It’s the latter
The real 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle, is a saying that asserts 80% of outcomes come from 20% of all causes. You can use it to organize your to-do list, among other things. But to many young men, 80/20 means something very different.
Young men are not alright. Masculinity is growing more toxic by the day. Online incel communities are growing, and the most receptive audience to poisonous ideas about gender seems to be children. This week’s column isn’t going to be fun: I’m explaining one of the guiding principles of the incel movement, and discussing a TikToker devoted to changing her red pill son’s mind. And I can’t talk about toxic masculinity without mentioning Elon Musk!
Spray some deodorizer and let’s jump into the dank, upsetting world of incel beliefs.
The Netflix series Adolescence, is currently the buzziest show on streaming, a harrowing exploration of the inner world of an angry young boy accused of murdering one of his classmates, a girl who spurned him. One of the teenage characters mentions the “80/20 rule” as a way of explaining the incel/red pill culture that’s central to the murder plot. Put simply, the 80/20 rule is an axiom that states 80% of women are attracted to only 20% of men, and understanding the pervasiveness of this belief is essential to understanding online misogyny.
Different communities of toxic dudes believe different weird things—many “looksmaxxers” think breaking your own facial bones can make you more attractive; red pill dudes believe men have to psychologically manipulate women into liking them—but the 80/20 rule is nearly universally accepted.
The idea seems to have originated in a post on Medium that was written 10 years ago. Taken on its own terms, the article is a fairly interesting, though methodologically flawed, look at the distribution of “likes” on dating site Tinder. Incel types ignored the problems with the research, ignored the context (it’s only about Tinder likes), and accepted the 80/20 Rule as a hard-to-swallow truth that explains how women relate to men. Even though the Medium post concludes that most men who want to meet women would be “better off just going to a bar or joining some coed recreational sports team” than using Tinder, incels decided the 80/20 rule meant something like “all women are shallow,” and/or “it’s not my fault that no woman wants to spend time with me.”
For 10 years, incels and the incel-adjacent have expanded on the theory and repeated it to each other so many times that it’s rarely questioned in those spaces. If anyone you’re talking to mentions the 80/20 rule in an affirmative context, you know you’re talking to someone who has a specific set of (wrong) beliefs, and who doesn’t have a large enough social circle to compare what they read on the internet to the way people act in real life. But is there anything you can do about it? Maybe.
The creator of in this week’s viral video, IAmRchlPrkr, is a mother trying to deprogram her teenage son. He has accepted some beliefs of the “red pill” community, a branch of incels, and she is not into it.
She first saw the problem when her child told her “all women are gold-diggers.” There’s a lot going on with that phrase. Despite bristling and yelling “not all men!” when anyone generalizes their own gender, the toxic male community is dominated by the idea that women are all the same: a Borg-like collective looking for the most attractive 20% of men, or the men with the most gold to dig.
This isn’t new. In her 1998 book Intercourse, Andrea Dworkin could have been describing the incels of 2025 when she wrote, “the first tenet of male supremacist ideology is that men have a self and that women must, by definition, lack it.” The difference is how sexist ideas that were once relegated to obscure corners of society have infiltrated the mainstream to the extent that literal children are repeating them to their mothers. (As with most of societal ills, we can thank the internet for that.)
Maybe this TikToker mom has the right approach to returning some sanity: When her son tells her, “all women are gold-diggers,” she responds with “Which women?” and “name one woman who is a gold-digger.” Of course he can’t. Because the incel philosophy falls apart in the face of actual relationships with real humans.
A fitting response to me quoting Andrew Dworkin in an earnest post about online masculinity is serious hat Soyjak:
Created by DevianArt user SoyGemArt, Serious Hat is a Wojak posted to comment on people who are, well, too serious online.
(If you’re asking “what’s a wojak?” I have previously covered the subject.)
Speaking of toxic men: Elon Musk! If you’re an adult, you probably know Musk best as the CEO of an electric car company or as a dedicated public servant with creative ideas about how forks work. But kids know a different Elon Musk: Gamer Elon. Gamer Elon is seen as the ultimate sweat, and Gamer Elon recently mixed it up on X with the official account of video game Assassin’s Creed and got roasted like a Costco chicken.
