Dead Pool 202: hints of autumn edition
Mrs Carl takes it with Esther Rantzen. Who has apparently been on death’s door for three years.
Sorry about the spam situation. We’re being absolutely buried in them. I clean them out once a day, but you’ll have to sit with them until then. I wish I could deputize you all to go spam hunting with me.
Are we ready?
0. Rule Zero (AKA Steve’s Rule): your pick has to be living when picked. Also, nobody whose execution date is circled on the calendar. Also, please don’t kill anybody. Plus (Pupster’s Rule) no picking someone who’s only famous for being the oldest person alive.
1. Pick a celebrity. Any celebrity — though I reserve the right to nix picks I never heard of (I don’t generally follow the Dead Pool threads carefully, so if you’re unsure of your pick, call it to my attention).
2. We start from scratch every time. No matter who you had last time, or who you may have called between rounds, you have to turn up on this very thread and stake your claim.
3. Poaching and other dirty tricks positively encouraged.
4. Your first choice sticks. Don’t just blurt something out, m’kay? Also, make sure you have a correct spelling of your choice somewhere in your comment. These threads get longish and I use search to figure out if we have a winner.
5. It’s up to you to search the thread and make sure your choice is unique. I’m waayyyy too lazy to catch the dupes. Popular picks go fast.
6. The pool stays open until somebody on the list dies. Feel free to jump in any time. Noobs, strangers, drive-bys and one-comment-wonders — all are welcome.
7. If you want your fabulous prize, you have to entrust me with a mailing address. If you’ve won before, send me your address again. I don’t keep good records.
8. The new DeadPool will begin 6pm WBT (Weasel’s Blog Time) the Friday after the last round is concluded.
The winner, if the winner chooses to entrust me with a mailing address, will receive an Official Certificate of Dick Winning and a small original drawing on paper suffused with elephant shit particles. Because I’m fresh out of fairy shit particles.
Note: I am woefully behind on dick deliveries. If I owe you one, you’ll know how long. I ain’t gived up, but I haven’t drawn much since lockdown. Some day, your heirs might hear from my heirs.
October 2, 2026 — 6:00 pm
Comments: 17
That was easy. Kind of.
Raspberry Pi came. I didn’t get a monitor because I was going to use my Huion tablet as the monitor. The robot said it would work. What the robot didn’t say was the kind of connector I’d need to hook it up, one of which I did not have.
In the end, I used our television. Which is enormous. And the type was eeny teeny tiny. I had to stand right in front of the monitor to read anything and operate the mouse on my thigh. Not ideal.
But – hoo boy! – it booted up sweet as a nut. Downloaded updates, and there we are. The one I bought had the OS already on the micro-SD, so I really didn’t have to do anything.
It’s quick! My gosh, this will be fun to play with. When I get a monitor.
And yes – we’re being hammered with spam at the moment. I’ve just killed about fifty of the bastards. I don’t know why the filter isn’t working. Patience – I biff them all in one go. And stay away from that anal porn guy.
New Dead Pool tomorrow!
October 1, 2026 — 6:18 pm
Comments: 8
Now what?
It’s a Pico 2 W and don’t call me Shirley. I don’t know what I’m going to do with it, I got it free with the Raspberry Pi subscription. It’s a microcontroller; the robot suggested hooking it up to a chickenhouse flap and a light sensor so it automatically lets them out in the morning.
Nah.
I do have a whole-ass Raspberry Pi coming. They’ve been out of stock everywhere due to data centers slurping up all the RAM – unless you bought the 8 or 16-gig version, which is more expensive than a Chromebook. They finally got 4 gigs in stock at not stupid money. I have no idea what I’m going to do with that, either.
Any pi-heads read this blog?
p.s. Aw, nobody played with Eleven Labs?
September 30, 2026 — 6:07 pm
Comments: 5
And I use it to make fart sounds
ElevenLabs is a company that makes robot voices. Nothing new there, but they’re getting really, really good at it. You can give the voice directions like: “[yawns] Good morning [smacks lips] gimme a sec.” It infers tone and emotion from context.
And, yes, [fart] works. I’m sure Uncle B will be happy to tell you how hard I laughed.
In addition to text to speech, it’ll do speech to text, voice creation, sound effects, a voice isolator and a voice changer. It’ll also do images, video and music, but I don’t know how well – there are specialist sites for that.
People are using them to narrate audiobooks and create podcasts and YouTube channels without revealing their real voices.
You can clone your own voice. And if that gives you the personal security willies, be warned: they already have your voice. I called up my pension provider the other day and the robot said my identity was confirmed by voice analysis. I am damn sure I never gave permission for that.
At some point, the courts (in America, I assume) ruled that your voice isn’t copyrightable. Which is why you hear so many Youtubes narrated by David Attenborough, John Goodman or that one hispanic guy who seems to do all the police ride-along voice-overs.
A free account gets you 10,000 credits a month – not enough to narrate a whole audiobook, but plenty to make David Attenborough cut the cheese.
September 29, 2026 — 4:56 pm
Comments: none
A certifiable antique
So there’s this guy named Dave and he’s put together an entire PDP11 workstation from 1983 and he’s built a website around it. When you visit the site, those numbers at the top are a custom Task Manager, showing you the running processes and refreshing itself every five seconds.
At the very top of the page is PDPGary, a link to a modern AI chatbot running on this computer. I don’t know how wide its knowledge is, but you can certainly use it to ask questions about Dave and this setup. It’s a little bit spicy, but very interesting. Erm, if you’re interested in that sort of thing.
