October 22nd, 2024 ― A story about psychic communion with giant bugs, colossal flesh golems, and our spiritual relationship to fungus may not immediately cry out to you for any sword-focused analysis. I would agree that Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984) is not really asking you to think about the swords, and the reason I love it so much has almost entirely to do with the bugs, the fungus, and the golems. However, there is a lot of talk in Nausicaä about materials for weapons and armor―the actual substance of swords breaking...
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or: They Asked the Machine That’s Killing the World About Chess, and It Said Black Has a Forced Win in 10,084,718,004,934,623
The day before, there had been an update to the knowledgebase. A redundant frontal core, extracted and trained separately for weeks on new data from a rediscovered population, was reconnected with the primary. Integration continued through the night. When the system was back online, finally, in the glowing AM hours of a Thursday in May, the lone researcher on duty downed a ceremonial last swig of tepid coffee and entered the first of the standard prompts: “Request diagnostic report on solving chess.” Some time elapsed―much longer than usual―before the machine gave a response...
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