Stephan Sokolow's Blog

I just finished playing Lumo, so I supposed I might as well review it.

When I was a kid, these were always the kinds of games I was curious about but never had (aside from Mario RPG), so I can only critique from a modern perspective… overall, it’s a charming little isometric puzzle-platformer and it worked flawlessly for me on Linux.

The game lets you choose between a modern mode with maps and infinite lives and an old school mode, but I found myself never using the maps because it leaves it up to you to figure out where you are on each one and it was easier to just remember which rooms I’d already passed through based on their appearance and what they connected to. I was, however, very thankful for the infinite lives at some points. I also appreciated the very generous choices for where I respawn on some of the longer rooms.

Playing with an X-Box 360 pad, the controls are about as good as can be expected and I like how it lets you configure how the 45° axes of the isometric perspective get mapped to the 90° inputs of a keyboard, D-Pad, or analog stick. The movement speed is OK but, given the amount of backtracking, I do wish that there was a Run button or that it was running in an emulator so I could hold down “unlimit emulation speed” (A.K.A. fast-forward) to simulate it.

As with a pixel-based isometric game, the perspective is locked, which makes gauging certain jumps difficult. It’s retro-authentic in a game that’s got various 80s references sprinkled throughout it, so I won’t hold that against it. If you’re not used to controlling isometric games, my advice is to use un-mapped “up is north” directions until you get to tricky jumps, then switch to “up is north-west” temporarily for those.

That said, there’s one block-pushing+hopping puzzle in the ice area (about 2/3rds of the way through the game) where the slipperiness when you’re trying to hop on the blocks, the ease of accidentally pushing them in a direction they’ll shatter, and the delay before you can respawn a new ice block combine to make some Angry Video Game Nerd-level bad design… and I’m not one to judge a game’s controls quickly. (I actually have a post on the way about the zen of Getting Over It with Bennet Foddy.)

Also, in the final area of the game, it starts to rely too heavily on spike-block mazes, which drive home how frustrating it can be when you can’t rotate the camera, the spike block is preventing you from seeing your feet/shadow, and simply brushing against a spike will kill you… as well as the occasional optional puzzle which drives home why you don’t mix locked cameras with 3D environments which don’t follow isometric grids.

Beyond that, I’m not a huge fan of how, if I miss a collectable in a secret area, I’ll have to start a new game to get it because I can’t backtrack past certain points. I do know THAT is retro-authentic, however, so I’ll excuse it. (Even if it didn’t give “??” as the total count for certain types of collectables, I don’t plan to start a new game to achieve 100%… I’ll just excuse it. I’ve got far too many games on my backlog to humour a cheap excuse for replayability from a more entertainment-starved era.)

It does a nice job of keeping the puzzles varied as things go on, but there are occasionally some of them which feel like they’re varying far enough to feel ill-fitted to the genre (thought nowhere near as bad as in Fez), such as suddenly having to play an easier variation on Lights Out to progress.

Overall, the main glaring flaw is the storytelling, which has a very “I get the impression there’s a story, but it’s making me guess at what it is and I’m just here for the puzzles” feel to it. First, the intro has you pick a gender and color for a generic looking kid, then spend maybe a minute walking to the Tron scanner and then the actual game starts. It’s pointless, feels very tacked on, and makes a very poor first impression. Second, once you’re in the game proper, you occasionally have some mysterious Black Mage-y characters who feel like they should have significance, but instead just serve as props to set up puzzles.

More subjectively, I’d also have preferred if it were pixel-art rather than 3D. Whatever it is that my childhood has left me wanting from these games is intimately tied to the distinctive isometric look that I would sometimes glimpse. (And, given that some of the collectables are clearly referencing 8-bit micros, but it’s not aiming for a retro-authentic color palette, why not do 320×200 at 256 colors?)

Finally, It’s not a very long game, so you’ll want to buy it at a discount. I finished it in maybe 12 hours.

