Bad Science
It’s a snow day and my eyes are stinging for some reason, so work is taking a back seat. So, I wanted to write this…
As you may or may not be aware, I’m writing the next Elementary book. Calista has been busy winding herself up over certain people conducting bad science. In this case, it’s the classic kind: I know what my conclusion is, let me find evidence to prove it. It’s amusing in fiction and, of course, those who do it will get their just desserts because it’s fiction. But I’ve also spent the day seeing it happening in real life.
The totally harmless version of this is from Genshin Impact lore. I’ve been playing a lot of Genshin Impact for the past year and, me being me, I’m interested in the lore of the game which is, quite frankly, huge and complex. Seriously, they dragged in elements from just about every major philosophy, mythology, and religion to create the background for a gacha video game! Awesome. You can find lore videos all over YouTube. I recommend Ashikai’s channel, if you feel the need to see what I’m talking about, because she seems to do her research, admits when a theory is probably just guesswork, and has a really soothing voice.
Many theories revolve around Paimon. For those unaware, Paimon is both our in-game companion and mouthpiece, and the ‘face’ of the user interface. One can click a button and enter the Paimon menu which gives access to various user interface features such as the shop, the wishing mechanism, the exit button, and more or less everything else. (This bit’s important) When you enter this menu, your character freezes and Paimon pops out to fly around in front of you. (And, on a PS5, if you blow on the microphone in your controller, it blows Paimon about, which is just the stupidest cool thing ever.) Various people have used this freezing to ‘prove’ that Paimon is a degraded version of the Goddess of Time. There’s other evidence, but here it is: when Paimon appears on-screen in the menu, time stops. Paimon has control over time. Ergo, Paimon is the Goddess of Time.
Except… Now, pointed out in many of these videos is the fact that the wind still blows. You can see it moving grass and leaves, etc. So, Paimon doesn’t stop the wind. Ah, but you see, the wind is associated with Time for various reasons I won’t explain (but they make a little sense), so she wouldn’t stop the wind. And water keeps flowing. But she wouldn’t stop the water for, um, reasons. And butterflies still fly… When I noticed the butterflies, I went looking. Turns out, there’s no discernible pattern to what stops and what remains animated. Named NPCs freeze. Unnamed NPCs remain animated. Cats (probably dogs, maybe other animals) freeze. The robot police officers in the new area (Fontaine) freeze. It’s not consistent. One thing is for certain, it’s nothing to do with Paimon’s true nature. It’s probably some feature of the game engine.
Someone had a theory about something. They went looking for evidence to prove it. They did not do the research, stopping when they found evidence to back their claim and not checking to see whether it really did. Bad science. But it’s hardly going to break the world.
In other news, Trump won Iowa. Early this morning, I watched something about this saying, ‘Look, barely 50% of Republicans actually voted for him. How terrible.’ At lunchtime, I watched another video which pointed out that no one has ever got 50% of the vote in Iowa. Trump won by 10% more than anyone has ever managed before. Bad science. Someone has been huffing so much copium that they didn’t bother looking at the actual statistics (probably at all; it’s propaganda; both sides can put out propaganda, and do). This could break the world, and it made me kind of nauseous.
It feels like this kind of thing is getting worse. When it comes to the lore of a video game, who cares? When it’s becoming the most common mode of operation regarding politics and even science, we have a real problem.
Sorry for the rant. Had to get it off my chest. And my eyes are feeling a little better now, so maybe I’ll get some work done. Big heroic seen coming up for an unexpected character. And now you’ll have to wait until April to find out who! Bwahaha!