The online dust-up started when ex-game developer @grummz made a post about streamer Hasan Piker, who he labeled a terrorist (because that’s what you do on X when you disagree with someone about public policy):
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This led Musk, who is a grown adult, to post:
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And then:
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At this point, the official account of the video game at the center of the fight Assassin’s Creed: Shadows brought gasoline to the flame war.
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The Assassin’s Creed post was viewed over 52 million times. It references the all-but-confirmed rumor that Elon Musk, a grown adult with a major position of power within the United States government, pays someone so gamers will think he’s really good at Path of Exile 2, a video game where you pretend to be an elf.
I don’t want to leave you with all these toxic men, so let’s end with a funny meme.
Back in 2020, then-Twitter user @blanketm9 changed the world forever when they tweeted:
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Their post lay dormant until 2023, when a user (whose original post and name has been lost to history) added the context of a text conversation, complete with a “straight man.”
Things were quiet for a couple years, then, for reasons unknown, the meme started truly taking off this month. I guess the time is right for posts like these:
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For those dealing with exFAT formatted storage devices under Linux, the upcoming Linux 6.15 kernel has a big optimization for yielding much faster delete performance when making use of the “discard” mount option…
Starting with the top dog
I went body-in with Sony’s new mocopi Pro motion capture system with 12 points of body tracking at GDC 2025.
The mocopi Pro system from Sony aims to elevate its body tracking system beyond the six points of the base system by adding six more. It integrates with Sony’s XYN Motion Studio, a motion capture pipeline intended for both professional production and VTubers.
UploadVRDavid Heaney
That said, the other interesting use case for mocopi Pro is full body tracking for VR. VRChat and Resonite users who want to spend extraordinary amounts of time in VR want to bring their full bodies in with the highest possible fidelity, and so I suited up and put the system to the test at GDC.
For readers who might be unaware of what Sony’s mocopi system is or does, these sensors attach to straps on the body to track movements in supported applications or games using the mocopi VR app on Steam, or for use with the XYN Motion Studio software and headset solution Sony recently revealed at CES 2025.
Announced in 2022 and released in 2023, Sony’s mocopi sensors initially required a smartphone to operate with SteamVR. In a recent major update, the necessity for the smartphone was eliminated, allowing you to connect the trackers directly to a PC for full body tracking in compatible games and applications.
Mocopi is both modular and expandable. For newcomers wanting to experience full body tracking in applications like VRChat, the “VR Kit” priced at around $560 is their starting point for a direct PC connection.
This system offers six sensors, providing full-body tracking, which Sony says should be “good-enough” for most users, at least according to the representative at the demo session I attended. There’s an add-on kit available for folks who bought the original mocopi system meant to connect through mobile devices priced around $730. Going from six to 12 potential tracking points should allow for better accuracy and more precise translation of body positions.
During the hands-on demonstration, other participants opted for making simple motions such as waving their arms around or walking a few steps across the room. But I wanted to test the system more thoroughly.
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Calibration and first test
I attempted army crawling, jump kicks, and even pretended to be a quarterback scrambling in the pocket trying to land the perfect touchdown pass.
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Recalibration due to tracker movement
I saw the tracking system occasionally slip out of position during this aggressive testing. If the strap slips out of place in any way on my body, it seemed enough to confuse the system and trigger the need for a recalibration. That’s a quick process, but one that could be annoying if you had to do it multiple times during a play session. I suspect that for high-intensity movements, mocopi Pro might need a more robust harnessing system to ensure reliable tracking.
Overall, though, I was impressed testing mocopi Pro, and it seemed to have solid performance to my eyes. Of course, incorporating Sony’s software ecosystem into the workflow of a professional would be an entirely different question.
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High-intensity testing.
After the demonstration, Sony provided us with a mocopi Pro review kit that I have sent off to our Editor-in-Chief, Ian Hamilton for further evaluation. Keep an eye on UploadVR.com for Ian’s upcoming insights on how the mocopi Pro performs in his home.
