Charlie Magee

author of The Last Breath, available on Amazon.

[Charlie Magee @signald]

The Last Breath and The Last Login scifi novels: 250 million people are pushing and shoving to be the first to breathe “brain dust” so they can become superhuman. Will the future be Apocalypse Two or the Age of Imagination? https://t.co/Fc9hNqGpdU

Covers created in #blender3D.

[Charlie Magee @signald]

@blac_ai Absolutely. I’m keeping a machine with old school SD/Auto1111/Deforum so I don’t lose the looks I can get with those. I gave up on midjourney a year ago. The censorship was enough.

[Charlie Magee @signald]

@DunBradstreet Need help: existing DUNS under sole proprietor, trying to add LLC at same address. https://t.co/ktRbraS3kR is completely down. Phone support loops endlessly. Can someone assist? #DUNSnumber

[Mouin Rabbani @MouinRabbani]

Posted by former US Congressman @AdamKinzinger on Facebook. Beautifully written, in both form and substance:

Hey everyone, happy Sunday. Are you ready for some good news? I know I am.

We are told, over and over, that America has gone cold on the rest of the world. That we have decided the people on the other side of the ocean are a threat to be kept out. That the welcome mat got rolled up and put away for good.

Then a soccer team from the North African nation of Algeria showed up in Lawrence, Kansas, and within a week the whole town was wearing green.

For today's Good News Sunday, I want to tell you about one of the best things happening in this country right now. It is happening at a soccer tournament, and it has almost nothing to do with soccer.

The World Cup is here, 48 teams playing across the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Each team in the tournament picks a base camp, one town to live and train in between matches. Germany set up shop in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Spain is training in Chattanooga, Tennessee. And Algeria, playing two of its games up the road at Arrowhead, picked Lawrence and made it home for the summer.

What the people of Lawrence did with that is the part I can't stop thinking about.

It started small, with a whole town of people who had never given Algeria much thought deciding, more or less overnight, that this was their team now. Flags went up in shop windows. Folks pulled on the green jerseys. People drove over just to catch a glimpse of the players. And then a local news crew stopped an older gentleman on a Lawrence sidewalk, standing in front of a storefront draped in a whole row of Algerian flags he had clearly just gone out of his way to find.

They asked him what he actually knew about the country whose colors he was flying. He grinned, paused for a beat, and said something along the lines of: not much yet — but we want to welcome you here. There is no agenda in that man. Nothing performative. Just a neighbor, thrilled to his bones that these strangers chose his town, and perfectly at ease with the fact that he has a lot left to learn about them.

The welcome only got bigger from there.

The University of Kansas, the state's flagship school that calls Lawrence home, sent its marching band out to the training ground. They had spent the previous days learning Algeria's national anthem, note for note, and they played it as the players walked out for practice. Think about what that means for a moment.

These men are thousands of miles from their families, living out of a hotel in the American Midwest, preparing for the biggest sporting event of their professional lives. And the first thing they hear when they step onto the grass is the sound of their own country's song, played by a hundred American college kids in red and blue who learned it just for them. Several of the players stopped walking. A few of them looked like they weren't sure what to do with themselves.

Algeria did its part, too. The team opened a training session to the public and spent the afternoon out on the grass with neighborhood kids, walking them through drills, signing autographs, posing for pictures. There are children from small-town America who are going to be telling the story of the day they trained with a World Cup team for the rest of their lives. And the Algerians have spent the last week calling themselves honorary Kansans, falling hard for a corner of a state most of them could not have found on a map two months ago.

But it's not just Lawrence.

This is happening all over the country, in towns you would never expect.

The city of Alexandria, Virginia threw a street festival with an evening of Croatian food and music, and wrapped a city bus in the team's red and white. After crowds in Spokane, Washington flocked to watch Egyptian superstar Mohamed Salah, a brand-new Egyptian restaurant in town suddenly had locals lining up for food most of them had never tasted. All told, 19 American communities that are not hosting a single match still raised their hand to take in a national team and call them neighbors for a month.

There is a story we get told constantly about who we have become. That Americans have soured on outsiders. That we have decided the rest of the world is a threat. That we look at people who do not talk like us or pray like us or come from where we come from and see a problem instead of a person.

