#Adaptation Cycle

[softlabsgroup05]

Explore the feedback loop in adaptive AI systems with our illustrative flowchart. Follow stages including data collection, model adjustment, performance evaluation, feedback analysis, and model update. Simplify the process of continuously improving AI systems based on user feedback and changing conditions. Perfect for AI developers, engineers, and researchers. Stay informed with Softlabs Group for more insights into adaptive AI technologies!

[kidspawn]

One thing I love about Ronan - dare I say, I find incredibly refreshing - is that he's *not stupid.* And I mean that in any other series his character archetype would be designated as "the dumb one." Because he doesn't like school, well golly he must be dumb. But he's written as incredibly smart, in a way the others aren't.

I always appreciated that The Raven Cycle shows us Ronan IS intelligent. He's just not suited for the school system or traditional education - and that's perfectly okay. It's one of the few series I've seen that equally acknowledges intelligent people do not always perform well, or even enjoy, being in school. Because Ronan, when he cares about the topic, is intelligent as any of the others. He's the best in Latin and it's implied it's nearly effortless. (And solidifies my stance that Ronan is a bit of a perfectionist and when something is difficult for him he has a tendency to write it off - in academic spheres. But that's for another day.) His Latin is not perfect, but it's notably better than Adam or Gansey's. This is also part of Ronan's character that is later fleshed out, and expands him beyond his one dimensional character tropes.

So, this boils down to me being especially frustrated over his line about the Latin for "raven" being given to Gansey. Because even if they have their reasons - like us not having Gansey's inner monologue - I find this an odd choice because 1. Ronan is connected to Latin in a way that foreshadows his connection to Cabeswater, 2. RONAN IS INTELLIGENT and it's important we see that he's smarter than he projects, he likely hasn't been engaged in academia the way his brain needs to be (i remember a draft involving Ronan connecting with a teacher in elementary school, and this being significant for him), and finally, 3. Gansey is bad at Latin. Like. Explicitly so. Like. He admits to the reader he doesn't know or enjoy Latin all that much. And it might seem mundane or pointless but that's a detail about Gansey that further stresses the significance of having Ronan on their search. He doesn't know the Latin for raven, and this moment was meant to establish that Ronan is intelligent in ways Adam and Noah and Gansey are not. I'm worried Ronan is being written as the dumb comic relief, to be frank, and not having him as the resident Latin expert really alters his place in the group's dynamic.

(I'm not writing off the graphic novel but of all the changes this one baffles me THE MOST. It's not even a censorship issue its a rewriting of character dynamics and character depths that bleed into the rest of the plot.)

[cuttledreams-bugs]

Invertebrate Tarot:

Card 7: The Lovers

Two parasitic Strepsiptera bound by fate to find each-other in the brief and narrow window they have. A relationship as inevitable as it is violent.

[lyculuscaelus]

So lately I’ve been seeing a lot of posts asking people to stop trying to make Odysseus look nice in their works cuz he’s a “messed-up person in the mythology”. Your opinion is valid however I have but one thing to point out:

You want to know who started all this? Who started to “make Odysseus look nice” in the first place?

It’s Homer. It’s nobody else but Homer himself.

A non-Homeric Odysseus would try to murder people out of his own interests. He’d murder Palamedes without remorse (and we’d be cheering over this but it’s a murder after all), he’d attempt to murder Diomedes just to get the Palladium himself, he’d volunteer to kill Astyanax…meanwhile you wouldn’t find any mention of either Palamedes or Nauplius in Homer’s poems, neither did he mention anything abt the Palladium heist (and Diomedes necessity did not happen until Conon’s version), the death of Astyanax, the distribution of war prizes, etc. And all the details in the Odyssey seemed to deny the existence of Nauplius’s vengeance at all, so Odysseus would not take any of the blame.

A non-Homeric Odysseus would be depicted as “cruel, treacherous”, meanwhile in book 10 of the Iliad Odysseus was not mentioned to have killed anyone during the marauding, neither did he promise Dolan anything at all. The negative interpretations are denied by these details subtly put by Homer.

