https://www.facebook.com/share/p/17qezvdv7L/
Heather Cox Richardson claims to be a historian. My lefty friends have been copy pasting from her account or reposting. She has diatribes every day it seems. All of them say Orange Man Evil.
October 27, 2024 (Sunday)
I stand corrected. I thought this year’s October surprise was the reality that Trump’s mental state had slipped so badly he could not campaign in any coherent way.
It turns out that the 2024 October surprise was the Trump campaign’s fascist rally at Madison Square Garden, a rally so extreme that Republicans running for office have been denouncing it all over social media tonight.
There was never any question that this rally was going to be anything but an attempt to inflame Trump’s base. The plan for a rally at Madison Square Garden itself deliberately evoked its predecessor: a Nazi rally at the old Madison Square Garden on February 20, 1939. About 18,000 people showed up for that “true Americanism” event, held on a stage that featured a huge portrait of George Washington in his Continental Army uniform flanked by swastikas.
Like that earlier event, Trump’s rally was supposed to demonstrate power and inspire his base to violence.
Apparently in anticipation of the rally, Trump on Friday night replaced his signature blue suit and red tie with the black and gold of the neofascist Proud Boys. That extremist group was central to the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and has been rebuilding to support Trump again in 2024.
On Saturday the Trump campaign released a list of 29 people set to be on the stage at the rally. Notably, the list was all MAGA Republicans, including vice presidential nominee Ohio senator J.D. Vance, House speaker Mike Johnson (LA), Representative Elise Stefanik (NY), Representative Byron Donalds (FL), Trump backer Elon Musk, Trump ally Rudy Giuliani, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., right-wing host Tucker Carlson, Trump sons Don Jr. and Eric, and Eric’s wife, Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump.
Libbey Dean of NewsNation noted that none of the seven Republicans running in New York’s competitive House races were on the list. When asked why not, according to Dean, Trump senior advisor Jason Miller said: “The demand, the request for people to speak, is quite extensive.” Asked if the campaign had turned down anyone who asked to speak, Miller said no.
Meanwhile, the decision of the owners of the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post not to endorse Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris seems to have sparked a backlash. As Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer noted, “in a strange way the papers did perform a public service: showing American voters what life under a dictator would feel like.”
Early on October 26, the Washington Post itself went after Trump backer billionaire Elon Musk with a major story highlighting the information that Musk, an immigrant from South Africa, had worked illegally when he started his career in the U.S. Musk “did not have the legal right to work” in the U.S. when he started his first successful company. As part of the Trump campaign, Musk has emphasized his opposition to undocumented immigrants.
The New York Times has tended to downplay Trump’s outrageous statements, but on Saturday it ran a round-up of Trump’s threats in the center of the front page, above the fold. It noted that Trump has vowed to expand presidential power, prosecute his political opponents, and crack down on immigration with mass deportations and detention camps. It went on to list his determination to undermine the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), use the U.S. military against Mexican drug cartels “in potential violation of international law,” and use federal troops against U.S. citizens. It added that he plans to “upend trade” with sweeping new tariffs that will raise consumer prices, and to rein in regulatory agencies.
“To help achieve these and other goals,” the paper concluded, “his advisers are vetting lawyers seen as more likely to embrace aggressive legal theories about the scope of his power.”
On Sunday the front page of the New York Times opinion section read, in giant capital letters: “DONALD TRUMP/ SAYS HE WILL PROSECUTE HIS ENEMIES/ ORDER MASS DEPORTATIONS/ USE SOLDIERS AGAINST CITIZENS/ ABANDON ALLIES/ PLAY POLITICS WITH DISASTERS/ BELIEVE HIM.” And then, inside the section, the paper provided the receipts: Trump’s own words outlining his fascist plans. “BELIEVE HIM,” the paper said.
On CNN’s State of the Union this morning, host Jake Tapper refused to permit Trump’s running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, to gaslight viewers. Vance angrily denied that Trump has repeatedly called for using the U.S. military against Americans, but Tapper came with receipts that proved the very things Vance denied.
Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden began in the early afternoon. The hateful performances of the early participants set the tone for the rally. Early on, comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who goes by Kill Tony, delivered a steamingly racist set. He said, for example: “There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. I think it’s called Puerto Rico.” He went on: “And these Latinos, they love making babies too. Just know that. They do. They do. There’s no pulling out. They don’t do that. They come inside. Just like they did to our country.” Hinchcliffe also talked about Black people carving watermelons instead of pumpkins.
The speakers who followed Hinchcliffe called Vice President Kamala Harris “the Antichrist” and “the devil.” They called former secretary of state Hillary Clinton “a sick son of a btch,” and they railed against “fcking illegals.” They insulted Latinos generally, Black Americans, Palestinians and Jews. Trump advisor Stephen Miller’s claim that “America is for Americans and Americans only” directly echoed the statement of Adolf Hitler that "Germany is for Germans and Germans only.”
Trump took the stage about two hours late, prompting people to stream toward the exits before he finished speaking. He hit his usual highlights, notably undermining Vance’s argument from earlier in the day by saying that, indeed, he believes fellow Americans are “the enemy within.”
But Trump perhaps gave away the game with his inflammatory language and with an aside, seemingly aimed at House speaker Johnson. “I think with our little secret we are gonna do really well with the House, right? Our little secret is having a big impact, he and I have a secret, we will tell you what it is when the race is over,” Trump said.
It seems possible—probable, even—that Trump was alluding to putting in play the plan his people tried in 2020. That plan was to create enough chaos over the certification of electoral votes in the states to throw the election into the House of Representatives. There, each state delegation gets a single vote, so if the Republicans have control of more states than the Democrats, Trump could pull out a victory even if he had dramatically lost the popular vote.
Since he has made virtually no effort to win votes in 2024, this seems his likely plan.
But to do that, he needs at least a plausibly close election, or at least to convince his supporters that the election has been stolen from him. Tonight’s rally badly hurt that plan.
As Hinchcliffe was talking about Puerto Rico as a floating island of garbage, Democratic presidential nominee Vice President Kamala Harris was at a Puerto Rican restaurant in Philadelphia talking about her plan to spread her opportunity economy to Puerto Rico. She has called for strengthening Puerto Rico’s energy grid and making it easier to get permits to build there.
After the “floating island of garbage” comment, Puerto Rican superstar musician Bad Bunny, who has more than 45 million followers on Instagram, posted Harris’s plan for Puerto Rico, and his spokesperson said he is endorsing Harris.
Puerto Rican singer and actor Ricky Martin shared a clip from Hinchcliffe’s set with his 16 million followers. His caption read: “This is what they think of us.” Singer and actress Jennifer Lopez, who has 250 million Instagram followers, posted Harris’s plan. Later, singer-songwriter and actress Ariana Grande posted that she had voted for Harris. Grande has 376 million followers on Instagram. Singer Luis Fonsi, who has 16 million followers, also called out the “constant hate.”
The headlines were brutal. “MAGA speakers unleash ugly rhetoric at Trump's MSG rally,” read Axios. Politico wrote: “Trump’s New York homecoming sparks backlash over racist and vulgar remarks.” “Racist Remarks and Insults Mark Trump’s Madison Square Garden Rally,” the New York Times announced. “Speakers at Trump rally make racist comments, hurl insults,” read CNN.
But the biggest sign of the damage the rally did was the frantic backpedaling from Republicans in tight elections, who distanced themselves as fast as they could from the insults against Puerto Ricans, especially. The Trump campaign itself tried to distance itself from the “floating island of garbage” quotation, only to be met with comments pointing out that Hinchcliffe’s set had been vetted and uploaded to the teleprompters.
