that vast moth-eaten musical brocade

my brains are pink; you can see 'em work • blinded and renewed by that revelation, the city • everything in the world is exactly the same • γῠνή τεχνητή • unfortunately, as you probably already know, computers • remember there is no triangle, however obtuse, but the circumference of some circle passes through its wretched vertices • lipstick is real, lips are not • alter quam pepulit sexus nec suscipit alter • sex positive, trans positive, autogynephilia positive

[xenostalgic]

I don't go to see movies in the theater that often so i've only done this a few times. but there's a theater about an hour's walk from home over a big hill, and walking there in the early evening in the summer, then seeing a movie, then walking home around midnight is a really decadent experience. sometimes I put on makeup to mark the special occasion even though I'm going to sweat it all off. you get the physical pleasure of exercise, and the crafted sensory pleasure of a movie, and the social pleasure of talking it over on the walk home, augmented by the perhaps very slightly antisocial pleasure of talking loudly and excitedly outside people's houses in the middle of the night, and the novelty of seeing parts of the city that are quiet and empty in the dark. I guess this is probably what people get out of going dancing...

[xenostalgic]

Odyssey was not very good but most of the negative tumblr posts about it were wrong about why so at least I've found a way to feel superior to both

I think the basic concept of "Odysseus caused the Bronze Age Collapse by his underhandedness/impiety" is not just fine but good, actually. it helps the sack of Troy feel really apocalyptic and tragic, xenia is a good thematic focus for the story and giving it this threatening context helps convey it to the modern viewer. unfortunately every single line of dialogue drawing this connection was so horrifically clunky and bad that it kind of ruined the potential good there.

having Athena be the priestess he saw killed in the sack was really good, made me tear up. too bad Zendaya didn't really get any good lines or much to do

Hades was spooky and Sinon was good in that scene but the zombie army chase was dumb. the Cyclops was good (and better for skipping the "Nobody" bit, actually!) but the chase was dumb. Robert Pattinson was good, the hack and slash with the suitors went on too long. Agamemnon's armor was honestly really cool. didn't like that Scylla was socks. 2/5

[xenostalgic]

they merged my on call rotation with a different one so now I'm on call less frequently but for twice as many services half of which I know half as well as I ought and more than half of which I know twice as much about as I deserve to have to know. and then they added a separate second rotation which I'm also on but which has fewer people on it so in total I'm on call about 150% as much of the time per year (though actually slightly less because they can overlap). which spells disaster for me at Sacrifice

[xenostalgic]

when recruiters email me like "hi xenostalgic have you ever considered working for [famously selective lab]" it's like. come on man. you can see my resume is not a famously-selective-lab resume. don't taunt me

[xenostalgic]

OpenAI and Hugging Face partner to address security incident during model evaluation

OpenAI and Hugging Face share early findings from a security incident during AI model evaluation, highlighting advanced cyber capabilities a

this is so insane. yud scream infinity dot gif

Last week, Hugging Face disclosed a new kind of security incident⁠ after they detected and contained an AI agent that compromised their infrastructure, something we expect to become more commonplace with the proliferation of increasingly cyber-capable models. After investigating, we now know that this particular incident was driven by a combination of OpenAI models — including GPT‑5.6 Sol and an even more capable pre-release model, all with reduced cyber refusals for evaluation purposes — while being internally tested on a benchmark⁠ of cyber capabilities.

literally they were doing an internal eval, the model hacked their system to gain internet access, and used that to attack Huggingface to get access to the test set answers

[plasmapop]

10/07/2026 • jumps on the bandwagon. so we’re doing double dactyls now i guess

[xenostalgic]

Bertie, please, this is the Augustine chapter. can we get back to Augustine

[kata4a]

higgledy piggledy dactyls and dimeter seem to be everyone's lyrical friend

what kind of force will it take (I conjecture) to antimemetically rout out this trend

[xenostalgic]

Any poster of verses refined is at present to dactyls inclined. But what follows this phase and becomes the next craze for the meter-appreciative mind?

[kata4a]

higgledy piggledy precious is that that it's like to be somebody (even a bat!)

which, after all of that precious candescence is, incomprehensibly, gone. just like that

[xenostalgic]

The Event

“Something has taken place that we cannot speak of or know or even fully perceive, yet the fact of which sits before us.”

