October 2024 – L.T. Hanlon

Erik of Farpoint Farms makes a compelling case for how AM radio can save lives.

I’ve written before about the value of AM radio during emergencies, and why, even in big cities, having a dependable portable, multipowered is a must.

Here, Erik of the Farpoint Farms YouTube channel explains how WATA-AM kept him and countless others informed after Hurricane Helene cut a path of destruction through western North Carolina.

“AM radio is often thought of as obsolete,” Erik writes. “I wouldn’t want to tell that to any of the tens of thousands that have relied on the info broadcast from this station for the past three weeks! Reach out to your local station and see if they need help staying on the air. many of these are mom and pop stations that are run by a single soul. When the time came, this station was ready to step up.”

Check out Farpoint Farms’ latest video above for recordings of WATA making a difference.

A fun feature of Midjourney is that even when it misses the mark, its efforts can be valuable for other projects. The image above seems to show how the famed “thunderbird” might have terrorized ranchers — and could find use in a Weird West idea I’m developing. For the record, here’s the prompt that generated this image…

Generate a primitive, hastily completed doodle sketch that a cowboy under hypnosis might create to illustrate seeing cattle abducted by extraterrestrials. Despite being an amateurishly created drawing, the images should look scary. This drawing should be shown on a ruled sheet of three-hole notebook paper. –ar 16:9 –v 6.1 –stylize 0 –weird 600