I remember this console. The company I worked for was still run on these things when I started there. We – the art department – had the very first desktop computer in the whole company in 1985, and we snuck it through by calling it an ‘electronic slidemaking apparatus.’ Because the engineers were Very Serious Men who did not Play With Toys.
My friend the photographer was trying to illustrate the concept of risk to computers using one of these behemoths. He put a single water droplet on the chassis, looked away for a sec and naturally it snuck inside and shorted out $100,000 worth of computer.
The good old days.
September 28, 2026 — 6:04 pm
Comments: 2
Speaking of…
I had a Tamagotchi once. His name was Baby Lars. He was yellow. I remember he began to cry in a movie theater once.
As I recall, if you neglected one long enough, it died and you had to hatch out another one. Which I did at least once, until I lost him completely. I found him again when I went to move out and I think he’d died for real by then.
Why did I, a grown woman, have a child’s toy? Because I never met an electronic doohickey I didn’t want to play with. And lose interest in after a vanishingly short time.
Anyway, the Tamagotchi turns 30 next year. Seems like an active culture, still. Oddly, that site doesn’t actually seem to sell Tamagotchi.
Amazon does. Looks like £15 for a classic and more for a themed one (like Star Wars, f’rexample).
Don’t even get me started on Neopets. Good weekend, all!
September 25, 2026 — 4:10 pm
Comments: 5
This is bad. Oh, this is bad.
JUST IN: Meta unveils Muse Charm, a Tamagotchi-style AI gadget designed to fit on a keychain, with Zuck calling it a “joyful little device.”
At first, I thought it was a hilariously dumb idea: resurrecting the Tamagotchi, but letting it tap into AI to make smalltalk. Oh, no – this thing is a whole-ass fucking agent. An LLM is an oracle: you ask it questions, it gives wise answers and then goes back to sleep. But an agent has a life of its own: it can go off and screw with your bank account and read your emails while you’re on the toilet and blissfully unaware. It does stuff.
Muse has its own computer, with a file system and a terminal, so it can write its own code and build the tools a task needs. It also has access to a full web browser, so it can search, navigate sites, fill out forms, and complete transactions, like booking and purchasing.
Muse also can produce things for you — documents, PDFs, web pages, and more. It can build a tracker for your spending, an interactive study guide, or a dashboard to find patterns in your sleep.
And Muse is always working. Once you’ve set a goal or a task, Muse continues to work on a schedule and in response to relevant events, taking the next step and following up, alongside whatever you ask it in conversation. When it completes its background work, it evaluates whether the result is worth surfacing, and notifies you only when something is meaningfully new or needs your input.
Muse is always working. I don’t like the sound of that.
The little twee cartoon avatar thingie around your wrist is just your interface. It plugs you into angry GladOS up in the cloud somewhere.
We introduced Muse just a few weeks ago, and the response has been incredible. At Connect we showed what’s next: a Muse you can talk to in real time and reach in more places throughout your day.
A great voice mode: Talking to an agent as capable as Muse is different from voice chat with an assistant. You can have a long, in-depth conversation, and Muse gets work done in the background while you’re still talking. You can also design your Muse’s voice just by describing what you want: faster, slower, or even a specific accent.
See your Muse come to life: Meta Superintelligence Labs is introducing Muse Realtime Avatar, state-of-the-art embodiment technology that turns Muse Realtime Voice into expressive, interactive avatars.[…]
Muse will have its own email address that it can use to get things done, or even just as another way for you to communicate with it.
It’s the cartoon face that really gets me. If it came in a shiny chrome cube with a glowing red eye and a sinister robot voice it would feel more honest.
Go follow the links. We’re screwed.
September 24, 2026 — 5:47 pm
Comments: 7
Guys, I have my doubts about this one…
Silicone feet. I…don’t even. Whatever.
Ebay is doing this advertising thing on Facebook where they post increasingly bizarre things in the upper right corner of the page to show the wide range of products they offer. I guess. One I remember were replicas of the eggs from Alien.
Some of the things they advertise, I had no earthly idea what they do. Like a Parlux Melody Silencer. Turns out, it’s not a karaoke accessory – it’s a dingus you fit on the back of a blow dryer that reduces the noise it makes by 45%.
Ours is a time of wonders.
September 23, 2026 — 5:56 pm
Comments: 1
Life is an adventure
We’re having Chinese food delivered tonight. I’m very excited by this. I’ve never had food delivered before in my whole life.
How sad is that?
September 22, 2026 — 6:50 pm
Comments: 6
You know it. You just don’t know you know it.
I Googled ‘looney tunes conveyor belt music’ and it knew exactly what I meant. And by “Googled” I typed it into the address bar and I think that goes to Claude if you’re using Brave. Judging from auto-complete, it’s a common question.
It’s a big band tune called Powerhouse written by Raymond Scott and recorded in 1937. The “conveyor belt music” is actually the slow interlude in the middle. The faster tune on either side is also used in Looney Tunes cartoons for frenetic chase scenes. You’ll know it when you hear it.
Referred to as Powerhouse A and Powerhouse B. I created a version of it using FruityLoops that was composed of autotuned clicky sounds (I think I clashed silverware together to make the original noises). But can I find it? I cannot.
Oh, just hit the link already.
September 21, 2026 — 4:07 pm
Comments: 5