A YouTube video with a bit more imagery of the impact and the results…
Oct 042022
Oct 042022
As promised, I’ve set up a backup blog, using Bluehost. While it is also a WordPress blog, irritatingly, the same “theme” isn’t available so the other blog looks different from this one, as well as having a different blog-creation interface. Grrr. There also seems to be a fair gap between blog posting and the post actually appearing. Sigh. But, at least it seems to work.
So, for now, *this* blog will remain the “official” blog, with the backup blog being used as just a backup in the event that *this* one goes down again. Feel free to bookmark the backup.
*This* blog could go down again at any time due to Mystery Technical Issues. And there is always politics.
Oct 032022
Gotta admire the hustle:
Discounted from $685 all the way down to $378! You’d be crazy *not* to buy one!!!
Honestly, I’m jealous. Why can’t *I* ever think of things like this to extract vast sums from people with more money than sense??? Granted, it looks like this thing is actual metal, and designed to be removable and only *look* like a zip tie. But a silver-painted plastic zip tie has got to be sellable for, what, at least a couple dozen bucks, right?
Oct 032022
Indonesian soccer match stampede leaves 125 dead
Shoot, I can’t imagine even getting 125 people together to watch that dull, dull “sport,” much less getting them excited about it.
Oct 032022
Bruce Willis, now famous for aphasia wiping out his ability to communicate and to act, has a new source of income:
Bruce Willis Signs Deal to Get Deepfaked Into Future Movies
The same company that bought the rights has previously added a Deepfaked Willis to TV commercials for a Russian phone company (before The War, of course). The results are… minimal:
It seems that the new agreement is based on “Die Hard” and The Fifth Element” era Bruce Willis… back when he had hair. Is this a good thing, or a bad thing? Well… it’s an inevitable thing, so it’s probably a good thing that we’re getting a precedent of a *living* actor signing up for this while they can do so willingly, and get paid for it. Soon there will probably be money to be made for regular folks to sit in a scanner and go through a range of motions and emotions and sell their Deepfake rights for X amount and Y royalties. Just the way it’s gonna be, I suppose, along with AI-created entirely original “human” actors. One presumed benefit will be a mangling of “celebrity culture,” since celebrities won’t be real people anymore. Some might argue that political campaigns will be able to Deepfake support from digital celebrities… but considering how consistently *stupid* celebrities are about politics anyway, it could hardly be worse. Will anyone *really* care what Marilyn Monrobot has to say about the 2028 Presidential campaign?
Of course, the article includes hand-wringing:
That doesn’t bode well.
…
While this should help Willis and his family earn extra cash, it’s an ominous precedent. With an already golden legacy and a filmography dense with classics like “Die Hard,” “Pulp Fiction,” and “The Sixth Sense,” is this really how Willis should be drawing out the end of his career?
…
But for the sake of both actors and moviegoers: let’s not have our stars replaced by lifeless reconstructions.
Meh. To my knowledge, there are no Deepfaked actors in “The Rings Of Power,” and Amazon spent a *billion* dollars to crank out a lifeless reconstruction of a psuedo-Tolkein story. So a sequel to “The Fifth Element” with a Deepfaked Bruce Willis? At this point I’d be far more likely to be concerned about a crappilly written story than a bad digital actor.
Oct 022022
The blog was out for a day for Unexplainable Tech Reasons. Tech support gave up and said they couldn’t fix the problem – I couldn’t log in to either of my blogs, so I couldn’t edit posts, couldn’t make new ones. They gave no hope of the problem being fixed. And yet… here we are. Yay. They work now.
That said, I’m rather sick of the problems popping up with irritating regularity. So I want to examine options. One clear problem is that both blogs (the other being https://www.aerospaceprojectsreview.com/blog/) are on the same host, so if something mysteriously appears to plague one blog, it often plagues the other. I need to separate them.
I’ve tried – and hate – Discord, Facebook and Twitter. I *like* the WordPress blog, if for no other reason than I’ve grown accustomed to it. So what I might do is get new “Unwanted Blog” and “Aerospace Projects Review Blog” WordPress blogs, hosted elsewhere, then simply park a “this blog is now over yonder” post at the top of each of the legacy blogs. If someone has suggestions along those lines, by all means drop a comment.
Mood: annoyed.
Oct 012022
A few photos showing the innards of an F-22 being repaired:
and some more pic.twitter.com/yZjvk5Fl49
— Fighterman_FFRC (@Fighterman_FFRC) June 12, 2022
Oct 012022
Oct 012022
Back when art was uplifting. And *society* was uplifting.
— Americana Aesthetics (@AmericanaAesth) October 1, 2022
That’s “The Kansas City Spirit” by Norman Rockwell, 1951, painted in response to historic and damaging floods, and the resilience shown by those who rebuilt.
Oct 012022
The Woman King
The budget for this movie was apparently about $50 million. Something like half of the domestic box office goes back to the studio… about $19.85 million. About a quarter of the international box office goes to the studio… about $0.325 million. For a total of $20.175 million. Add in anywhere from $25 million on up in advertising costs, and I’m uncertain that $20+ million will pay off an investment of $70 million, even given that it has weeks to months more run time. I can see it getting to $60, maybe $80 million domestically… which won’t be break-even on production, never mind marketing. If it truly fails, I wonder if we might get a sequel to THIS STORY.
“Inspired by true events.” In much the same way that “The Man in the High Castle” was, I suppose.
