Good morning, RVA! It's 48 °F, rainy, and a heck of a lot colder than yesterday. Today you can expect cloudy skies and highs in the 50s, which is a full 30-degree drop from just 18 hours ago! The rain should, with any luck, move out of the area at some point later this morning. Warmer—but maybe not unseasonable—temperatures could make an appearance at the end of this week, but, until then, grab your boots and flannels!
Since it’s Halloween, and I spend most of my free time watching horror movies, I thought I’d suggest a horror film to pair with each news item. For this morning’s cold, wet weather, I’m going with John Carpenter’s The Fog. Something about today’s weather just says “reanimated fisherfolk” to me.
Water cooler
Jack Jacobs at Richmond BizSense reports that, in 2025, GRTC will “add four 60-foot-long articulated buses to the fleet dedicated to the Pulse.” The new bendy buses will hold 120 passengers, a significant upgrade compared to the existing 40-foot buses which have a 76-person capacity. Also interesting, to bus people at least, these new buses will be built by New Flyer instead of Gillig, which makes all of GRTC’s current 40-foot buses that you know and love. Look at us! Articulated buses! This is some big-city stuff!
Horror film pairing: Train to Busan. It’s zombies on a train, not a bus, but still.
Em Holter in the Richmond Times-Dispatch has more Casino 2.0 coverage leading up to the election (just a week from today!) and writes about the lessons learned from Atlantic City’s big bet on gambling. As you can probably guess, Holter finds both positives and negatives to banking on casinos to save your city. Tap through if you dare / aren’t already exhausted by casino coverage.
Horror film pairing: Hellbound: Hellraiser II. I think about the original Hellraiser constantly! The sequel is still scary, I guess, but, somehow, also boring, too—a lot like where I’m at with Casino 2.0. In retrospect, I should have been calling it “Hellbound: Casino II” this whole time.
The RTD’s Dave Ress reports that Governor Youngkin will not participate in the New Hampshire primary this coming January. I definitely do not think this means the Governor has decided not to run for president, but it is a data point. I imagine he’s still in a “wait and see about the whole Trump situation” mode.
Horror film pairing: A Nightmare on Elm Street. A classic! Just like the Governor’s presidential flirtations, this movie features at least one fake ending and a signature top.
Richard Hayes at RVAHub posted photos from this past weekend’s Zombie Walk in Carytown. I look forward to this post every year! I loved zombie MLB umpire and zombie Toad. Great work, everyone.
Horror film pairing: Train to Busan is definitely my favorite zombie film, but I’ve already used it. So how about Anna and the Apocalypse, a zombie Christmas musical?
Via /r/rva, “What’s your go-to takeout when you’re sick?” I celebrate all the pho suggestions, but, for me, I just kind of want to drink very cold water when I’m really sick.
Horror film pairing: There’s a million and one horror films about eating bad stuff. I watched Raw once, and that was plenty for me!
This morning's longread
Confessions of a Viral AI Writer
Another long essay about how AI impacts art! This one’s written by a guy who used AI to help write an acclaimed short story about his sister, but, despite that, ultimately finds AI a sort of soulless, empty tool.
Horror film pairing: Her. Is it a horror film? Yes, especially if the AIs we’re all about to fall in love with look anything close to what’s described in today’s longread.
That definition of writing couldn’t be more different from the way AI produces language: by sucking up billions of words from the internet and spitting out an imitation. Nothing about that process reflects an attempt at articulating an individual perspective. And while people sometimes romantically describe AI as containing the entirety of human consciousness because of the quantity of text it inhales, even that isn’t true; the text used to train AI represents only a narrow slice of the internet, one that reflects the perspective of white, male, anglophone authors more than anyone else. The world as seen by AI is fatally incoherent. If writing is my attempt to clarify what the world is like for me, the problem with AI is not just that it can’t come up with an individual perspective on the world. It’s that it can’t even comprehend what the world is.
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Picture of the Day
They don’t all safely migrate for the winter.
Horror film pairing: As Above, So Below. While not about birds, this movie is pretty much about urban infrastructure.
