Michael Hopcroft

Blow up the Earth. It obstructs my view of Venus. NT: Subtle signs the mission commander of the Terraform Mars project is out of their mind.

Invent Full Conversion Cybernetics, using my crewmates and myself as experimental subjects. The real fun begins when we get home... Q: What did you do to be sent on a one-way excursion to Mars with nothing by snarky robots for company?

ACharles Aznavour song I have not heard before -- and since it is in French, I cannot share what he is singing about. All I can say is that beauty of the song is astoundingly beautiful, and I am happy to share iot.

Preparation outside of game time is a key. As your players to have their characters ready in advance. Hero character creation is best done one-on-one with you, so the players can exhibit surprise at what their new teammates can do. Keep in mind that once characters are made the math basically consists of making Skill Rolls and Attacks. If you've done your homework, these are absuyrdly easay to calculate. That's because the heavy lifting is done by the character sheet during creation. And the more NPC material you have laid out, the easier YOUR evening becomes and you can settle in to the age-old game of "You think you' ve got me, Doctor dishonest Answers of my Thesis? Well, you just watch this, while I...." -- those great gotcha moments that both sides can bring. Hero has math, but it's top-loaded. And even then it's far from rocket science.

Q: It's a bird! It's a plane! It's;... Los Alamos Labs? A: Batter my heart, Three-Person God!

Deep One Filets, made right at your table. Mind you, the Deep One might object, but they're a "servitor race" anyway. NT: R'lyeh as a Tourist Attraction.

The Nuggets will be interesting. Joker has the potential to be a Tim Duncan-style player who does everything well and wins relentlessly even if his stat lines pale in comparison with the superstars of seasons part. But the Heat certainly have a puncher's chance -- if they can take even one game in Denver the series becomes a dogfight. I would love to see Vegas win a title its second time around..

I did not see anything in those five pictures that would change my opinion, if anything they might strengthen it. Once I was at a convention with an Artist's Alley and commissioned a piece from one of the artists. The thing is she never heard of the characters or series I was wanting art for. Nonetheless, she did her own research and produced a pretty good piece of art to my estimation. Does it match the original series I commissioned it for? No, not at all. That's not what you get when you hire a fan artist. But danged if it didn't establish a mood, and it looked like something drawn by a human being with intellect and feelings. If I were to ask an AI to produce something remotely like it (assuming the AI could even find the base models), it would have the same dead look of the American Gothic pieces at the start of the thread. It might (but probably won't) have no technical flaws, but it will lack the "life" found in good human-created art. A computer or bank of computers can be a great tool and boon for a creative artist or artists. I can cite the first ten minutes of WALL-E or the horrific experiments portrayed in Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3. These are in the hands of skilled and creative human artists. An algorithm did not direct WALL-E -- a human being did. Now imagine the much more ambitious project of "asking" am AI to produce a feature-length motion picture out of a brief outline. You know somebody will want to try it someday, as a novelty release if nothing else. You could feed it really obscure and challenging terms like "Make of a 150-minute film adaptation of Moby Dick starring 1930s Orson Welles as Captain Ahab and Joseph Cotton as Starbuck" You could even up the difficulty by asking it to case Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson as Queequeg (a request he would be offended by in real life.) You could even give it access to every image of these actors available, enough voice samples to completely replicate the actors' speech, every record to be found on how mariners dressed in 1847, everything there is to know about white sperm whales, etc. After that, cut it loose and let it do its thing. I could tell you right away that it would turn out garbage, or at least something that will never remind anyone of Gregory Peck's magnificent Ahab. Think of the animated version of The King and I and comparing it to Yul Brynner's King of Siam in the flesh. {posthumously over dubbing Brynner's simulated voice over the animated footage would make the finished product even worse. And that doesn't even begin to mention the legal and ethical concerns of copying a human actor after their deaths (something Disney pioneered with Peter Cushing's "performance" in Rogue One. Even with the Cushing estate's approval anyone who had actually seen Peter Cushing act in roles other than Tarkin (such as his Sherlock Holmes) could absolutely tell the difference. So this Turing Test of cinema would almost certainly end up in abject failure. And if people watched this theoretical movie enough that itr made money for the studio, they would be emboldened to make all sorts of films the actors would have wanted no part of in real life. If Peter Cushing had lived to be asked if he wanted to play Tarkin again, he would have said no in no uncertain terms.

Not only do these pictures have no financial value, they have almost no aesthetic value. An experienced artist, or even a consumer of art with no real training, would throw them aside (or throw them away) because they are really, really terrible. Someone may have thought that their idea was clever, but they produce no feeling -- certainly not the speculation and even terror induced by the original. They have nothing like an idea, nothing to say, only a pale imitation of whatever feeling original art with the same topics would attempt to convey. The farmer's hundred-yard stare and the unease in the eyes of the woman next him are gone. Let me propose a counterexample of a human being taking a piece of art -- a song from the musical Six -- and making something unique and special with it with real character and ideas (in this case, the tragic story of how the life of Henry VIII's fifth wife was ruined by the men in her short, sad life) in a way that the lyrics alone don't quite. The technique is at best art-school freshman. The effect, though, at least in my mind, has power and resonance. Teach an algorithm to do that and maybe you'll have AI art.

