towards a better delusion

failed/aspiring pseudo intellectual

[torschlusspanikattack]

Rate my new glasses—fit, pretension, vibes,

(they are very fragile—questionable decision in the wake of a pressing need to replace the previous pair)

[torschlusspanikattack]

there’s a fair amount of wishing your best friend was also gay / was genderflipped but what if they were also ugly?

would be tough to be faced with such clear evidence of personal shallowness

[torschlusspanikattack]

coughing up a lung so hard shake myself awake every ten seconds

[cryptotheism]

you are very type A and always have water snacks hand cream on you

I'm not entirely sure what type A means tbh. Water and snacks are simply common sense.

[torschlusspanikattack]

type a means higher risk of coronary heart disease than type b

[cryptotheism]

I don't think this has been debunked at all? Like the existence of the sea peoples is pretty well attested isn't it? Has the scholarship changed recently?

[cryptotheism]

Like yeah they probably weren't the single primary cause of the bronze age collapse. Nothing in history is ever caused by just one thing. But it's my understanding that the Sea Peoples were very much real.

[thethunderbirdrising]

Did Odysseus Cause the Bronze Age Collapse?

We were all set for The Odyssey to be our summer discourse. Battle lines had been drawn, takes had been prepared. Christopher Nolan’s adapta

I'll recommend this article on the historicity of the Odyssey, sea people included

[torschlusspanikattack]

this review conjures a better film than the one nolan made

[slowavesloth]

[shieldfoss]

#people out there forgetting that the efficiency ALSO trades off against navigability during heists #if i was crawling in the air ducts and got blocked by turning vanes i'd be furious

[literallymechanical]

ok being serious here for a sec, but you absolutely can climb through air ducts and it's very fun!!!! If you move slow it's quiet, they are not full of filters and equipment (why would they be full of things that obstruct air flow????), and yeah they can be cold and windy but like, that's part of the fun? They're also not dusty, why would a place with extremely strong airflow be dusty?????

I feel like everybody vaguely remembers that one mythbusters episode and quotes it like that was the be-all and end-all of HVAC duct traversal wisdom

No, the actual hard part with air ducts is all the un-trimmed sheet metal screws that protrude into them, you need to watch your hands and keep low. I have yet to see a move where somebody hunches up a little too far and slices up their back (it's not fun!!!)

[semusepsu]

I spent a year or so installing and replacing HVAC and never have I installed a vent system that a fully grown adult could climb around in. Literallymechanical's comment about the screws is real and it makes me think they might know some of what they are talking about but check it:

The air systems I installed usually had a branching design where the main corridor off of the air intake was in theory big enough for a person, but each branch gets progressively smaller, because this is more efficient, because the farther from the pumps the less air pressure the system has. So while there are large enough vents exist, they are not the majority of vents. Second, these often had crossbars to strengthen them at regular intervals, which would at the very least make traversing them awkward. Third, while some vents have the structural support where a worker could rest their weight on it, and thus presumably a person could go in it, again, this is only true of some vents in a larger system. Fourth, while not dusty per se, the inside of old vent systems are sometimes full of crusty white limescale from condensation. I remember replacing one such system that had been installed in the 1980s. Definitely not the clean interior you see in the movies. Fifth, on the matter of equipment that restricts air flow, most vent systems actually have firestoppers at regular intervals so that a vent can be closed off so that smoke and fire cannot move through the building via the air system. Sometimes literally blocking the flow of air is a good thing!

So yes, if you have a set of blueprints for the vent system, and know the places that you are going are accessible from the largest vents, and supported well enough, and the person in question is small and/or flexible enough that the crossbeams are not a problem, then yes you can use the vents to move around. But really, you are probably better off spoofing your credentials and buying a janitor's outfit as a disguise.

[literallymechanical]

So yes, if you have a set of blueprints for the vent system, and know the places that you are going are accessible from the largest vents, and supported well enough, and the person in question is small and/or flexible enough that the crossbeams are not a problem, then yes you can use the vents to move around

All true, and those conditions are pretty much guaranteed to converge in a machine room of a large building! Also you don't need blueprints if you just walk around and look up.

Furthermore! You'd be surprised how narrow of a space a fully grown adult can squeeze through with a bit of practice. Turn your head sideways and scoot forward on your toes, with your arms straight to keep your shoulders narrow. But yes, it's easiest near the fans, where the ducts are big and you can shuffle on your elbows. You can even traverse vertical ducts if somebody has tied off a rope to a cross bar and you sort of shrimp-scrunch and have a bit of faith.

And yeah at a certain point you can't go any further, usually not more than one or two branches. So it's not great for infiltrating places, but its still a lot of fun!! It's great to wiggle around in dark spaces with a headlamp, scratches the same itch as caving but much safer, except for the screws.

I had a very specific scar on my back for a while from such a screw (it's a short, wide mark that tapers to a point), and some people have them on their arms. It's a characteristic injury of the sport, like broken toenails on a ballerina or roughed up ears on a boxer.