A non-Homeric Odysseus would be widely known as a “coward” for only shooting arrows from afar. But Homer gave him a spear and had him absolutely slaying in both the Iliad and the Odyssey. That part of Ajax’s speech was invalid already.

Most importantly—a non-Homeric Odysseus would be having kids everywhere else, and the loyalty to his own wife as seen in the Odyssey is no where to be found. Meanwhile his lineage was a single-son line made by Zeus in the Odyssey, and his love for Penelope was one of his main drives, especially seen in book 5 of the Odyssey. He loved his family as a loving parent—something you don’t get to see in most of the non-Homeric writings—for most of the time they followed a different tradition indeed, in which Odysseus wasn’t half as nice as in the Odyssey.

TL;DR: in case you haven’t noticed, the characterization of the Homeric Odysseus was quite different from a non-Homeric version of Odysseus. It’s not that Homer didn’t know of the existence of other versions—he knew them too well, which is why in his version of the story, you don’t get to see any mention of them.

[kill-me-with-a-spoon]

Trojan War, a brief summary:

[tossawary]

I don't have a solid plot attached to this idea, I don't currently really have the desire to drop everything to go write "The Hobbit" fanfiction, but for a while I've had the idea of *gestures vaguely" some post-canon story (probably some form of fix-it) taking place before, during, and after a grand dwarven opera performance in Erebor.

Because I am absolutely certain that the Lonely Mountain had an absolutely stunningly beautiful Royal Opera House (and plenty of other, less grand performance halls) that, at the city's height, was putting at least one show every single day. Orchestral symphonies, operas and operettas, dramatic plays, dance performances... you name it, they had it and more. The various cultures of Middle Earth evidently ADORE music, dwarves absolutely included. The Company all bring instruments to Bag End to play and sing themselves off before their quest!

Also, beyond the music side of things, with how dwarves are named as master crafters? Smiths and toymakers and magicians? No way that they did not have some of the most gorgeous costumes, sets, and effects on the planet. Dwarves would go WILD with their articulated stage puppets, I know it.

One of my biggest issues with the film trilogy is that it failed to deeply explore the Company as people who had lost their home, beauty and culture included. Smaug not only killed countless people, entire families, and leave many of the survivors poor and desperate, the dragon went on to hoard their heirlooms and life's work and leave these priceless gold treasures UNUSED. It is an additional heartbreak to imagine Smaug tearing through Erebor neighborhood by neighborhood, house by house, so that he could tear out every gemstone in, say, mosaic made by someone's grandmother that sat above the breakfast table every morning. To think that Smaug in the aftermath tore magical lanterns off the walls, the sort that might have been decorated with animals or flowers, to make some daycare walkway just a little more cheery for the children, and in his greed left a dead city in the dark.

The live-action movies put both Smaug and the Balrog in these... absolutely enormous chambers that serve somewhat unclear purposes. The king's treasure vault and a former marketplace, I think? (Moria has been raised by goblins, I can forgive the emptiness.) It's a quick visual depiction of Thror's uncontrollable gold lust to give him a Scrooge McDuck room, sure, instead of anything with an actual organizational system (normally, I assume dwarves are big on sorting their vaults if they have one). Super big columns and hallways and staircases do somewhat effectively communicate the "lost glory" of Moria (I am very fond of these movies!!!), even if I also think it's not as interesting as it could have been. And the other obvious purpose of big, open warehouse-like spaces is 1) it's easier to animate the big creatures moving around in them generally and 2) it allows the films to show off the full-bodied visual spectacle of their big creatures.

But I think it would have also kicked ass to put Smaug in Erebor's former Royal Opera House or something, some enormous theatre decorated across generations. That could be big! The ART (statues, fountains, banners, windows, general architecture) that you could put on the exterior, which has had its face ripped open for the dragon to get inside? The ART that you could put INSIDE (mosaics, murals, and more) as Bilbo sneaks inside? Ohhh, you could include so many potential lore references with thematic relevance!

