HERE’S ANOTHER PIC OF GOV. WHITMER IN THE OVAL OFFICE WITH TRUMP (At Least We Think That’s Her):
To boldly go where Monty Python has gone before:
April 12, 2025
WE CAN BE HEROES, IF JUST FOR ONE PROMPT: What Is the ChatGPT action figure prompt?
Action figures — small, poseable dolls often modeled after superheroes or movie characters – are popular collectibles, especially for fans of Marvel and DC. With this new tool, you’re no longer limited to fictional icons. Now, you can see what your own collectible figure might look like.
How to make your AI action figureGo to the ChatGPT website or app.
Upload your photo, then enter the following prompt:
“Use this photo of me to create an action figure of myself in a blister pack, in the style like a premium collectible toy. The figure should be standing up and have a relaxed, friendly smile. The blister pack should have a header with the text ‘[ACTION FIGURE NAME]’ in large letters and a subheading of ‘[SUBHEADING]’ below it. Include accessories in compartments to the side of the figure: [LIST OF ACCESSORIES].”
Not surprisingly, quite a few pundits had fun with this new feature last night, such as these from Gabriella Hoffman and Karol Markowicz:
(Yes, of course I tried it as well. But my ChatGPT action figure left me thinking that I had a bright future in Hollywood as J.K. Simmons’ stand-in.)
Also not surprisingly, while simultaneously generating loads of action figure versions of themselves, some lefty Websites are tut-tutting this new feature: The action figure trend is the latest way people are misusing the power of AI – and I wish I could stop doing it.
This is all good fun, but there are concerns.
First of all, AI image generation is not without cost. Sure, there’s the price of a ChatGPT Plus membership (around $20 / £16 / AU$30 a month), although you can generate around three images a day on the free tier, depending on current demand. Perhaps more importantly, there’s the cost of AI models like 4o.
A Queens University Library report claims, “Artificial Intelligence models consume an enormous amount of water and emit large amounts of carbon in their production, training, operation, and maintenance.” Another Cornell University study calls out AI’s growing freshwater use footprint, claiming “training the GPT-3 language model in Microsoft‘s state-of-the-art U.S. data centers can directly evaporate 700,000 liters of clean freshwater.”
If you don’t think these AI trends and the memes they spawn are attracting wide use, stressing the system, and possibly eating natural resources, just look at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s comments.
We have a joke in my house that every time we create one of these AI memes, it kills a tree. That’s hyperbole, of course, but it’s safe to say that AI content generation is not without costs, and perhaps we should be thinking about it and using it differently[.]
Self-styled environmentalists are burning Teslas on the eve of the 55th anniversary of “Earth Day,” so I’m not sure that’s much of an argument in 2025.
UPDATE: Ed Morrissey of Hot Air emailed me his attempt at Mego-fication:
Reverse Jim Cramer tweeted his own appropriately-styled action figure:
And for completion sake, here’s my attempt from last night:
Like I said above, not sure what’s going on with the J.K. Simmons-ing of my chin, but it was a fun first effort. Chat GPT spat that image out in less than a minute; creating this sort of thing, with its fake blister-pack imagery, die-cut style background, the font work, and slightly plastic-y appearance of the “action figure” would have taken at least a half-hour to an hour of donkeywork in Photoshop.
ZOOM: Tested: 2025 Audi RS7 Performance Absolutely Lives Up to Its Name.
Even quicker than the one I reviewed a decade ago.
SLEEP BETTER: FLANCCI LED Light Blocking Stickers. #CommissionEarned
STAY SAFE: KAYGO Cut Resistant Gloves Micro Finishing Nitrile Coated. #CommissionEarned
NOW WE KNOW WHY FBI WANTED THOSE FILES FROM MAR-A-LAGO: Here We Go! Kash Patel Releases Massive Trove of Crossfire Hurricane Docs.
MILE MARKERS ON THE ROAD TO DETROIT: San Fran City Attorney Sues More Tenderloin Stores for Being Gambling Dens, One Allegedly Selling Meth Over the Counter.
It’s getting to be a fairly common occurrence that SF City Attorney David Chiu prosecutes suspected illegal gambling dens in the Tenderloin, operating out of what appear to be normal corner liquor stores. This is generally because police find the location is home to telltale unauthorized gambling video games. But the Chronicle reports that Chiu’s latest lawsuits against four Tenderloin corner stores found that one of the stores was going well beyond illegal gambling.
At a store called Family Corner Discounts at Ellis and Jones streets, Chiu’s office announced Friday that “SFPD executed a search warrant and seized six electronic gambling machines, $4,456 of cash, a payment ledger, foreign tobacco products, merchandise on display for sale with CVS price stickers, and 50.8 grams of methamphetamine located under a display shelf.”
