What grinds my gears

Anita Sarkeesian made another video series, "Ordinary Women", for which she, of course, e-begged for a hefty sum of money. $200 thousand this time. When she started the fundraising campaign, the videos had actually already been shot, and the campaign was for "post-production". The series is about famous historic women. So, where did the $200000 go? Maybe each episode is a full 1-hour documentary about a particular famous woman from history? Or, at the very least your standard 22-minute format? No. The episodes are 3 to 5 minutes long. Ok, then maybe there are lots and lots of episodes? Like 50 or so? That would explain why so much money is needed for "post-production". No. There are 5 episodes. So five episodes, each 3 to 5 minutes long. Surely the visual effects are awesome, with that money? Once again, no. There are some graphics and extremely simplistic animations which you can do with basically any professional video editing software that c...

Some time ago I created a new blog about things that don't grind my gears, but are neutral or positive. This "what grinds my gear" blog gets about 20-40 views per post on average, which is ridiculously little. However, that other blog is getting about 0-2 views per post, which is even worse. So this post is a promotion of the other one. These are short summaries of the new posts I have made there, if you are interested: Which chess endgame is the hardest? I examine a few classical chess endgame positions and ponder which one might be the hardest to win for a human player. Turning 3D off on a 3DS: The devil is in the details. A funny anecdote of how I had been using my 3DS for a year before figuring out how to turn 3D off completely. Xbox One S: Too late? Written when the Xbox One S was just released, I wonder if its features should have been in the original Xbox One for them to matter. The downside of single+multiplayer combo games. Why I think that games th...

This post is not about social justice warriors who hate white people (especially white men). While they are great enablers of anti-white racism, this is nevertheless not about them. It's about some black people who are deeply, deeply racist against white people. And I'm completely serious about that. Just imagine the absolute worst kind of racist you can think of. The kind of racist that's not only prejudiced and discriminatory, but actually thinks of those other races as actually and literally inferior, in the physical and biological sense, even non-human. That kind of racism. There are some black people out there who seriously and literally think that white people are not actually human, and that all white people, every single one of them, is innately racist (the sheer irony is palpable.) In other words, their brains are hard-wired to be racist. They literally think of white people as sub-human; not just as an insult, but actually biologically non-human. They think t...

Reductio ad Hitlerum (a wordplay on " reductio ad absurdum ") is a semi-humorous term coined in 1951 by Leo Strauss. It describes an attempt to invalidate someone's argument, position or opinion by making a connection to Hitler or the nazis. (In other words, that opinion or claim is undesirable or wrong because the nazis (at least allegedly) also held that opinion.) It can also be used as the end of a slippery slope argument (in other words, that the opinion or position, if allowed or accepted, would lead to something that the nazis did.) Godwin's Law is a semi-humorous observation made in 1990 by Mike Godwin, which states that the longer a heated online discussion or flamewar continues, the more likely it is that somebody will bring up nazis into the conversation (most often in the form of accusing others of being like them.) While both involve the concept of nazis, they are not really the same thing. The latter might involve the former, but not necessarily. (...

I have noticed that there's a pretty good method for finding out if a Wikipedia article is politically biased and drives a given sociopolitical agenda (something that a true encyclopedia should never do, given that such an encyclopedia should always maintain absolute neutrality): Look at the lede of the article and see how much it "poisons the well" with regards to the topic in question with minor minutiae that doesn't really belong there. The "lede" is the introductory part before the table of contents, and "poisoning the well" is the dishonest technique of introducing people to a subject in a biased manner, with a clear agenda to make the reader/listener form a biased opinion based on incomplete information about the subject. (This can be done by eg. emphasizing things that support the agenda out of proportion and, conversely, de-emphasizing or even completely skipping things that would go contrary to that agenda.) "Poisoning the well...

Pokémon Go is a free-to-play mobile game that has taken the world by storm. Millions and millions of people have been playing it actively for months. Wherever you live, every now and then you'll see somebody playing it on the street. There are videos out there of literally hundreds of people playing it at a given place (seemingly because there's some rare pokémon in the vicinity or something). And the thing is... I don't get it. I have tried it, of course, but I just don't get it. The entire game consists (barring the menus) of two screens: The map, and the capture screen. And that's it. Sure, it's somewhat cool that the map is the real map of the place you are, and it updates in real time as you walk around, using GPS, but the gimmick gets old pretty fast. It's only barely more interesting than your average run-of-the-mill GPS app. But perhaps the capture screen is more interesting? Maybe here you will have a team of up to six pokémon, and you ...

The Game Awards is an annual awards ceremony for video games that has been running from 2014. It's a kind of successor to the Spike Video Game Awards , which had started in 2003, and which had received an increasing amount of criticism for being little more than corporate advertisement of video games, among many other criticisms. The Game Awards was supposed to be a kind of fresh start, cutting out all the bullshit and concentrating solely on what the whole show is supposed to be about, ie. video games. Yet, once again, commercialism and other such BS seems to have been raising its ugly head, in only three years. Critics point out how the first installment was ok, the second was already showing worrying trends, and now the third, most recent one, has pretty much succumbed to most of the same problems as its predecessor, being less about actual video game achievements and more about showmanship and ad-ridden propaganda. I'm not going to go into all the details because I...