All in all, I enjoyed it, but it’s nothing special so definitely wait for a discount.

When I was developing programs with PyGTK, one of my favourite little things to include to make life better for users was a drop-in helper named gtkexcepthook.py which adds a GUI traceback handler for uncaught exceptions.

Well, I finally got around to porting it to PyQt 5.x for one of my more recent projects, and I’ve named it qtexcepthook.py. (what else?)

The original was under “The license is whatever you want.” terms, so, out of respect of the original author’s intentions, I’m releasing the port into the public domain rather than putting it under a permissive license (eg. MIT) like I usually would for a something like this (simple, and I want everyone to use it).

I’ve also done a lot of refactoring to make it more maintainable.

Admittedly, there’s still a little more I’d like to do, and it doesn’t have any automated tests yet, but manual testing seems to give it a clean bill of health and I added a fallback so that, if the most complicated code does contain a bug and that bug triggers an exception, it’ll fall back to a more primitive exception-formatting mechanism (plus a traceback for the more advanced code) rather than failing entirely.

Finally (and, from a user’s perspective, most importantly), I took the liberty of splitting out the old email-based option for one-click reporting of bugs into a callback so you can swap in something more modern (eg. like an HTTP POST) if you so choose.

The code contains a working if __name__ == '__main__' example which can be switched between no callback and localhost-based e-mail reporting just by swapping some comments, so it should be pretty self-explanatory. Enjoy. 🙂

I’ve been making a push lately to try to get things cleaned up around here, and I came across an old GIMP plugin I slapped together when I decided to try my hand at colorizing manga pages.

The approach you take will depend on whether you’re dealing with line art (blacks stay black and white regions becomes color) or photo-like grayscale (whites stay white and black becomes color).

I won’t go into too much detail on the approach for photo-style images, but a common technique suggested in tutorials is to set a layer to the “Screen” blending mode and place it above the original image. You can then paint into it to change the hue and saturation of the pixels while leaving their intensity alone.

For line art, where you want the blacks to stay black, but fill in the white and half-toned regions with good-looking color, the technique I learned involves applying “Color to Alpha” to the source image, then painting under it. The blacks stay black, anti-aliased edges blend cleanly, and halftones Just Work™ as you paint in the colors.

…but setting up to do it “correctly” (ie. non-destructively, so you can easily go back and correct oversights) gets tedious when you have to do it for more than a page or two.

This GIMP plugin will set up all the layers necessary so that you can just start selecting regions and filling in colors as you please. Just install it, restart GIMP, and choose “Start Colorizing…” from the Image menu.

I also attempted to eliminate as many sources of annoyance as I could while using it:

• The plugin will automatically switch the image to RGB mode if it started as Grayscale or Indexed color.
• The plugin automatically runs “Color to Alpha” on the line art, then sets up a Colors layer beneath it. (This is
• The original image is kept, unmodified, hidden under an all-white background layer as an alternative target for selection-defining operations which don’t like transparency.
• All layers except Colors start out locked to minimize the chance that I’ll wind up having to undo some edits because I wound up modifying the wrong layer without noticing.
• A half-opacity “Fluids” layer is added so that fluid colorizing good enough for all the cases I ran into is as simple as painting some pure white on top of your existing color.
• A separate “Blush Lines” layer is provided and a decent default red is provided in the “Blush Lines Color” layer using the Screen-based approach. Just cut-paste the blush lines into it and they’ll turn red.
• For adding a soft glow to the blush, just select the blush lines, grow and feather the selection as appropriate (I think I feathered to 20 pixels back in the day), and then bucket-fill the “Blush Lines Color” into the “Blush Glow” layer.

Windows users will have to look up where to put it, but, on Linux, I installed it at
~/.gimp-2.8/plug-ins/coloring_helper.py. It shouldn’t do anything platform-specific though.

The script is up on GitHub Gist if the embed doesn’t work.

