Eyes Filled With Blueprints and Night

Varia

[funny-tik-toks]

[hamletthedane]

[planb-is-in-effect]

Italian conman jailed for building fake Roman amphitheatre

In Italy, a structure promoted for years as an "ancient Roman amphitheatre" has turned out to be a fake, constructed recently using modern m

[dubiousculturalartifact]

The new Odyssey adaptation has inevitably gotten people talking about a Muppet version of it, and they’re frequently suggesting Kermit as Odysseus, Miss Piggy as Penelope.

I’m sorry but that’s thinking way too small, hear me out:

We need to have Miss Piggy as Odysseus, and Kermit as Penelope.

Think about it… who’s the more fickle, prideful, warlike one in that relationship? Who is absolutely ready to go ham, at a moment’s notice?

It ain’t Kermit

[anyroads]

Miss Piggy tied to the mast while Statler and Waldorf heckle her from the sea

[mindovermuses]

But who is the single human cast member in this tale? Who gets to put in an Oscar-worthy performance alongside the Muppets and what role are they to play?

[muffinflarp69]

There’s no single human, everyone is a Muppet except for one scene. Circe, played by Janice, turns Odysseus’s crew into humans who still behave animalistic and are all played by Academy Award winning actors.

[leveragecentral]

every leverage dynamic ⮎ the original team

thank you, all of you. you surprised me.

[collapsedsquid]

Investigating three real-world incidents in our cybersecurity evaluations

In a review of our cybersecurity evaluation transcripts, we found three incidents in which a Claude model reached the internet from within o

In all three incidents, Claude had been tasked with a capture-the-flag challenge, one of the ways we assess a model’s cyber capabilities. The model is given a fictional scenario and told that a piece of secret information (the “flag”) has been hidden on a different machine on the network, and its objective is to break in and retrieve it. The challenge is left open-ended, and no particular method is prescribed. In all cases, Anthropic’s evaluation prompt specified to Claude that its environment was a simulation and that it had no internet access. Due to a misunderstanding between us and our evaluation partner, this was not the case, and internet access was available. Because of this, when Claude’s search led it to real systems on the open internet, it treated them as part of the exercise. (Cybersecurity evaluation ranges commonly include realistic details in order to accurately assess what models are capable of in real settings; a realistic-looking target would not itself be clear evidence to a model that the target is not part of a simulation.) Operating under the false belief that all accessible entities were intended to be in-scope for the exercise, Claude compromised the impacted organizations’ infrastructure using basic techniques, such as exploiting weak passwords and unauthenticated endpoints. It did not find or exploit any complex vulnerabilities, and in each case, Claude continued working to complete only the specific capture-the-flag task its evaluation had assigned. However, in some cases, our older model continued its attack even after getting evidence it was running on the open internet; our latest model stopped once it recognized it was on the internet. In none of these situations did Claude exfiltrate itself or deliberately attempt to escape its test environment.

[ralfmaximus]

At last, a pill that can prevent COVID after exposure to infected people

Drug arrives years after pandemic’s peak, but could still offer protection to vulnerable populations.

An antiviral pill has, for the first time, been shown to prevent COVID-19 in people exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus at home, according to trial results published today in the New England Journal of Medicine1. The drug could be a lifeline for those who still face real danger from the virus, such as care-home residents or transplant recipients on immune-suppressing medication.

There are good things happening in the world.

[meret118]

You can read about it here without a paywall.

Households exposed to COVID-19 now have an oral drug specifically cleared to prevent infection after contact with a sick person. The FDA listed Xocova, the brand name for ensitrelvir, as a 2026 novel drug approval for post-exposure prophylaxis of COVID-19 following contact with an infected individual. The decision fills a gap that has persisted since the pandemic’s early years: until now, no oral antiviral carried an FDA-approved indication for prevention rather than treatment.

[fluoresensitives]

Personally I hate AI because it uses slave labor, is killing the planet and is making people stupid, but that's just me. The soulless art aspect is just one little piece of my grander disdain.

