2019 Mac Pro isn’t the most expensive Mac ever. Not even close.: “There has been much handwaving over the $5,999 price tag on the 2019 Mac Pro. It’s often been criticized for being Apple’s expensive computer ever. But it’s not. And it’s not even close, if you factor in inflation. Many of the early Macs cost much more than $6,000 in today’s dollars.”
📚 fifty-nine of 2019: Gods Above, by Peter David. ⭐️⭐️⭐️
A little odd, because I didn’t know beforehand that the New Frontier books were quite so serialized, and I was coming in mid-story. Still an enjoyable follow up to TOS’s “Who Mourns for Adonais?”. 🖖
On This Day
I’ve just added an On This Day page, using cog.dog’s Posted Today plugin, listing any posts made on the current date in past years.
I’m also considering pre-scheduling have scheduled a daily “On This Day” post for the year of 2020, as I’ll mark 20 years of blogging on November 25, 2020 (though I didn’t discover the term “blogging” until a few months later). While each day’s post will duplicate the “On This Day” page, they’ll be static lists, and will be a nice retrospective of my babbling over the years.
But if you need it…
The new Mac Pro is available for order today. I’m not even remotely in the market for one of these powerhouses, but for fun, I maxed out the configuration options.
A 2019 Mac Pro with a 2.5GHz 28-core Xeon W processor, 1.5TB of RAM, two Radeon Pro Vega II Duo video cards, 4TB SSD storage, an Afterburner card, wheels, and both the Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad is a mere $52,748.
Tack on the new Pro Display XDR —- with nano-texture glass and stand, of course — for $6,998….
Grand total: $59,746 (before taxes).
Just in case you were wondering.
So…Free Guy is basically The Truman Show, but starring Deadpool, right?
Ghostbusters: Afterlife Trailer
First things first: I really enjoyed the recent Ghostbusters reboot, am disappointed that so many people attacked it and its stars so viciously, and am disappointed that rather than continuing that story, it’s apparently being ignored in favor of continuing the original story. Even some of the statements from the upcoming film’s creators were quite questionable, even if they were quickly walked back afterwards. So when the first trailer dropped today, I went into it with a pretty healthy dose of skepticism.
That said — it’s a good trailer, and while all of the above comments absolutely still apply, I’m now a lot less skeptical than I have been. While I’d still love to see a continuation of the reboot continuity, this new film picking up the original continuity does look promising.
Plus, it was fun watching this for the first time with Prairie, because I didn’t clue her in to what we were watching, and she didn’t realize what it was for until the reveal about halfway through (right at the “Whoa…killer replica!” line). Her final reaction was much the same as mine — still bummed that the reboot is being ignored, but also looking forward to the new film.
Of our two silly little window things, one seems notably more invested than the other.
The Silent Coup
The US is being run by a government that no longer represents the people:
Today, representative democracy is on the brink as our government demonstrates an unprecedented disconnect from public opinion.
For instance, 83% of the public supports background checks for gun owners, but that hasn’t come to fruition. Some 77% of Americans want Roe v. Wade upheld, but that precedent keeps getting chipped away at. And 84% of the nation supports paid maternity leave, which has yet to become law despite President Donald Trump’s promising it during his 2016 campaign. We see time and time again that even overwhelmingly popular public views don’t translate to policy.
That’s because our three branches of government live under minority rule.
The Republicans in power care far more about holding on to their power and protecting their personal interests than they do about following the will of the majority of the electorate. Over the past few decades, we’ve been the victims of a silent coup, and I’m often worried that it’s too late to recover.
📚 fifty-eight of 2019: Sleeping Beauties, by Stephen and Owen King. ⭐️⭐️⭐️
A King take on the fears that women have of men, of the men that generate those fears, and how they all react when mysteriously separated. King (and his son) still knows how to tell a good tale.
AI Dungeon 2
I haven’t taken the time to try this yet, but this seemed like something quite a few people I know would be into: a Zork-style game with an AI backend, so you can do…well, anything, apparently.
I wrote earlier about a neural net-powered dungeon crawling text adventure game called GPT-2-Adventure in which gameplay is incoherent and dreamlike, as you encounter slippery sign text, circular passages, and unexpected lozenge rooms. A PhD student named Nathan trained the neural net on classic dungeon crawling games, and playing it is strangely surreal, repetitive, and mesmerizing, like dreaming about playing one of the games it was trained on.
Now, building on these ideas (and on an earlier choose-your-own-adventure-style game he built), Nick Walton has built a new dungeon-crawling game called AI Dungeon 2. Nick made a few upgrades, such as beefing up the AI to the huge GPT-2-1.5B model OpenAI recently released, adding a penalty for repetitive text, and expanding the dungeon game training examples to a bunch of modern human-written games from chooseyourstory.com.
I CAN’T STOP PLAYING THIS GAME
Here’s the actual game site: AI Dungeon. Have fun!