And then a college town in Kansas goes and learns every note of a North African country's national anthem, just so a group of strangers feel at home for a few weeks. An old local stands in front of a row of its flags and tells them, in so many words: we don't know much about you yet, but we are awfully glad you came.

That is who we actually are when nobody is telling us to be afraid. The band on the field, playing somebody else's song as if it were their own. The neighbor who knows next to nothing about you and waves you in anyway. We forget it sometimes. The good news is that it takes about one afternoon to remember.

That, my friends, is good news for your Sunday.
— Adam

[Charlie Magee @signald]

@aftercompile @MathiasChu Because having said we are mostly kind, it acknowledges that some of us aren't. The full release, currently, gives those people too much power to do damage. Anthropic, and Mythos presumably, want us to continue succeeding.

[Charlie Magee @signald]

@RachelBitecofer That's not how futures contracts work.

[Charlie Magee @signald]

@shane__willett @NeuralDerp @bennash @dreamina_ai @capcutapp @runwayml Probably doing it local with ComfyUI and a bunch of tools.

[Charlie Magee @signald]

@tomcolicchio I was a bartender for many years. 86 meant get rid of that guy for the night, at least. Repeat offenders get 86'd for life.

In the kitchen it meant, usually, that the seafood had gone bad: "86 the shrimp."

[Rachel Bitecofer 🗽🦆 @RachelBitecofer]

🚨🚨🚨Welcome to the Hotel California
How California Democrats nearly locked themselves out of the Governor’s Race (and still could)

California Democrats came dangerously close to pulling off one of the strangest political disasters imaginable: locking themselves out of their own governor’s race.

The culprit isn’t Republican strength. It’s California’s top-two “jungle” primary, created when voters passed California Proposition 14 in 2010.

Under this system, every candidate from every party runs on the same ballot and the top two vote-getters advance to the general election. Party labels don’t matter. That means the most important number in a crowded California primary isn’t 50 percent.

It’s second place.

[Charlie Magee @signald]

@carolecadwalla I took this screenshot of Apple Maps at 11:35 am PST. This is southern Lebanon and northern Israel. The whole of Lebanon looks like that.

[Charlie Magee @signald]

@Pitt_ATHLETICS @Pitt_VB @Pitt_WRES @Pitt_GYM @Pitt_Cheer @Pitt_DT @ROCthePanther @PittTweet That teaser is killer . . . no fair! I want to see it right now.

[Charlie Magee @signald]

@volcaholic1 It’s the resource consumption and pollution thereby to create stupid unnecessary shit like this that is the cause of much climate change. A topic you usually seem concerned about.

[Charlie Magee @signald]

@FurkanGozukara No such thing as an "emergency" CO claim that immediately halts a deployment. The application process is rigorous, can take months. While a service member can file a claim, they are required to continue their duties—including deployment—until the claim is fully adjudicated.

[Charlie Magee @signald]

@WeatherProf “Ever observed.”

Until the next one.

[Charlie Magee @signald]

@OrganizerMemes It was when entire nation in 1970s said “Why bother paying attention to civics and politics? We’re a rich nation. Kick back and don’t worry about that shit.”

[Charlie Magee @signald]

@gtconway3d He's dumb, sure, but he's doing this on purpose. Putin's orders. Netanyahu's orders.

[Charlie Magee @signald]

@TheRickWilson Trump and his pals are playing the markets off each decision, sometimes several times a day. The chaos is a money-maker. A weakened, hungry citizenry is one easy to defeat/control. No midterms. Byebye USA.

[Charlie Magee @signald]

@LibertyBlitz More likely that Iran will wake sleeper cells, they will attack because reports are that the FBI isn't being permitted to issue warnings on potential terrorism issues in CONUS & its antiterrorism personnel have been cut significantly. And then Trumpers will take advantage.

[Charlie Magee @signald]

@TheRickWilson Hey Rick, have you by chance commented on this and I missed it: There is reporting that the FBI isn't being permitted to issue warnings on potential terrorism issues in USA & that antiterrorism personnel have been cut significantly.

[Charlie Magee @signald]

@accnetwork. Split screen to show fans but not other competitors in Elevate the Stage right now? Lame.

[Charlie Magee @signald]

Hey @accnetwork. On Elevate the Stage right now You’re showing girls stretch before routines while other girls are actually competing. And why aren’t there 4 windows? C’mon