Misdirected Arby's

When Sean and I were figuring out what to order for dinner on Saturday, he set his Skip the Dishes app to my address--then forgot to change it back. As a result, his lunch order today arrived on our doorstep. So I had to taunt him with this photo--even after he spent Saturday helping me move stuff! The cruelty! 

Turkey club sandwich
Savoury treat lost; Sean says
"I am so hungry" 
 

The Singer's New Home

When Sean came over to help me move a bunch of stuff yesterday, we moved Mom and Dad's old manual Singer sewing machine into my office. Now it's become a little table and storage space for knicknacks. The copper mug, soapstone duck, electrical insulator, and repurposed 8-track cassette storage box also came from Mom and Dad, and they'll live on a little while longer with Sylvia and me. Thanks again, Sean! 
 

Out of the Past, the Star Raiders

Sean came by today to finish Below on Netflix (such a promising start, such a dreadful finish) and to help me move around some furniture and appliances. He presented me with a pristine copy of Star Raiders for the Atari 400/800. Sean and I played this game to death back in the 1980s; it would have been perhaps the fourth or fifth game we bought for the system, and it's been described as the "killer app" for the 400/800. 

It deserves the accolade. Star Raiders was a great space shooter/strategy game that made excellent use of the joystick and keyboard in combination to provide a depth of gameplay far beyond what could be accomplished on the Atari 2600, the Intellivision, and other game platforms of the era. 

Sadly, our Star Raiders cartridge went missing some time ago, and Sean decided that the Woods brothers simply could not be without the game. And here it is! Our 400 doesn't work anymore, but there's a new product coming out next year that will play this and our other cartridges, a recreation of the 800XL. The Star Raiders will fly again! 


 

Other Gateways Than These

I've been working my library and office all evening, taking occasional breaks to read Other Worlds Than These, which I've almost finished. Stephen King's latest novel got me thinking about the Dark Tower and Mid-World again, but also about his other works, some of which tie in to the Dark Tower stories. Most don't, of course, and one of those that don't is "The Jaunt," one of King's early short stories--and one of his most terrifying. In "The Jaunt," humans can teleport across interplanetary distances in the blink of an eye--but they can only do safely if they transit while unconscious. If you're awake during transit, you come out the other side either dead, about to die, or utterly insane, because subjectively, the trip lasts anywhere from a hundred years to a billion years in a white void with only your thoughts to keep you company. 

The short story doesn't provide much in the way of visual detail, so I ran a few suggestions through ChatGPT about what a Jaunt facility might look like, and it came up with this. Not bad. But then I got to thinking . . . in the Dark Tower books, and in Other Worlds Than These, the land of Mid-World is littered with the high-tech remains of some very advanced but long-dead civilization. But what if that long-dead civilization has actually yet to be born? What if it's us? (It could also be a civilization from a parallel universe, or multiple parallel universes, but stay with me for a second.) 

Imagine if, a few centuries after the events of "The Jaunt," humans have perfected Jaunt technology to make anesthesia unnecessary. Imagine further that a future corporation, which I've called Carune-Janus (after the inventor in King's story and the mythological Janus), is responsible for the doorways Roland encounters in The Drawing of the Three. Maybe the doors, in the far future, looked and operated something like this . . .

By the time Roland finds the doors--which would be, I suppose, both before and after this technological breakthrough--they've degraded, and of course Roland doesn't have the brain-computer interface that would allow him to use the doors with a greater degree of control. 

A fun little thought experiment, anyway. 

Starfleet Fashion Show

 

I have extremely mixed feelings about so-called "AI," but I must admit I find generating short nonsense videos a lot of fun. 

Pot Sticklers

Mom and Dad put up with a lot of nonsense. 
 

Eight Years Gone

Dad in sunglasses, somewhen in the 1960s, somewhere in western North America. Rest in peace, Dad, you were a real one. 
 

Sean Inspects a Bicycle in Cranberry Portage

 

United Conservative Time Minus Six

Remember, remember, this first of November
Clocks frozen in place by Danielle's distemper
Albertans said no to year-round daylight time
Of course she ignored us, her most common crime

If you're late tomorrow
As thousands will be
Remember with sorrow
The damned UCP

Free at Last

"Inside each of us is a skeleton eager to escape." 
--Abdul O'Connor, October 31, 2097, just before his skeleton escaped

The Short Fuse

"If I babble, and I'm not saying I do, it's so I can't hear the voices in my head," Jimmy remarked as he tinkered with the bomb's detonator; it was only then I started getting nervous. 

Bees Wax Eloquent

Bees
Buzz
Bee suit
Be gentle
Eight bees hovering
Queen rests on a throne of honey
Honeycomb patterns
Amaze eyes
Sun sets
Night
Falls

 

What Does the Universe Know about Itself?

During "The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean," the first episode of Cosmos, Carl Sagan says "We are a way for the universe to know itself." As an 11-year-old kid watching this back in 1980, this was a revelation, and it's stuck with me ever since. It's an idea that's given me comfort for decades, because it suggests we're here for a reason, and at the same time we're part of a greater whole. 