We also talked about my experience with this system on our weekly VR Gamescast so if you missed it, you can see the replay here:
Hand-tracking support came to PSVR 2 back in December, letting developers update their games to use the headset’s on-board tracking cameras for controller-less interactions. And it turns out casting magic is one of the most immersive things you can do with your bare hands.
Studios COVEN and ALBYON have released the long-awaited hand-tracking update for Masters of Light (2024) on PSVR 2, letting you blast beams of light, summon shields, and control energy as you combat against dark celestial enemies.
“Every flick of your wrist, every precise movement, translates into real-time spellcasting, making battles feel more intuitive, immersive, and exhilarating than ever,” game director and Coven co-founder Celine Tricart says in a PS blogpost.
While the game now has feature parity with the Quest version, which launched on Quest 2 and above last May, it wasn’t as simple as flipping a switch, with Tricart calling the game’s latest feature “an incredible challenge, but also a dream come true.”
To bring hand-tracking to the PSVR 2 version of Masters of Light, Tricart credits porting team VR Monkey, which has worked on a number of ports, including Into the Radius, Ghosts of Tabor, Vendetta Forever, and Synth Riders to name a few.
VR Monkey says it took two and a half months to accomplish, owing to Unity’s lack of PSVR2 ’s hand-tracking support, which required the studio to create an in-house plugin—likely a big contributing factor in why we’re not seeing many hand-tracked games on PSVR 2 today.
To boot, besides Masters of Light, there’s only one other hand-tracked game on PSVR 2. Aldin Dynamics was the first to enable hand-tracking on its PSVR 2 version of spell-casting game Waltz of the Wizard back in February. And we’re still waiting to see whether other studios will follow suit.
In the meantime, you can find Masters of Light over on the PlayStation Store for PSVR 2, and on the Horizon Store for Quest 2 and above, priced at $20. It’s also slated to arrive on Steam “soon” for PC VR headsets, where its currently available to wishlist.
The post PSVR 2 Gets Another Hand-tracking Game as Devs Slowly Tap Into New Feature appeared first on Road to VR.
This year marks the 25th anniversary of Final Fantasy IX and Square Enix has announced some celebration plans for the PS1-era RPG. The publisher said it’s “preparing various projects,” including new figures of the main heroes that slightly alter their appearance. It’s enough to have long-time fans once again believing …
Rapha has released two new shoes, the Rapha Pro Team Powerweave Road and Gravel, which are said to benefit from its Wear Test programme.
The programme asks 130 amateur and professional athletes worldwide to give feedback on new products, from initial development to validation.
Finn Abbot-White, Rapha’s Wear Test lead, says: “We handpick testers, people I would call experts and seasoned riders. People who are critical, but who want to help us push boundaries.”
The new Road and Gravel shoes feature Rapha’s woven Powerweave uppers, which debuted on the Pro Team shoes in 2020.
The uppers have a new knitted sock collar, similar to what you find on some football boots. Rapha says this “ensures a stable, locked-in fit eliminating tongue movement and hotspots”.
The new £350 shoes also share Boa Li2 dials for “comfort and total control” over fit adjustments.
The Pro Team Powerweave Road shoes target greater comfort and a “superior connection”.
Alongside the woven upper and Li2 dials, the road cycling shoes have a 100 per cent carbon sole for stiffness and power delivery.
There is also a heel counter made from Pebax, a thermoplastic polymer with a low material density and an efficient energy return, according to its producer Arkema.
You can adjust the fit of the new road shoes thanks to interchangeable insole arches.
The shoes take inspiration from the Rapha Climber’s Shoes with reflective detailing.
Rapha says they weigh 227g per shoe (size 42) and recommends you go up half a size.
Rapha’s new road shoe features a carbon sole, but the Pro Team Powerweave Gravel pairs an EVA midsole and Vibram Megagrip outsole.
Rapha says this combination “enhances off-bike agility and grip”, while a carbon plate and reinforced toe aid power transfer, durability and support.
“For the Gravel version we didn’t want a completely stripped back sole, we wanted to keep that off-bike comfort, and at different levels of contact, allowing your foot to adjust to different shapes in the terrain,” says Rapha’s senior footwear designer Tom Matic.
Another difference between the shoes is the upper material. The road shoe uses a 100 per cent recycled polyester, but the gravel shoe combines this with a TPU yarn for better abrasion resistance.
