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The S.C.P. Foundation – Strange Corner

“The SCP Foundation is a fictional organization documented by the web-based collaborative-fiction project of the same name. Within the website’s fictional setting, the SCP Foundation is responsible for locating and containing individuals, entities, locations, and objects that violate natural law.” – Wikipedia

The Strange Corner team takes a look into the SCP Foundation in this video.

Food Truck Locations for Tuesday 9-8-20

Local Mobile is at TRI Realtors just east of Crosstown.

Gypsy Roadside Mobile is in Baldwyn at South Market.

Taqueria Ferris is on West Main between Computer Universe and Sully’s Pawn.

Magnolia Creamery is in the Old Navy parking lot.

Stay tuned as we update this map if things change through out the day and be sure to share it.

Coffee Shop Stop – Tupelo River Coffee

Tupelo River Coffee @ 522 West Main Street, Tupelo, MS. Located inside Indigo Cowork. Open Monday – Thursday: 7am – 6pm, Saturday – Friday: 7am – 8pm, Closed Sunday.

Husband and wife owned, Tupelo River Coffee has been serving coffee since 2017. They are a small startup striving to bring great coffee to Tupelo.

From Tupelo River, “We have continued to grow each year expanding from a 3rd party roaster’s black coffee, to espresso, to now roasting all of our own beans. We strive to provide the best service and coffee we can as we believe in simple quality in our products and in our service. Come try our locally roasted, simply brewed, well crafted drinks at Indigo cowork. let us share our passion with you.”

Located on Mainstreet in Downtown Tupelo, you can walk up to their togo window to pick up your order, or go inside to chill with your favorite coffee, latte, cappuccino, or any of their other flavors.

My daughter and I had the pour over Lattes iced, with caramel. It was a very tasty and well crafted drink!

Oh, and don’t miss out on some of their sweet confections on the side. They go fast! We like to have gotten the last of the huge chocolate chip cookies provided by Talbot House Bakery & Cafe!

BTW, if you’ve ever had anything from Talbot house Bakery Cafe in Tupelo, you can appreciate how awesome their cookies, pastries, and other baked goods are. Tupelo River Coffee proudly serves Talbot House products.

So drop by for some freshly brewed coffee and the tastiest gourmet sweets Downtown Tupelo has to offer! See y’all there!

Visit my blog for events, contests, new restaurants, LOCAL Favorites, and their FAMOUS foods!

Message me If you would like to have your restaurant, menu, and favorite foods featured in my blog. Over 18,000 local Foodies would love to see what you have to offer!

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Taylor Grocery Downtown Tupelo

Taylor Grocery Special Events Catering – Tupelo @ 316 Spring Street, Tupelo, MS.

Curb Side / Pick Up (662) 681-6044. Open Monday- Saturday 11:00am – 7:00pm.

NOW OPEN! If you haven’t made the trek to Taylor Grocery in Taylor, MS in a while, you can get a taste of their famous fried catfish plates and a few other flavors from their new outpost in Tupelo.

Currently, curb side/pick up only. Just give them a call and pick up a plate for lunch or dinner 6 days a week!

For my 1st trip, I called ahead and picked up a catfish plate and added 6 fried shrimp. The plate comes with four tasty fillets, a fistful of fries, hushpuppies, slaw, and all the condiments you should need. INCLUDING packets of Louisiana hot sauce to spice things up a bit!

Message me If you would like to have your restaurant, menu, and favorite foods featured in my blog. Over 17,000 local Foodies would love to see what you have to offer!

Facebook @ Eating Out With Jeff Jones https://m.facebook.com/eatingoutwithjeffjones

Instagram @ Eating Out With Jeff Jones
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Balloons in Veteran’s Park – A Gallery

Saturday September 5th Veteran’s Memorial Park in Tupelo, MS played host to a gathering of hot air balloons. While we we able to share other’s pictures of the morning lift offs, we did manage to arrive for the 5:30 PM show. And let me tell you, it was spectacular.

I could ramble about beauty, talk about noise and heat, and wax poetic all day long, but a picture is worth a thousand words, so here are a few dozen of them.

38: Episode 38: Probing Questions

*Warning: Explicit language and content*

In episode 38, We discuss Mississippi’s most infamous UFO case out of Pascagoula and a few other incidents that happened around that same time frame. 

All Cats is part of the Truthseekers Podcast Network.

Host: April Simmons

Co-Host: Sahara Holcomb

Theme + Editing by April Simmons

http://anchor.fm/april-simmons to donate to our pickles & coffee fund

https://www.redbubble.com/people/mangledfairy/shop for our MERCH!