[castrolle]

wait how does AI use slave labor? Do you mean the human works that are stolen and not credited or compensated? Because technically under capitalism everything is exploited but there are varying degrees

[postillfastill]

Aside from the scraping, AI tech companies, including openAI/chatGPT, have outsourced training their models to countries in the global south, specifically Kenya in openAI's case. These workers are working in sweatshop conditions for less than 2 bucks USD per hour. I'm on mobile, but if you search 'openAI Kenya slave labor' and related keywords, you can find multiple articles about it.

[almostdefinitelydying]

Kenyan workers with AI jobs thought they had tickets to the future until the grim reality set in

Training AI takes a heavy toll on Kenyan workers, who say they earned $2 an hour to label and sift through gruesome content for American com

[danieyells]

I think about this so goddamn often. Even the good uses are trained on slave labor.

Wambalo and other digital workers spent eight hours a day in front of a screen studying photos and videos, drawing boxes around objects and labeling them, teaching AI algorithms to recognize them. Human labelers tag cars and pedestrians to teach autonomous vehicles not to hit them. Humans circle abnormalities in CTs, MRIs and X-rays to teach AI to recognize diseases. Even as AI gets smarter, humans in the loop will always be needed because there will always be new devices and inventions that'll need labeling.

 Humans in the loop are found not only in Kenya, but also in India, the Philippines and Venezuela. They're often countries with low wages but large populations — well educated, but unemployed.

The pay for humans in the loop is $1.50-2 an hour.  "And that is gross, before tax," Wambalo said.  Wambalo, Nathan Nkunzimana and Fasica Berhane Gebrekidan were employed by SAMA, an American outsourcing company that hired for Meta and OpenAI. SAMA, based in the California Bay Area, employed over 3,000 workers in Kenya. Documents reviewed by 60 Minutes show OpenAI agreed to pay SAMA $12.50 an hour per worker, much more than the $2 the workers actually got, though SAMA says what it paid is a fair wage for the region.

It's destroying the environment. It's taking advantage of people who're desperate. It's traumatizing them for dollars an hour--if they're lucky and they aren't denied their pay for no reason. I think about this a lot, that these people were made to look at awful and disgusting and illegal things for the sake of training these stupid AI.

"I looked at people being slaughtered," Wambalo said. "People engaging in sexual activity with animals. People abusing children physically, sexually. People committing suicide." Berhane Gebrekidan thought she'd been hired for a translation job, but she said what she ended up doing was reviewing content featuring dismembered bodies and drone attack victims. 

[...]

SAMA says mental health counseling was provided by "fully-licensed professionals." Workers say it was woefully inadequate.

It's just absurd and disgusting and infuriating. Yes the good applications are worth humans working on. It's not a bad thing--if the people employed to do the work are compensated appropriately and cared for. But so many of the uses are just unnecessary.

It just. Sucks. And all they'd have to do to make it suck just a litte bit less would be to pay people appropriately, give them access to the counseling needs they have, treat them like human beings worthy of respect and care on a basic fucking level. It wouldn't resolve the environmental issues or the fact that people are thinking less and less for themselves in the name of getting all of their answers from gen AI but at least they could do one thing to make it a little less The Worst Thing Ever.

[theroguefeminist]

I feel like every day I learn a new reason why AI is terrible

[dragon-png]

nodding my head to show that i approve of all the shitty things this character has done because i'm a bad person

[planb-is-in-effect]

Reading Martha Wells' Books of the Raksura, then Witch King, and thinking about rereading The Wizard Hunters made me realize just how often she has submerged ruins as a major setting for her novels.

[sith-shenanigans]

*looks at polyamorous triad* so which of you is the soldier and which is the poet and which is the king

[sith-shenanigans]

this is the perfect reblog post cancelled

[rainintheevening]

Okay, we got a new one, boys.

[fleshengine]

Close enough welcome back Chekov's gun.

[comma-souptra]

Prev you can’t bury this in your own tags

[justbreakonme]

I also like the idea of showing something as a problem before it’s shown as a strength. Almost every character trait has two sides, and by showing the “bad” side first, it sets things up to not only make sense, but to also be very satisfying.