The Pro Team Powerweave Gravel shoes weigh a claimed 282g per shoe (size 42) and come with interchangeable insole arches.
I absolutely adore PowerWash Simulator. I’ve adored it for three years now. It’s the console game I keep coming back to; curling up on the couch, putting on a podcast, and cleaning the muck off an ice rink or UFO. It got me through a horrible bout of covid, it offers me comfort when I’m feeling down, and it keeps…
Originally released on Sony’s
Occam’s
The developers behind Palworld have re-revealed their furry high school dating sim (almost) nobody asked for. It’s called Pal♡world! ~More Than Just Pals~ and was almost certainly an April Fools’ joke the first time it was teased in 2024, but might actually be a real thing now?
Bearly Escape, an Early Access claw-machine puzzler, will launch this May on SteamVR and Quest 3.
Developed by Time Traveller, Bearly Escape is a puzzle game where players explore a hazy forest called Everwood searching for their missing dog, Robin. During this search, you’ll find the twisted labs of the game’s villain, Dr. Kidd, which are packed with stolen animals. Using a specialized drone and your wits, you’re tasked with freeing the confined creatures and guiding them to safety through trap-filled platforming levels.
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“Bearly Escape provides an immersive experience like no other by combining cinematic storytelling with engaging interactive VR gameplay,” explained Time Traveller Founder Kelvin Hou, in a prepared statement. “The team is dedicated to polishing every detail before Early Access, and we can’t wait to share more exciting news about Bearly Escape.”
Across Bearly Escape, you can find eight laboratories and up to 40 animals needing assistance. Time Traveller also explained that multiple solutions exist for each platforming level, so players can return to try again and sniff out more rewards once they’ve completed the story. Each level also features leaderboards, and you can earn additional rewards by rescuing animals.
Bearly Escape will arrive in Early Access on Steam and the Quest 3 family on May 1 for $14.99.
We’ve reached the final day of Amazon’s Spring Sale, but there are still plenty of great deals to shop. That list includes a $50 price cut on our pick for best MacBook overall this year, Apple’s 2025 MacBook Air M4. The 13-inch, 16GB model is available for $949, down from $999.
Apple only released the new MacBook Air M4 in mid-March. It scored a 92 in our review, thanks to features like its M4 chip. The 13-inch base model boasts a 10-core CPU, 8-core GPU and 16-core Neural Engine. It also has an excellent battery life, lasting more than 18 hours while playing HD video.
The 2025 MacBook Air M4 is also well done from an exterior standpoint. It has a 13.6-inch liquid retina display and it’s very lightweight. The smaller model (it’s also available, and on sale, in a 15-inch option) is 0.44 inches thick and weighs 2.7 pounds.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/apples-m4-macbook-air-is-50-off-in-the-amazon-spring-sale-132413964.html?src=rss
Big brands are allocating small amounts of their advertising budget to Elon Musk’s X, seeking to avoid being seen as boycotting the social media platform and triggering a public fallout with its billionaire owner.
Multiple marketing executives told the Financial Times that companies have felt pressure to spend a nominal sum on X following Musk’s high-profile role in US President Donald Trump’s administration.
They said Musk’s pursuit of legal action against groups that have stopped advertising since his $44 billion acquisition in late 2022 had also sparked alarm. X last month added about half a dozen more companies to its case including Shell, Nestlé, Pinterest, and Lego.
Late last week, President Donald Trump decided to upend the automotive industry by levying a new 25 percent import tariff on all imported cars, which goes into effect on April 2. An additional 25 percent tariff on car parts is set to go into effect within the next month, which promises to make US-made cars more expensive as well, as many parts and subassemblies used in domestic manufacturing come from suppliers in Canada or Mexico.
During the election campaign (and in the years preceding it), Trump repeatedly claimed that the cost of tariffs would be borne by the exporters. But tariffs don’t work that way—they’re paid by the importer, at the time of import.
The White House does not appear to have any concerns about this, despite a report in The Wall Street Journal last week claiming that Trump had warned automakers not to pass the costs on to their customers.
