This… Is BGNN

Things you might want to know, for Feb 24, 2023:

• The Last of Us is finding apocalyptic meaning where The Walking Dead couldn’t — I don’t know if he ever explicitly said it, but it’s obvious TWD was designed to be an open-ended, long-term source of income for Robert Kirkman… it was a creator-owned property that he could write for and earn from as long as he liked. Then it became a TV show, Kirkman became fabulously wealthy, and he ended the comics. There was never much room in there for him to focus on a single POV, or give the series as a whole any kind of thematic goal other than “survive another year”. Comparing it to TLOU isn’t really fair to either show.
• Alec Baldwin enters not guilty plea over Halyna Hutchins death
• You already speak fluent computer code according to Nvidia’s CEO — Perhaps the single greatest, real advancement that ChatGPT and its kin are bringing to the table is the ability to convert human speech into functional code, or convert from one computer language to another. For all the scary possibilities over the horizon, the ability for average people to automate their lives could yield massive, positive change in the world. Then again, that was the plan for democratizing access to broadcast speech, and look how that turned out…
• Baldur’s Gate, one of my favourite CRPGs of all time, will be free-to-keep for Prime subs next month — Hey, I may finally play this 20 year old game! Next up: Half-Life 2! 😂
• The Greatest Unexpected NBA Performances
• Marilyn Manson Accuser Ashley Morgan Smithline Now Supports Manson — This is where we deploy one of my guiding principles: it’s possible that Evan Rachel Wood was abused by Brian Warner, and Ashley Morgan wasn’t. The truth doesn’t have protagonists, only characters.
• James Webb telescope captures ancient galaxies that theoretically shouldn’t exist — Any time we find out anything about the early universe, someone says “this may upset our understanding of the early universe” because frankly, our understanding of the early universe is mostly based on recent observations, calculations with missing variables that we don’t know are missing, and hubris.
• Stephen King’s It is getting an HBO Max prequel series set in Derry — I loved the book, liked the Tim Curry TV movie from the 90s, and couldn’t make it through that mess with the Stranger Things kid. So honestly, I have no idea how to feel about this.