Random Thought and Chatter.

[moonbeam]

Hello. I just wanted to pop in to say hello. Hello. Goodbye.

[Clarke]

[Empty Glass]

^ Glad I'm not the only one who thought of that!

[iron_jones]

Please no Beatles.

[moonbeam]

Originally Posted by iron_jones

Please no Beatles.

What's wrong with The Beatles?

[moonbeam]

I just realized something. You know how in "The Wizard of Oz", the Scarecrow is the first person Dorothy meets in Oz, and he's looking for his brain? And at the end, she says that she'll miss him most of all? It's because he's meant to foreshadowing that the whole adventure is in her mind. Brain=Mind.

[moonbeam]

So, I saw "Jurassic World" last week, and it pretty much reawakened my love of dinosaurs. And it also made me remember this Brontosaurus plushie I had when I was real young, and I miss it a lot. Here's a picture of it. Mine was purple though.

[Cyvaris]

So, has anyone played around wit the new "Deep Dream" program stuff? The images are insane. Feeding Avatar stills into it is fun as well.
https://dreamscopeapp.com/i/142825

[moonbeam]

Originally Posted by Cyvaris

So, has anyone played around wit the new "Deep Dream" program stuff? The images are insane. Feeding Avatar stills into it is fun as well.
https://dreamscopeapp.com/i/142825

That's crazy looking. Everything is turning into a face.

[Cyvaris]

Yes, it's a series of filters revealing how a computer "sees" images. Shortest version, we've trained a computer to tell us what is a picture of a "dog" by showing it millions of pictures we've told it are a "dog" and now it sees dogs everywhere.

More examples
https://deepdreamin.s3-eu-west-1.ama...bc1c831b10.jpg
https://dreamscopeapp.com/i/302259
https://dreamscopeapp.com/i/302428

Yes...I think Avatar works well with this.

[moonbeam]

Originally Posted by Cyvaris

Yes, it's a series of filters revealing how a computer "sees" images. Shortest version, we've trained a computer to tell us what is a picture of a "dog" by showing it millions of pictures we've told it are a "dog" and now it sees dogs everywhere.

More examples
https://deepdreamin.s3-eu-west-1.ama...bc1c831b10.jpg
https://dreamscopeapp.com/i/302259
https://dreamscopeapp.com/i/302428

Yes...I think Avatar works well with this.

Awesome!

[Raptor]

First full non-stitched image of Earth since the Blue Marble picture taken by Apollo 17 astronauts. Looking at this, I'd like to quote Carl Sagan.

Originally Posted by Carl Sagan

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

[Marvellous Chester]

Well, that's the end of Avatar-Forums. Bloody good while it lasted.

[Sight Unseen]

Originally Posted by The Silver Stag

Well, that's the end of Avatar-Forums. Bloody good while it lasted.

I wonder how much Lon is asking for the domain. Also, this isn't the first time that AF has gone dark; I'm sure it will pop back up eventually.

[Crickett]

Originally Posted by The Silver Stag

Well, that's the end of Avatar-Forums. Bloody good while it lasted.

It was going to go down eventually. I'd never donated money to anything that wasn't a charity before. Not a single go fund me or patreon or anything like that. But I gave $20 to AF once. That wasn't the kind of thing I was going to be able to do on a regular basis and that forum didn't have a large enough active userbase to support it via donations over the long run. It would have been one thing if Avatar had been able to develop an expanded universe capable of attracting that kind of audience, but we don't even have a sequel yet and we won't for years.

It was nice to be able to think of myself as an "Avatar-forums original" though. I hope the regular posters there can find their way here.