I have been to the Last Blockbuster in Bend Oregon. It’s a real treat and blast from the past. But now, you can have your own amazing movie night – by renting out the store!
Starting August 17 at 1 p.m. PST on Airbnb, Deschutes County residents can call dibs on (aka book) a totally rad, yet intimate slumber party at the world’s last BLOCKBUSTER store by requesting to book one of the three individual, one-night reservations that will take place on September 18, 19 and 20. While a movie rental will cost you $3.99, for just a penny more you can book one of these stays for $4 (plus taxes and fees) for an unlimited movie marathon.
The owner stipulates that interested parties must spend a night on the island before he’ll consider an offer. There’s also the fact it can get pretty dicey in New England winter storms from October to May when it’s ‘Not fit for man nor beast’ with storms, ice, and potential flooding. A friend only managed to stay there 3 days before coming back in the winter. There is also no running water, showers, nor heat. Bathroom facilities are an outhouse. Still, it’s a rare find because the structure could never be built with today’s new zoning laws.
If you live in Portland, you can sign up for one of the many free OPS (Original Practice Shakespeare) Festival shows. They do a bunch of summer Shakespeare shows in the local parks. Give it a go and get some culture!
I’ve been to Japan twice and loved each time I went. With the age of the internet, live streamers, and travel streamers – you can visit anywhere in the world at any time without leaving the comfort of your own home.
Over my 20 years of international travel, one thing I’ve learned is that you can never visit the same place twice. Time marches on in every country, every city, and even every life. Places you visited one year are gone and replaced the next. Cultural trends you loved in one place have been replaced with the latest new thing. Nothing stays the same.
That’s why I love checking up on the places I liked visiting using Twitch, Youtube, and other streams. Thankfully, we’re moving beyond the era of screaming, idiotic streamers into something more refined. I prefer streams from people that live in the countries and travel like locals and not tourists and Instagram influencers. The latter often rarely have any real curiosity or respect for a culture. They do culturally rude/insensitive things, forcing their way through a place with money and brashness. They pressure the goodness of kind locals just to get the shot they want and then go on to culturally pillage some other location for likes. They rarely leave a place or people the encounter better – or actually learn anything about the cultures that produced what they’re traveling through.
Here’s a few of those better channels. Do you have some?
Two of the the greatest intellectual achievements of modern times might surprise you. Both were developed by Austrian mathematician and logician Kurt Gödel in 1931. They are called simply Gödel’s incompleteness theorems and apply to all of mathematics, formal logic, and even philosophy (epistemology in particular). The implications turned out to be deeply profound and have thrown all of mathematics, logic, and even philosophy into disarray ever since. Despite almost a century of attempts, no one has been able to disprove them. In fact, almost all attempts end up supporting, and even reinforcing and expanding them. They now are accepted as almost certainly true.
The theorems sound simple enough at first blush. The first incompleteness theorem states that in any consistent formal system (mathematics, logic, physics, etc) in which a certain amount of arithmetic can be carried out, there are statements of the language of which can neither be proved nor disproved in that language. According to the second incompleteness theorem, such a formal system cannot prove that the system itself is consistent (assuming it is indeed consistent).
What is so shocking about these two simple theorem? They prove something devastating: that mathematics and logic is not complete. There will always be truths in reality that the system cannot prove. It means that some problems can NEVER be solved in some kinds of mathematics or logic. You can even try making new systems of math/logic (Algebra, Calculus, etc) but they ALL will have things they cannot prove. It meant that you might work on a mathematical, physics, or logic problem your whole life, and none of the systems we know about might be able to solve it – even though it might have a solution. There might even be some problems that if we make infinite numbers of logical or mathematical systems, we might STILL not be able to find a solution.
Veritasium did an absolutely fabulous video on the topic that’s worth a listen.
It blew my mind when I learned about Godel’s incompleteness theorems in college. Knowing that our tools are limited is frightening at first. It completely unseats our certainty that known mathematics or science as we have today is sufficient. In fact, we know it is NOT sufficient. In fact, we know that we’ll almost certainly have to make more logical systems for the rest of eternity. We can never have a grand unified theory of everything. There is no ‘bottom’ to reach.
Yet this opens the reality that there will ALWAYS be something new to learn and know. There will be countless other models that might work for problem we have but we haven’t found yet – even though each one will be flawed and incomplete in their own way.
Many purists find this knowledge to be disastrous. It rips the rug out from anyone that asserts we can know everything. Others were excited by the fact there will always be new developments. Others are left in awe that even our very universe/reality itself lacks the limits we have. Still others have taken this as proof of the infinite. I know at least one mathematician that believed it gave us proof of God.
I do believe in God – without question. Many people forget that the vast majority of modern science was developed by believers in God that saw no conflict with discovery of properties of the physical world. The idea that faith and science are incompatible is a very modern and absolutely incorrect train of thought.
Instead, I see this reality as much like ourselves. None of us are perfect, yet each of us has a uniqueness that might just express a great truth no one else in history has seen or could see. This is why life is so infinitely precious and a tragedy to all when even one life is lost. This is why it is a crime to all humanity when we decide suffering is reason to end a life or that a disadvantage life is a life not worth living when we have such contrary examples and saw exactly where that idea led too in the early 20th century during WW 2.
I’ve always wanted to own an old Vectrex, but the Vecfever cartridge amps that desire up to 11. Not only can it let you program your own Vectrex games, but it also allows you to play actual arcade vector-based ROM chips like Star Wars, Battlezone, Tempest, Lunar Lander, and many other vector-based graphics classics.
Check out this wonderful video (and many other fascinating retro computing videos) from the guys at The Cave.
You can also replace the CPU of an old Vectrex with PiTrex – a Raspberry Pi based emulator.
There’s also a lot of replacement parts from tenpencearcade if you need some replacement Vectrex parts.
Not a very good painter or artist? You don’t need to be anymore. Like some of my other postings on AI art generation, there are more and better tools creating art every day.
Enter nVidia Canvas AI. It has been offered for free and runs on just about all recent nVidia RTX graphics cards. Give it a shot.