As the clips spread like wildfire, political writer Charlotte Clymer pointed out that almost 6 million Puerto Ricans live in the states—about a million in Florida, half a million in Pennsylvania, 100,000 in Georgia, 100,000 in Michigan, 100,000 in North Carolina, 45,000 in Arizona, and 40,000 in Nevada—and that over half of them voted in 2020.
In 1939, as about 18,000 American Nazis rallied inside Madison Square Garden, newspapers reported that a crowd of about 100,000 anti-Nazis gathered outside to protest. It took 1,700 police officers, the largest number of officers ever before detailed for a single event, to hold them back from storming the venue.
October 15, 2024 (Tuesday)
After Trump’s bizarre performance last night in Oaks, Pennsylvania, when he stopped taking questions and just swayed to his self-curated playlist for 39 minutes, his campaign this morning canceled a scheduled interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” according to co-host of the show Joe Kernen. The campaign did not, though, cancel a scheduled live interview today with Bloomberg News and the Economic Club of Chicago. That interview echoed last night’s train wreck.
Trump showed up almost an hour late to the event with moderator John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News. When he arrived, things went downhill fast. Micklethwait asked real questions about Trump’s approach to the economy, but the former president answered with aimless rants and campaign slogans that Micklethwait corrected, repeatedly redirecting Trump back to his actual questions. Trump quickly grew angry and combative.
When Micklethwait corrected Trump’s misunderstanding of the way tariffs work, Trump replied in front of a room full of people who understand the economy: “It must be hard for you to, you know, spend 25 years talking about tariffs as being negative and then have somebody explain to you that you're totally wrong.” Referring to analysis that his plans would explode the national debt, including analysis by the Wall Street Journal—hardly a left-wing outlet, as Mickelthwait pointed out—Trump replied: “What does the Wall Street Journal know? They’ve been wrong about everything. So have you, by the way….. You’ve been wrong about everything…. You’ve been wrong all your life on this stuff.”
The economy is supposed to be Trump’s strong suit.
The former president seemed unable to stay on any topic, jumping from one idea to another randomly, or to answer anything, instead making statements that play well at his rallies—referring to people with insulting names, for example—or by rehashing old grievances and threatening to end traditional U.S. freedoms. He made it clear he intends to "straighten out our press,” for example. “Because,” he said, “we have a corrupt press."
As Micklethwait tried to keep him on task, Trump asserted stories that were more and more outlandish. He claimed that children could do the work of U.S. autoworkers in South Carolina, for example, and that he would be a better chair of the Federal Reserve than Jerome Powell.
Micklethwait did not fight with Trump, but he didn’t indulge him either. When Trump explained that “you don’t put old in” the federal judiciary because “they’re there for two years, or three years,” Micklethwait replied: “You’re a 78-year-old man running for president.”
And therein lies the rub.
Aaron Rupar of Public Notice, who watches and clips Trump’s speeches, called the appearance “bonkers.” Journalist David Rothkopf of Deep State Radio wrote: “The past 24 hours seem to have been a dividing line in the Trump campaign...and in Trump. He went from being periodically adrift and sporadically demented to being 24/7 unfit and in need of permanent medical attention. He's one cloudless night away from baying at the moon.”
Likely reflecting this shift, trading in shares of Trump media, the parent company of Trump’s Truth Social social media site, was stopped briefly today as the price plummeted in unusually heavy trading. Trump took to social media to hawk tokens for his new crypto project, although the nature of the project is still unclear and investing simply offers voting rights in the new platform. The website crashed repeatedly during the day.
Trump’s issues make it likely that a second Trump presidency would really mean a J.D. Vance presidency, even if Trump nominally remains in office.
Currently an Ohio senator, J.D. Vance is just 39, and if voters put Trump into the White House, Vance will be one of the most inexperienced vice presidents in our history. He has held an elected office for just 18 months, winning the office thanks to the backing of entrepreneur and venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who first employed Vance, then invested in his venture capital firm, and then contributed an unprecedented $15 million to his Senate campaign.
Vance and Thiel make common cause with others who are open about their determination to dismantle the federal government. Although different groups came to that mission from different places, they are sometimes collectively called a “New Right” (although at least one scholar has questioned just how new it really is). Some of the thinkers both Vance and Thiel follow, notably dystopian blogger Curtis Yarvin, argue that America’s democratic institutions have created a society that is, as James Pogue put it in a 2022 Vanity Fair article, “at once tyrannical, chaotic, and devoid of the systems of value and morality that give human life richness and meaning.” Such a system must be pulled to pieces.
Thiel has expressed the belief that the modern government stifles innovation by enforcing social values like equality and anti-monopoly. Those limits have caused society to stagnate, a situation he warns could lead to an apocalypse. “We are in a deadly race between politics and technology,” Thiel wrote in 2009. To move society forward, he calls for freedom for technological leaders to plan a utopian future without government interference.
It is at least partly the promise of dismantling the administrative state and its regulation of technology that has brought other technology elites, most notably Elon Musk, to support the Trump-Vance campaign. These technology entrepreneurs envision themselves, rather than a government, planning and then creating the future. New campaign records filed today show that in just over two months, from July to the beginning of September, Musk invested almost $75 million in his pro-Trump America PAC to get Trump and Vance elected.
Like Thiel, Vance has spoken extensively about the need to destroy the U.S. government, but while Thiel emphasizes the potential of a technological future unencumbered by democratic baggage, Vance emphasizes what he sees as the decadence of today’s America and the need to address that decadence by purging the government of secular leaders. A 2019 convert to right-wing Catholicism, Vance said he was attracted to the religion in part because he wanted to see the Republican Party use the government to work for what he considers the common good by imposing laws that would enforce his version of morality.
Their worldview requires a few strong leaders to impose their will on the majority, and both Thiel and Vance have rejected secular democracy. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel wrote in 2009.
In 2021, Vance called American universities “the enemy” and said on a podcast that people like him needed to “seize the institutions of the left, and turn them against the left.” In a different interview, he clarified: American “conservatives…have lost every major powerful institution in the country, except for maybe churches and religious institutions, which of course are weaker now than they’ve ever been. We’ve lost big business. We’ve lost finance. We’ve lost the culture. We’ve lost the academy. And if we’re going to actually really effect real change in the country, it will require us completely replacing the existing ruling class with another ruling class…. I don’t think there’s sort of a compromise that we’re going to come with the people who currently actually control the country. Unless we overthrow them in some way, we’re going to keep losing.” “We really need to be really ruthless when it comes to the exercise of power,” he said.
Vance told an interviewer he would urge Trump to “[f]ire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” This plan is central to Project 2025, whose main author, Kevin Roberts, has a book covering those ideas coming out soon—it was supposed to come out this month but was postponed when Project 2025 became a lightning rod for the election—for which Vance wrote the foreword. “We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay [sic] ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon,” Vance wrote.
Like Roberts, Vance wants to dismantle the secular state. He wants to replace that state with a Christian nationalism that enforces what he considers traditional values: an end to immigration—hence the lies about the legal Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio—and an end to LGBTQ+ rights. He supports abortion bans and the establishment of a patriarchy in which women function as wives and mothers even if it means staying in abusive marriages. Vance insists this social structure will be more fulfilling for women than becoming “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made.“
That desire to get rid of the current “ruling class” and replace it with people like him has prompted Vance to say that if he had been vice president on January 6, 2021, he would have done what former vice president Mike Pence would not: he would have refused to count the certified electoral ballots for President Joe Biden.