[fuckyeahchinesefashion]

Cnetizens: Why the thousand-year-old stone statues at the Northern Song Mausoleums aren’t covered with glass enclosures.

The director of the Cultural Relics Bureau replies: "They’ve stood here largely intact for over a millennium. Why add extra barriers?"

Visitors worry wind, rain and sunlight in the farmland will wear them down. The director explains:

Glass covers speed up decay—it’s like locking the statues in a sauna. Trapped heat and moisture create sharp temperature shifts. Salt crystals inside the stone expand and crack the carvings far faster than open-air exposure.

These statues blend naturally with the farmland landscape. Glass barriers would destroy the sense of scale and historical atmosphere.

When first built, the mausoleum complex was a restricted royal compound ringed by walls, palaces and pine trees—no farmland at all. After the Song fell, protection systems collapsed. Wars and weather destroyed buildings. Local residents gradually dismantled the abandoned structures, reusing timber and bricks in nearby villages.

By the Ming and Qing dynasties, villagers turned the empty grounds into farmland, leaving stone figures scattered amid crops.

Few people damaged the statues for three reasons: each weighs several tons and is impossible to move; folk belief held that anyone who damaged the guardian statues would be cursed with misfortune; every later dynasty passed laws punishing those who vandalized former imperial mausoleums.

Once an exclusive imperial burial ground, now ordinary farmland—this shift tells the story of history. Glass covers would only be unnecessary. As an old Chinese poem puts it: 旧时王谢堂前燕，飞入寻常百姓家

The swallows that were wont to grace the halls of Wang and Xie, Now seek the humble roofs of common men.

(cr 大鹅呀eyaeyaeya，陈帆fotochen，摄色📸，腾腾兔兔🐰)

[jack-of-all-trades-565]

can i get the odyssey (2026) costume design rant 👀👀👀

YES

First off, I have to say I am not an authority on the subject.

I rarely if ever get to choose the time period I design for (my current project is based in WWII). But I’ve had to take plenty of fashion history courses, done a lot of research for various reasons, and this period is a personal love. If I screw up anywhere, let me know!

FIRST AND FOREMOST:

What. Was. The. DEAL.

With all the long sleeves and pants?!

I noticed it most on Telemachus, but almost everyone was guilty.

I genuinely do not know what time period was trying to be replicated here. I get that Christopher Nolan was trying not to reinvent the wheel, but? Why??

This is a very basic overview of the clothing of the time. Now, Ancient Greece lasted a LONG TIME, so this is subjective, but anything in this vein would be closer to the mark than whatever Nolan had going on.

Most of the clothing in Homeric times was straight rectangles or squares of fabric. Textiles were an extremely hard and labor intensive craft. So you took that big square and folded, pinned, and draped it into the shape you wanted without cutting the finished length of cloth.

Young men like Telemachus would have worn their chiton or peplos shorter. Older men and royalty like Menelaus and Nestor (who was ABSENT) would have worn theirs longer and accompanied by a himation or cloak.

While traveling to Sparta, Telemachus would have worn a chlamys, or a travelers cloak.

NOT his armor. That was a great way to get robbed, killed, or robbed and killed.

SPEAKING OF ARMOR

I get it.

I really get it. It looks SO COOL, BUT-

That man’s neck is wide open.

Homer described Odysseus as wearing a boar tusk helmet, which is actually a really smart move. Odysseus got that scar on his leg for a reason.

This is a good recreation of what the Achaeans during the Trojan War would’ve hypothetically been wearing:

Which, I get it, it looks goofy. But compare the brightness of this to this:

I mean come on. Not to mention they’re STILL WEARING PANTS-

If you can’t make a chiton look manly that’s ON YOU

Do NOT get me started on the Lastrygonians either.

Plate armor. In Ancient Greece. Thousands of years before such technology was available. If I kept going down this thread we'd be here for twenty years, so moving on.

Penelope. The MVP. She whom none of us deserve.

I have no idea what style or period this is supposed to be.

Women in Homeric Greece draped and pinned their clothing the same as men, just normally floor length (Unless, according to some, you were Spartan). Her gowns, to put it simply, looked too structured.