Contact us at allcatspod@gmail.com

Call us at 662-200-1909

https://linktr.ee/allcats for all our social media links

Shoutout podcasts this week: Real Ghost Stories Online

Credits: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascagoula_Abduction

https://www.wlox.com/2019/03/15/pascagoula-ufo-new-witness-comes-forward/

http://www.ufosentinel.com/places/Mississippi.html

https://www.sunherald.com/news/local/counties/jackson-county/article219679955.html

https://www.ufoinsight.com/ufos/close-encounters/1977-flora-ufo

https://exemplore.com/ufos-aliens/Abducted-by-Aliens-the-Betty-and

This episode is sponsored by
· Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/april-simmons/support

Marshall Ramsey: Special (No) Delivery

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Secretary of State Michael Watson said he will appeal a ruling by a Hinds County judge that would allow early voting for people with pre-existing conditions who feel they could be at risk from COVID-19 this November. Read the rest here.

The post Marshall Ramsey: Special (No) Delivery appeared first on Mississippi Today.

Microsoft’s New Deepfake Detector Puts Reality to the Test

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two faces blurred deepfake microsoft

The upcoming US presidential election seems set to be something of a mess—to put it lightly. Covid-19 will likely deter millions from voting in person, and mail-in voting isn’t shaping up to be much more promising. This all comes at a time when political tensions are running higher than they have in decades, issues that shouldn’t be political (like mask-wearing) have become highly politicized, and Americans are dramatically divided along party lines.

So the last thing we need right now is yet another wrench in the spokes of democracy, in the form of disinformation; we all saw how that played out in 2016, and it wasn’t pretty. For the record, disinformation purposely misleads people, while misinformation is simply inaccurate, but without malicious intent. While there’s not a ton tech can do to make people feel safe at crowded polling stations or up the Postal Service’s budget, tech can help with disinformation, and Microsoft is trying to do so.

On Tuesday the company released two new tools designed to combat disinformation, described in a blog post by VP of Customer Security and Trust Tom Burt and Chief Scientific Officer Eric Horvitz.

The first is Microsoft Video Authenticator, which is made to detect deepfakes. In case you’re not familiar with this wicked byproduct of AI progress, “deepfakes” refers to audio or visual files made using artificial intelligence that can manipulate peoples’ voices or likenesses to make it look like they said things they didn’t. Editing a video to string together words and form a sentence someone didn’t say doesn’t count as a deepfake; though there’s manipulation involved, you don’t need a neural network and you’re not generating any original content or footage.

The Authenticator analyzes videos or images and tells users the percentage chance that they’ve been artificially manipulated. For videos, the tool can even analyze individual frames in real time.

Deepfake videos are made by feeding hundreds of hours of video of someone into a neural network, “teaching” the network the minutiae of the person’s voice, pronunciation, mannerisms, gestures, etc. It’s like when you do an imitation of your annoying coworker from accounting, complete with mimicking the way he makes every sentence sound like a question and his eyes widen when he talks about complex spreadsheets. You’ve spent hours—no, months—in his presence and have his personality quirks down pat. An AI algorithm that produces deepfakes needs to learn those same quirks, and more, about whoever the creator’s target is.

Given enough real information and examples, the algorithm can then generate its own fake footage, with deepfake creators using computer graphics and manually tweaking the output to make it as realistic as possible.

The scariest part? To make a deepfake, you don’t need a fancy computer or even a ton of knowledge about software. There are open-source programs people can access for free online, and as far as finding video footage of famous people—well, we’ve got YouTube to thank for how easy that is.

Microsoft’s Video Authenticator can detect the blending boundary of a deepfake and subtle fading or greyscale elements that the human eye may not be able to see.

In the blog post, Burt and Horvitz point out that as time goes by, deepfakes are only going to get better and become harder to detect; after all, they’re generated by neural networks that are continuously learning from and improving themselves.

Microsoft’s counter-tactic is to come in from the opposite angle, that is, being able to confirm beyond doubt that a video, image, or piece of news is real (I mean, can McDonald’s fries cure baldness? Did a seal slap a kayaker in the face with an octopus? Never has it been so imperative that the world know the truth).

A tool built into Microsoft Azure, the company’s cloud computing service, lets content producers add digital hashes and certificates to their content, and a reader (which can be used as a browser extension) checks the certificates and matches the hashes to indicate the content is authentic.