The worst part of it is that art -- real art, from real artists -- is going to be something created by, and commissioned by, hobbyists. On;ly the very best-connected artists will be able to earn a living, and will have to work at the whim of their rich and powerful patrons. Meanwhile the general public gets a steady dose of cookie-cutter hackwork (for which the actual hacks do not require payment) that they think they had a role in making. ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION FOR THE VISUAL ARTS, INC. v. GOLDSMITH ET AL., the Fair Use case recently decided by the SCOTUS offers a grounding for treating AI art, which works by piecing together images from the Internet willy-nilly into your request, as a form of plagiarism as opposed to Fair Use. Unfortunately it makes an even stronger case for fanfiction and fanart also being violations of copyright law, which would cause irreparable damage to fan culture in general (as even cosplay would be illegal under many possible interpretations of Warhol v. Goldsmith.).

It is certainly a beautiful film, with lots of visual intensity in every frame. But that did not help me much in terms of understanding what I was seeing. Especially the ending, which left me with a sort of Schrödinger's Knight sensation.

I don't believe your joking. So you're Murder Squatters, but it's all right because the Orcish family you just slew was loud and obnoxious and the HOA would like you better?

I watched that race in Monaco. To my American mind, I marveled that the race hadn't been called when the downpour came, and cars started sliding all over the drack. It is fortunate there were no injury crashes. How could you race in these conditions, just trying to see enough that you can avoid smashing into the car ahead of you when your visor is being hit with so much water you can barely make out your own gear switch?

With "real" humans couldn't really expect to be around much longer either. Protectors of reality fail even if they only lose once.

Q: Why should I follow your advice, doc, and have all the bits of my brain surgically removed? A: If this is the Hero This City Deserves, I'll take my chances and move my family to Manchester, New Hampshire.

Q: And how is your field painti9ng going, Mister Van Gogh? A: It'll take more than a handful of Scooby Snacks to make me do it this time!

For Mother's Day I brought some DVDs (I really need to get Mom a Blu-Ray player) and dinner. The one we ended up seeing was the original French comedy The Tall Blonde Man with One Black Shoe. The movie was an art house staple while I was growing up, but my mother had never seen it. It's a lovely combination of frothy comedy and Watergate-era political satire with a surveillance state run amok. Infighting within the French Intelligence services has led to the head of the agency looking to get the goods on a treacherous subordinate by setting a trap -- he tells his most trusted aide to go to Orly Airport and choose a random stranger to see if the rival takes the bait that this is a supposed "superspy" that poses a threat to the traitor's plans. His random choice is a man with shoes mismatched -- he points out :"The Tall Blonde Man with One Black Shoe" and steps aside to watch what happens. Sure enough, the bait is taken and the subordinate's entire crew devotes itself to discovering everything that can conceivably be known about this man, who turns out to be the Principal Violinist for a Paris orchestra. He is in fact trying to keep a secret -- that he's engaged in an affair with the wife of one of his friends -- but it seems that everything they watch him do or overhear him say leaves the man even further convinced that the musician poses a deadly threat. And the fiddler? He has no idea what's going on, how the toothpaste and shaving cream in his tubes got mixed up, or why the friend he is cuckolding thinks his wife is having sex with someone in the back of a florist's van. Add to this the fact that the violinist i8s played by Pierre Richard, one of French film's greatest clowns at the peak of his powers. Fortunately, this was the original French cut, subtitled, and is sounds a LOT better than an appalling dub for English-0language TV. That it is just as relevant a piece of satire as it weas in 1974 is profoundly saddening. But the movie is hilarious.

Funny, I remember in the old Colloseum days the Lions were always the safe bet. The NFL practically owes its existence to organized gambling which they dared not acknowledge while it was a.) illegal, and b.) controlled by organized crime. They attempted to half-heartedly keep the players away from it because in those days it was impossible for any athlete to play with two broken kneecaps. There is no bottle. The Genie was always there. Only now he dresses like a respectable businessman and not like a gangster.

I'm Charles Windsor, and I am running for President. What do you mean I'm King Charles III? I have an eyepatch, an evil scar down my cheek, and a greasepaint moustache! The King has none of these things! NT: How Foxbat plans to make his trademark big, splashy entrance at the Coronation.

Q: So two by two equals -- what did you want two plus two to be anyway? A: Two times two equals five for sufficiently large values of Two.

Instead of milk on your corn flakes, try cola. On second thought, don't--Cola on corn flakes is nasty. Really, really nasty.

Q: And what do you mean hiring Erwin Schrödinger to run the guillotine? A: They're going to send you back to Mother in a cardboard box! You'd better run!

Q: OW! Hey, why did you have to break my hand? A: Audience Participation Boxing.

Q: Trickel-Down Economics doesn't seem to be working, does it? A: In just seven days I will make you a man!

Q: Is it true that the gap between rich and poor in American is widening every year? A: Him. He's John Galt.