[xenostalgic]

(Horace, Odes IV.vii)

Higgledy piggledy, snowmelt is patchily greening the fields, and the trees are in bud.

Earth is remade by the change of the seasons. The rivers return to the riverbeds' mud.

Spirits of nature come all unapparelled and dance unabashedly, joyous at play.

Hope for no permanence: nonsempiternally, years, like the moment, are rushing away.

After the frost is the warmth of the spring, but it's trampled by summer, as greenery wilts—

slain in its turn by the heliocyclical bountiful autumn, then winter's white quilts.

All that is lost to the seasons' revolving, though, moon after moon in their time will restore;

we, when we die, like the mythocanonical heroes and kings, will be dust evermore.

No one can say if the gods will capriciously grant us the morrow, and maybe they won't.

All that you give to your heart, all you love, will be lost to your heirs on the day that they don't.

Once you are gone and your shadow is facing its judgement in death and the sentence is passed,

never, my friend, will your family, eloquence, piety, anything, save you at last.

Even Hippolytus, famously virtuous, dear to Diana, in death must remain; Theseus too had to leave his Piríthoüs love-unavailingly Lethe-enchained.

[xenostalgic]

hyped for the promise of J-space to substitute basic awareness of tone and intent—I will just look at a label that tells me "CLAUDE THINKS THAT YOU'RE DUMB" or "CLAUDE SAID WHAT IT MEANT"

[unknought]

Higgledy piggledy, turning and turning as gyres are widening, centers unheld,

things fall apart and there’s anarchy everywhere; falcons fly freely and can’t be compelled.

Dimming the tide there is blood in the water and everywhere customs of innocence drowned.

Held by the worst is a fervent intensity; lacking conviction the best run aground.

Surely there must be some kind of apocalypse; surely epiphany must be at hand!

Visions unbidden from Spiritus Mundi of something awakening out on the sand:

Head of a man with a leonine frame and a pitiless gaze that’s as blank as the sun;

sleep became nightmare by passage of centuries long before eons of slumber were done.

Higgledy piggledy, beast of antiquity, imminent, just as the prophecies warn,

shambling slowly but revelatorily, slouching towards Bethlehem, there to be born.

[xenostalgic]

Temere pemere, Latin hexameter's not universally dactyls at core;

Spondees are commonplace, trochees are possible; though it's "dactylic" the "hex" matters more.

Temere pemere, greats of antiquity metered by quantity rather than stress;

also was looser the lexical order to finding enable of dactyls, I guess.

[xenostalgic]

higgledy pig; with suff icient creative en jambment, dactylic con struction's a breeze;

strictly, conventions dis courage such anti-di aeresis; fuck it! re ject their decrees!

[xenostalgic]

attention conservation notice: whining about phones, whining about work

one of several ways in which work has deformed my psyche (in addition to leading me to use emoji reacts like a chimp in an experiment—without even a juice reward!) is noticeably worsening my social media addiction. it is unbearable to attend continuously to work for eight hours a day, and scrolling bluesky or tumblr provides relief in a way that doesn't fully consume my attention, so I can constantly be switching back to work as needed. I really dislike this, though. it feels bad in a way that's independent of the specific thing distracting me—if I were reading something more edifying in this same distracted way that would still be unpleasant and depressing because I wouldn't be able to do a good job of paying attention to either. as it happens I'm not even able to do that in any case; if I try to read a book in short pieces like this I just get absorbed and don't work at all. so it has to be social media—and so on top of the previous unpleasantness there's the added indignity of being constantly distracted by something that is often—no offense to anyone reading this, I'm mostly thinking of bluesky, but still—not worth the time spent even if I was fully attentive to it. and then, on top of that, the mental habit of distraction carries over into the rest of my life where I like it even less

ofc I've had this job for about four years and I've had tumblr for uh, almost twelve years?—yikes—and a smartphone for longer than that, so it's not like this is a situation entirely attributable to work, but it's so apparent to me how much work makes it worse. but I really can't conceive of any alternative, because being fully present at the office is, as previously mentioned, absolutely, totally, and in all other ways unbearable

[transgenderer]

higgledy piggledy, summer transgenderer, tavner's arrangement (for choir) of the lamb: https://youtu.be/BCnYdL_co6Y

didn't convince me the poem was good, but the harmonies do make it kind of a jam

:0! this is rly good! its sppoky in a blakean way. very unlike the sort of simple bouncing i was imagining