not. Or a TV series never explicitly mentions, say, stamp collecting. Does that mean that the TV series is "erasing" that hobby and "not allowing it to exist"? Obviously not. Just because a piece of media does not explicitly mention some characteristic does not mean that it's set on...

I have written many blog posts about the absolute disgrace that's the American police and their police culture. American cops literally consider their own safety more important than the safety of citizens, which makes them absolute pathetic cowards, and there are many, many examples of this (one blog post about this here ). Way too many times they also assault, injure, maim, paralyze and even kill people who have done nothing wrong (an example blog post ). They also have an astonishing ID fetish, often going to absolutely insane lengths to get the ID of a completely innocent person who has done absolutely nothing wrong (such as, for example, dispatching a whopping 7 police cruisers and 9 police officers in order to get the ID of a completely innocent bystander , and nothing else, in a completely non-threatening non-dangerous situation where no crime of any kind has happened or is even suspected of having happened. They just wanted his ID, that's it. It goes beyond insanity. Co...

All the way since the early 1980's and even much earlier there was, at least in many parts of the world, this widespread notion that some movie producers had at least considered inserting a form of subliminal advertising into the movie reels that they were sending to movie theaters, in the form of showing an advertisement picture (eg. for a brand of soda, or whatever) during one frame of the movie, eg. every 24 frames, ie once per second. The widely believed claim was that since the picture was only shown for one single frame, it would go too fast for anybody to consciously notice, but the subconscious would notice it, especially since it was shown repeatedly once per second during the entire movie, and thus it would create a subconscious craving for that particular product in the viewers. This notion was so widely believed that, in fact, many countries outright passed laws banning this from being done. The funny thing is that many people believed that claim, ie, that you wouldn...

I recently wrote a blog post about the recent video game Concord , which is not only arguably the biggest failure in the entire history of video games (because it took 8 years to develop, cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and was completely shut down in less than 2 weeks, all purchases refunded), but was even more of a failure than at first seemed. How so? Well, Sony, the company that had purchased and thus owns Firewalk Studios, the development company that created the game, envisioned Concord to not only "revolutionize gaming" but in fact become their flagship franchise, the video game franchise that would be most associated with Sony. Where "Mario" is the flagship franchise of Nintendo, and "Final Fantasy" the flagship franchise of Square Enix, "Concord" would be the one for Sony. They planned it to not only be an entire series of games, with new entries coming out for the foreseeable future, they wanted this flagship franchise of theirs...

A far-leftist bigot working for the game developer company The Initiative got recently some flak for several completely unhinged tweets that he has posted attacking "gamers", in other words, his very core audience, the people he is helping to develop games for. Among several other such tweets he has posted these: They repeat the same strange narrative and lie that far-leftist bigots have been repeating for well over ten years now: That "gamers" hate female main characters in video games, and whenever a game is announced or published that has one, the "gamers" throw a hissy-fit and temper tantrum and start furiously attacking the game online. This is such an obvious untruth, such an obvious lie, that it's just incomprehensible why they just keep repeating it over and over and over. This very thing has been going on for over ten years now, and is not showing any sign of stopping, no matter how obviously false it is. Where was the backlash and anger when ...

I have written earlier about the video game Concord, which is arguably the biggest flop in the entire history of video games, surpassing every other (in)famous failed video game by a large margin, by any metric you may want to use: It took about 8 years to develop, cost several hundred million dollars to make (the 400 million dollars figure is the most commonly cited), and it was recalled by its publisher, Sony, less than 2 weeks after launch, all purchases refunded. Reportedly the game had sold a few tens of thousands of copies by that point (which is a small fraction of the typical sales numbers of such high-budget games, which are in the millions, and obviously nowhere even near enough to even break even), and the maximum number of concurrent players on Steam was something like 600, which is abysmal (in contrast, typical video games of this kind of budgets get hundreds of thousands of concurrent players, sometimes even millions). With a budget in the several hundreds of millions of ...

I have for years wondered about one of the biggest mysteries of life: Why is everything that the government does so expensive? And to be more precise: Why is everything that the government does that's something that private citizens/companies also do, always so astonishing expensive? As a private citizen, go to a sculptor, for example, and commission a hand-made human-sized statue or wooden carving. Depending on the quality and status of the artist, it may cost you anywhere from some thousands of dollars/euros to maybe a few tens of thousands, at the very most, if it's a really professional high-quality work. However, when the government commission that exact same thing , it will invariably cost at a minimum ten times more. In the hundreds of thousands dollars/euros. Heck, even millions being spent on such a sculpture doesn't even bat people's eye. As a private citizen, hire a company to fully renovate and modernize your home? Again, you might have to spend some tens of...

I have touched on this very subject in the past in this blog, but I think it deserves repeating, because this concept invented by American leftists of "black history" just keeps being repeated over and over, year after year. The very concept of there being some kind of "black history" is racist. How so? Because it treats every single black person in the world as a monolithic group, as if they all belonged to the same group with a shared history. Just Africa alone is a vast, vast continent that has historically had literally thousands of completely different and independent cultures that go back literally millenia. Take one group of people with a common historical background from somewhere in the continent, and it may be vastly different than another group from a different part of the continent. It's a very diverse and culturally rich continent, with thousands of peoples with their own backgrounds, their own cultures, their own histories, which are completely in...

For pretty much the entirety of his role as the President of the United States, Joe Biden repeatedly stated that he would accept and respect whatever sentences the justice system might impose onto his son, Hunter Biden, and how "nobody is above the law". That was, apparently, the biggest lie ever told by a politician. On December 1 of 2024, less than two months before he is stepping down, he gave blanket pardon, and I quote, "for those offenses against the United States which he has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 1, 2014 through December 1, 2024, including but not limited to all offenses charged or prosecuted (including any that have resulted in convictions)". That's right, he gave a full unconditional pardon for all crimes that he has or even may have committed during the past ten years. If they later find out that he, let's say, murdered someone in cold blood, or raped someone, or kidnapped and tortured so...

Not often, but sometimes some people are highly critical of the modern far left for years, in other words, they are what's commonly called "anti-SJW" or, more recently, "anti-woke" (for some reason I don't really understand it seems that the term "SJW" has fallen out of fashion and most have stopped using it), and then stopped being so, and either just stopped presenting any political opinions at all or, much more commonly, swung to the other side, sometimes even to the extreme other side. I have seen some videos made by these people, and there appears to be one thing in common with most if not all of them: And that's the sheer lack of rational arguments about why they decided to switch sides (or, even in the best case scenarios, just stop being "anti-woke" political and move to something else entirely.) In one such case an ex-Jehova's Witness, who makes tons of videos criticizing that religion, made a video about how when he a...