In the iOS 18.2 update, Apple gave users a dedicated Default Apps tab, finally letting us pick our own default apps for messages and calls. Unfortunately, not many apps have been updated to take advantage of this yet. I previously talked about DefaultSMS, which takes over the default messaging app and redirects it to WhatsApp, Signal, or Telegram, but at least one of those now has an official option that you can use instead.
Yes, WhatsApp has finally been updated the to support the Default Apps feature. This means you can now make WhatsApp the default Calling and Messaging app on iPhone. But does this mean you can stop using the Phone app and Messaging app altogether? Not exactly.
Think of it more like a shortcut. When applicable, you can use this feature to quickly call someone using WhatsApp Audio, or open up a text conversation in WhatsApp, directly from the Phone app or anywhere you see a phone number.
First, let’s talk about how to make this happen. On your iPhone running the latest iOS 18 build, go to Settings > Apps > Default Apps.
Scroll to the Messaging and Calling sections. Here, choose WhatsApp as the default.
The default feature doesn’t mean that you can simply replace the Phone app and Messages app. When you get an incoming SMS or Apple iMessage, it will still show up in the Messages app. And when you get a phone call, you’ll still see it in the Phone app.
In this context, “default app” means that when you tap the Message button or the Call button for a contact in your Phone app or Contacts app, it will now open a call or message with them via WhatsApp app directly. This essentially serves as a shortcut, rather than a full replacement for the apps that come with your phone.
After you change your default calling or messaging app, when you open a contact card and tap the Call button or Message button for the first time, you’ll get an overflow menu where WhatsApp will be the first and default option. You can pick another option to change your default if you like. From then on, tapping the Call button will directly call the contact using WhatsApp Audio (or whatever you changed your default to), unless you change your default again in your iPhone settings.
From there, you’re all set… mostly. If your contact doesn’t have WhatsApp, WhatsApp will simply tell that they’re not on WhatsApp, at which point you’ll have to manually open the Phone or Messages app to reach out instead.
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 supports PC VR headsets, although you’ll also need a pretty beefy rig to even run it. Now, players are getting the much-requested fixed foveated rendering feature, saving on compute and boosting performance.
Microsoft Flight Sim fans have been waiting for native support for foveated rendering for some time now, and now developer Asobo Studio has pushed its ‘Sim Update 2’ beta which brings both fixed foveated rendering to the game.
Foveated rendering is a technique that lowers the resolution in your peripheral vision, reducing your GPU’s workload and upping frames per second (FPS) you can render. When activated in the VR Settings menu, it uses Quad View rendering, which can add to your CPU overhead, the studio warns.
While fixed foveated rendering is available to all PC VR headset users who opt-in to the beta update today, there’s no word on when to expect dynamic foveated rendering, which allows users with eye-tracking even more performance gains.
Dynamic foveated rendering does this by only rendering where you’re looking at the highest quality, leaving all else outside of your focal vision to be rendered at low resolution. Of course, a PC VR headset with eye-tracking is required for this, which in similar applications can double performance.
It does seem to be in the works though, as Asobo says in the settings screen above “it can be used with Eye-Tracking when available for best use,” although the company hasn’t provided a timeline when it will turn on the feature.
That said, Asobo is working with Pimax, which has been an official peripheral partner for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 since November, to bring this and other VR-specific features to game.
Notably, we haven’t seen mention of any of this in the official Sim Update 2 changelog, so we’ll be keeping an eye on YouTuber ‘VR Flight Sim Guy’, who regularly dives into MFS2024, and was also one of the first to report the new fixed foveated rendering feature. You can check out his video below showing off the new performance gains.
The post New Feature in ‘Microsoft Flight Simulator’ Boosts VR Performance, Extra Eye-tracking Gains Coming Soon appeared first on Road to VR.
This guide helps you to fix “opcode close: Corrupted file object” or “Deleting ref due to invalid objects” errors while updating or repairing Flatpak.
The man, the myth, the Sandman. Adam Sandler is easily one of the biggest comedy stars ever in Hollywood. Though he’s run afoul of critics for years, Sandler has enjoyed a loyal following due to his everyman persona that thumbs the nose of well-dressed muckity mucks. His recent cameo at the 2025 Oscars says it all:…