But then, as I was washing my hands after lunch, that quote came to me in a different light. 

I thought--

If we're the means for the universe to know itself, the universe is in trouble. Sure, we've learned a lot about the universe, but there's so much more we don't know, including the answer to the question "Why is there something instead of nothing?" Moreover, there's a good chance we're going to destroy ourselves before we learn much more about the universe. 

There's a bright side; given the vastness of the universe, our species is unlikely to be the only one learning about the cosmos (Fermi paradox notwithstanding). If the lights go out for us, our tiny corner of the universe won't have a way to know itself. But maybe the other guys will come along and check out the neighbourhood before entropy grinds the whole works to a halt. 

Beautiful Boucher Birthday

A sweet for my sweet! Happy Birthday, Squishy McMonkey! 
 

She Is the New (and Improved) Green Lantern

Years ago, I had Sylvia pose while wearing a fake, battery-powered Green Lantern ring and used Photoshop to parody the cover of Green Lantern number 196. I was never happy with that version due to a couple of flaws, so I had ChatGPT fix them. Not bad! 

For reference, here's Howard Chaykin's original cover: 

Dali Does Dada

Here's my Dada Comics #2, but reimagined as a Dali painting by ChatGPT. Apparently Dali's genius is comprised solely by making things melt or putting them on stilts. 
 

Rembrandt Does Dada

 

Years ago, I used Photoshop to assemble Dada Comics #1. Here's what it might have looked like if Rembrandt had composed it. 

The Two Faces of Earl

I asked ChatGPT to restore a photograph of me from the time Sylvia and I went to Radium. Sylvia put a little bit of her thumb over the lens of the camera when she shot this, so as a result there's a large pink blur obscuring me in the original image.

As you can see, about half of my face looks kind of Earl-ish, while the other...does not. It made me feel a little bit like Two-Face, one of Batman's enemies. But instead of being horribly scarred on one side, it looks like I've been through half-finished plastic surgery meant to disguise my identity. 

On a whim, thinking of Two-Face, I asked ChatGPT to give me half an outfit on each side, just like the villain does. 

Unprompted, ChatGPT chose to put the "me" half of this composite Earl in a Discovery-era Starfleet uniform. I really am embarrassingly predictable. 

Behold my brother Sean
Standing in a tree
Apple blossoms of the crab
In the year 80
Red canoe observes
Canoehead underneath?
Soon the season will bequeath
Crab apples for the Woods fam-lee


 

Moon Portrait Gone Wrong

Sean and I have been fooling around with Gemini's video generation software for a while, and yesterday he posted a funny clip inspired by Space: 1999. I followed suit, and over the last couple of days we've created about a half-dozen 10-second clips of us on the Moon. 

In an attempt to make future clips truer to the spirit of the show, I fed ChatGPT images of me, Sean, and the Space: 1999 spacesuits and asked it to put us into the suits. You can see the result above. Now we have reference images for future shorts. 

Chat GPT asked me if I wanted a photo of the two of us together on the Moon, so I said sure, why not. This is what ChatGPT created: 


 

I thought "Wow, cool," and shared this image with Sean. Then it occurred to me that this image as a fatal flaw...a quite literal fatal flaw.

ChatGPT is getting pretty good at human-sounding responses, I must say. I'll admit I laughed at the incident report. 

Here we are, protected from the vacuum of space. Safety First goes double on the Moon! 

Democracy Manifest

So the needless, divisive, misleading, non-binding referendumb is over, and Albertans, thankfully, have voted three to one to bring this nonsense to an end--except of course it won't end, because the separatists won't let it, aided and abetted by their captured MLAs in the Unlimited Corruption Party. 

As I feared, a bare majority of people were taken in by the nine leading questions that are either out of Alberta's jurisdiction or are just racist dog whistles designed to turn people against each other and distract us from the fundamental issue--decades of almost uninterrupted rule by one political movement--a movement that's getting increasingly more dangerous. 

According to the current results, those nine questions are running at pretty much 50-50 each, but that won't stop Danielle Smith from claiming she has a mandate for making health care more inaccessible, demonizing immigrants, and creating more obstacles to voting to combat a voter fraud problem that doesn't exist. 

Business as usual in Alberta, I guess. 

Referendum Night

Polls are still open, which is a good thing--turnout is high, from what I've seen of the coverage so far. I'm too tired to stay up for live results, which won't start rolling in until the polls close. So I'll find out what the morrow brings in a few hours...

Storage Trek

These are the voyages of the Star Trek stuff I've collected over the decades...now neatly stored together in these bespoke bins. 
 

Bartholomew Jones Goes to Australia

Tonight--or, rather, over one hundred years ago--big game hunter Bartholomew Jones set foot on the shores of Sydney, Australia. Bart has been hospitalized several times and very nearly lost his sanity on his long trek from New York to London to Cairo to Kenya to Down Under, but so far the worst that's happened is he's been fined for bringing an improperly registered elephant gun into the country. This is dealt with much more easily than the eldritch horrors he's faced on other continents . . . 
 

Nacho Night

I made some nachos. Tasty! Note the classy paper plate and Tupperware presentation.