This… Is BGNN

Things you might want to know, for Mar 25, 2023:

• Is Reality-TV Sex Safe? — Only vaguely. And that’s the point.
• AI voice generation helps mod Fallout 4’s narrow dialogue choices — Vocal deepfakery and AI synthesis are the best things to ever happen to RPG modding.
• Idaho GOP Women Deny Girls Free Tampons in School — This is one of those stances on a mundane issue that’s so fundamentally stupid that the motivations behind it are laid bare: the only reason to oppose this stuff is a disdain for women that feels ripped from the pages of Leviticus.
• ChatGPT gets “eyes and ears” with plugins that can interface AI with the world — The chatbot describes a live webcam feed to a blind person… a good thing. The chatbot watches the live webcam feed for someone’s ex-girlfriend’s license plate so she can be stalked using public data… not so good. Gonna be a tricky time out there, kids.
• SURPRISE! Ronnie Ortiz-Magro Returns to Jersey Shore, Offers Major Life Update — That wasn’t a return so much as a perfunctory “there he is, he’s not on the show, next question” clearing of the table for Sammie’s imminent return.

• Knock at the Cabin, Nope, Netflix’s Furies, and every other movie you can stream from home this weekend — I’m going to watch all three when I get the chance.
• TikTok’s sludge content isn’t just for short attention spans — I feel like the article is trying too hard to convince me that this is something worth caring about when it almost certainly isn’t.
• Porn Studies class at Temple investigates ‘the other sex ed’
• Brandon Sanderson Is Your God — This whole incident —WIRED writer crafts incredibly snarky, disdainful look into the life of an incredibly uninteresting fantasy author, fans get pissed, writer says to chill— is pointlessly dumb. Unless the point was selling a lot more books by that uninteresting author, ‘cause I’m sure he’s gonna see a mini-boom in sales.
• A first look at using iMessage from a PC with Microsoft’s Phone Link app — Well, I guess… if that’s the best you can do… it’ll do.

• A parent found that “The Bible” is full of stuff Utah’s book-banning laws prohibit, and filed a formal complaint to have it removed — Reminder: Lot saved his daughters from a night of sexual assault by throwing his household guests to a rape-mob, only to have those same daughters later get Lot drunk and rape him after their mom was murdered by God for the sin of having peripheral vision and a neck.
• Cops raided Afroman’s home, then sued him for using footage in music videos — Stay out of a man’s house and he won’t bother to film you.
• Nvidia quietly boosts the video encoding capabilities of GeForce GPUs
• Queen + Adam Lambert Announce 2023 North American ‘Rhapsody’ Tour Dates — Adam has been the for-all-intents-and-purposes frontman of Queen for over a decade now, a fact that is only slightly less alarming than my sudden awareness that I’ve known about the existence of Kelly Clarkson for over twenty years.