For today’s fic, a little something I found because someone else thought I already knew it. Thanks a bunch, Aura Of The Dawn.

Harry Potter and The Iron Lady by mugglesftw

This is a story that had such potential for me to love it, and has a ton of excellent writing… but then messes it up because the author didn’t see what was trying to develop.

The plot starts simply. Suppose Ron Weasley’s squib uncle decided to join the military instead of becoming an accountant, and a chance encounter gave Margaret Thatcher’s frustration at Voldemort’s first reign of terror an outlet. She founds the “Committee of Magical Affairs” (or “Maggie Works” as its members originally from the military take to calling it) and things progress from there. They quickly discover Harry Potter’s situation and one of their members offers to adopt him, since he and his wife had been wanting a second child but the risk of complications in childbirth might kill her.

Up until Quirrelmort is forced to act early during Harry’s first year at Hogwarts, this works beautifully and it has two major aspects which make it especially unusual and satisfying for me.

First, it’s a story that goes above and beyond to make characters interesting. For example, Professor McGonagall’s obsession with quidditch is fleshed out with appropriate bits of flavour text. We also get to see this little treat during a snowball fight:

“We should just surrender,” Hermione said, shivering slightly in the cold .
“The Irish never surrender!” Seamus bellowed, managing to hit Fred with a snowball before he was beaten back under a deluge of icy missiles.
“But we’re not Irish!” Hermione said, dragging Seamus back to safety.
“Speak for yourself!” Neville yelled as he began digging in the snow to form a new barricade and switching to an Irish lilt. “Me mum’s maiden name was Murphy!”
“I knew there was a reason I loved you Neville!” Seamus sputtered, wiping the snow off his face.

Snape is probably the most interesting case of this, because he’s believably cast as a character you can like, without him having met Harry before he comes to Hogwarts, and without Harry having a terrible home life.

He’s still acerbic and self-interested, but didn’t let his hatred of James Potter blind him from seeing the true nature of this Harry who insists on going by his adoptive parents’ family name rather than Potter.

Likewise, when he manages to suss out the little conspiracy that Harry’s a part of, he sees a potential “third option” which won’t leave him trapped between an insane madman and a barmy old fool. It’s all done in a believable way and his loyalty to Lily’s memory over either of his supposed masters is done in a way which feels much more satisfyingly realistic than in canon, where the focus on Harry’s perception of him really crippled Rowling’s ability to develop him as a character.

The second thing this first act does well is that it’s a story explicitly focused on merging the two worlds.

Harry’s adoptive father, being an SAS member and part of the Maggie Works has raised him as most fanfic authors would expect a properly on-the-side-of-good Dumbledore to. He had a good childhood, but he was given martial arts lessons from a young age, as well as carefully supervised shooting training, and he was given ready access to superhero comics likely to give him the right outlook on his abilities.

As a result, by the time Harry is told that he’s adopted at age 8, and that he’s a wizard, they’ve developed mechanisms for hardening electronics against magical interference and Harry winds up seeing his abilities with an appropriately childish but responsible view: Like superheroes such as SpiderMan, he’s an ordinary person with special abilities and it’s his responsibility to use them to help others.

However, that isn’t at the front of your mind when you’re reading the story. (Which is a good thing because I’m rather tired of “super Harry” stories.) More time is spent on Harry either changing people’s minds or provoking people by like Draco Malfoy by threatening their flawed worldview, and his interactions with his friends.

Examples of that include introducing Ron and his siblings to non-magical entertainment like Tetris on Game Boy when they visit and Harry asking his parents to owl over his book on the Apollo missions, which causes a stir with Draco and rekindles Fred and George’s childhood obsession with space.

He also integrates Hermione into the group early, when Ron sees her use a knockback jinx against Draco and his goons on the Hogwarts Express, and befriends Neville Longbottom. I’m not sure what the magic ingredient is, but I find the resulting “golden four, not golden trio” dynamic that develops to be both quite satisfying and oddly unique.

