Asides

Nobody really expects the ads for a mobile game to resemble in any way the actual game, do they? Why do I care so much when TW:BG advertises a game that doesn’t exist? TopWar: BattleGame (the actual one) TW:BG is a base building game, where you click stuff and drag stuff onto other stuff to upgrade it into better stuff. Opening up new areas requires using your merged troops in a non-interactive battle with some enemy troops. You can purchase heroes that will do an initial action in a battle. Marvel’s Black Widow is given for free, and they also currently have a Hasbro Transformers collaboration running, so they have connections. ...

Creating portraits with artflow.ai? Old news. Creating abstract fantasy paintings with wombo.art – now we’re talking. Wombo is already pretty well-known for their AI powered lip sync app that turns a selfie into a meme. (Although, I wonder what would happen if I piped artflow into wombo… LATER: IT WORKS!) How long until we don’t know what’s real any more? Anyway, the lip sync app is “wombo.ai”. Wombo’s new app is “wombo.art”, and generates random art based on prompts you type in, and an optional selection of an art style, which range from “synthwave” to “dark fantasy” and many points between. ...

It’s at artflow.ai – you type in a description of the portrait you want, and out comes a portrait of someone who never was. The featured is what displayed when I asked for “She Hulk”… I have Lum to blame for this. He started tweeting amazing looking portraits created with this tool and I just had to see what I could make with it… Some more AI portraits I have to admit, I really want to hear what old Jimi Hendrix is playing. ...

Yay! Back to rotating through my old original EverQuest image collection. We’ll try that out for awhile. I wonder if it would be sacrilege to start adding images from the games I’m playing these days? I haven’t played EQ1 much for many years.

115,261 people like Purina ONE? That’s more people than I would have ever though had TRIED Purina ONE, much less LIKED it. Do they share with their cats? Or do the cats get their own bowl? I wonder how they taste with milk?

Yesterday, Bear was caught in a bind because he didn’t have a computer to run the Champions Online beta. He didn’t know that he was standing on a computer – the Monopoly board itself. Before World War II, computers weren’t machines, they were a profession. Rooms of people-computers, usually women, would perform calculation after calculation with mechanical calculators (that could only add and subtract) and paste the results in huge books, which would be shipped to military bases and used to calculate firing solutions for weapons of war. ...

A little list of people I don’t like as much as I used to. #1: GENJER for addicting me to this STUPID KOREAN SITCOM, GOONG. Gah it’s so addicting. Must be her revenge for me getting her into the IT Crowd…

I just get a kick out of my comment spammers. I just loves them to death, always right there for me, telling me what a great writer I am, abstracting my posts and linking back to me… your kids might not like you, your spouse might not like you, your dog might not like you, but somewhere, there’s a spammer who thinks you’re great!

I don’t care, but I just felt I should say something about it. Genj, comments? Edit: Actually, I guess I do have a observation: Aside from making shag rugs from hundred dollar bills, life at Blizzard must be pretty tough. What the heck do you do for a second act? Their next MMO has to do better than World of Warcraft, or it will be seen as a failure. Ten million subscribers in the first week, or blogs and game sites around the world will have “Blizzard has LOST IT! HA HA!” as their headlines. ...

Researches in Surrey, England, have discovered how to slow light down and trap it in glass. I was immediately reminded of a story by one of the great Irish science fiction writers, Bob Shaw, in his “Light of Other Days”; Slow Glass was glass that took months or years to pass light from one side to the other, and he crafted that idea into a short story of heartbreak and loss. SciFi.com has the entire short story here… I’ve loved it since the first time I read it.