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[nyanmeowmiau]

If you want info:

- To Play The Game - John Guiver. Most recent and most complete.

If you want survivor’s accounts:

- Society of the Snow - Pablo Vierci. Contains chapters on all 16 survivors, mostly what had stayed with them after 35 years.

- Miracle In The Andes - Nando Parrado. Mostly about what happened in the mountains.

- I Had To Survive - Roberto Canessa. Focused on how what happened later influenced his career as a pediatric cardiologist.

- Out Of The Silence - Eduardo Strauch. Very instrospective. Title makes reference to the fact that it was written after 40 years of silence.

- After The Tenth Day - Carlitos Paéz. Mostly talks about how the experience has shaped his later life

- Into The Mountains - Pedro Algorta. Mostly about the “after”. Pedro has a very unique way of looking at what happened, more pragmatic. Not a read for everyone.

- Memories of the Andes - Coche Inciarte. About the emotional and spiritual journey. Alongside Numa, he took over comforting the rest of the survivors after Liliana died.

Others:

- Survive! - Clay Clair. Good info about the search attemps. Known to have made up facts about what happened inside the fuselage, though. Interviewed airforce, no survivors.

- Alive - Piers Paul Reed. Mostly crude and factual, does not take into account the inside world of the people living in it. Has certain excerpts that come out as judgemental.

links:

https://www.reddit.com/r/SocietyOfTheSnow/comments/1b2zitk/master_list_of_links_movies_books_updated_2292024/

Hi ☺️ I've recently found myself being super interested in the story of the tragedy/miracle of the andes (not sure how it's supposed to be called tbh) — do you maybe have some books to suggest that talk about that event? Possibly ones that have been translated into english or italian, because unfortunately... i don't know spanish 🙈 Thank you!

Hi! I'm very sorry for the delay.

The thing is, the Tragedy of the Andes is the sort of thing everybody here knows about, but not necessarily have read about it or can give you an extensive/intensive list?

That's me XD like, I remember stories my parents have told several times, like the psychic that told Páez Vilaró that his son was still alive, several weeks after the crash, and the shock at the news of their being found and the accidentally poetic "I come from a plane that fell on the mountain" quote. I haven't read about it, so I cannot recommend you anything first hand.

But Fernando Parrado and Roberto Canessa were, between the survivors, the most willing to talk about it since early on. Both gave lots of interviews (there used to be one on YT from... 1973? that was on a US tv program -they both were decent English speakers already- but the channel that uploaded it got nuked and it's lost).

Parrado wrote Miracle in the Andes: 72 Days on the Mountain and My Long Trek Home (2007), and Canessa, I Had to Survive: How a Plane Crash in the Andes Inspired My Calling to Save Lives (2016).

I know that Piers Paul Read's Alive was divisive between both survivors and """aficionados""". Some appreciate the thoroughness of the research, while others feel the account is morbid and laser focused on the material, mechanic aspect and underplaying the experiential/psychological/spiritual side. So on that one YMMV (that's the book the Alive! movie was adapted from).

That's all I can give :/

[nyanmeowmiau]

Also, there was Diego Storm, third year, 20 y/o.

Part of “La Barra”, friend group that also included Carlitos, Bobby, Roy and Coco.

He was also very important during the first days after the crash, and was the one who noticed Nando was regaining consciousness and insisted he be moved to a warmer spot so he wouldn’t die of hypothermia. He was one of the victims of the avalanche

The doctors

Roberto Canessa was in his second year of medical school. Gustavo Zerbino was in his first. They were both only 19 years-old.

They administered first aid when the plane crashed and monitored the wounded until the last day.

Gustavo didn’t continue his studies because, according to him, he had seen too much death already.

[nyanmeowmiau]

Ese momento en el que te bajas en una estación de metro distinta a la que planeaste.

Porque si te hubieras bajado en la otra, hubieras tenido que cruzar la calle.

Y en estos momentos no confías en que no te vayas a tirar frente a un bus.

[nyanmeowmiau]

The crazy thing about Society of the Snow is that it so could’ve easily been nominated for the majority of the categories for the regular films (outside of best supporting actress, best actress, original screenplay, and best original song). It’s got the strong main actors, like Enzo, Matias, and Agustin. And it has strong supporting actors like Esteban Bigliardi (Javier) and Esteban Kukuriczka (Fito). The score was amazing and unique. The cinematography was beautiful yet jarring at the same time. And I’m honestly surprised it wasn’t nominated for best sound. J.A. Bayona’s direction gave as much accuracy and respect to the true story as he could. And his direction had power that made us feel like we were there with the survivors as they were fighting for their lives and tackling their morals. As for the adapted screenplay, Numa’s narration, Arturo’s monologue, Javier’s monologue was peak writing

Just sayin.

[nyanmeowmiau]

el que la sociedad de la nieve no ganara ni ningún oscar o que no hayan tenido más nominaciones solamente es otra demostración del esnobismo de la academia y lo rezagado que aún está el cine/arte latinoamericano frente al mundo. i’m not even surprised, sólo profundamente decepcionada.