“Let’s be clear,” former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) said. “This is illegal and unconstitutional. The American people had voted. The courts had ruled. The Electoral College had met and voted. The Governor in every state had certified the results and sent a legal slate of electors to the Congress to be counted. The Vice President has no constitutional authority to tell states to submit alternative slates of electors because his candidate lost. That is tyranny.”
Early voting began today in Georgia, where more than 328,000 voters smashed the previous record of 136,000 set in 2020, during the worst of the pandemic. One of those voters was former president Jimmy Carter, who turned 100 on October 1, and said over the summer he was trying to stay alive to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.
At a rally in Atlanta, Georgia, tonight, a slurring, low-energy Donald Trump told the audience: “If you don’t win, win, win, we’ve all had a good time, but it’s not gonna matter, right? Sadly. Because what we’ve done is amazing. Three nominations in a row…. If we don’t win it’s like, ah, it was all, it was all for not very much. We can’t, uh, we can’t let that happen.”
Propaganda
The US is reactivating old nuclear power plants
Dockworkers discuss strike
This has nothing to do with anything. It's an announcement by a friend that he is commiting suicide. In fact, he is just waiting for it to kick in.
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/RzHAI.
He's alive!
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/tw7i8
Rachel Bovard says that we can sell weapons to Ukraine, ship food to other countries and do so much. Then a disaster happened in the US, like a Hurricane, and the same government has difficulty doing anything
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/ijPRY
Halloween Haunt disrupted by 300 rioting teens
Why DEI is dying as told by NPR
Archive sites are preserving the history of the world through the internet. This is why I archive all my links
All the ammo for the Ukraine war is made near Scranton Pennsylvania
Some people miss the Covid lockdowns
Mark Cuban wants to buy X and Fox News
Bill Gates says there will be a war or pandemic in the next 30 years
Russia economy doing better than expected
The USA Marines just updated their training manuals on leadership and guidance.
Mark Zuckerberg talks about how he and his company won't apologize anymore.
Propaganda: FEMA and Helene
A long list of bad moves
Propaganda: Fake malls
A guy walks through a mall asking how all of the businesses are making money. He believes it's all fake.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C9vgM4Ct8Pd/
I found the original video
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTFS3Y2q5/
Propaganda: Haitians
Haitians have culturally eaten cats.
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/9jQ6p
A post showing how to statistically prove dogs and cats are being eaten at Springfield Ohio
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/9jQ6p
Propaganda: Pop Culture
Jack Blacks career is over. Why is this in the propaganda section? Because one of their signs is that he ended a tour after his partner at Tenacious D made a Trump Assassination joke. The Assassination just disappeared! How dare he mention it!
The 90’s are now big nostalgia items for adults.
Propaganda: China
China is about to win the nuclear market
The next revolution for AI will happen, and America can't stop China. Yes, that's the article.
Propaganda: Disney
Bob Chapek said he didn't sue Disney because his family asked him not to. They were big Disney fans and didn't want the company to be tarnished. Soooo….
Election
Different views from journalists around the country
Someone hacked a voting machine live.
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/IGtoE
An outline of the vice presidential debate.
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/ad7k2
Election: Trump
It turns out the fact checks at the debate were using false statistics to correct President Trump.
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/nqF2R
Laura Loomer is a conspiracy theorist!
Elon Musk says that if Democrats win, the country is lost
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/y0QnU
Election: Iran Documents
Iran stole info from the Trump campaign and sold it to Kamala
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/5kaKs
An article says Kamala Harris refused it… which means she accepted it and is using it.
Election: Kamala Harris
She had a pain free election so far says BBC
Harris thanking P Diddy for hosting an event in her honor.
Tech
Weird stuff at a Design Convention
Bluetooth 6 protocols now released. They can now pinpoint the location of a device within a centimeter of error.
Aerospike aircraft to be tested soon.
Chinese scientists can now detect stealth bombers because of interference between satellites and ground transmissions
Robotic furniture
Tech: Lighting
Hue, a lighting company, is releasing cabinet lighting that changes color on command. This is a big company with big ties doing it. The actual devices aren’t new. Also, it needs a power source. This could be in architecture as well.
Glowing rope lamps
Tech: 3D Printing
An add on device that lets you mod out a top of the line 3D printer
3D Systems has a 10% decline this year. That's the name of the company BTW. They're still hundred millionaires
Non planar ironing can smooth final prints
First metal printing in space
Fan makes AT-AT that is rideable
Tech: 3D Printing: Handguns
You can modify a gun into a rapid repeater using a 3D printer
Tech: Mushroom Robots
A robot controlled by a mushroom
Have another article on this insanity
Computers
Your IQ affects how well you use a computer.
Connect your TI 84 to the Internet
Mini SSD with 2TB of memory
Tech you need for your home computer lab
Are graphics cards for gaming going away to integrated CPUs with GPUs in them?
Kubernete attacks are on the rise
Comp: Processors
Optical based parallel computing
Engineers develop a bendable, programmable, non-silicon microprocessor that requires only 6 mW of power
Science
Quantum internet combined with normal internet
Sourdough microbial environment
How the scientific American became a skin suit of its former self.
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/cBjSV
MIT is trying to create islands for the Maldives… to fight global warming…
A wobble from Mars could be signs of Dark Matter
Sci: Materials
Porous Materials for wave transmitting antenna. Specifically Si3N4
Using excess carbon as a new power source
A gallium compound has been synthesized
Sci: Quantum
Experiment to find Gravity Particle is beginning soon
Physicists achieve ultrafast steering of quantum-entangled electrons
Negative Time found
Entanglement at a distance is observed
Sci: Quantum Computers
This one is big. Energy is transferred and stored using a quantum computer. If this continues, energy use will be very different very soon.
What is a Quantum Processing Unit?
The history of Quantum Computing
Explaining quantum computing. From 1’s and 0’s to complex numbers in amplitudes
Sci: Atomic Creation
3D printing photonic crystals
New manufacturing method for nano wires
New fusion reactions create heavy nuclei
Chaotic quantum systems
Sci: Space
Dual black hole system
History
The oldest map of the world
How the crystal palace was made
Co-Own a building from Japanese history
History: Xeni Universe
XeniUniverse is a history reteller with great ways of telling it quickly. I can't say he's always accurate, but it is interesting
Here's his take on the history of Honda
Story of Michael Jackson trials
Business
Lots of buzzword and big talk about digital twins and VR. It's actually a good article, but the marketer writing it wanted to sound smarter
Mark Zuckerberg says that tech CEOs better have tech skills or be ready to lose.
Tech layoffs this year
Self service kiosks and apps are making restaurants busier.
“I told you so,” former McDonald’s CEO Ed Rensi said in 2016 after the company expanded kiosks. “I and others warned that union demands for a much higher minimum wage would force businesses with small profit margins to replace full-service employees with costly investments in self-service alternatives.”
Office pods for home use
Blackrock is preparing for the USA dollar collapse by supporting Bitcoin.
Why all the demand for returning to an office?
Business: Major Resignations
Starbucks CEO quits after 6 months
All the top staff at 23 and Me just quit
Bus: Amazon Office
Amazon will return to the office completely says new CEO.
Another article on the Amazon demand
Education
The Coddling of the American Mind
There will be an academic symposium on WarHammer in Germany
I've been asked why I don't post smaller lists. The truth is I have too much info, but expect others to make connections with it. The post with the Zelda Rogue like gave me some courage to make an example.