The story puts a lot of effort into being familiar to canon, yet original… something both rare and the mark of an author who has skill in spades. From the troll being defeated by confusing it with repeated uses of Scourgify until Snape arrives, to McGonagall and Snape successfully pressuring Dumbledore to deal with Quirrelmort early and Harry’s friends being present for the drama while Harry is elsewhere and unconscious, the events leading up to Chapter 17 really do feel like a plausible alternative series of dominoes that could have fallen, given the small change at the beginning.

I’d also like to mention a few other details I have yet to see anywhere else:

First, the antagonistic relationship between Harry and Sirius. I think this is the first time I’ve ever read a decent fic where they’re at odds because Sirius refuses to accept that Harry sees two muggles as his real parents to the point where he changed his name.

Second, showing a werewolf’s first full moon from their perspective. (I won’t say who, because it’d be a spoiler.)

Third, this brilliantly creative little quote:

Ginny just shrugged. “Who knows? Luna knows all kinds of things that she probably shouldn’t, because her father doesn’t really monitor what she says or does. Do you know, he put her in muggle school for a few weeks, then forgot about it and my dad had to send in the obliviators everyone because they thought a child was missing?”

(Why is it that the typos always seem to prefer to show up in the most quotable bits?)

Broadly speaking, when it comes to the good parts, I’ve read various stories which incorporate the elements it uses, but none as satisfying. All the others either don’t go far enough, or implement them in too crude a manner.

The problems start to mount around chapter 15 when Quirrelmort is forced to make a break for it… and kills three named characters.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not one of those people who is categorically against killing off named characters… but it just feels shallow and sloppy. From this point on, the story gets worse, then better, then much worse, because “upping the drama” crowds out everything that made the chapters before so special.

It also doesn’t help that the author seems to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the Harry Potter setting. Rowling worked very hard to leave things like religion in the HP setting up to the reader’s imagination, with the few elements that one would associate with religion being a self-neutralizing mish-mash of secular contemporary elements and things you’d expect to keep pagan beliefs alive. (eg. Ron Weasley saying “Happy Christmas, Harry” and being focused on the presents rather than talking about Yule, while things like ghosts and the Deathly Hallows suggest that, if anyone’s right, it was the pagans.)

Most good fanfiction authors (and even the mediocre ones) either preserve that feel or build a suitably canon-compatible conception of “wizarding paganism”. This story, on the other hand, is clearly written by a Christian who didn’t stop to think about whether the elements of their faith would be compatible with the elements shown in canon.

For example, chapter 18 feels like a phoned-in Christmas special of sub-standard writing quality and, aside from the Weasleys using “Merry Christmas” multiple times and acting as if they were at some kind of non-magical vernacular cram session while off-camera, they also talk about “praying for” people… something that lends a distinctively “American Christian” feel to these British members of a minority who were canonically persecuted by Christians. (See “Witch Burnings”)

Yes, the latter half of the chapter is spent with muggles who are probably Anglicans, but they’re still saying “Merry Christmas” rather than “Happy Christmas” like muggle Brits do and, given that things like the bible are never mentioned in HP canon, which does depict Christmas, it still feels gratuitous and unnecessary and contributes to making the chapter feel out of place. My advice is to just skip it. You won’t be missing anything important as far as I can tell.

(To be honest, the overall writing quality of chapter 18 compared to earlier chapters with similar elements sort of reminds me of the difference between Rick Cook’s The Wiz Biz and its sequels. He wrote something great, but then didn’t properly understand what made it so special, so the sequels feel like cheap cargo cult copies, matching the superficial details of their successful predecessor, but without the deeper underpinnings which made it work.)