[literallymechanical]

I think we're saying the same thing. Not practical for sneaking around a building but a lot of fun to climb around where you can!! Also maybe I just have low standards for crawling-surface cleanliness but by the time you're shimmying up elevator shafts for fun, you're already resigned to taking a very thorough shower when you get home.

[winterwatcherxx]

i can’t get over emily wilson’s review of the odyssey. anyways here are my favourite parts:

“Unlike some of Nolan’s other films, The Odyssey is not boring, thanks to the source material, which is impossible to mess up entirely.”

“Nolan’s spectacle threatens to drown out his story just as the towering waves of the wine-dark sea – more grey than purple – threaten to overwhelm his hero’s ship.”

“But writing dialogue is not one of Nolan’s talents. The language is relentlessly expository, humourless and flat.”

“I was humbled to learn that Nolan has read at least the first line of my translation of The Odyssey into iambic pentameter. In at least one interview, he cited my version of the first line of the poem: ‘Tell me about a complicated man.’ But I would be ashamed to have written any part of this script.”

“It lacks psychological, emotional, political and ethical depth. Its narrative structure is gimmicky. The writing is abysmal. None of the characters has convincing motivation for their actions or words. There are no sex scenes, and all the food looks horrible.”

[standard-text-editor]

Here's my favourite bit:

Nolan’s other major addition to Homer’s narrative is the repeated reference to threats to ‘our civilisation’ from ‘the sea peoples’ – a now debunked 19th-century theory about maritime tribes who were thought to have attacked Egypt around 1200 BCE and to have also been responsible for the roughly coeval collapse of Mycenaean Greek culture. [...] The current consensus, as Nolan clearly knows, is that there was no such thing as ‘the sea peoples’, and that the Greek-speaking world’s shift away from the more centralised, literate palace culture of the Mycenaeans in the 11th century BCE towards the fragmented social formations of the early Greek Iron Age was caused by a range of factors, including climate change, earthquakes and internal unrest.

This is such a bizarre failure of reading comprehension on Wilson's part that it has single-handedly demolished my opinion of her.

There were undeniably Sea Peoples! The hand-wringing about nuance archaeologists like to perform these days is about their role in the LBA collapse, not their very existence.

[torschlusspanikattack]

i have yet to see smth from wilson that explains y she is the most famous classicist rn

[torschlusspanikattack]

doing the thing whether neoconservatism was invented by trots by doing neoconservatism to the homeland

we need to bring democracy to the middle west, these ppl don’t know how to read, we need to build schools, they hate women and must be educated out of their regressive religion, we must embark on a project of nation-building bc they are clearly not capable of doing it themselves and will be a threat to world peace until someone does

also we gotta bomb em, we gotta do a highway of death, it’s the only way

[torschlusspanikattack]

Turning a big dial labeled “biologist evilness” one mark PDF a single tick to the right and immediately learning of the retroactive extinction of the Chinese race through unit-731 race-selective bioweapons

turning the dial one tick and immediately dropping 10 iq bc amodei was right about inverse relation between desire for catastrophic harm and intelligence

[torschlusspanikattack]

To summarize, what I believe currently keeps us safe in biology is not “defenders”, or even the availability of materials, but a negative correlation between intellectual capability and desire to commit catastrophic harm.

[str-ngeloop]

who said this? curious

[torschlusspanikattack]

Our position on open-weights models

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on open-weights models

[torschlusspanikattack]

outside of cybersecurity, nothing i’ve seen from models indicate some fundamental jump past when the internet made all human knowledge freely available to anyone

a lot of the chemical and biological weapon worries sound like someone saying, ‘terrorism will win bc someone made a rlly good video lecture’

the things that separate a PhD chemist from someone self-taught by reading are not things that the models replicate (i.e. experiential & institutional)

ofc, cybersecurity is fundamentally different, but is also much more symmetrical. is any frontier lab claiming theirs models show significantly asymmetrical cybersecurity capabilities?

symmetrical capabilities doesn’t preclude red queen’s race raising infrastructural costs, but that’s not a paradigm shift

[torschlusspanikattack]

To summarize, what I believe currently keeps us safe in biology is not “defenders”, or even the availability of materials, but a negative correlation between intellectual capability and desire to commit catastrophic harm.

[str-ngeloop]

who said this? curious

[torschlusspanikattack]

Our position on open-weights models

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei on open-weights models

[torschlusspanikattack]

To summarize, what I believe currently keeps us safe in biology is not “defenders”, or even the availability of materials, but a negative correlation between intellectual capability and desire to commit catastrophic harm.

[torschlusspanikattack]

is amodei sincerely maximally hawkish on china or just seeing it as the best line to take?

[arttla]

extremely frustrating that you can't look up depictions of any mythical figure without getting bombarded by dogshit ai-gen images

[torschlusspanikattack]

i was trying to find depictions of geryon over time and searching outside of art databases was p much useless

(i wanted to see if there was any pattern to 3 bodies vs 3 heads vs wings over time)

[torschlusspanikattack]

the odyssey is the rare exception that ends on a tournament arc

[torschlusspanikattack]

emily wilson’s review of nolan is some real mussolini vs hitler

[torschlusspanikattack]

opus 5 likes to sprinkle hanzi into output for unclear reasons