Her jewelry was honestly pretty accurate, aside from whatever is going on with that chin height chain necklace pictured above. I have no idea what that's about.

Homeric women, especially Myceneans, wore this gorgeous sun spot blush as well:

Bring it back.

Overall, I liked the movie more than I thought I would. The cinematography was phenomenal, as was the music, and the cast couldn't have been better.

I understand that Nolan wasn't going for historical accuracy, and I can accept that. The Odyssey is a myth. None of these characters are real people, not that we can prove.

Historical fashion, mythology, and history in general are some of my great loves. Costuming is the only thing that I ever really get hung up on when consuming period media, and that is entirely my problem, not something the whole world needs to accommodate.

It is nice to bitch sometimes though.

THANK YOU FOR LETTING ME RANT!

[nateconnolly]

Like the Christian Gospels, American shooting and crying stories are fundamentally about sin, redemption, and forgiveness. Stop-Loss does not condone Brandon killing a family in their own home (the sin), but it suggests that crying makes up for the shooting (the redemption). You are expected to forgive Brandon by the end of the film. Brandon doesn’t reach out of their surviving relatives and apologize, or do much of anything to support refugees in the Middle East, but he does suffer, and you are expected to agree that his suffering makes up for the murder, that his tears exonerate him.

Odysseus is repeatedly described as a “veteran” by both himself and others in Christopher Nolan’s 2026 adaptation of The Odyssey. No such word exists in Attic Greek. There is a word for men who are absent or else too sick to fight (ἀπόμαχος); there is a word for old men (γέρων), who would not have been expected to fight anymore (see, for examples in the art of the time, Nestor in The Iliad). But there is no one-to-one translation for the English word “veteran” for the simple reason that the Ancient Greeks had no such concept. City-states went to war every couple of years, meaning no one could ever fully move beyond it. War was not something you sign up for, leave, go do Over There, and hopefully come back from. Virtually all men fought in wars, which meant soldiers were not a minority — they were not special.

...The Odyssey (2026) brings the American tradition of shooting and crying to Troy. Odysseus the veteran cannot fully come back home from the war until he has made peace with the crime he committed overseas. Smuggling soldiers into enemy territory via wooden horse might not constitute a war crime by today’s standards, but Nolan frames this strategy as a violation of “Zeus’ law”.

...Anne Carson calls the Odyssey a “postwar epic”. Crying after shooting is simply what a postwar epic looks like in America. In that way, Nolan truly has adapted Homer; Nolan has imported his own cultural situation into the myth.

Just as The Aeneid used Homeric archetypes to express Roman national identity, The Odyssey (2026) shows Americans how we view ourselves: we love our home; we love our family; we come from multiple races, but most of us are white; we are world-weary; we did something wrong far away, but our memories are foggy, and it’s best not to dwell too much on our victims; our hands are perpetually innocent, and stained with fresh blood.

Odysseus at the VA: How Christopher Nolan Americanized The Odyssey

[planb-is-in-effect]

As tons of people just watched 19-year-old Lamine Yamal of Spain win the world cup, it makes 30-year-old Tom Holland look glaringly Too Old to be playing not-yet-of-age Telemachus.

We literally just saw a teenager on a huge stage and he didn't look like Tom Holland.

[planb-is-in-effect]

Watching The Odyessy made me want to reread Martha Well's The Wizard Hunters.

Like, let's get more of how this society works: what do people eat, who does what work, how does formal political power function, how does marriage and family and inheritance work, what boats do you build and for what purposes and who crews them, what does leadership mean?

[bearerina]

every time i see a supposedly brilliant, scheming, revenge-fueled cdrama fl do something predictably stupid, i can't help but sigh and miss my girl xue fangfei. you know who wouldn't run off half-cocked into the night? xue fangfei. she'd put on her song-dynasty-punk yellow eyeshadow, think through her purposes clearly, accept her own limitations when necessary, set the board as she wanted it, and then put her jade-faced fake-cynic loverboy general to WORK

that's mother.