What grinds my gears

When you start a new game in Shadow of the Tomb Raider , the first thing you are greeted with is this: "Shadow of the Tomb Raider was created by a diverse and talented team comprised of multiple genders, backgrounds, ethnicities, religious beliefs, and personalities. Although the game is not based on real life events and represents a work of fiction, it was developed in conjunction with a historian and cultural consultants. This variety and partnership were both instrumental in crafting the world you're about to experience. No matter where you come from or who you are, allow us to say: Welcome to Shadow of the Tomb Raider." I have to ask: Why? Why do they feel the need to virtue-signal like this? Or is it that they are somehow preemptively trying to defend themselves against some kind of accusations? Or maybe it's a bit of both? I don't think the game itself is an SJW game (like some other games are ), which makes that notice stand even more out li...

I sometimes (quite rarely, for my own sanity, but sometimes), just for the fun of it and out of curiosity, skim through the Twitter feed of some big-name hard-core social justice warrior activist. If because of nothing else, as an "armchair psychologist", to see a glimpse of the mind of a deeply indoctrinated quasi-religious zealot. I recently skimmed through the Twitter feed of one Tim Wise, who is a real big name among SJWs, especially SJW universities (like Harvard), and apparently a full-time SJW activist with pretty much no other job. It's funny how SJWs talk about "hate", and how it's the most horrible thing in the world. Hate this, hate that. "Hate" should be banned, punished, shunned, shamed. Yet you only need to read through that Twitter feed to get nothing but pure unadultered hate, in all of its forms. Without any exaggeration, that man is obsessed . Reading through his Twitter feed is like staring into an abyss of obsessive madnes...

Recently PewDiePie posted a serious video where he asked for the "subscribe PewDiePie" meme to stop. A "meme" that garnered him something like 20-30 million new subscribers on YouTube over the past year or so. The thing is, "subscribe to PewDiePie" is more than just a funny little "meme". A lot more. It is, essentially, a revolt against the modern political climate. The two major important messages that this revolt is pushing forward are: 1) Individual independent YouTube personalities vs. soulless giant megacorporations. The "meme" may on the surface be a revolt against the YouTube channel T-Series , where people are campaigning to keep Pewds as the #1 most subscribed YouTuber. However, when we look deeper, it's more than just that. It's more than just this one random Indian music megacorporation. It's a statement against all megacorporations, including Google itself. Google wanted to disassociate from Pewds after th...

Nintendo recently added support for a level editor and the sharing of user-created levels to their Super Smash Bros Ultimate video game. Obviously, as is always the case with these things, it took approximately 2 milliseconds before the first inappropriate levels were submitted (and probably quickly removed by Nintendo). In this day and age, however, not very surprisingly it took maybe another 2 milliseconds before people started creating levels with a "progressive" political message. And, for some reason, the political message that has been the most common during the past years is "trans rights" (whatever that means). Nintendo decided to ban those levels as well. This is the most crucial part of that article: Twitter user MomBot reported that not only was Nintendo removing stages with trans flags, but was removing all stages “with political messages.” Yes, yes, one million times yes! This is exactly what video game companies (and all companies produci...

During the past two or three years the political left in the United States has been drumming on and on about their conspiracy theory of Russian meddling with the American presidential elections, and how it's the worst thing in the world, and how Trump was elected because of it. Of course Russia did not meddle with the American presidential elections in any significant way (not any more than any other country), but that's not really even the point. They don't really care if there was meddling. They only care about getting some kind of political weapon against Trump, no matter what it is. The whole thing is just a big bunch of hypocrisy. (If Hillary Clinton had been elected, and the conservatives presented claims of Russian meddling, of course the left would just dismiss it and laugh at it.) Do you know what's even more hypocritical? Silicon Valley tech megacorporations meddling with the United Kingdom parliamentarian elections, and nobody, especially not the leftis...

Here's a speech by a man who was convinced by a doctor to go through sex reassignment surgery, he went through it, and now he deeply regrets it. He also presents his opinion on the current trend in the west of parents and doctors not only enabling but encouraging children to "transition". I highly recommend watching it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlRkLtKqSrY He is not a unique case. He has, in fact, created a website full of real life stories of people who are in the same position: They went through the surgeries, and later regretted it. Pretty much invariably the lives of these people have been permanently ruined. Also pretty much invariably there were underlying reasons why they were convinced to change their sex (such as having been sexually abused as children, the sex change becoming a coping and defense mechanism against it), reasons that should have been dealt appropriately, rather than doing drugs and surgeries. The absolutely horrendous thing happening to...

Since its very first version, published in 1992, the Mortal Kombat video game series has always been notorious for its over-the-top graphical brutality, never shying away from showing the most egregious and brutal ways to maim your opponent. Cutting people in half, ripping their arms or head off, ripping their insides out, impaling them or beating them to a pulp... anything goes, in all gory detail. Rather than toning this down over the years, if anything, the game series has only emphasized it. The "modern gen" of sorts installments of the series, starting with the 9th game in the main series (named merely "Mortal Kombat" without a number, although subsequent games did start using Roman numerals again) took the graphical violence to the next level, by not only showing the brutality of the finishers in high-definition modern 3D graphics, but introducing even more gory detail by, among other things, using a gratuitous "X-ray vision" in the finishers, sho...