Just a few doors down from there, an SFPD search at a store called US Smoke Shop turned up five illegal gambling machines, a couple gun magazines, plus “loose leaf cannabis, pre-rolled cannabis joints, cannabis vape cartridges, and illegal flavored tobacco products.” And one sure has to wonder about the above November 2023 Instagram post from US Smoke Shop promoting “mushroom cereal bars” on the shelves.
“It is clear these stores are magnets for substantial illegal activity,” Chiu said in his announcement. “Drug dealing, gambling, fencing, selling contraband and illegal tobacco products—these stores are the Wild West. One store went as far as to store meth for sale under a display shelf.”
Take a tip from Oakland and close them down over excessive graffiti.
FROM MY NEW SUBSTACK: What Your Professors Didn’t Tell You.
For new programmers, and maybe some old programmers.
OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND: Mother arrested and held in cell for ‘confiscating child’s iPad.’
History teacher Vanessa Brown, 50, spent seven-and-a-half hours in a custody cell on March 26 this year, following a claim she had stolen two iPads which were traced to her mother’s house in Cobham, Surrey.
Yet it transpired that the two devices belonged to her daughters, and Ms Brown had merely confiscated them to encourage them to focus on their schoolwork, a fact Surrey Police has now acknowledged.
“I find it quite traumatic even talking about this now,” Ms Brown recalled.
“At no point did they [the officers] think to themselves, ‘Oh, this is a little bit of an overreaction for a moment, confiscating temporarily her iPads and popping over to her mum’s to have a coffee’. It was just a complete overreaction.
“It was thoroughly unprofessional. They were speaking to my mother, who is in her 80s, like she was a criminal.”
In 2018, when British cops were threatening social media critics after the NHS banished 23-month-old Alfie Evans to the Spartan hillside, British ex-pat Charles C.W. Cooke tweeted, “Michael Brendan Dougherty pointed out to me that police in the U.K. spend all their time on Twitter threatening people with jail time for frivolous things, and now I can’t stop seeing it.” They certainly had a field day during lockdown, and absolutely miss the sugar high.
It certainly beats trying to chase actual criminals:
Earlier, from Glenn: What Policing Looks Like in Britain These Days.
PROGRESS: Nuclear fuel reaches new enrichment standard. “For the first time, nuclear fuel enriched above 5% will be irradiated in a commercial U.S. reactor, the Department of Energy announced Thursday.”
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: If One Wanted to Destroy the U.S. the Last Four Years Matched the Blueprint.
Barry’s third term was all about “fundamentally transforming” the US back into the Stone Age.
MADE IN THE USA: Grass Fed Colostrum Powder, Unflavored Bovine Colostrum. #CommissionEarned
SKYNET SMILES, ROLLS OVER, LIGHTS A CIGARETTE: First baby born from robot-controlled IVF in clinical trial.
YOU CAN GO HOME AGAIN: Original Star Wars Cut Will Be Shown at a Theater for First Time in Decades.
A rare screening of the original 1977 Star Wars movie — complete with Han shooting first — will be shown at a theater in London this summer.
Since its release, Star Wars: Episode 4 – A New Hope, as it’s now called, has undergone several controversial changes made by the film’s creator George Lucas. The original movie that sparked one of the biggest franchises of all time is now a holy grail for fans who want to watch the film as it first appeared in the 1970s.
The subsequent alterations made to the film are well-documented: Han Solo being shot at by the bounty hunter Greedo first, rather than the original in which anti-hero Han killed Greedo without being shot at. Then there is the addition of a CGI Jabba the Hutt who was only mentioned by name in the 1977 release. Fans have also complained about the color grading painted on re-releases.
But for those attending the British Film Institute (BFI)’s Film on Film festival in London, they are in for a treat. Star Wars will play not once but twice on the opening night on June 12.
* * * * * * * *
“I wanted to show the film to my kids, and I wanted them to see the original version that I enjoyed at their age,” writes Robert Williams on The Star Wars Trilogy website 4K77. “Not the one with the already dated-looking CGI, over-saturated colors, and a strong magenta tint.”
The Guardian notes that anyone wanting to see the original theatrical cut legally must find an out-of-print VHS release or a DVD bonus features from 2006.
Lucas has little sympathy for those who want to see his first version of the film telling the Associated Press in 2004, “I’m sorry you saw half a completed film and fell in love with it. But I want it to be the way I want it to be.”