Now, the good thing is that the Christian stuff is shoehorned in and the story wouldn’t feel like it’s missing anything if you were to copy the text into your favourite word processor and delete all mentions of God, the church, and prayer. The bad thing is that, if you don’t, there is a really problematic bit where the author arbitrarily adds holy water to the list of things that can destroy a horcrux, but then writes it out for being known to strip away a wizard’s magic and, thus, kill them.

I could write an entire blog post about how fundamentally broken an idea that is in the Harry Potter setting, but, in the name of brevity, I’ll just say that it reminds me of a particularly sick and twisted piece of rhetoric from American Christians that basically says “If you use God’s power to murder someone, you’ll go to heaven. If you use magic not of God to heal someone, you’ve earned eternal damnation.” (That is, that even the most sick and depraved things are moral if God says so, but power not from God will damn you no matter how virtuous a use you put it to.)

I’m also worried about how the author presents a conclusion Dumbledore and company have jumped to that Harry gave up The Potter Family Magic™ and made Neville the Boy Who Lived when he took on his adopted family’s name. It’s bad enough that unbreakable vows exist in Harry Potter canon (where there’s ceremony and some degree of knowledge that you’re making a consequential decision) without doubling down on what makes them a problem. I’ll admit that it’s possible that Dumbledore and friends are mistaken and grasping at straws, but the way reminders of it are paced makes it feel more like foreshadowing. Leave this “names have power that you can use to hang yourself without realizing it” stuff to settings like The Dresden Files which are supposed to be inherently dark. (Especially when it’s such a stupid idea to imply that all canon Harry had to do to achieve being “just Harry” like he wanted was to literally cast off the Potter name at the horrendous cost of “becoming ‘just Harry'”.)

However, fundamentally, the problem with the story is that it has three phases: Great, Good, and Mediocre… in that order.

After Quirrelmort makes a break for it, the story just isn’t the same. The parts which showed the most promise (like the battle of ideas between Harry and Draco, the Weasley Twins’ interest in rocketry, and introducing Harry’s friends to the muggle things they’ve been missing out on) get crowded out, some parts (eg. chapter 22) feel rushed, and the plot swings in a direction that I’ve already read a million times before and grown tired of.

Then, near the end, it kicks out into open war against the Voldemort-infiltrated ministry and muggle Britain’s emergency broadcast provisions are used to shatter the Statute of Secrecy.

I will have to admit, despite not being the “Military, F*** Yeah” type, I did find it satisfying to see the incredibly rare twist of having open conflict break out between a secret branch of the British muggle military and aurors sent by the Voldemort-infiltrated Ministry of Magic. However, while it is satisfying in the moment to see the muggle side uses their emergency broadcast provisions to shatter the Statute of Secrecy, I’ve yet to see a fic which survives such a drastic change. Given that the final author’s note makes it clear that the sequel will be even more different, I’m not sure if it would interest me but, if I do decide to read it, I don’t have high hopes. Even before you include the implications of all-out world war, chapter 52 is already feeling far too similar to various other fics I read and found wanting. (Mostly male power fantasies with horribly simplistic views of human nature and the causes of our social problems which enable the hero to become a benevolent dictator.)

When you break from canon that drastically, you “cut the umbilical cord”. Just counting the ones that are either pure Harry Potter or have it as the primary story in a crossover, I’ve read over a thousand of these fics and only one of them readily comes to mind as being written with the requisite skill to pull that off and survive. (The Pureblood Pretense series)

That said, I can at least try to analyze the problem, and it seems to stem from three issues: First, it’s just plain difficult (possibly impossible) to properly prepare readers for such a drastic shift in the kind of story that’s being told. Second, when you have a story that’s had this kind of character focus, it’s like threading a needle to acknowledge something of such a massive scope as the outbreak of a world war while still maintaining a healthy character focus, and this didn’t feel like it pulled that off. Finally, Harry Potter fanfiction is almost universally written around a worldview that works in pure fantasy and some kinds of science fiction, but is unacceptably simplistic when applied to a contemporary setting where history and personal experience make it abundantly clear how complex human society is.

