Tag: news

making cars more fun

Most car manufacturers don’t make cars fun. They’re just serious. I understand how they can become risk-averse. They don’t want to risk making the Homer mobile — which is a great episode of The Simpsons — but there is a lot of space between serious and over-the-top.

Initially, Tesla did some fun things with their interface, but they’ve been one-upped. Actually, more like lapped. (Elon Musk is very busy destroying the federal government from the inside with his DOGE agenda, so who is leading Tesla these days? But I digress…)

Rivian is a rival EV (electric vehicle) maker to Tesla, and their update last Halloween is what car makers should strive for. They released free theme packs that changed the truck dashboard, vehicle sounds, and exterior lights to be like KITT from Knight Rider or the time-travelling DeLorean from Back To The Future. See for yourself in this video:

Here’s how it looks from the inside:

Here’s more pictures and details at the official website. If you want to read more about it, here’s an interview with Rivian’s chief design officer.

Unfortunately, these were available only for a limited time and only usable while the vehicle was parked. So that’s a major bummer. But this is just the start. Someday a car manufacturer will realize many people want their cars and trucks to look cool and be fun to use, and since most modern vehicles have large screens in them, this is a great way to do it. (Reportedly Toyota has hired developers from the game engine Unity to design user interfaces for their car dashboards, so hopefully something good will come from that.)

Here’s my vision of this — cars will include various themes that you can choose from. Obviously they don’t need to be too distracting with many animations while you’re driving, but there is a fun middle ground. There can be themes based on movies and video games and sports teams which could be purchased (since royalties would have to be paid, and there is work involved). If they were to make them self-moddable like some video games are, that would be great. (Most companies would not do this, but hopefully somebody will. They could release the modding software to ensure safety standards are met.)

Imagine the possibilities! If you want a Batman theme, you could. If you prefer to show off your favorite sports team, you could. If you want it to look like a vintage muscle car, you could do that (to some degree). There could also be various themes that aren’t brand-affiliated, like with nature landscape backgrounds, or flowers, or lightning, or a steampunk design. This could also sync with ambient lights to produce a greater effect. And it could include sound effects that go with each theme. There is so much possibility here to make this an awesome thing. Somebody get on this.

breaking news about Thanksgiving

I was visiting some family over the Thanksgiving break, and someone turned the TV news on for a few minutes. One of their “Breaking News” stories was that there was a lot of holiday travel on Thanksgiving. That’s not really news, since everyone knows it will happen, and it’s not breaking news because it was already predicted and known.

I’ve seen a lot of other mundane things be called “breaking news” before. One time the President’s plane was landing in Philadelphia. I don’t keep up with his travel schedule, so I wondered if something was wrong. Nope, that was where he was going. He was just traveling to a meeting. So I don’t see how it’s even news. Does anyone need to know? Was there nothing more relevant happening that day?

I understand that the news networks want to keep their viewers “engaged” [i.e., glued to the TV / radio / stream all the time] so they want “breaking news”, and they sometimes manufacture drama, but instead of all that, why don’t they actually report interesting and/or relevant news? There’s a lot of good things that happen in the world each day. It seems like these days some of the most popular mainstream news sources just try to incite anger toward a particular political party by blaming all the problems on that one group of people. (I’ll stop the rant on that before it gets going, but let me remind you that biased reporting like that is called propaganda. News is reporting the facts of what happened, not casting blame on that “other party”. Look to see if your preferred news sources do this. Both sides do it.)

Whoops! Started to rant there. My bad! Back on topic, here’s some “breaking news” about Thanksgiving — many people ate a lot and had a good time doing it! 🙂

Here’s some Thanksgiving-related news… at a family get-together I attended, someone brought cheese dip with sausage in it. I think there was some slight befuddlement at that, since it’s not a traditional side dish at Thanksgiving. But it’s not like green beans and corn are anything special on their own. Besides, cheese dip proved to be beneficial since the turkey was on the dry side. (I’m not complaining — it’s hard to cook a turkey well, and it was still good — especially with the cheese dip.)

Here’s another point along those lines. There’s nothing inherently wrong with tradition and having the same foods for Thanksgiving each year. I’m glad we always have dressing/stuffing, since it’s rare and delicious. But it’s better to not let tradition keep us from making things better. It’s good to ask, “How can we make our Thanksgiving meal more awesome?” Keep what’s already great, but don’t be afraid to add new items or change things up if it improves the experience. The holiday meal is not great just because of tradition — it’s great because of good-tasting food and enjoyable fellowship with family. So make it awesome!

Fox News apology mashup

Here’s a funny (to me) video about current political events. If you want to skip this post, I understand. Also, there’s a serious intro to give it context (since a certain news site is ignoring it).

If you haven’t heard, Fox News just settled with Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million. That’s a lot of money! It’s because Fox News intentionally misled their viewers, claiming there was voting fraud in the 2020 election and that Dominion’s machines were corrupt. There’s no proof of fraud, but there’s plenty of proof from inside recordings that Fox News knew the election fraud story was fraudulent, yet they pushed it anyway*. Fox News didn’t want the court case to proceed, with their top TV entertainers** possibly having to testify, so they settled.

An unfortunate part of this settlement is that Fox News didn’t have to admit to its viewers that they misled them. So no official apology, and thus people that only watch Fox News may continue to be misled by propaganda. In response to this, Stephen Colbert made a compilation of Fox News TV personalities admitting to what they did. This is funny (FYI, this clip starts right before the mashup):

For the record, I’m not necessarily against Fox News — just against lying and propaganda. They’re doing much harm to the country by continuing to promote the big lie of voter fraud when there’s been no evidence. I realize Donald Trump still says there is “massive evidence”, but it’s way beyond time to put up or shut up. He had 60+ court cases where no actual evidence was presented. (Some of those were actually humorous, if you read the pre-trial discussions between the judges and lawyers. Should I write on those?)

* Apparently “Fair & Balanced” means “We’re all for Trump, and everything bad is Biden’s fault”.

** In a previous defamation lawsuit, Fox News said their TV news hosts are entertainers, not to be taken seriously. The actual wording, from Fox News lawyers about Tucker Carlson: “cannot be understood to have been stating facts, but instead that he was delivering an opinion using hyperbole for effect”, and the judge agreed, saying, “Given Mr. Carlson’s reputation, any reasonable viewer ‘arrive[s] with an appropriate amount of skepticism’ about the statements he makes.” There’s a previous defamation lawsuit where the Fox News laywers claimed that the TV hosts are entertainers and thus not to be held to the standard of speaking truth. That’s a lame cop-out, and I’m surprised it worked, because “Fox News” is the name of the channel, and it’s displayed on the screen most of the time, so they are marketing themselves as news. Can they just adopt a new identity as it suits them, regardless of who they are? I figured they were against such things…

Sorry about all the seriousness here — I know some of you come here for randomness. I wasn’t going to write on the lawsuit, but found that video clip funny.

If I may close with a quick public service announcement: Get your news from multiple sources, and not all that are only conservative or liberal. Actual news is facts. Any news source that tells you who is to blame or who to be mad at is pushing an agenda.

Now I’ll return you to your regularly scheduled randomness…