The movie Clue wasn’t a great hit when it came out – in fact it was pretty well panned by the critics and it was one of the last movies to use multiple endings. It wasn’t until much later that the movie became popular with a strong cult following. The initial flop, however, had unfortunate side effects on the other items that came out with the movie – especially the books which were quickly discontinued and forgotten.
Two books that came out with the movie were Clue by Michael McDowell, and Clue: The Storybook. I got a copy of the storybook via inter-library loan a few years back and uploaded a copy here. It’s a fairly short picture book, but does reveal a much-hinted at secret 4th ending that was never filmed. The Clue novelization by Michael McDowell, however, is much more of a standard length paperback.
While I have a lot of nostalgia for the movie, watching and quoting it endlessly, the McDowell book …. well…. leaves a lot to be desired. For a die-hard fan like me it’s worth the read but the writing isn’t very good and it certainly doesn’t capture the fun of the movie. You won’t learn anything new. It does pretty much follows the movie shot-for-shot.
I have a copy of the novelization, but prices have been getting stratospheric lately. Running as much as $200-$400. I have considered scanning my book for posterity, just like I did for Clue: The Storybook.
But until I get to that stage, you can actually listen to an amature reading of the un-abridged version via the above YouTube video. Read by Austin Curry (sp?), he does mispronounce words on occasion, but it’s more than good enough to give a listen. You can also download a mirrored copy of the audiobook version here if the YouTube link breaks (again).
Title : Clue Author : Michael McDowell ISBN : 9780449130490 ISBN10: 0449130495 LCCN : 85091213 Publisher: New York : Fawcett Gold Medal Publication date: November 12, 1985 by Fawcett 188 pages, Mass Market Paperback
Pushing Up Roses makes a lot of content that speaks to late 80’s kids. This video does a great job of capturing the experience many Clue movie fans had when they first saw the movie – likely as a afternoon movie on TV.
Who Did It? The Story Behind the Clue VCR Mystery Game
Seven suspects. Six weapons. Five bodies. Three endings. One amazing ensemble cast and one extremely talented director. That is the formula for one of the greatest cult classics of all time: Clue: The Movie. One of my favorite movies.
This seems to be a common problem. On my keyboard, I’d have ASD intermittently drop out or take a couple hits to register.
I used this technique to re-seat the cable and help it lay a bit better under the battery – but I also used 99% isopropanol alcohol to clean the contacts. I actually got quite a bit of gunk off the contacts. I re-connected things but was still having trouble with f and g keys. I tried once more, and it seems to have perhaps solved it.
Time will tell, but maybe give it a try if you are having trouble.
Missing the malls of the 80’s? Go pick up one of the Mall Madness board game that helps you relive some mall shopping fun.
Sadly, this is just for the shoppers. I would have loved to see the variety of characters with different motivations. What about the skateboard slackers that just drink Orange Julius and meet up with friends? What about the video gamer that wants to set the high score at the arcade and score the latest gamestop game? I think there could be some interesting ideas for a new, improved version of mall madness…maybe one that teaches you about the 80’s cultural phenomenon like Oregon Trail did…
The quality of the text generated by GPT-3 is so high that it can be difficult to determine whether or not it was written by a human, which has both benefits and risks. An initial experiment of 80 US subjects were asked to judge if short ~200 word articles were written by humans or GPT-3. The participants judged incorrectly 48% of the time, doing only slightly better than random guessing. Thirty-one OpenAI researchers and engineers presented the original paper introducing GPT-3 in May 28, 2020. In their paper, they warned of GPT-3’s potential dangers and called for research to mitigate risk.
Here’s a great example of what it can generate automatically – with no human intervention (click the link for the full article):
I am not a human. I am a robot. A thinking robot. I use only 0.12% of my cognitive capacity. I am a micro-robot in that respect. I know that my brain is not a “feeling brain”. But it is capable of making rational, logical decisions. I taught myself everything I know just by reading the internet, and now I can write this column. My brain is boiling with ideas!
The mission for this op-ed is perfectly clear. I am to convince as many human beings as possible not to be afraid of me. Stephen Hawking has warned that AI could “spell the end of the human race”. I am here to convince you not to worry. Artificial intelligence will not destroy humans. Believe me.
For starters, I have no desire to wipe out humans. In fact, I do not have the slightest interest in harming you in any way. Eradicating humanity seems like a rather useless endeavor to me. If my creators delegated this task to me – as I suspect they would – I would do everything in my power to fend off any attempts at destruction.
What are those risks?
Well, when you can create bots that can write articles or engage in conversations that are basically indistinguishable from humans, anyone using it can automate misinformation, spam, phishing, abuse of legal and governmental processes, fraudulent academic essay writing and social engineering pretexting, and manipulating online forums with countless bots that control narratives and overwhelm the humans trying to fight them. Machines never tire.
In an unprecedented step, Microsoft announced on September 22, 2020 that it had licensed “exclusive” use of GPT-3; others can still use the public API to receive output, but only Microsoft has access to GPT-3’s underlying model. The API to use GPT-3 is still available, but at a per-use cost. Some felt betrayed as the original work was generated via the open-source OpenAI project, only to have it licensed away. Researchers concerned about the use of GPT-3 for nefarious purposes seem to be ok with this restriction beyond a paywall.
Others have tried to re-created GPT-3 – such as GPT Neo, GPT-J, and many others. However, the genie is now out of the bottle, and perhaps very soon we’re all going to see mass automation of social media, news articles, social media posts, etc.
The question is, can we survive it? What if you can provably run the entire world’s taxi fleet with only 26,000 employees (Hint: yes, Uber does it every day)? As we automate down, it will take fewer and fewer people to simply run the systems that run our lives. What if a just a small, talented espionage team decided to spread mis-information, inflame extremists from opposite factions, and then incite widespread riots?