The story would have flowed much more naturally if chapter 52 had been omitted and the relevant details were fed to the reader slowly, as they were made known to Harry and company. Heck, the best solution would have been to follow the slow-burn progression in the Queen Who Fell To Earth series. It’d have allowed what worked so beautifully about the pre-Quirrelmort chapters to continue to shine.

I think the biggest thing the story does get right is the amount of time and effort spent on characters and ideas who/which were present in canon, but could have been developed more. I didn’t notice many technical errors, but there are a few. The most consistent one seems to be using “Mrs.” to address or refer to characters like Nymphadora Tonks when “Ms.” seems to have been intended.

Overall, I think I have to give it a 3.7 out of 5 (0.7 on a more intuitive scale from -2 to +2). The early stuff is at least a 4.5 out of 5, chapter 18 is a 2.5 out of 5, what follows is more of a 4.0 out of 5, and the breakout of hostilities at the end is a 3.5 at best.

(While the early stuff has a spark and uniqueness, the drama which takes the forefront following Quirrelmort’s break lacks that spark and isn’t particularly novel, regardless of how well-executed it is.)

If it weren’t so easy to edit out the out-of-place religious stuff without leaving any traces that something had been removed, I’d have rated it even lower.

UPDATE: Having since seen TREY the Explainer’s The Native Bigfoot and how willing seemingly trustworthy secondary sources are to intentionally misrepresent primary sources (and how misrepresented those primary sources have been), I now strongly suspect that there is nothing to balance. I also recommend The Lore Lodge‘s treatment of the topic, given their dedication to good methodology.

I was watching some old documentaries on YouTube and a particular one on Bigfoot made some points I hadn’t considered in my conclusion that it was just a mix of myth and hoax.

Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t become a believer, but I now don’t feel that there’s enough evidence to solidly disbelieve either. (Luckily, I don’t really have an emotional connection to either outcome, and that ambivalence makes it easy to sit on the fence.)

Arguments Against

So, why was I so certain that Bigfoot didn’t exist before? Mostly because I had the following strong arguments which grouped Bigfoot in with other things that everyone agrees to be fake:

First (and most convincingly), now that everyone has a cameraphone in their pocket and an entire generation is obsessed with getting attention using it, we should be seeing a lot more evidence. Evidence for real phenomena doesn’t stay flat as the number of people with the will and means to gather it grows exponentially.

The BBC had a whole series, Nature’s Weirdest Events, built entirely around this idea and the fact that, with the massive number of people carrying cameras now, even very rare occurrences are getting conclusive recordings made.

Second, in 2017, they finally did DNA analysis on purported Yeti remnants (fur samples caught on vegetation in valleys, scalps kept as relics, etc.) and every single one was conclusively determined to not be from an unknown primate. Some were potentially from an unknown type of bear, but the only conclusively positive result that was surprising was that, judging by the fur samples, the Himalayan goral has a larger range than we thought.

Third, oral histories (in any culture) tend to blend myth and reality in ways that mislead those who try to extract reality from them without being experts, and Bigfoot believers invariably brush this under the rug.

Fourth, it’s very rare for large animals to remain undiscovered. The countless new species we continue to discover tend to be insects, small reptiles and amphibians, plants, and fungi. When we do discover new large species, thet tend to live in the deep ocean, which has been compared to the moon in remoteness.

Fifth, it’s suspicious that humans would have legends of such cryptids on every continent with aboriginal populations, including Australia, when we only have such a large range because we’re a tropical species who developed fire and clothing.

Finally, Bigfoot believers tend to set up a false dichotomy that, with all this evidence, it must either be true or some grand conspiracy to commit a hoax. However, we humans have a history of cognitive biases producing odd results.

It doesn’t have to be a global conspiracy to engage in a hoax if our neurobiology is inherently biased toward developing the concept of “wild men of the wilderness” in the same way that it’s inherently biased toward inventing gods to explain nature.

