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The Best August Videos, Pictures, and News

The Best August Videos, Pictures, and News, personally curated by me Andy Zach. Be warned: these may not be what you expect.

The first video might be the weirdest prank I’ve ever heard about. And it’s part of English history too. Who’d ever believe this in fiction?

But hold onto your galoshes: there’s a lot more.

How about a late-breaking science video of new advances in rocketry?

Now let me try to be more relateable by posting a cute dog video for your viewing pleasure.

Speaking of relatable, I have a dog I walk every day over the hills and valleys in the park around my house. A105 pound black lab named ‘Trip’, so-called because he likes to rub against you and trip you.

Which picture do you like the best? Let me know and I’ll send you a free short story from my next book Oops Tales from the Turkey Apocalypse

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What else do I have for you? How about this article about an exoskeleton?

More Best August Videos

This is a good one. If you’ve seen it before, contact me and I’ll give you a book of your choice.

Pachelbel’s Canon on the rubber chicken

I have more for you!

Or maybe this picture will tickle you. Everyone loves puppies!

Even three-headed puppies!

Then you’ve got this bon mot.

Okay, I have one last video for you. But before you see it, let me offer you a chance to win one of my books. I have two drawings coming up this month, one for a free book and one for a free audiobook.

Best August Videos
Andy’s four books

Click here to enter the monthly drawing and get a free subscription to my newsletter.

Andy Zach reading from his book Zombie Turkeys

Finally, A Secret Supers Review

Best August Videos
Secret Supers covers

Title: Secret Supers: What happens when ‘differently-abled’ people become ‘super-abled’?

Author: Andy Zach

Genre: Fiction/Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror

Audience: Middle-Grade

Word Count: 31000

Assessment:

Plot: Four differently-abled middle school kids use science to give themselves super powers and solve crimes while in disguise. This is a sweet YA read with a surprise ending that will delight readers.

Prose/Style: There is some clever imagery here, with steady and clear dialogue. Descriptions of the super powers and how the children react to them are authentic, touching, and sometimes funny.

Originality: Disabled kids who are not just the heroes but superheroes of the story is a fresh and clever premise. Even without revealing their secret identities, the kids are accepted by their peers after saving the school budget.

Character Development: All of the young and vibrant characters are wonderfully drawn, especially Dan, the blind boy who gains the ability to read minds. Even the pet hamster, Dancer, plays an important role in the plot twist.

From my Book Life Prize entry. I entered Secret Supers and will find out if I progress to the next round.

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My 5 Best SciFi Story Ideas for You. Plus . . .

My 5 Best SciFi Story Ideas from science articles I’ve found around the internet. Let’s start with number one.

A quick summary of the previous story: The WannaCry worm came close to crashing the internet. It was only stopped by the quick thinking and hard work of two cybersecurity specialists.

How would you write a SciFi story off this? What would happen if the whole world used virtual reality and hackers attacked that? Reply with your best ideas and I’ll give each of you a short story.

This video is kind of science-fictiony, but more of a cautionary tale is what can go wrong with high-risk rocketry.

5 Best SciFi Story Ideas – Your Next Idea

What if? That’s the essence of writing science fiction. What if the moon program hadn’t been cancelled by a budget conscious Congress? What if we discovered something that changed human history? Again, comments to this blog post or email replies will get a free short story from me

Along with writing stories comes editing. Editing separates the lemons from the melons.

Your Third Science Fiction Seed

Here, I present to you a scifi take on pterodactyls.

Would you like pterodactyls flying around? Would you hunt them?

Then, speaking of things that fly, you have this unique video.

Your Fourth Science Fiction Inspiration

Where can you go with an AI poker player? Clean out Las Vegas? Or take over Las Vegas? Or flee assassins seeking to kill you?

Then you can get this science fiction short story I wrote, based upon a jar of pickles. And so much more.

5 Best SciFi Best Story Ideas
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The Last of 5 Best SciFi Story Ideas

Gravity lensing. Now used for astronomy. Could it be used for space travel? Teleportation? The sky’s the limit! No, your imagination is all that limits you.

No scientific article or paper is complete without a pie chart. So here it is.

Thanks for reading to the end of the blog! Laugh through my first novel, Zombie Turkeys for free by clicking this following cover.