It seems the AI Doomers are losing.
AI has beaten the Doomers
While they are saying the hype is over.
Hype for AI is ending, so work can actually be done with it
Is the Gen AI bubble bursting?
Meanwhile databases are going insane to provide for AI
Data bricks and Shutterstock are trying to stay relevant in the AI world by being image suppliers. They try to sound moral and strong in this article.
Academic databases and publishers are demanding more papers and books to add to the AI databases
And governments are admitting to using them.
Mi6 and CIA admit to using generative AI
And the big names are using up power like none other to reach the next breakthrough.
There's not enough electricity to create the next huge AI discovery
It’s so cool that cities are like “pweeease only turn your AC on if you’re actively dying and don’t go below 79 🥺🤘🏻💗” while the AI nobody asked for is slurping up the power grid to make 1 image of a girl with 5 tits
Google is causing global warming with AI
The interview with the former Google CEO and his opinions on how AI should be used. He wants to build cheap 3D printed drones with AI making targets to attack the enemy. He wants Canada to lend power to the AI industry. There's a lot in here, and it's broken up by commentary by the video creator.
There are even attempts to make solar power a use.
This article prompted a solar powered data center because AI has stalled the Power Transition to greener supplies.
Meanwhile companies like NVidia make trillions. The big names want big computers for centralized systems. However, smaller AI for more standard computers is coming and being used. It's my next big step, but my computer keeps breaking down, so I'm forced to use Runway ECT.
But that's the likely big thing, normal computers using AI. I've seen stuff even before the big names could do it, but videos are hard to archive. This is the likely reason why the big names are talking so much about Responsibility in AI. Then they can regulate the next big thing to themselves.
What will it take to achieve responsible AI?
How open source ai creates responsible AI
Open letter to MidJourney that all AI should be government controlled
Rome Call to AI Ethics
Safety conscious creators at openAI are leaving
EU warns Microsoft that they have to be responsible
Keep in mind, these are the same people demanding power from Canada, or the government directly. It's not about responsibility, but about control.
Godfather of AI says it should be regulated, because the message will be lost! And interview.
Stable Diffusion was used to make child porn. We need all AI to be regulated so we can stop this.
A bill that would control what AI can do in California is getting ‘support’ from AI workers. The companies are against it.
If all this money is being thrown at AI, why don't they make socialism?
NVidia wins no matter what though. Just letting you know.
AI: Papers
A list of the best AI for specific uses.
A Co LLM works with a smaller LLM to get the best of both worlds.
Climate modeling
GSGEN is a text to 3D AI using Gaussian Splatting. The link is a year old, so this marks one of the very first attempts.
Replacing one person in a video with a person in a picture, project MIMO
https://menyifang.github.io/projects/MIMO/index.html
Spark Face capture
https://kelianb.github.io/SPARK/
Graphiti helps design python memory graphs using LLMs
NVLM 1.0 is by NVidia and has several picture analysis tools
AI: Science
Machine learning electrical fields one bit at a time
Automated discovery of reprogrammable nonlinear dynamic metamaterials
Quantum Geometry
AI: 3D
A nice article on how Gaussian Splatting is making a nice kitchen for it to grow and take over markets from
Gsplat is an open source python library for Gaussian Splats
You can edit Gaussian Splatting in Blender, add models, and even animate it with Sugar Frosting
AI: Video
FineVideo is based on YouTube videos and is a data set to be used.
AI that creates podcasts
AI
X has a new xAI with 100k training in 122 days. Elon Musk bragged about it.
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/wUe3W
The eviction fo text to ai creations
AI: Creations
AI Art Museum
This creator made a cute looking Hobbit. The problem is the sref doesn't actually do that. It's based on his preferences and then uses the sref.
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/2Z6Uw
AI: Lists
A long list of news for Monday September 16th. Highlights include ALOHA robotics and white house data center controls.
https://x.com/adcock_brett/status/1835348626949767448?t=gHtp8RiKig0vrhmwPNks0w&s=19
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/8MQ1x
Another news list from the 20th.
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/GnTQa
AI terms to know for the beginner
A great list of anime srefs for MidJourney
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/JJzs8
People using ChatGPT 4 image recognition right when it came out.
AI: Vs
Flux vs StableDiffuion
MidJourney vs Freepik
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/gwqL8
AI: Tutorials
How to code agents
How to train a Llama 2 bot. This article is a year old.
Making a comic with DallE3
How to turn one article into several with AI
Making 3D characters using Tripo
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/H9NfM
Creating a movie character in Flux on Cloud
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/2Xkwd
Using various AI and Blender to make a scene for a movie. It's really impressive. I have a direct link and an archive just in case.
https://x.com/techhalla/status/1837216167913787501?t=NXX5cSUlJrAJ6TwGNYxEDw&s=19
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/k2JQc
AI: Videogames
Peter Molyneaux says AI will take over gaming. Seeing as he's a bit of a sensationalist liar, this puts doubt on AI
This article says that Nintendo is behind the times by not using AI. The actual quote is that the Nintendo creators don't see a use for it yet. So the entire article is writing how Nintendoomed but noble is based on misunderstanding a quote.
AI: Business
Introducing AI Engineering
The price of Cloud Computing for AI is rising higher than actually expected
Liquid Foundation Models by a company that started at MIT
Silicon Valley is changing because of AI
Agentic AI will take over automation
How to be the AI guy in business. Know what you're doing, and be human to the humans.
35 AI companies that have raised $100 Million+ this year
Workspaces is a manager for AI systems use. You have multiple AI instances and you want to control when and how they work, so this program gives permission or limits them based on needs. It uses Claude
How much does it cost to set up a conversational AI for business? This includes LLMs, computers, and implementation
AI: Bus: Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia is investing in AI
AI: Hardware
New AI chips beating out regular chips.
AI is in the brute force era where they try to force it to work by sheer power. More elegant and cheaper designs will follow.
It costs a lot of power to run AI due to the needs of the computer hardware. This has caused pricing fluctuations for the cost of doing it
AI: Grok X
An AI tracer finds images of various characters and issues a DMCA take down
AI: Jobs
News reporter reading the news to the camera
D&D designer
Prompt Engineer
Software Engineers
AI: MidJourney
The company is working on a dedicated video and story maker that allows for specific characters, scenes, and styles. 8 images may pop up instead of 4. Version 7 is a few months out, but will cover more language understanding
There will be a better more dedicated image editor that will let you edit images you upload.
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/x4Kdq
AI: Stability
James Cameron and Andy Serkis support company. New CEO used to be in charge of WETA Workshop
AI: Runway
Runway is offering grants to movie makers who want to use the video AI program.
Lionsgate has made a deal with Runway to do storyboards and vfx. this should save the company millions.
AI: Google
Gemini is now in Chrome
Google adds the ability to see dresses on you. There's a bunch of other articles on businesses doing badly under that.
YouTube now has an AI Video generator
AI: Apple
Apple is not investing in OpenAI
AI: OpenAI
T-Mobile is sellings it's user data to OpenAI.
New programming based ChatGPT editor. It helps you create, edit, comment, and correct code.
AI: OpenAI: Strawberry
Strawberry to be released soon. It's an AI that thinks a bit first, or uses reasoning to respond
It has been released and costs a lot
What it has done so far
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/GjL8e
It's good at big questions, but not basic ones
Big article that brags engineers will be replaced by new ChatGPT
You are not allowed to know how it thinks. Anyone who tries is banned from ChatGPT
AI: Adobe
How Adobe Ethically does AI. This article is paid for by Adobe
AI: Microsoft
Microsoft intends to expand its AI suite to be more useful
AI: Propaganda
Stable Diffusion was used to make child porn. We need all AI to be regulated so we can stop this.