Finally, Microsoft also launched an interactive “Spot the Deepfake” quiz it developed in collaboration with the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public, deepfake detection company Sensity, and USA Today. The quiz is intended to help people “learn about synthetic media, develop critical media literacy skills, and gain awareness of the impact of synthetic media on democracy.”

The impact Microsoft’s new tools will have remains to be seen—but hey, we’re glad they’re trying. And they’re not alone; Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have all taken steps to ban and remove deepfakes from their sites. The AI Foundation’s Reality Defender uses synthetic media detection algorithms to identify fake content. There’s even a coalition of big tech companies teaming up to try to fight election interference.

One thing is for sure: between a global pandemic, widespread protests and riots, mass unemployment, a hobbled economy, and the disinformation that’s remained rife through it all, we’re going to need all the help we can get to make it through not just the election, but the rest of the conga-line-of-catastrophes year that is 2020.

Image Credit: Darius Bashar on Unsplash

How to Have Your Cake and Eat it Too

I have never really understood the expression “one cannot have their cake and eat it too.” I mean, why would you not eat your cake? Are you going to just sit it up and look at it? The expression baffles me, and as a writer I refuse to use it due to how contradictory it is in the first place.

I want my cake and I promise you that I will eat it too. I want to enjoy my life to the fullest. Hence why you won’t find me up there on the list of paper-thin model material. I like my Italian food and I like my ice-cream. There are things I like too much to sacrifice it for the latest diet fad and a few pounds lost. I relish life too much. Do I sometimes look at the numbers on the scale and grimace? Heck yeah, but it doesn’t last long…or maybe only until the next round of my mother’s homemade lasagna.

Honestly, the whole not being able to have our cake and eat it too is just a belief that is handed down to us by society and we adopt it as truth inside us. Maybe without even realizing we have done so. Think about it the next time you see someone really enjoying life and soaking it all in. Does their joy make you upset? Does it trigger some raw emotions like how dare they think they can have their cake and eat it too? Perhaps it is because you have that rooted belief that was handed down to you and you adopted it without even thinking about it. You just remember hearing your mom repeat it to you as a child or your grandfather saying it when he was observing someone over-enjoying life (I mean if over-enjoying life is a thing). Then you adopted it as a core belief without even realizing you had done so. 

I remember as a small girl, pulling up to the Lee County Library to check out books (I was a book worm even way back then) and there was a sleek black Lexus parked across the lot. I immediately chimed in that I wanted a car like that when I grew up. My mom, being the practical person she happens to be, reminded me that “luxury was a fantasy.” I adopted the belief right then that it was only a dream to own a luxury car. I didn’t realize it until years later that this belief, adopted way back when I was kid as truth, had hindered me from pursuing certain achievements in my life because I thought they were not meant to be achieved.

I limited myself.

The truth is, my potential is unlimited.

In fact, I test drove a Range Rover this week because it is the next SUV I want to buy. I want my cake and I want to eat it too.

I challenge you this week as you go about your normal daily routines to find where you cast small judgements on people without even realizing you are doing it. Then take those judgements and trace them back to why you feel that is the truth.

Many times, we’ll find that it comes from a deep-rooted belief that we didn’t even know we had. Maybe we just heard it passed down and adopted it as our own somewhere along the way. But we are holding ourselves back with these baseless and untruthful beliefs. If we can find them and weed them out of our garden of life, we can all of a sudden watch our plants in our garden grow bigger and healthier. We aren’t stifling them with some crazy gunk that is not even needed. We are showering them with the belief that if I want my cake and to eat it, by goodness, I am going to do just that.

I had the pleasure of traveling to France earlier this year before the big C word took over. One of the amazing things I learned was that everyone stopped at the local bakery every day and got themselves some goodies. The had cake and they ate it in the slowest, relishing life, enjoying the moment, kind of way.

Photo by Brodie Vissers from Burst

I was just in awe. They would sip their cappuccino or hot chocolate while taking small bites from their pastries and laughing with friends at the table. It reminded me that life is meant to be enjoyed. It is meant to be taken in and relished. Life is too short to throw the cake away. Geez. Enjoy your life. Take your cake, grab a fork and eat it up! 

Until next time…I am going to eat more cake! Are you?

It’s Food Truck Friday Yall

It’s Food Truck Friday and most of the action is down town at Fairpark, Tupelo’s Front Porch.

Catch Jo’s Cafe, Local Mobile, Gypsy Roadside Mobile all downtown.

Looking for a great authentic Mexican Street Food experience? Check out Taqueria Ferris on West Main between Computer Universe and Sully’s Pawn.

Grab some cool dairy goodness and American Creamery in the Old Navy parking lot by the mall.