This issue has…

• 🎨 Art Festival Pics
  8,000 people, you guys

• 👹 Costume Rentals Info
  let us help you look your scariest

• 🤖 Some Weird Robot Stuff
  okay, this is just weird

VISUAL ARTS

Spirit of the St. Croix 2024 is in the books

Although this weekend saw the closing of The Drowsy Chaperone (super-duper production, everyone) as well as another Stand-Up Junior event (so many funny kiddos), it was the Spirit of the St. Croix Art Festival that dominated Phipps headlines.

About 8,000 people strolled through Lakefront Park on either Saturday or Sunday to see the 80 art booths, musicians, community booths, etc. The weather cooperated beautifully (although a little warm for Sept.) and made for an all-around great time.

Kudos to Lee Ann for all her work helping to put this fun community event together.

ANNOUNCEMENT

The PCA will solve your costume problems

I teased this a couple of weeks ago, but now it’s official: the PCA will be opening up its costume storage for Halloween rentals.

The Phipps has always been a place you could rent costumes for productions (think high schools, other theatre companies, etc.), but now you can grab your Halloween costume(s) by stopping by your favorite community arts center. Wow!

Click here for more info.

👆
my favorite gallery piece of the week
If you haven’t yet, please stop by Gallery 3 and check out Anne’s work because this photo doesn’t do it justice. So great!

TECHNOLOGY

AI’s hot take on The Flying P

Artificial Intelligence has been a part of our world for what seems like a while now, and although the technology itself has progressed a lot in a very short time, I haven’t found it too terribly mind-blowing…until now.

Google recently released this thing called Notebook LM, which allows you to dump a bunch of documents, websites, etc. into it and then it gives you a little Large Language Model (AI) for just that grouping of information. Sounds useful and everything, sure, but what’s the big deal, right?

In addition to answering questions about your group of docs in written form, it also has this audio feature where it will summarize your info in a little …sort of two-person podcast format.

To test this out, I input all 9 issues of The Flying P and…you guys…this is kinda nuts.

As is the norm, there are some AI hallucinations — for some reason they think this is a year’s worth of issues, they mention a couple of things that I never actually said, I’m pretty sure the guy calls us the “Phipps Center for the Arps” at the beginning — but outside of that, this is really pretty amazing. Especially considering the AI spit this out in about 3 minutes. WE LIVE IN THE FUTURE!

Content Warning: it’s ~10 minutes long, they talk about me A LOT, and they do dive into the ketchup-on-a-brat debate.

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Talk to you next week!