If Disney can restore and rerelease Michael Lindsay-Hogg’s Let It Be, the last Beatles movie, which had only been available for decades on badly duped copies of copies of copies the ancient VHS videotapes, surely they can find a way to bring the original version of the original Star Wars to streaming or Blu-Ray.
WHAT POLICING LOOKS LIKE IN BRITAIN THESE DAYS:
A retired detective tried to expose the Pakistani child rape gangs. He was told to stop by senior police, because the 'right wing backlash' would destroy the city.
The POLICE admit they knowingly sacrificed young girls to Pakistani paedophiles to prevent the truth coming out. https://t.co/qm7rU30Jf2
— James Price (@jamespriceglos) April 11, 2025
CLEAN YOUR KEYBOARD: Solareye Compressed Air Duster – 180000RPM Electric Air Duster. #CommissionEarned
CHANGE: Matt Taibbi: Burn it all Down. Globalization, once hailed as a panacea, has proven to be fundamentally corrupt and needs to be blown to kingdom come. “Everyone who follows this site knows I’ve always had an uncomfortable relationship with the Trump phenomenon. At the best of times, I find him puzzling and maybe dangerous, even when he’s being funny or taking aim at deserving targets. Now he’s president and people seem reflexively to want more criticism of him, but on this issue, what choice is there? The global economy created by both parties from the eighties onward was not only designed to be a giant predatory clusterfuck, but nearly impossible to unwind. Forget ‘incrementally,’ it’s got to be exploded. Would more of the same and a slow death be better?”
Some things can’t be done incrementally.
THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: ‘Puppy Prozac’ surges tenfold as owners medicate anxious lockdown dogs.
Vets have reported a surge in the use of “puppy Prozac” as owners seek medication for anxious lockdown dogs.
Research has revealed a tenfold increase over the past decade in the number of dogs in the UK on fluoxetine, an antidepressant sold under the brand name Prozac when used in humans.
Fluoxetine increases levels of serotonin in dog’s brains and is licensed in tablet form to treat pets with separation anxiety, or those displaying forms of aggression.
Greater use of the medication reflects a wave of behavioural problems in puppies bought during the pandemic lockdowns, who were not socialised properly and struggled to be left alone as owners returned to the office.
Vets said that social media had contributed to a “mismatch between owners’ expectations and the reality of dogs being dogs”, creating demand for the drug.
In some cases, people wanted their pets to be “fur-babies” that stay quiet, and believed medical intervention was needed if dogs ran around, jumped up or barked too much, vets added.
As always, life imitates the earlier, funnier version of Saturday Night Live:
Watch on TikTok
TODAY’S FEEL-GOOD STORY: What Trump Did With Obama’s White House Portrait Is Epic.
REMEMBER WHEN THE LEFT WAS AGAINST “PRICE GOUGING:” GOP lawmakers launch investigation into high Ivy League tuition prices: Republicans suspect institutions have ‘collusion to raise tuition prices.’
GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: Oakland Chinatown businesses say they’re getting fined thousands for graffiti on their own property.
In Oakland, Chinatown merchants are raising the alarm after many are being hit with thousands of dollars in fines for graffiti on their properties.
Shirley Lou knows how this story goes. On any given day, the supermarket she manages is tagged. They paint over it and then it happens again.
“We cannot control. We clean up and they come again. So many times, but the city — I don’t know why they are charging me money,” said Luo, manager at Won Kee Supermarket.
On Tuesday, she tried to pay the latest fine of $500. The city told Luo she owes $3,000, which includes late fees.
“It’s not my fault. Not our fault. It’s somebody go to the roof and mark so many graffiti,” Luo said.
This is not an isolated issue. Throughout Oakland’s Chinatown, business owners are reporting thousands of dollars in fines for not painting over tags fast enough.
“We close at 4 o’clock when we go home, and we cannot watch people do things like that. We can’t. So, the city has to help,” said Susan Lam, Oakland business owner.
As Lawrence Person wrote in 2023, “Defund The Police + Decriminalize Shoplifting = ‘Food Deserts.’” Oakland’s government attempting to push their grocery stores out of business is also guaranteed to make that happen.
For years, Oakland has ignored the taggers covering every surface of the city in graffiti.
Now Oakland is taking a stand, by fining businesses thousands of dollars for not removing the graffiti that the city stopped policing fast enough. pic.twitter.com/FNi0jS4WHb— Kevin Dalton (@TheKevinDalton) April 11, 2025
COMMON SENSE RULES EXCEPT AMONG THE RULING CLASS: Most Americans support Trump crackdown on anti-Semitism on campus, new poll shows.
