What grinds my gears

Every year, literally thousands of new video games are published. Even if we discard completely sub-par amateur trash, we are still talking about several hundreds of video games every year that could potentially be very enjoyable to play. It is, of course, impossible to play them all, not to talk about it being really expensive. There are only so many games one has the physical time to play. So how to choose which games to buy and play? This is where the job of video game critics comes into play. If a game gets widespread critical acclaim, there's a good chance that it will be really enjoyable. If it gets negative reviews, there's a good chance that the game is genuinely bad and unenjoyable. A good chance. But only that. And that's sometimes the problem. Sometimes I buy a game expecting it to be really great because it has received such universal acclaim, only to find out that it's so boring or so insufferable that I can't even finish it. Sometimes such game...

There is an interesting article at vox.com about the Brussel's attack, and how radical islamism and jihadism has risen not only outside, but also inside of Europe itself. The gist of it is that we have allowed a situation where there are essentially immigrant/islamic ghettos within our cities, the people in these ghettos are forming isolated communities that have a very separationist mentality, and they are radicalizing themselves. They are being preached by radical islamists into hating the west, the very countries they live in. This is one of the reasons why so many terrorist attacks are actually committed by jihadists who are citizens of the country, sometimes even second or third generation (ie. they were themselves born, or even their parents may have been born, in the country, and thus they are natural-born citizens.) Not all terrorist attacks are committed by foreigners coming from the outside into the country for the express intent of committing the attack. The problem is ...

Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada, prides himself for having appointed a Cabinet of Canada with "equal representation", which means that half of the members are women and half are men. This was not just coincidence, but his political agenda for years, and his full purposeful intent. But consider that from 184 current MP's, only 50 are women. In other words, the Cabinet has not the same male-female representation as the parliament. Which means that many of the members of the cabinet were deliberately chosen due to their gender, which means that other potential candidates were discriminated against. To my knowledge, Trudeau has never claimed that the Cabinet was chosen purely based on merit and expertise; the only message that Trudeau has ever given is that the Cabinet was deliberately chosen to have 50-50 representation (implying that expertise and personal merit was only a secondary factor.) When you elect, or don't elect, people based on their gender ...

Social justice, especially in the United States, is becoming more and more radical and extremist, and more and more like a fundamentalist cult. Just read the Campus Reform website for tidbits of the most insane things they are doing. These people have already become so radicalized that their protests and demonstrations are becoming more and more violent by the day. In fact, many of them outright harass and even commit acts of physical aggression already. It will be only a matter of time before they become so radicalized that they will start committing actual acts of terrorism. The kind of terrorism that leaves dozens, if not even hundreds of people dead. Mark my words. It will inevitably happen. It may be a mass shooting, or a bomb, or something similar, but something like that is likely to happen sooner or later, committed in the name of social justice. If Donald Trump happens to be elected president of the United States (I have no idea at this point if he will, but I think he ...

I have already written about how they are taking virtual reality headsets too far , and how they are thus too expensive and too full of useless cruft . Recently I have noticed a third drawback of concentrating their efforts to much on the augmented reality crap: Many people now think that the augmented reality part is the only way to use the VR headsets, and writing about the negative aspects of that. It is, in fact, being compared to the infamous Kinect for being a similar gimmick (requiring a lot of space, rearranging your room, causing accidents and so on.) The problem is that they are hyping the VR headsets with their AR capabilities. In fact, they are over-hyping it to the extreme. These AR hype videos make for cool and at the surface exciting demonstrations... but it has also had the side-effect that now many people think that's the only and main way of using the VR headsets, and are turned off by the prospect of it being too inconvenient. They don't have the spac...

I have written previously about the difficulty of translation and localization . Appropriate translation/localization of works to another language can be a surprisingly difficult and arduous job. However, sometimes companies go too far, for several possible reasons, and just botch the whole thing to unacceptable levels. Translating something to another language, from a purist point of view, is to reflect in the target language as accurately as possible what was said in the original language. The more closely the translation matches in meaning the original, the better. And, rather obviously, absolutely nothing of the original should be added or removed, unless it's absolutely necessary and there is no other option. (In some rare cases it may be outright impossible to translate something accurately, and conveying the exact meaning would require extensive amounts of ancillary explanations, which may be completely unsuitable for most media.) Purists, who want an accurate translatio...

Again, not something that grinds my gears, but in a way another entry in this "the genius of (some game franchise)" two-parter (the first one being about Pokémon games .) I have previously written about id Software , and wondered what happened to them. They used to be pretty much at the top of the PC game developers (or at the very least, part of the top elite). Their games were extremely influential in PC gaming, especially the first-person shooter genre, and they were pretty much the company that made the genre what it is today. While perhaps not necessarily the first ones to invent all the ideas, they definitely invented a lot of them, and did it right, and their games are definitely the primary source from which other games of the genre got their major game mechanics. Most action-oriented (and even many non-action oriented) first-person shooter games today use most of the same basic gameplay designs that Doom and especially Quake invented, or at least helped popularize....