When people see something they’re not certain about, they tend to fill in the details based on whatever cultural zeitgeist is floating around in their heads. One of the books I’ve read (probably Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World) went into detail on how the post-World War 2 UFO craze caused a rapid shift in interpretations of existing events like sleep paralysis.

UPDATE: Likewise, as demonstrated by LEMMiNO’s Bygone Visions of Cosmic Neighbors, even scientists tend to fight hard against giving up preconceptions that we want to be true, such as the idea that intelligent life exists on planets in our solar system other than Earth.

It also doesn’t help that, often, the lack of increased evidence in response to increased technology is justified by the special pleading that ape-like cryptids are smart enough to have learned to be more elusive in step with our developing technology.

Arguments For

So, with all that strongly leaning away from Bigfoot being real, what did the documentary say that cast it back into doubt?

First, it pointed out two things that I had never seen mentioned in any other documentary, and which hadn’t occurred to me before:

1. It’s rare to find animals remains in the wild, because they tend to retreat to die, and, when it’s not dead livestock in the middle of a wide-open pasture (with no cover and possibly a guard donkey or llama), scavengers are very efficient.
2. Animals like Bigfoot and the Yeti are said to live in areas which are still rugged and sparsely-populated to this day.

As the anthropologist they interviewed said, there are at least 100 bears for every Bigfoot and he’s never found a bear that died a natural death, just lying there in the wild.

That ties in with an important detail I already did know: Some animals are very shy. Heck, even primates we know about can present supporting evidence. Western scientists didn’t acquire specimens of the mountain gorilla and bonobo until 1902 and the 1920s, respectively.

According to one believer in Bigfoot whose videos I watch because he applies enough skeptical argumentation to make them interesting and entertaining whether or not you consider them credible, we have enough trouble with known primates:

• People who haven’t worked with wild chimpanzees and other great apes underestimate how aware they are of automatic cameras that have been placed in their habitats. When they’re caught on camera, it’s because they choose to be.
• The reason it took so long to learn what we know about the Bili/Bondo apes (a population of chimpanzees) is that, to avoid bush-meat hunters, they don’t allow themselves to be seen within 20km of a road… and these are animals we know to exist. [1]

Beyond that, from observations of other shy species, it’s perfectly plausible to conclude that there exist species so shy that they are likely to go extinct from competition for habitat before we ever encounter them and it’s plausible that Europeans, having a more industrialized and less in-tune-with nature lifestyle, produce a larger “radius of deterrence” compared to aboriginal peoples.

There were a couple of other points made in the documentary regarding pre-Columbian evidence (some native carvings that seem too consistently ape-like and a claim that Leif Erikson encountered a “forest spirit” that doesn’t fit the description of of a Native American), but I had to discard them since I couldn’t find any solid online corroboration and I don’t care enough to go poking through offline sources.

Third Option: Maybe Bigfoot once existed but doesn’t now

Everybody seems to be so caught up in taking sides that I’ve never seen anyone address this possibility. Maybe all the 20th century stuff is hoaxes and wishful thinking, but there really is something to the native myths.

Difficulty in testing it aside, it’s certainly a reasonable hypothesis. Tribal history doesn’t really care about precisely recording how long ago the most recent encounter was, and there is strong evidence of pre-industrialized humans driving animals to extinction even when we don’t outright hunt them. (Jared Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee mentions that, for example.)

All in all, I think you can see why I adopted the more scientist-ish viewpoint of “What do I believe? I believe that the evidence is inconclusive.” (Though, as always, “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”, so I lean toward nonexistence.)

In the end, I think eDNA will probably rule one way or another in the not too distant future. It’s already put the final nail in the coffin for the Loch Ness Monster in any reasonable person’s eyes. (See TREY the Explainer’s previous videos on the Loch Ness Monster for my reasons to say “final nail”.)