awesome duuuuuuude

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I love this story!!

I’m impressed by ChatGPT.  But I’ve also got a healthy respect for Atari Chess, a cartridge for the classic Atari 2600 Video Computer System from 1977.  I got Atari Chess when I was nine years old in third grade.  I’d just learned how to play chess and already wanted to get better by having a computer opponent to practice with.  Atari Chess beat me EVERY time.  Then again I’ve only won a single time at chess but that’s beside the point…

Anyhoo, a Citrix engineer set ChatGPT against the Atari 2600 in a game of chess.  And the Atari from almost fifty years ago clobbered the modern AI.

Here’s the full story courtesy of Futurism....

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A few weeks ago a good friend, the lovely and effervescent Kate Mary, posted something on her Facebook page.  It’s a piece of art that she commissioned to have made and I could barely take my eyes off of it.  Here is Batman shredding on guitar as he and his colleagues rock it out.  You’re going to want to click and enlargen this pic in order to absorb all the details:

This was created by Andrew Griffith.  Kate was right: he is enormously talented.  Here is some more of his craftsmansship.

I like this one especially: Orson Welles in his final role (Unicron from Transformers: The Movie).

And speaking of Transformers, here is Grimlock being ridden by Boba Fett:

Andrew has much more work on his website at glovestudios.com.  He also maintains an online shop for his art and he also has a site dedicated to his commission work
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This blog has been SLAMMED with visitors since three days ago coming to read about Short Sugar’s Bar-B-Q in Reidsville, North Carolina shutting down after more than 75 years in business.  The counter has been ringing up visits from all fifty states, Canada, Ireland, Australia, Germany, even some people in Brazil. There were few corners of the globe that hadn’t heard of Short Sugar’s, it seems.  Judging by the comments and e-mails that have come in there have been a lot of folks who are regretting that they will now never have an opportunity to eat at a place that once was judged to have the best barbecue in America.  Short Sugar’s was the kind of place that they just don’t make anymore and it’s not just a loss to a small town, but to our culture as a whole.

Well, it’s been a very depressing past 72 hours but ...

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 A blue 1977 Volkswagen Type 2 van, untouched by flames, sits alone amid the ash of Los Angeles:

Volkswagen needs to purchase this from owner Preston Martin (who lived in the van for a year while in college) and put it on display in its museum.  That is one hardy testament to resilience.  Or else a fluke of nature, much like how a tornado will sometimes mow down everything in its path except for one solitary farm house which miraculously escapes unscathed.

However it happened, it’s an amazing story and Epoch Times has an article all about it....

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 Is this a trend?  If it is then I hope it’s a growing one!

In the past few months I’ve found a number of young ladies – these are girls under twelve – who are not only gun enthusiasts but are also very adept with firearms.  In every way pertaining to guns, from responsible gun handling to describing various ammo, each of these girls possesses more knowledge and expertise with firearms than most adults.

Here are a couple of examples.  And as you can tell, these ladies also command extremely authoritative and articulate voices.  No doubt a result of the confidence that they have gained from their gun ownership and use.

This first young woman, I discovered on Facebook from the ads for her father’s VERY clever invention StopBox (note: I do not own a StopBox, but I do think it’s pretty cool).  Meet Emma Ervin, from the state ...

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This is… THE greatest thing that I have seen in a very long time.  These kids are… wow.  They are amazing!  They were able to pull off what a lot of us thirty and forty years ago were only able to dream of doing.  I know my best friend Chad and I used to plan out our own Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies.  How when we grew up we would be the next Lucas and Spielberg.  I like to think a little of that carried over to when we were making our films fifteen or so years ago.  Still a bit of childhood magic left.

But these kids, the young men and women of Oliver Springs Elementary School in Van Buren, Arkansas were not content to wait that long.  No, they went all out and they did it now.  It took them two years of fundraising and planning ...

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 A few nights ago I was propped up in bed, just randomly looking up things with my iPad.  And I came upon something truly, truly special.  It is for me anyway…

It’s on the website for the Order of the Arrow lodge of the Boy Scout council that I was in.  This photo dates to 1954.  The man on the right, in the light uniform shirt, is Allan “Doc” Lewis.  He was a lifelong educator and advocate for Scouting.  In the photo he and the other man (C. Lin Adams) are wearing their Order of the Arrow sashes, which indicate that they were Vigil rank.  The OA was especially near and dear to Doc’s heart, as it symbolized true brotherhood and service.

I know these things about Doc, and much more, because he was the grandfather that I never got to have.  I suspect a lot of young men ...

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Apparently, there are still good things about America.  And these Polish people know it.  So much so that a bunch of them have been live-action role-playing (LARP) as Americans.  Specifically, Americans in small-town Ohio.  And what has come of it is completely bonkers!

Vice has the story of the Polish LARPers, who were inspired in part by shows like Stranger Things and The X-Files (and also by Breaking Bad, if some of the photos are to be believed).  And at least two pages on Facebook (here and also here) are filled with more pictures.  Seems that these folks wanted to imitate the Fourth of July.  They certainly do not lack in their research.  These are just… wow.  It’s like that Star Trek episode where the crew finds the planet that’s copying 1920s-era gangster Chicago.  The cop with the donut (pictured here) is cracking me up hard....

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Okay, this has apparently been up for a decade or so already but only now am I learning that Internet Archive has a collection of EVERY issue of Starlog: that tome of science-fiction goodness that many of us savored every month.  Originally devoted to keeping the embers of Star Trek burning in those years between the original series and the movies, Starlog soon expanded to cover anything and everything pertaining to sci-fi and fantasy, be it in film or on television or in literature or whatever.  In the decades before the advent of the Internet, it was magazines like Starlog that kept our appetites whetted for whatever was coming new out of the genre.  I dare say that it broadened a lot of minds, to things that they otherwise might not have considered.  I for one might never have read a Philip Jose Farmer novel, were it not for ...

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