5 Best SciFi Story Ideas
Click to get your free copy of Zombie Turkeys

Sam Melvin, an underachieving e-reporter from a small town, changes forever when he meets turkeys that won’t stay dead. You can shoot ’em, chop ’em, burn ’em—they come back stronger. The undead plague of poultry spreads uncontrollably, rocking the whole country. As Sam tracks down the zombie turkeys and how to eradicate them, his editor, Lisa Kambacher, nags him to turn his stories and expenses in on time. During their years of working together, Lisa has mellowed into an irascible pinchpenny.

Lisa snipes at Sam for plebeian writing but uses her intelligence to pursue the lucrative carnivorous turkey story. Sam and Lisa ricochet across the landscape, tracking turkeys and fleeing the bloodthirsty hordes. Careening from shell-shocked grocery store owners fighting turkeys crawling out of refrigerators, to machine-gunning turkey farmers, to secret militia, Sam and Lisa doggedly report. Throughout the turkey apocalypse, they dare ravaged cities, plow knee deep in gore and corpses, and upload streams of zombie turkey video news to the world.

Paranoid militias clashing with the federal government forces and unkillable turkeys make Sam and Lisa doubt their ability to survive. Sam and Lisa have no superpowers. If you have a heart condition or lack humor, you should not read Zombie Turkeys, no matter how much you want to find out what happens.

from Zombie Turkeys

Zombie Turkeys Review

Rik Ty

4.0 out of 5 stars

Miss Goosebumps? Have Fun With Zombie Turkeys!

July 17, 2018

What was most surprising to me about Andy Zach’s Zombie Turkeys? – that is qualified as an actual adventure story! I wasn’t expecting that. About a quarter way in, when a young reporter gets the assignment to follow a swarm of 10,000 rampaging turkeys into a stretch of unfamiliar woodlands, it actually grabbed my attention while I was driving, and I was scared for the reporter (even without the zombie element, 10.000 turkeys is a LOT, and being a reporter is no protection against 10,000 wild animals).

More here:

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3 Laughs and 3 Links to the Future – Best of the Month

3 Laughs must come first! Here’s the first laugh for you. Then you have to categorize this video. What is it? Animation? Comedy? AI? Something else? Your cleverest response will get a free book fom me.

I must tell you when I first watched this I laughed until I cried.

Your First Link to the Future

In the previous video we have a variety of robots currently working. All of them remind me of my 1960s scifi reading I Robot in this volume by Isaac Asimov. Does any of this make you fear for the present or the future?

My biggest fear is the use of robots in war and terrorism. I can envision these robots with guns and ammo programmed to kill people. Soon. Today. Let me know what you think.

3 Laughs – Your Second

Maybe some of you think racing lawnmowers and world speed records for lawnmowers are perfectly serious topics and not suitable for laughing. Tell me why. in this link

Your Second Link to the Future

Continuing my computer theme, the next article focuses on AI, artificial intelligence. I never heard of ‘Generative Adversarial Neworks (GAN)’ before, so I had to read this article.

My quick summary:

  1. AI = a network of computers that learn patterns from raw data. That’s the ‘N’.
  2. Adversarial – One AI network pitted against another.
  3. Generative – The two AI networks work together, one to train the other, correcting it if it doesn’t achieve the goal. A little-discussed aspect of these learning networks is that training them is quite hard and involves enormous amounts of data and a LOT of time. Using an AI to train an AI in something like facial recognition speeds up the process to light speed and vastly improves the quality of the results.
  4. GAN – Two AI networks solve the problem of time and money in training an AI network to do a task.

What tasks would you like to train AI to do? Maybe link it with a robotic soldier to recognize a civilian versus an enemy soldier versus a fellow soldier? How about how to drive in snow and slush? I know a lot of people who don’t know how to do that yet. Let me know your thoughts. I’ll give each of you who responds a free short story.

3 Laughs – Your Third Laugh

In case that’s not funny enough for you (or not funny at all), here’s a backup joke next:

Still not laughing? Here’s my last, desperate attempt at humor.

Your 3 Laughs are over, but we’ve got one more link to the future, the last video.

Admit it. Isn’t this the space travel future you imagined as a kid?

I grew up as a child of the space age in the 60s, reading science fiction, following NASA space flights, and studying astronomy and physics. I dreamed of becoming a science fiction author and finally am one. You can find my books here:

3 Laughs
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Or, you can subscribe to my newsletter here.

Until next time!

3 Laughs
Andy Zach in repose