Twenty Aught Vision
Previously, on Phil’s Newsletter: #OAK2021 took off. It was almost movie night.
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I use the Apple Notes app with iCloud syncing to keep track of topics and links for these newsletters. On Thursday mornings I wake up and start writing, as I am now. Like every Thursday morning today I got up and took a shower and then at about 7:30am I pulled open my notes app and… nothing was here. Not a synchronization error, nor some missing content. I just hadn’t saved or written anything for the newsletter this week. At all.
So I started looking back at the week and if I’d done ANYTHING and it turns out I had. I feel like my pandemic brain shut down for the week. I worked, I had conversations, I watched wrestling and wrote press releases and campaign updates, I got mildly intoxicated with friends over the internet. I bought Valheim, a new kind of… Viking Minecraft game, but didn’t play it. I wrote a bunch of words for clients and myself. Just no newsletter.
So here we are. Another blank week full of activity. Events landing and beading together and rolling off my smooth pandemic brain.
So many of us have been trapped in this holding pattern. Can’t make real plans. Can’t say goodbye to the loved ones who keep dying, invisibly and far away. Beading together and rolling off of the world and into our smooth pandemic-brain memories.
It didn’t have to be this way and it’s really fucking with me. None of this is a surprise, and somehow it still hurts waking up every day and knowing it’s not over, can’t be over, won’t be over. The realization, like most glimpses of truth, doesn’t help: When this pandemic “ends” the world that was will not return. It died in the pandemic, too.
The Ghost of Movie Nights Past and Future
Last weekend was a RetroStrange Movie Night weekend! We featured a couple of Italian Space Operas, which is a fun phrase to type even after the 100th time. A decent number of people watched with us. A relatively decent time was had by all. The Bodega Cats people like us:
The next episode, on March 20th, will feature some more old school tokusatsu of the rubber suit variety- Gamera .vs. Barugon and Majin the Monster of Terror both originally released in 1966. I have always been a sucker for kaiju, and though I’ve seen all the Gamera movies I haven’t seen Majin yet. Movie Night teaches us all so much.
1993 Divergent League Baseball Postseason
Congratulations to the Toronto Blue Jays, who with their 5-4 victory over the Royals have won the last remaining AL Wild Card spot. The stage is now set for the Postseason. This Friday we’ll have a look back at the regular season, a new episode of the podcast and go over the winners of the various season awards.
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#OAK2021 Takes Off, Model Marketplace Launches
If you wanna follow along with the competition I’m helping run, where 250+ teams around the world build awesome new solutions with Computer Vision and Artificial Intelligence I suggest you bookmark the #OAK2021 hashtag on LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter. Some farming conference still has all the “top” posts on Instagram with that hashtag. We must defeat them.
The competition wasn’t the only OpenCV AI Kit stuff I worked on this week! Yesterday we announced and invited Backers to an invite-only online CV/AI model market, the OpenCV AI Marketplace. The site features pro-grade AI models, tested and benchmarked for the OpenCV AI Kit, and with live in-browser previews of how any ‘ol image will be interpreted by a given algorithm. I don’t think anything else like it exists today and it’s gonna be huge.
There is a waitlist, but I might know a guy…
The Music Section
Somehow I’m still using Last.fm which is a website that nobody under the age of 35 even knows exists. Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of The Kinks and getting back into the habit of listening to entire R.E.M. albums as I work.
I remember acquiring every R.E.M. album. I remember walking into a used CD shop in Kansas and picking up Murmur. I remember getting my vinyl copy of Fables of the Reconstruction at Recycled Records before it closed. I remember kissing a pretty girl while Automatic For The People played from the car stereo. I remember collecting the tapes and CDs, because you still had to do that then in order to hear the music you wanted.
Some of these memories are poison to me now but I don’t want to let them go. Turning away is not healing. Sometimes you just have to pull up your collar and face the hurt. Easier said than done.
The Good Links
The links are a little anemic this week. I wonder if it will make a difference.
Some very beautiful game-inspired black and white phone wallpapers
A massive breach of camera start-up Verkada exposed over 150,000 “private” cameras to the public. Surveillance culture is utterly broken and we have to turn away from it now.
Foone has now gotten Police Quest II running on an actual old police car terminal and it is delightful
I love everything about this tree generator. It is a very soothing software toy
BrooklynVegan looks back at Cock Sparrer’s album “Shock Troops” an all-time classic and one of my top 5. There’s a sick vinyl reissue coming out soon
Quinn Norton wrote at length this week about another pandemic thing. I’m just going to quote from it: ”When all the people who worked and sacrificed to slow Covid-19 down encounter all the people who didn’t, it’s going to be a new and vicious split in society, and it’s going to take a generation to heal.”
Like I said last week… hurt calcifies if you don’t tend to it. Tend to your hurts, babies. There is much to do and you’re gonna need every bit of yourself for whatever the hell comes next.
Me? Smooth brain or no, I will see you here again next week. Thank you for reading.
— Phil