https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finding_Bigfoot

Wikipedia only has it through nine seasons. And they’ve been regularly called out for “Oh we think we found something!” excited grainy nothingness that gets hyped into an alleged encounter.

The incredulity of the producers is what makes the show work. The Bigfoot hunters are never seriously challenged or meaningfully debunked, and a great deal of the show involves them insisting they’ve parsed mistakes out from “real” Bigfoot evidence.

Ie. Prove the rules of divination as written in their belief system.

Traditionally, you prove (or more practically refute) the efficacy of a magical system like divination through empirical consistency.

Divination doesn’t work because it is unreliable. I can predict, say, the next week of weather or the outcome of an athletic game through climatology or sabermetrics far more reliably than the I Ching or Tarot.

But let’s pretend it did work. I’m not sure how you’d functionally prove it.

I can envision this being like Shark Tank, but with the added benefit of educating uninformed minds as to why these people are idiots.

The gimmick only really works from season to season if you occasionally allow one of these freaks to win.

Also sets up this ridiculous standard of “debate”, wherein arguing over a thing is considered more important than actually understanding a thing. Episode after episode of people making increasingly fanciful claims and fraudulent proofs will simply reinforce the idea that the Earth is, in fact, flat. If you have a parade of people asserting with supreme confidence that this theory is true, you create the impression that there is some serious doubt about the shape of the planet.

We should though. He seems like a cool dude with a good head on his shoulders and we’d all be better off if we took his advice.

If you can explain how magic works, it isn’t “real magic”. Sort of the paradox of magic as a concept.

If I can dangle a steel penny in the air with a couple of magnets, is that a miracle? Only if I don’t know how magnets works.

Algea and algea adjacent species, mostly.

The ecology changes until a new balance is reached. People can be a bit overly fatalist about these realities. Its not like we’ve never witnessed an ecology change before.

But the more carbon we put into the atmosphere, the more this tiger-by-the-tail we’ve got called Climate Change is worked up. Bad news if your civilization craves stability.

Well, sure. And that’s really bad for Ice Age evolved macro-species that require a certain survivable temperature and condition to thrive. But you’re missing the bigger picture. For lots of plants and bacteria and various insecticidal organisms that thrive in hot, humid environments, this is going to be absolutely amazing.

Yes, humans are absolutely fucked, along with enormous chunks of the mammalian class of species. But life will continue on in exciting new ways.

I find it amusing that we can prove the existence of black holes thousands of light years away and glean the state of the universe at its earliest moments, but we can’t decide whether there’s a rock big enough to count as a planet floating around the inside rim of the Oort Cloud.

What’s the point of all that expensive hardware if they have no clue what to do with it

I mean, if you straight up don’t know how to use a computer at all then that’s fair. But I don’t think the suggestion is that you learn how to code before you learn how to work a mouse. Hell, the whole target audience for the joke is people who are already online.

Its a good litmus test for people who are genuinely interested versus people who just heard “Lern 2 Kode” from a hustler on YouTube and thought they could bullshit their way through it.

But also, you’ll notice the cartoon character getting handed a nice looking laptop and keyboard. How cool is that? A cartoonist handing you a few hundred dollars worth of hardware plus presumably an always-on internet connection. Imagine if everyone had those kinds of resources just tossed to them at the asking.

Rolling up and getting started is a great way to find some really sloppy ways to do some initially very fascinating tricks. Like, its not a terrible idea on its face.

But there’s a huge difference between learning some javascript tricks or python commands to macro with and professionally designing a full stack. Really depends on what you’re trying to accomplish.

Best thing in the world is a fresh faced young developer who is eager to learn everything you put in front of them. Worst thing in the world is someone who only half-knows how to code but thinks they can do a proper mobile app from first principles. Every time I see a mile of copypasta spaghetti code sitting inside a single oversized Main() function, I die inside.

The Norberta reveal actually happens in Deathly Hallows.

No wonder I don’t remember. That book was a fat blur.

And frankly, I don‘t see a shift that is connected to the movies.

I saw it more in Book 4 and 5, when her writing style changed from something akin to Roald Dahl into a more Twilight/Hunger Games esque YA dramady. She was in the middle of writing Book 4 when the first film premiered and ended up selling the rights to the movies before the fifth was officially started.

The size the books swelled, and you could tell there was a lot more editorial/ghost-writer punch ups happening along the way. What started as these cute little Christmas-y children’s stories mutated into enormous screenplays.

What I actually observed was the overcompensation for criticism two books after the fact

Once Rowling got on social media and started yapping her yap, I think it cast a shadow on the series. The stuff about goblin bankers being a stand-in for jews and the sloppy way she fumbled through Hermonie’s SPEW plotline took on an increasingly sinister cast as she got more vocal in the wake of her movie debuts.

Also not unlike Roald Dahl, the media comments forced people to re-contextualize a bunch of these fantasy tropes as legit derogatory views.

Whether they were there early on or whether they only really found their legs once Rowling started hanging out with a bunch of rich British freaks… idk. But they definitely became more obvious as she climbed the economic ladder.

Had to jog my memory, because I haven’t read these books in nearly 20 years.

But yeah. I think the Rowling of the mid-90s was relatively chill and fairly progressive, given the tone of her writing. It wasn’t until she got Disney-fied (or, I guess, Warner Brothers’d) that she took a turn. The novels really take a dive in book 5 and her political opinions just get nastier and nastier after that.

Funny, because that was the exact same attitude the Russians had when they began bombing Ukraine.

There’s a 10-story tall billboard of Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu shaking hands, adoring the Likud Party HQ in Tel Aviv and I can’t help but notice their friendship has lead to some enormous overlap on attitudes toward recalcitrant neighbors.

When you’ve got the Israel Defense Minister calling residents of his country “human animals” and Israeli assassins shooting up hospitals and a the Israeli air force launching rocket strikes aimed on ambulances, its abundantly clear who the terrorists are.

the perspective of someone who has no issue with terrorism being used to achieve political goals

Apparently you can sponsor a missile strike on behalf of the Israeli government in Gaza.

I’m sure you also believe that the far right is fully within it’s rights to kidnap senators and storm capitols?

They’ve gone far beyond that. Just this week, a team of IDF gunmen broke into a hospital and shot the place up because it hosted injured Palestinian politicians.

Why would you encourage more people to be sexually assaulted as a response to your own history?

So crazy that a woman who liberally employed the Polyjuice Potion in her novels and had ghosts who would just wander through the restrooms to talk to you would take some of the most insanely conservative positions on changing your appearance or who should be allowed in the toilet.

Well in the medieval textbooks it was a valid strategy…

Embracing medievalism to own the heretics.