Panda's files

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Pop-science as dangerous for science as conspiracy videos for the truth

What is pop-science? I don't think I need to introduce conspiracy theories in various forms, but let's define a pop-science type medium. It can be a video, a documentary, a book, an article or even a post or short from a "pop-scientist", so the form isn't important, but what is is how it's delivered. It bring you easy to understand truths, fact relations and very often a story that goes around it with vague sources that are narrated to make it appealing and easy to consume. This deeply differentiates it from a study you may find in scientific journal that requires often blind testing, sources and proving applying the scientific method . Method that, because of it's limitations cannot provide reliably all the answers. Pop-science servers as dilution of scientific findings, delivered in a easy to understand way - like a content creator explaining relationship of melanin on skin color - never providing sources, how it was confirmed or what were the other co...

Pyst at Myst

Stunning world that can't deliver on the promise Showing up on the pier and taking first steps, you see the world that has it's secrets. A foreign land with indecipherable puzzles and a mystery to resolve. Each click and movement makes it more familiar and you slowly think it may make scene after all. World is beautiful... and absolutely empty. For something praised like Myst it's really unenjoyable. I tried to play Myst at least 5 times and that included different versions. From original PC release, through PlayStation, DS and finally even the realMyst masterpiece edition. I lost count of the re-releases I tried. After many, many attempts I just gave up and watched a let's play. Mainly to skip the unintuitive puzzles and try to enjoy the story. Source: https://lparchive.org/Myst/Update%2017/ Stockholm syndrome Myst is surely product of it's time and remembering being able to be bored in 1993 - this would be a respite. Then, you didn't have any expectations and...

Lie politics and living in post-truth reality

Considering recent elections in US I decided to write a piece about this, as in Poland we also lived through a rise of post-truth politics and hopefully we will see soon it's final collapse. This is based on my own observations and experiences and hopefully you'll find a glimmer of hope in this writing, because it most probably get worse before it will get better. I will relate this mostly to Polish situation as I don't want to force narration on US state of things. Also as many EU countries face the same dangers these days more people will be able to relate and compare. I'm simplifying stuff here for brevity sake, and keep in mind that there are no "good guys" in politics. There are bad guys that make some policies work barely, just so they get re-elected and there are horrible people that will lie to you about why they couldn't do what they promised and how they will make future even better. How did we get there? There were actually two major events th...

The game you rather watch than play

I just finished watching two let's plays and a long play of the DOS game, The Quivering. The reason it was 3 separate plays was that the first guy gave up upset after 2 hours and the 2nd two other guys gave up 30 min before the end, while also pretty pissed because of what they thought was a bug. Long play was just to see the last half hour. I think there was no bug in their case, but in their defense there was a very confusing way to pick dialog options that they couldn't figure out. I usually just watch LPs of games that are obtuse and I judged this one perfectly. I prefer some commentary because it keeps me following the story, while I'm usually doing something completely else and just eye the game play from time to time. Confusing puzzles and frequent deaths were common at the time, but what really upset the players were limited numbers of saves to the number of imps you collect along the way, or in 2nd half - win in a slot machine that can kill you at ...

Welcome to the world of Survival Theme Park Horror

It's October, go play Crow Country . I'm not joking, you don't need this recommendation, if you like survival horror or cool retro stuff - it's worth it. If you're still here, I'll be brief with the story introduction, because it's best experiencing it yourself. As Agent Mara you come by car to a closed down theme park - Crow Country. You look for the owner - Mr. Crow. Armed with a pistol, you enter the premises and somehow you bump into some body horror, human shaped beings that seem to be aggressive. While other people you meet in the theme park, somehow at the same time as you decided to come, are shocked by their presence - you, Mara, were expecting them... are almost familiar. Keeping to yourself, you explore the Crows Country secrets, learning what's been going on here really. There is one reason you came here - you need to find Mr. Crow. Aesthetics Big selling point are the original PlayStation graphics or rather how they look in our nostalgic mem...

Welcome to Panda's Files!

Thank you for visiting. I'll post here a more long form texts from what I'm into right now which mostly is gaming, media, technology or some caveman level philosophy. I'll start with reposting edited versions of some stuff that I already wrote. Feel free to put your thoughts in the comments, on BlueSky or Twitter .