We should make it easier to spot essays written in AI for school assignments! How will children learn!?
Academic databases and publishers are demanding more papers and books to add to the AI databases
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/k5T67
Godfather of AI says it should be regulated, because the message will be lost! And interview.
We will have AGI in the next thousand or so days.
There's not enough electricity to create the next huge AI discovery
Interview with computer scientist who disagrees with the ideas of AGI, but still thinks AI is amazing.
The interview with the former Google CEO and his opinions on how AI should be used. He wants to build cheap 3D printed drones with AI making targets to attack the enemy. He wants Canada to lend power to the AI industry. There's a lot in here, and it's broken up by commentary by the video creator.
Mi6 and CIA admit to using generative AI
This article prompted a solar powered data center because AI has stalled the Power Transition to greener supplies.
AI changes how we use information networks. This is the synopsis of an entire book called Nexus
The lawsuit against AI moves forward into discovery
A bill that would control what AI can do in California is getting ‘support’ from AI workers. The companies are against it.
Cars
A Porsche and a Toyota Camry can cost the same
A motorbike based on see through consoles of the 90’s
Laguna Seca is under new management
Toyota Camry fan made design
Tesla auto driver coming soon
Bruno Sacco who designed cars for Mercedes has passed away
Cats: Celica
The Celica and MR2 to make a full gasoline powered comeback
Why the ‘71 Celica was awesome
Cars: Toyota Electric
Toyota has some awesome 620 mile batteries that charge in 20 minutes.
BMW and Toyota are teaming up to push Hydrogen Cells
Toyota has lowered its EV production and expectations
Books and Comics
Interview with woman who wrote about a pandemic in 2014 and how it was so amazing. Navel gazing for both sides.
Books: Tolkien
Tolkien has a new box set including unpublished works. I'm sure his laundry list will come up soon enough…
Finding the places that Tolkien used to imagine his world
Toys
Owl House, Gravity Falls, and Amphibia will get meet up toys and merchandise
New Urban Lego sets
A Disney Imagineer designed an actual retractable lightsaber as a prop. He wants it released as a toy.
TTRPG
Build a working pinball table with these kits
TTRPG: Warhammer
40k characters with They Them pronouns
How to get into Warhammer
TTRPG: Videogames
Valheim now has a boardgame
A videogame designer gave it all up to make TTG. The videogame business world is falling and he wanted out.
Art
Moss turned into a statue.
3D prints of new modern designs for 2050
The creative scene in Hong Kong mapped out
Drawings of people with projections going onto them, and a choir singing. It's all propaganda about refugees and dispossessed people, but still impressive in scope
atelier brückner to create deconstructable wood pavilion for uzbekistan at expo 2025 osaka
A display puts out cleaning bubbles throughout a display floor
A website dedicated to the graphic art on tape decks
Food
Coke discontinues new flavor. I want raspberry and orange vanilla cream back
Architecture
An interesting cabin like structure with a skylight roof.
A white bungalow stands out in a dark Phillipines island forest
Lots of flare for this glass building. It looks Japanese from some angles.
A nice loft home
A nice looking Brazilian House shaped in a triangle
A building designed to look like DNA
Universal gets a big new office
Rounded roof buildings made of brick and glass.
A Japanese house for a retired couple
A Bangladesh newspaper talks up a student winning an architecture award. There's some other articles to read after that which are fun as well.
Hawaiian design with office hut and stilts
Arch: Interiors
A Reno Nevada Library has a giant garden inside it. The plants are all hand watered.
Modular spaces in a Kyoto Cafe
Arch: Impractical
Rammed Earth and Timber are used in this Indian design
A flying saucer looking Sauna made of wood.
A cement church that feels like a Doom level
The Goff School of architecture
Brutalism curves captured by expert photographer. Wouldn't Brutalism curves be an oxymoron?
A window over a manmade pond
Arch: Round
A round house on a hill overlooking San Francisco
A rounded glass house with wood facade
A building that looks like a venn diagram from the top and has lots of windows and wooden facade
Curved partitions
Arch: Hidden
A house with a fake top so it appears much smaller than it actually is. They are calling it a Stealth Mansion
Another hidden building on a cliff side
Arch: Facade
A metal facade for Real Madrid Stadium
Perforated brick
Arch: Pavilion
A brick Pavilion that looks like a Viking long ship
A simple pavilion built to view the Norwegian coast
Arch: Contest winners
7 winners from Drexel University
3D printed house design winners
Arch: Lists
10 new awesome buildings
New styles of courtyards
Architect offices
8 strange American Designs
Houses in the woods
African Modernism
Art Deco Staircases
Cool design choices
Chinese homes that combine modern and traditional
Zaha Hadid buildings
Housing
Underground housing design
This guy turned a cruise ship into a home
3D printed village outside of Austin Texas
House: Tiny Homes
A list of the top Tiny Home communities
$24,000 home with water and power already put in. It can survive a typhoon
$18,000 expandable
$27,000 with a rooftop deck and working bathrooms.
$50,000 two story tiny home with electricity and plumbing. Lots of windows and space. It's a freaking house ok.
Tiny home with tank tracks for traveling. Baba Yaga has moved up in the world.
House: Propaganda
Shrinkflation hitting housing market.
We just need to decorate streets to make them more desirable. The term is Complete Streets, because it's selling Complete Bollocks
Too many people live on the coast and it will destroy the world.
There are two types of tiny homes, the first is for homeless while the second is for upper class people. They use the same terms, but not the same houses
Two architects got funding to build a house for one of them to enjoy. I mean to prove prefab works! I need to do this…
Prefab housing can look beautiful
House: Prop: Homeless
Tiny Homes being used to house homeless in Humboldt
Should California continue making tiny homes for the homeless?
Tiny Homes in Tacoma in the Spam away district.
House: Urban
A walk through London with Architects trying to revitalize the city.
City Living by faking countryside living
Elevated parks in urbanism
Barcelona is turning major streets into parks and walkways
Turning business buildings into housing, because everyone is working from home and moving out of the city.
Theme Parks and Experiences
Disney drops college program. It's not fully dropped, but tons of it is.
A look at the American History area of Disney World
Blumhouse will have a horror experience in the hotel from the Shinning
Collectors recreate McDonalds Land
Area 15 will not build an area in Orlando after all
Russia has a theme park where they show off their weapons
Universal will have a Wizard of Oz store for the Wicked Experience coming soon.
If you go to Halloween Horror Nights there is a lot of awesome music playing. Apparently it was made by Slash and he has released an album for it.
Arcade FEC Social Gaming
More games coming out for eXa arcade
Film TV
Why Blumhouse succeeds in bringing back Universal Monsters
The live action Voltron starts filming this year. The actors have been announced.
Francis Ford Coppola's Metropolis bombed. The opinions say he's old and no one should like it.
Long lost Jim Henson film, Mirrormask
George RR Martin adaption starting Bautista
We're getting more Over the Garden Wall
Another Scooby Doo is in the works. The author of this article wants it to be about an apocalyptic Scooby Doo comic. The show will be for Netflix.
FTV: Videogames
Liam Hemsworth is not as prepared for the part of Geralt
The Minecraft movie trailer
Hideo Kojima talks about films and movies he will create.
FTV: Warhammer 40K Fan Film
Warhammer 40K fan Film The Awakening
The film itself
Another Fan Film called Helsreach
FTV: Jobs
ILM has cutbacks and job losses while they try to bring people back to the office.
