Previously on Phil’s Newsletter: Divergent League Baseball 1999 came back, it was Movie Night (and will be again!), we crammed some stuff onto Floppy Disks.
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*coughing up dust* Welcome back to the continuing adventures of Phil (I’m Phil) across time and space (this is time and space). This issue is all about getting you back up to speed on my various interests, projects and travels.
Fast-forwarding: I went to CVPR in Vancouver and found the city to be quite charming indeed. I got to go to a few SF Giants games with friends new and old, and got to spend time with some pals from back home. I did a metric tonne of work, made some new friends and, sadly, lost some along the way. I’ve been playing Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and it is incredible. Also, Baldur’s Gate III is extremely good.
Onward and upward. Or at least, forward and not down.
The big news work-wise is the launch of OpenCV AI Competition 2023. We’ve run these big yearly Computer Vision & AI contests each of the last 3 years, and given away over $200,000 in prizes to the community. This year we’re teaming with Hackster.io to host the competition on their awesome community platform. It’d help me a lot if you shared and liked and subscribed to the new official OpenCV.org YouTube channel, which this is the first video on. It’s where you’ll find the continuing OpenCV Live webinar series I produce as well. So far a little over 700 people have signed up to participate. The deadline is August 31st, I’m hoping we can hit 1000. I’m not sure yet how good the hit rate is in terms of signups .vs. actual projects submitted, but I’m excited to find out.
I wrote, edited, and narrated the launch video which is embedded above. Yes, I am still available for narration and voiceover work. Hit me up.
It has been a super exciting postseason in Divergent League Baseball ‘99, my atemporal fantasy baseball league which uses historical rosters and is simulated in MLB The Show. Moving on to the playoffs this year were the following teams and their owners:
AL Wild Card: Seattle (Derek Lipkin) vs New York Yankees (Liam)
ALDS: Detroit (Joseph Nelson) vs Houston (Derek Arthur)
ALDS: Boston (Austin) vs Winner of Seattle vs New York Yankees
NL Wild Card: Montreal (Charles Nelson) vs San Francisco (Henry)
NLDS: Cincinnati (Sandra Wirick) vs Arizona (Tony)
NLDS: New York Mets (Phil Nelson) vs Winner of Montreal vs San Francisco
A few teams have moved on already. You can watch the games on YouTube:
The Expos defeated the Giants, but fell to the Amazin’ Mets in 3 straight games. Incidentally, I’m the team owner of the Mets.
The Diamondbacks lost to Cincinnati after an uncharacteristic total collapse by The Big Unit who gave up 5 runs in the 1st inning.
So our NLCS series is Mets .vs. Reds
The ALCS is TBD vs TBD, with both AL series going 5 games. Yankees .vs. Red Sox Game 5 and Tigers .vs. Astros Game 5 will be broadcast live next week on the YouTube channel.
Divergent League Baseball also has a Facebook group where we post the games and fun bit of baseball trivia and historical oddities.
For the 46th edition of our monthly watch-a-long series we are watching The Death Kiss starring Bela Lugosi and Walk The Dark Street starring Chuck Connors. For the uninitiated, on Movie Night we pick some shorts, a couple of new (to the channel) feature films, and stream them at a specific time on RetroStrange TV Channel One. We also open up audio chat on my Discord server for folks who want to come riff on the movie and generally crack wise.
As always you can watch ad-free, tracker-free, surveillance-free, at RetroStrange.TV. RetroStrange also has a YouTube channel where we upload a lot of the public domain films and other content we use on the channel.
I didn’t like the single-coil tone on the Traveler guitar, so I replaced it with a Telecaster-style “lipstick” pickup. It was a simple job, but I wrote it up for Hackster with some pics and a demo.
Ugh. Yeah, I bought another Telecaster. Fender had a 20% off sale and I was in a moment of weakness. It’s a Fender Venter 50s Telecaster Modified, meaning it has a modern 9.5” fretboard radius and hot-rodded pickups, plus a cool little push button in the volume knob that gives it a sort of “strangled” tone. I am in love with it. Somebody stop me. I fear I may kill (my checkbook) again.
I have started yet another YouTube channel called Old School Heel, which I’m using to post vintage pro wrestling VHS tapes and LaserDiscs that I’m capturing direct from the original hardware. Subscribe and thumbs up and share it and stuff!
That’s all for now. It has been a wild *checks watch* 6 months or so. I have been busy. Thanks for sticking with me, I’ll try to make it worth your while. Since you’ve read this far, let’s trade war stories: What’s the biggest thing that happened with you since January? Pop ‘em in the comments.
Yours,
Phil Nelson
Wizard Tower Gamma, South of Market, San Francisco, California, United States of America, Earth, Hell
2023.08.13