[nyanmeowmiau]

Rip “it was a big bathtub” gone but never forgotten ✊🏻😔

[nyanmeowmiau]

percy jackson jesus parallels

son of (a) god

walks on water

"one of you will betray me"

[nyanmeowmiau]

yall.... maybe this is a lukewarm take but Gabe is still 100% an abusive asshole in the tv series... he very clearly is negligent of Percy (and just generally Mean to him because nobody should ever talk to a 12 year old like that)... he doesn't really care about Sally's consent and ownership of her stuff and her time... he may not snap on screen but he shows signs of being able to and the way Sally has to speak to him does not indicate he's just some Guy now... just, abuse takes on many forms and being more implied about it is a much stronger choice for this series in many ways

[nyanmeowmiau]

hey there! fellow naturalist (albeit less experienced!) here! in regards to the AI-generated ID guides, do you have any advice for helping the general public learn to recognize them? are there any giveaways other than incorrect information a layperson might not pick up on that we can tell people to watch out for?

Hi, @fischotterkunst! It's a messy topic, to be sure, but here's what I've been seeing of these AI-generated texts, at least on Amazon:

--If you sort your search for "foraging book" or "mushroom hunting" or whatever search string you use by "Newest Arrivals", you'll notice that there is a glut of books that have come out in the past few weeks. Yes, there are always new books, but this is at a higher than normal rate, which suggests AI is behind at least some of them. There ARE occasionally real authors' books that just happened to come out recently, so don't dismiss every single book that is a fresh release. Use the other criteria below.

--They will invariably be self-published or from some publisher with zero online presence. Not a problem by itself; my own chapbooks are self-published on Amazon KDP. But they come out every three months, not every three days, because I am researching, writing, and editing them all myself, rather than churning out content with AI.

--The titles and subtitles are often very long and stuffed with keywords. They are obviously optimized for search engines rather than being descriptive of the book and they have a rather clunky fashion.

--Look for obvious typos and other errors; for example, in the image above we have "WILD MUSHROOM COOKBOOK FOR BEGINNER: The complete guide on mushroom foraging and cooking with delicious recipes to enjoy your favorite". It should be "for beginners", and the subtitle just...ends prematurely. Favorite what? Favorite mushrooms? Favorite cartoon characters? Favorite color? Also, while there are lot of variations on name spellings, "Magaret" instead of "Margaret" stands out as a possible fake in combination with other clues. (All her other books also have this spelling, though.)

--This is a BIG one: Who's the author? Check their bio. In the above image you'll see that "Jason Cones", the author of "The Wild Edible Plants Forager's Handbook: A Beginner's Guide to Safe Foraging, Including How to Identify Edible Plants, Learn About Their Medicinal Properties, and Prepare Them for Cooking", has a very generic picture and bio that has pretty obviously been generated by AI. If you search for him online, the only page for an author named Jason Cones is the Amazon author page--no website, no social media, no interviews, nada. Even a brand new author will at least have something other than their Amazon page, and they'll mention experience, credentials, other biographical info.

--Look at the author's other books. Magaret seems to focus on cookbooks of very specific sorts, but again they've all come out in a very short time. They also tend to often be on really super-specific niche subjects--this, again, is not a red flag in and of itself, but it's a common pattern with AI "authors". Jason Cones, on the other hand, has written over two dozen books not just about foraging but anger management techniques, acupressure, and weed gummies, and all of his titles have come out since last December.

--If all the books have the same cover but slight differences in title, it's also a big red flag. There are reputable publishers of regional foraging guides like Timber Press, but their books are written by multiple authors and have come out over a long stretch of years (plus they're a well-known publisher with a solid track record, online presence, etc.) Also notice the typos in the title and subtitle; everyone says "Mushroom Foraging", not "Mushrooms Foraging", and "Keep Track Your Mushroom Sightings" is missing "of".

--Compare the descriptions of multiples of these new books and you start seeing patterns. If you look at the images above, you'll notice that both Lorna K. Thompson's "Foraging Recipe Cookbook" and Kevin Page's "The Ultimate Foraging Guide for Seniors" have a very similar formulaic description. They start with a brief story about a person in a town or village who discovers some foraging secrets and then transforms his life, and then a list of things you're supposedly going to find in this seemingly miraculous book. This basically reads like "Hey, ChatGPT, tell me a story of a person who improved their life with foraging in two hundred words or less!" Also, the ends got cut off of my screen shot, but they both end with "GET YOUR COPY TODAY!"

I have not purchased any of these books to verify how awful the content is, but what little content I can see in the previews is uniformly formulaic and, again, reads like someone asked an AI to write content on a topic with some specific keywords thrown in. Needless to say, I do NOT recommend any of these books.

Also, I feel really bad for any actual authors who released their books in the past few months. They're likely getting drowned out by this AI junk, though hopefully they're getting enough attention for their work through their publishers, social media, etc. to get some sales. Support your real-life authors, and boycott AI!

Finally, PLEASE reblog this! It's really, really important that people know what to look for, and the more posts we have floating around with this info, the less likely it is someone's going to get poisoned by following what these books have to say.