Director of Disney Animation takes lower job to work on Frozen sequels
TV: Castlevania Netflix
The new Castlevania Netflix season trailer is out
Have the video
VR AR MR XR
Vision Pro can be used to create a flexible work space. Screens and devices are in the needed space without as many wires
Emperor is a VR movie for Quest
Hololense is no more
Mack Trackless VR Ride
A race simulator that can throw you to the ground.
An upscale VR restaurant in Bellevue Washington called Mirra
VR: Explore
VR museums
New app lets you explore and maybe even upload photorealistic places
AR: Google, Samsung, Qualcomm Smart Glasses
The Samsung and Google deal looks like it will be making Smart Glasses
A leak shows that it is
The 3s was talked about on an app by meta.
Kyle Rittenhouse was invited to a rock concert and bands and the news are trying to destroy the whole thing. This article includes the false info on how Rittenhouse defended himself
Another article
VG: Mods and Fan Made
A new collecting mod for Super Mario 64
Access Golden Axe the Duel Debug mode with this patch. Yes, Golden Axe had a fighting game. The debug menu lets you fight as the boss.
Epic Mickey Walkthrough
Nintendo DS as a music maker
Max Payne RTX mod has an update
Banjo Kazooie has been recompiled. This article is terribly written.
Legend of Zelda Rogue like
Splatterhouse arcade gets a mega drive port
A hardbound book with 340,000 signatures asking to save Team Fortress 2 has been sent to Valve
VG: Doom On
Doom on Volumetric Display
Doom on a Quantum Computer.. sort of…
VG: Omnistep
Someone made an FPS using blender as an engine
Seriously, it has nice graphics and everything
VG: Emulation
Duckstation changed to a much stricter license because people were branching it and not acknowledging the major creators.
PS4 emulator ShadPS4 gets an update
VG: Emulator: RPCS3
Creators of a PS3 emulator tell fans to not fall for the scams promoted as PS3 Mobile Emulators
The same emulator has online capabilities now
VG: Classic Indies
The Minecraft version for GameCube is working better than the switch one in some specifics
Atari wants to remake Tactics Ogre
Two new Star Fox projects for the SNES using the fan made FX3 chip. CD quality sound as well.
Dawn of War 1 and 2 have been re-released as anniversary editions including all the DLC
Promotional article for ant stream game streaming service.
Limited Run Games visited Nintendo and talked about partnership
VG: CI: Hardware
Sega Saturn Mini
Foldable Game Player with controllers
VG: CI: Sega Lord X
Sega Lord X talks about games releasing on Mega Drive this year by a single company
Here is an article on the wedding shooter
VG: CI: Classic Ports
A review of the remade Haunted Castle for the new Castlevania collection
VG: Graphics
How to achieve the style of graphics in the game Bodycam
Graphics: Age
A graphics guy for Godot shows how graphics have aged over the years.
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/D6cRC
Have an article about his post
3D
Paralax effect for real time screens. Open a portal to another world
Making a music video using mocap and unreal engine
Movie scenes done in PS1 style graphics
Time lapse 3D Modeling and Maya
Several shaders for Blender, including 2D and liquid styles.
Low Poly head sculpture
Procedural crowd creation for Blender
3D: Looks 2D
3D modeled hand made in 2D
Sci Fi 2D looking characters
3D: Flow Movie
Movie made and rendered in blender to be released to theaters
More on the movie
3D: Scenes
Asian market
Brushify fantasy pack for Unreal
Ancient China Autumn tunnel
An entire island that is part of New Zealand
Lighthouse
Neon streetside shop
ASMR
Red Dead Redemption 2 calm walk
Zelda totk with all sorts of visual add ons
ASMR: Music
Castlevania
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=RDCiclK3aHV5I&playnext=1&si=W20ZkZdiGGeuCBTQ
VG: Business
The Switch is on the path to beat the DS in sales
Godot shot itself in the foot, and says it's fine. grummz responds
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/S3Etv
Capcom asks if more series need a remaster or remake. Devil May Cry, Dino Crisis, and Power Stone made the list.
More people lose their jobs at Microsoft gaming division
Unity has dropped its runtime fee completely
The game industry is dying and Indies are taking over. Suddenly the big companies want to work with their replacement.
VG: Bus: Zombie Flappy Bird
Flappy Bird is back! Sort of…
The story gets even weirder with nfts
VG: Bus: Annapurna Interactive
Publisher of Stray and Kentucky Route Zero is gone
The entire staff quit at once and let the company fall
Fans react to the news
A bit of navel gazing about how this is a sign of hard times for gaming
More info comes out. The owner of the company is a billionaire and this is her hobby. She's replacing everyone and moving forward.
Both sides of the split believe they are continuing the company.
Apparently they've been fighting for years
VG: Business: PS5 Pro
It turned out to be real
It's more of a $350 upgrade because you traded in the PS5 for it. That's the opinion of one upper management guy.
VG: Propaganda
Sims 4 is old and showing it's age.
Dragon Age Veilguard creator says games will reach a graphical level beyond any need, and creators will start to give players more freedom to explore and figure things out on their own.
The writer of the article gets stressed out when playing Cozy Games
A mental health action shooter that gets funding from insurance
Sony Chief says all the job losses are because of bad sales not greed. That sounds good until he also says Go to the beach and take an off year. He's completely disconnected from reality.
VG: Prop: Palworld
Nintendo sues Pal world
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/FpfB1
Palworld admits to copying
VG: Prop: Concord
The team that took years to make the game, and for it to be shutdown within 2 weeks says goodbye. Lots of pats on their own backs.
There's a change list to rerelease the game.
There will be an episode of secret level about this game. It's an Amazon prime show about videogames
Sony starts asking questions about helldivers 2
VG: Classics
The first games for each Nintendo Console since the Wii
Lost Mega Drive Garfield game is found
There was almost a factory game in the WarHammer 40k universe
Sega is hiring an archivist lore expert on the company.
Why did 2000’s games look like that?
When X-Men vs Street Fighter was being created, it had its detractors in Capcom
A member of valve when it made Half Life found an old beta version of the game, and let people download it.
Retro gaming is totally here man! Fluff piece
The creator of Segagaga says he loved making the game and would support a translated port to English.
PlayStation was not expected to do well by creators. Likely hype article.
A look at the first open world Harry Potter game reveals that the same engine was used to port quake 3 to PS2
VG: Class: Nintendo Museum
Interview with Shigeru Miyamoto about the new Museum
The new Museum doesn't spill dirt about the company.
Another interview with Miyamoto about the museum by the Seattle Times
There won't be more museums
A look at the design of the museum
VG: Class: Remake Remaster
Lunar 1 and 2 gets a remaster
Have the trailer
VG: Class: Lists
NES Games remade for more powerful systems
Best Nintendo 64 Horror games
VG: Class: Symphony of the Night
Why Symphony of the Night is still awesome.
The game that became Symphony of the Night was originally for 32X
VG: Class: Dreamcast turns 25
The console turned 25 on 24/9/9
Here's a look at games that are still fun to play on the console.
Another look at games for the Dreamcast
Another Best Dreamcast games list
Fans have made it easier to get online with a Dreamcast.
VG: Class: Saturn Doom Code
New cheat code found for the Sega Saturn version of Doom
It lets you see through walls
VG: Class: Books
Two books on the history of specific Nintendo consoles have been released. They were originally in French and Spanish
Poca is about photography and the game boy camera
VG: Rumours and Leaks
Leaked footage of new Crazy Taxi and Shinobi games.
