It did not. You never played Quake or Unreal Tournament and made your own skins. You never dabbled in map making for any of these games or games in the Doom engine. Nobody ever made skins for minecraft Java. Your life is a lie.

So is mine!

I have seen variations on this online for a long time, and this has always baffled me: do strangers in America really go up to random people who are speaking foreign languages and tell them “you are in X, speak Xese”, a language they may or may not speak? Even among people who share their native language?

Maybe I am in a different environment (particularly not being American), but the old scientists still exist and are still hard at work. In fact, all scientists I know (and I work in academia) care very little for misinformation on their day to day lives. They’ll make fun of it, but don’t have any more contact with them than anyone else. They still spend most of their time working on their actual projects. The only thing that changed is that now they’re bending over backwards to include AI in their grants to make sure they’re accepted, but having to include the latest buzzwords is nothing new.

Science communicators, on the other hand, yeah, those probably have their hands full with fixing misinformation.