[nyanmeowmiau]

I'm seeing some frustration over fandom creatives expressing anger or distress over people feeding their work into ChatGPT. I'm not responding to OP directly because I don't want to derail their post (their intent was to provide perspective on how these models actually work, and reduce undue panic, which is all coming from a good place!), but reassurances that the addition of our work will have a negligible impact on the model (which is true at this point) does kind of miss the point? Speaking for myself, my distress is less about the practical ramifications of feeding my fic into ChatGPT, and more about the principle of someone taking my work and deliberately adding it to the dataset.

Like, I fully realize that my work is a drop in the bucket of ChatGPT's several-billion-token training set! It will not make a demonstrable practical difference in the output of the model! That doesn't change the fact that I do not want my work to be part of the set of data that the ChatGPT devs use for training.

According to their FAQ, ChatGPT can and will use user input to train itself. The terms and conditions explicitly state that they save your chats to help train and improve their models. (You can opt-out, but sharing is the default.) So if you're feeding a fic into ChatGPT, unless you've explicitly opted out, you are handing it to the ChatGPT team and giving them permission to use it for training, whether or not that was your intent.

Now, will one fic make a demonstrable difference in the output of the model? No! But as the person who spent a year and a handful of months laboring over my fic, it makes a difference to me whether my fic, specifically, is being used in the dataset. If authors are allowed to have a problem with the ChatGPT devs for scraping millions of fics without permission, they're also allowed to have a problem with folks handing their individual fics over via the chat interface.

I do want to add that if you've done this to a fic, please don't take this as me being upset with you personally! Folks are still learning new information and puzzling out what "good" vs. "bad" use is, from an ethical standpoint. (Heck, my own perspective on this is deeply based on my own subjective feelings!) And we certainly shouldn't act like one person feeding a fic into ChatGPT has the same practical negative impact, on a broad societal scale, as a team using a web crawler to scrape five billion pieces of artwork for Stable Diffusion.

The point is that fundamentally, an ethical dataset should be obtained with the consent of those providing the data. Just because it's normalized for our data to be scraped without consent doesn't make it ethical, and this is why ChatGPT gives users the option to not share data— there is actually a standardized way (robots.txt) for website servers to set policies for how bots/crawlers can interact with them, for exactly this reason— and I think fandom artists and authors are well within their rights to express a desire for opting out to be the socially-respected default within the fandom community.

[nyanmeowmiau]

As AO3 is down, I shall then return to my humble roots.

(I’ll be reading fanfics in ff.net in the foreseeable future).

[nyanmeowmiau]

what with all the oceangate stuff going on, a friendly reminder to everyone!

your safety regulation laws are written in blood.

[nyanmeowmiau]

I fucked up.

Not towards a patient, but still, I fucked up.

I was thoughtless, and didn’t think much of my words.

She forgave me and told me to take it as a learning chance.

She wasn’t angry.

She (who I had always thought of as tough as nails, scary, maybe even heartless), placed a hand in my back to show me that she noticed it distressed me.

But I still disappointed people I admire.

I still hurt people I didn’t mean to.

And I can’t even talk to anyone because it regards sensitive information about other people.

[nyanmeowmiau]

If you see this you’re legally obligated to reblog and tag with the book you’re currently reading

[nyanmeowmiau]

Apparently there’s another one with Zhang Hao in the Education faculty.

No one:

People at my university:

[nyanmeowmiau]

No one:

People at my university:

[nyanmeowmiau]

I am so glad we’re getting to experience the era of justice for the prequels actors, that there were always pockets of people who loved them, but with all the absolute garbage that Hayden and Ahmed both faced (and let’s not forget Jake Lloyd), that even Ewan who was praised as one of the few good parts of the prequels, still felt the tidal wave of hate wash over him for those movies, and seemed kind of genuinely soured on the whole Star Wars experience, has experienced the new wave of fans who love those movies, wholly and completely. Seeing Hayden and Ahmed and Ewan appearing at Celebration, seeing them getting to play their characters (or new characters) again, to be showered with affection for the movies they put their hearts into, that people loved their performances, that they’re welcomed with open arms–knowing how much these actors really struggled with it, that Ahmed has opened up with how low he was at points in his life, how much I suspect it really got to Hayden despite that he has nothing but kindness to say, how much I suspect it soured Ewan’s experience, to see them meet the masses of fans who love their performances, who want to celebrate their contributions to Star Wars–I’m genuinely emotional. I hope that Jake Lloyd knows that there are tons of people who love his performance.  I hope Natalie Portman knows there are tons of people who love her performance and aren’t creepily waiting for her to turn 18.  I hope one day John Boyega gets the same justice.  I hope one day Kelly Marie Tran gets the same justice. It is absolute bullshit that Star Wars actors get put through this shit, but if they can be shown enough love to balance even a little bit of that out, I am so glad, I’m even kind of crying a little bit. That I’ve seen nothing but shrieking joy to see Ahmed Best again has brought me to tears, there’s still goodness in this fandom, goddamit.