The next The Sims game is being QA tested right now
Rumours and speculation about the September Nintendo Direct, including that it exists
Switch 2 will be backwards compatible
VG: RL: Switch 2
The leaked image of the Switch 2 has been kind of sort of confirmed!
Another confirmation about leaked Switch 2. It has a bigger screen!
It might have Mario Kart X!
VG: Design
Godot can not officially make porting abilities to consoles. This is the official message from their blog.
VG: Design: Unreal
Unreal had a big event and lots has been announced
Make a game in 15 minutes with the new unreal 5.5
The secret level designers of film production
The new 5.5 has way more lighting abilities
Tim Sweeney says a lot of the big budget games are failures, because they don't understand how Fortnite works
Tim Sweeney is a booboo head for saying that. Single player is great!
VG: Design: Unity
Unity wants you to use a more modern version of it and is updating frequently
A show off video from Unity Unite
VG: Design: Unity: Time Ghost
An article praising the skill to make a movie called Time Ghost. It doesn't actually make sense.
The movie that is.
Videogames
Graft is a post cyberpunk adventure in a dying space station by Cyberpunk and MechWarrior creators.
I posted the wrong link here's the right one.
The midnight walk is a claymation first person adventure. One of the few games that caught my eye at the Sony state of play
A top down Smurfs game just got a demo
Breachway is a deck building rogue like spaceship game designed by architects. beautiful designs but the bathrooms are impossible to get to…
Woodo is a cozy unpacking game in the woods
Visegunn is a side scrolling Mecha Shmup
Like a Dragon Pirate Yakuza is an even zanier version of the series.
Clair Obscura is a French made JRPG that doesn't hide where it's influences are from.
New auditory horror game
Trust is a Vampire is a vampire immersive sim where people hunt vampires for electric power.
Alruna is a box based old school looking puzzle platformer. It starts with quotes from TS Eliot
Corpus Edax is a cyberpunk RPG
VG: Behind the Ship Shooter
Rogue Flight is a star fox like shooter with visuals referencing 80’s and 90’s anime
A After Burner Anime style shooter
VG: Metroidvania
Spirit of the Samurai is a Metroidvania with combo sword control. It may have Keanu Reeves
Voidwrought is a cosmic horror Metroidvania
VG: Strategy
Menace is a squad turn based action game where you know the stories of each character.
Burden of Command does the same thing in a world war II setting
VG: Survival Horror
Hollow body is a Resident Evil style survival horror game set in a cyberpunk world
Holist is a detective like Survival Horror game
VG: Silent Hill 2 Remake
90 minutes of gameplay
Someone played it for four hours and wrote about it
VG: Space Adventure Cobra
Space Adventure Cobra is about the show if it was a 2D side scroller
Another article on the game
VG: Metal Gear Collection
It didn't sell perfectly so the next compilation will be slower.
VG: Updates and DLC
Destiny 2 will be getting Metroidvania in its DNA to help players move through it.
New games for Atari 50
Zombie Apocalypse on GTA5
Spooky forest for Minecraft
Pacific Drive gets new difficult modes, including one that kills you if you put the roof on wrong
New updates for Minecraft
EA is adding paid mods and other bits to keep Sims 4 going
VG: Space Marine 2
A full playthrough with no commentary.
Review by ACG
The before you buy by Gamerranx
It seems to be selling well
The Benchmarks for the game
The game hit the highest Player count ever for a 40k game
It is outselling Doom and Quake
Steam reviews
There will be a Space Marine 3 sooner than later
Henry Cavill approves
Games Workshop was very particular about the way things worked. Even an ankle bolt was corrected.
VG: Reviews
Karate Kid Beatem up review by Nintendo Life
A look at Remnant 2 after a year of release
Ara is a Civilization like game. Review by PC Gamer
The demo of the Shire Hobbiton Cozy Game feels a bit dull. Farming is cookie cutter, while foraging has actual mushrooms and knowledge on foraging. The cooking isn't perfect, as is the missions.
Tiny Glade is good, but needs more says IGN
Review of Hollowbody
Caravan Sandwich is an open world where every building and person completes a story, but not a giant one.
Yar’s Rising is a middling but good Metroidvania
Reynatis is a Shibuya based JRPG with PS2 gameplay ideas. The reviewers call it pineapple on pizza. You either love it or hate it.
VG: Review: Driving
Review of Test Drive Unlimited Solar Crown. It's good, but not the highest level.
Parking Garage Rally Circuit is the best arcade racer this year. You race in garage parks near major sites. I hope they get the one near the space needle right.
What the Car is a racing game where the car has legs. It was originally for iOS and is now on steam.
VG: Review: CFC2
Capcom Fighting Compilation 2 has Punisher
Marvel vs Capcom collection is good
VG: Lists
Horror games
VG: Lists: Power Rangers
The top 20 games part 1
And part 2. There should be a giant open world power rangers style game.
A guy walks through a mall asking how all of the businesses are making money. He believes it's all fake.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C9vgM4Ct8Pd/
I found the original video
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTFS3Y2q5/
The thing that catches my thoughts is how much of the world is fake. Like this mall exists, but no one knows how it makes money. There shouldn't be a way for it to work out. We have a dead Internet theory, but what if much of reality is just like that, and the internet is where it's easiest to spot?
I live in Florida now, but still keep in contact with folks back home. The lefty people are crowing about Trump signs and banners disappearing from neighborhoods.
Meanwhile the big lefty names are saying that if Trump wins, they will protest again. These protests look like Chas and riots.
It's insane to witness even from afar.
I just finished reading the book Stories are Weapons by AnnaLee Newitz. It's about psyops and how they are used in politics today. She is very much a lefty.
She starts her book like this:
It's hard to write about a war while it's raging. Especially when there are no craters in the ground, no missiles streaking overhead- just words and images that are inflicting a form of psychological damage that is impossible to measure, impossible to prove. When I started researching this book in mid-2020, the world was locked down in a pandemic that was unleashing a torrent of propaganda the likes of which I had never seen. As a friend of mine lay dying of COVID on a ventilator, President Donald Trump promised that we could cure the disease with light and deworming medication for horses. After police killed George Floyd. I watched as disinformation about the Black Lives Matter movement piled up on social media, where anonymous accounts falsely blamed protesters for violence. A conspiracy theory from 2016 about pizza-eating pedo- philes radicalized a huge number of right-wing extremists, who later joined crowds storming the Capitol, trying to murder the vice president and overturn the 2020 presidential election.
- p Xi
So you can figure out her exact opinions without even trying. However, she does do some research and it helps in figuring out how psyops work. To create a psyop, you need to rebuild a world, and sci Fi and fantasy can be used that way.
Freud, again, provided an inspiration for Bernays's foray into international politics. In 1921, the psychoanalyst published a mono-graph called Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, in which he suggested that humans had a "herd instinct" and could easily be led into irrational behavior by influencers. Though Freud imagined those influencers to be patriarchs-fathers, heads of state, religious leaders-Bernays realized that they could be anyone, from a debutante to a grubby newspaperman. Freud thought that the herd mentality was dangerous and could lead to political catastrophe. Lippmann, who feared its power over the free press, agreed. But Bernays embraced it.
