So “The Conners” first episode aired last night, ABC’s desperate attempt to salvage something after unceremoniously cancelling its most popular show. I watched it to see if it was any good… and it really didn’t stick with me. Wasn’t good, wasn’t bad, wasn’t… anything. Kinda like “Solo:” it made almost no impression on me. But Critics and Audience seemed to have quite a different experience of it, according to Rotten Tomatoes:
The treaty allowed Chinese mailers to ship small packages for quite cheap. I’ve heard that the shipping is so cheap that it is a serious driver in competitiveness against local sellers.
What seems really likely is that ebay and Amazon sellers in China are going to take a hell of a hit. Cheap stuff from Hong Kong is going to become more expensive. This will also presumably include things like short-run books and magazines. The treaty doesn’t seem to cover larger shipments, so it’ll still make economic sense to have your books printed in China then shipped across the planet in a big container.
Fellow Americans: We are, as a group, a bunch of fat tubby bastards. This is objectively true. This is true when comparing Americans to many other nationalities. This is true comparing contemporary America to America of just a few decades ago.
Non-Americans: your time is coming, so don’t be too smug. Ireland: your doom is at hand.
Behold the instrument of your destruction:
Extraordinary video of the scenes at @KrispyKremeIRL in Blanchardstown from fed-up mother Kasia Zablotna 🍩 pic.twitter.com/qoOzKqeZ39
— ColmandLucy (@ColmandLucyK) October 3, 2018
There were a lot of problems with “Solo: a Star Wars Story,” a subject Doomcock covered quite adequately. One of the problems was that the actor hired to play Han Solo in no way resembled the Han Solo we know and love. He wasn’t written like Han, and that was a fault of the writers. He didn’t have Han’s charisma, and that’s the actor and director. He didn’t sound like Han, nor did he look like Han; these are problems but not necessarily blame-worthy, though a different choice of actor would have solved those.
But we’re entering a new era where some of the unsolvable problems just might be solvable. The actor you’ve hired doesn’t look like the actor they’re replacing? You can fix that in post. The video below (maaaaybe… youTube seems to be working now, but who knows) shows the results of Just Some Guy processing some scenes from “Solo” through the “Deep Fake” AI system which replaces faces. The results here are kinda deep in uncanny valley, but the results are also based on One Guy with no budget to speak of, using an early version of the system.
Imagine what Disney would be able to achieve if they put their mind to it. Or imagine what the average schmoe would be able to do five to ten years from now. Or a little disturbingly, imagine what political operatives, blackmailers, scumbags of all stripes will be able to do in creating fake videos of people doing things they didn’t do. Couple the video capability to a computer voice synthesizer that can do a proper job of Rich Littling a recognizable voice, and you can finally attain those yearned-for halcyon days when video evidence is no longer in any way reliable. So Joe Schmoe is running for office and suddenly a video comes out showing him kicking puppies, worshiping Satan and talking ina theater. One side will automatically Just Know that the video is true. the other side will Just Know that the video is an AI-produced fake. Huzzah. And even betterer thought: imagine an AI system that just cranks fake vids out all by its lonesome and floods the internet with ten thousand clips an hour. Some will be nonsensical, but the sheer volume will make video evidence of *anything* untrustworthy. Russians walking on the moon in ’68. Hitler strolling the streets of Beunos Aires in 1953. JFK and Elvis meeting President Reagan at a strip club.
Same feller did the video below which swaps out various James Bond characters with different actors. Most are… meh. the “Clint Eastwood” version, for example, looks terrible. But Elon Musk as James Bond in Goldfinger? Friggen’ brilliant. And my brain is still smarting over Rowan Atkinson…
“You’ll release the…” Snerk.
Seems something is amiss in YouTube town.
I get YouTube to come up, but the individual videos don’t work.
And if you needed further evidence that Humanity Is Teh Dum, behold:
Yes, our @YouTube is down, too. No, please don't call 911 – we can't fix it.
— Philadelphia Police (@PhillyPolice) October 17, 2018
A while back I stopped at the Brigham City airport. One of the hangars there is occupied by a warbird restoration company called “Forgotten Warbirds,” and on the day I stopped their doors were open. I took a number of photos. Nothing spectacular (cell phone camera… meh), but possibly of interest.
The full set of photos have been uploaded to the 2018-10 APR Extras folder on Dropbox for APR Patreon patrons at the $4 level and above. If this sort of thing is of interest, please consider signing up for the APR Patreon.
Looks like a storm surge from Hurricane Michael stirred up some junk on the sea floor and pushed it ashore. This 10X6-foot chunk has been confirmed to be from a SpaceX rocket, but the article doesn’t say which launch. A previous bit of a SpaceX rocket to wash ashore in the region came from a nose cone, so this may well also be part of a jettisoned and expended payload fairing, rather than a sploded rocket.
Just published on the Fox News website is this:
This article discusses the NASA “HAVOC” concept for manned exploration of Venus by way of balloons and blimps. That’s cool and all… but readers of US Spacecraft Projects would have known about this six months ago.
This whole streaming service looks like Pearl Street and Netflix had a baby.
Yeesh. I remember a time, not so many decades ago, when many people actually thought that the “Information Age” would lead to people finally shucking nonsense. Feh. Newage is here to friggen’ stay.
Peter Jackson of Lord of the Rings fame has made a documentary about WWI with a difference. He was given hundreds of hours of vintage footage, and through computer magic transformed it into footage that *almost* looks like it was filmed today. Films from a hundred years ago always look jerky, the people look sped up, because the frame rate was low by later standards; in order to not flicker badly, the films were often sped up to a higher frame rate. Until recently, there just wasn’t much you could do. But it looks like Jacksons computers were able to interpolate between the frames, giving these old films smooth, clear motion. They also colorized them, which is less impressive (and from these glimpses, still a little unconvincing in places). But the “smoothed” films look pretty spectacular. I gather the film had a one-day showing in theaters; I assume it’s on to Blu Ray now.