- p 7
This is how Linebarger introduced science fiction into psyop. Immersed in the science fiction community, he was familiar with the idea of worldbuilding, a term popular among writers trying to create realistic fictional universes that are detailed and emotionally resonant enough to suspend an audience's disbelief. Good worldbuilding chips away at the audience's skepticism by providing plausible, consistent details. … Notice that none of these worldbuilding details hinge on plot or character-they are consistent, believable sets and props that suggest many kinds of stories and myths, without being stories on their own. They are, in essence, a version of those black propaganda drops that Linebarger imagined would lead to mythmaking.
- p16
She also gave good advice on how to study psyops.
To grasp a nation's propaganda strategies. Linebarger argued student of psywar should choose one or two forms of media and monitor them for a lengthy period.
- p 20
I chose videogames because I happen to like them, but Lineberger chose Radio, and Newitz used social media. Either way, watching how companies and governments control ideas leads to knowledge of how others will be used.
One of these observations is that it needs truth to work.
The success of figures like Lord Haw-Haw led to another of Linebarger's important observations about propaganda: it is nearly always built on truth. Lord Haw-Haw was popular in England partly because he reported on the war at a time when most news was being censored by the British government. … “Opinion analysis pertains to what people think: propaganda analysis deals with what somebody is trying to make them think.”
- p 23
She says that Steve Bannon had access to millions because a handful took a small test. They used an exploit in academic learning to have access to this information.
Though only about 270,000 people took the app test. Cambridge Analytica was able to grab personal information from 87 million accounts. Wylie and Kogan believed this profile data could reveal Americans' secret desires and latent tendencies-especially the little thumbs-up icons that signaled engagement with topics from immi- gration and guns to LGBT rights and Black Lives Matter.
- p 72
Then it gets into conspiracy and evil!
Bannon was interested in reaching people who exhibited what psychologists call the "dark triad" of antisocial personality traits: narcissism. Machiavellianism (manipulativeness), and psychopa thy (lack of care for others). People who score high on dark triad tests tend to be authoritarians who are willing to break the law to get what they want.
…
They targeted those people with ads, luring them to Facebook pages that the firm had set up to test out which messages worked best on these easily acti vated people. In his book, Wylie claimed that some of those mes sages included "drain the swamp" and "make America great again," which later became slogans of Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. Once a group of people with dark triad personalities had converged on a message, Cambridge Analytica operatives would encourage them to gather in a local bar or coffee shop, where they could swap conspiracy theories and strengthen their ties.
- p 73
The firm's strategy seemed to be working. After Wylie left the organization, Bannon put Cambridge Analytica to work on Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. Now it was time to deploy all the tools and messages they'd developed by manipulating people on Facebook who never knew they had shared their feelings with a group of political operatives.
- p 74
She also shows a memo released by Facebook on countries trying to to influence the 2016 election.
Private and/or proprietary information was accessed and stolen from systems and services [they're referring to the stolen DNC emails here):
■ Dedicated sites hosting this data were registered:
■Fake personas were created on Facebook and elsewhere to point to and amplify awareness of this data; • Social media accounts and pages were created to amplify news accounts of and direct people to the stolen data. From there, organic proliferation of the messaging and data through authentic peer groups and networks was inevitable.
Concurrently, a separate set of malicious actors engaged in false amplification using inauthentic Facebook accounts to push narratives and themes that reinforced or expanded on some of the topics exposed from stolen data.
- p 89
She even describes the people doing it.
Al-Rawi said that he's started describing groups like the IRA operatives as "disguised elites." That's because their modus ope randi is to disguise themselves as concerned citizens trying to organize in their local communities, but in fact, they are actually elite operatives with a significant advertising budget, state approval, and hundreds of dedicated agents who spend their days posting propaganda and garbage memes. To win, all a group like the IRA has to do is create a wrathful mix of brain fog online-and, they hope, offline too.
- p 90
She then goes on a multi page rant about how this led to the January 6th riots where people were threatened. I'm also jumping past the Indian wars chapters. There is no mention of GamerGate.
Then she gives threats of X
That said, the clickability of right-wing populism on social media is not isolated to Facebook. Twitter (now known as X) has become a radical-right stronghold in the wake of Elon Musk's purchase of it in 2023. … A 2023 lawsuit in Missouri about political jawboning aimed to stop the Biden administration from asking social media companies to block material that was false or misleading. The case was just one part of a larger right-wing movement to prevent governments and civic organizations from working with social media to stop misinformation about elections, public health, and more. Cumulatively, this movement has had a chilling effect. … Meta, Facebook's parent company, is no longer blocking COVID misinformation, and in 2023 the company laid off members of a global team that countered election disinformation and harassment.
- p 92
There's a little bit about how companies are fighting off right wing extremism.
Anti-woke campaigns take aim at corporations too. Amazon took the unprecedented step of turning off user ratings for its 2022 series The Rings of Power, a prequel to The Lord of the Rings. Tens of thousands of people were "review bombing." giving the show one- star ratings, in an attempt to sink the series.
- p 157
There's a lot of writing with little substance for this entire section labeled Culture Wars. Once again, no mention of GamerGate I could find.
The next section is labeled deprogramming. She demands the internet slow down and be controlled.
Psychological disarmament requires a very different strategy when you're doomscrolling social media all day, eye- balls melting under the barrage of half-truths, memes, news, entertainment, and state propaganda. The 2016 election demonstrated that it's hard to track an online psyop unfolding in real time because there may be several random connections between the operatives and their audience. Because online psyops campaigns move so quickly, we have to be ready for them in advance. It's a bit like disaster preparation. We need skilled first responders at tech platforms, moderators and safety managers who can spot pro- paganda outbreaks and put them out before they explode. But we also need to create firebreaks, technical features that can slow the spread of weaponized information.
- p 177
She also noted that there is a fake counter psyop to make the first sound real.
It was a psyop designed to look like a psyop. People on Twitter quickly noticed the duplicate tweets coming from a wide variety of accounts, and called them out as fake. But why would a group of psyops agents want their targets to figure out that they were being fooled? The answer is that they didn't. By making the "debunking" tweets from #DCSafe so obviously inauthentic, the operatives also cast doubt on the real tweets from journalists at NPR and else- where. The #DCSafe operation made it seem like some shady group
- p 179
She demands the government control the internet, and it be entirely left leaning people. Also, it can only work if it's slowed down.
Another possibility would be to slow down the circulation of content on the platforms. "Maybe it will be more like newspapers or snail mail," she mused. "You submit something (to You Tube) and it doesn't show up the next minute. Maybe we'll upload things and come back in a week to see if it's there." She acknowledged that this would be a significant, qualitative change and would require "completely different business model. But she pointed out that "there are other kinds of slow business models in entertainment. It takes a long time to make films and shows even journalism. There is some value in slow.”
- p 189
In fact, she says the internet as it is gives her no future.
"I could not think of a way to have a good future with the internet as it exists today," Ruth Emrys Gordon told me from her home office near Washington, DC.
- p 191
What she wants from all this is to disarm or deprogram people caught in psyops. At no point does she look inward and ask if she was programmed, if her own mind had been washed. It has to be someone else, and that person was the enemy. So her book talks about psyops, but shows how difficult deprogramming actually is, and not in the way she thinks.
My lefty friends are really obsessed with the idea of mocking or trying to disprove that there are immigrants eating cats and dogs. I've had a few claim it was started by an evil racist group, that President Trump is full of himself, and that it's completely absurd to believe it.
There are people on the right posting pictures of immigrants killing ducks in a local pond, being arrested for eating a cat on the street, and more. The entire left is acting like it doesn't exist. They've made memes on the weirdness that anyone would think such things are possible.
This disconnect is just as strong as when CHAS existed and I was told it either didn't exist or was a peaceful pure amazing experience.