Also, Bilbo could get jump-scared by old articulated stage puppets or something. IT'S THE DRAGON-! Oh, no, it's some old opera prop. (Yes, we're talking more about an actual adaptation of "The Hobbit" rather than fanfiction concepts now.)

Sure, there's raw material treasure and coins hoarded here in this place, but there would also be musical instruments and toys and household tools and cookware and fancy dishes, wedding jewelry and anniversary gifts and family shrines and festival costumes, fountain statues and street lamps and mailboxes and business signs, and other evidence that people really LIVED here. These are all ordinary objects that Bilbo recognizes from the Shire.

We could tie these objects directly back to objects we saw featured in Bilbo's home early in this adaptation, which he was trying to "protect" from the dwarves during their "That's what Bilbo Baggins hates" song. There are half-burned portraits of people's late parents here too. Did he think that there weren't any dwarves who made doilies or handkerchiefs embroidered with flowers? Of course they made things like that too.

It's perfectly symbolic to, say, place Smaug's bed in an area like the king's throne room. The dragon is now the King Under The Mountain. But I think it would be deliciously haunting to have the throne room of Erebor be empty, the throne half-broken, the silver stripped from the walls and moved elsewhere, because Smaug doesn't care about Thror's old audience chamber. What's a dwarf king to a dragon? He burns the same as all the others. The dragon has instead made his bed in a beautiful public place of art and culture that was for the people, by the people, surrounded by the lovingly crafted belongings of the ordinary people he killed. Gold is gold to a dragon whether it's in a coin or a candlestick.

I think if you really want to sell one of the key messages of "The Hobbit", which in my opinion is: "If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world." then you ought to throw yourself behind EREBOR being a place where food and cheer and song had value, not just the Shire. Thorin isn't lost at the end because he's a dwarf and dwarves don't value such things, but because he as a specific person who makes the mistake of weighing pride and gold over people, and he comes to regret that on his deathbed.

So, back to the fanfiction idea, I think that Erebor had music again in it as soon as dwarves started living in it again. It will take decades and decades before the Royal Opera House is half as splendid as it was before, and there is a performance there with beautiful costumes and puppets and sets comparable to those that came before, some traditional historical show that is part of specific seasonal holiday for dwarves. But that very first winter, when the future still looked grim, I think the dwarves cleared out a small stage and cast the roles of this traditional musical retelling of their history among them, based on who knew the parts best, because they aren't just miners and smiths and soldiers, and there was music again in Erebor that winter despite all the damage that the dragon did.

[squash1]

borrowed. phrases. need i say more????

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[contrarianwitt]

watched bones and all for taylor russel as blue sargent fan cast and i do see the vision!

[thewavesbreak]

Burroughs' posthuman becoming of unlimited desire

from the cambridge companion to the body in literature, in the chapter "posthuman bodies," 2015

[clemsfilmdiary]

Pee-Wee's Big Adventure (1985, Tim Burton)

6/29/24

[yourgoodfriendjh]

i know the henry cheng edits to 365 would go hard i just know it

[kitttttchaos]

Things I need in a currently nonexistent raven cycle adaptation: (Gansey)

1. The middle part flow haircut but like longer because that is the “not like other girls” of the preppy boy haircuts and Gansey is not like other preppy boys

2. Ik he wears all those brightly colored polos but keep in mind, he’s been everywhere, he probably has so many souvenir sweatshirts—picture extremely tired Gansey, just threw on an oversized crew neck from like Wales or Singapore or some other place he’s been LIKE—and you know he wears those so people ask him about all the places he’s been

3. He has the newest iPhone. We love that he likes vintage things but a block of a phone is not going to help him find Glendower the way an iPhone 37 and a half will. Plus, imagine Adam’s face in every scene when Gansey has to check the time with a thousand dollars worth of capitalist propaganda

4. Acting wise, he is always looking up. At the stars, at the trees, at the future. The most prominent expression on his face is WONDER. I can envision so many scenes where he just turns to Blue or Adam with this wide-eyed excitement, and suddenly everyone else in the room is excited too. Just AAAH

5. Adam says, “Ronan and Gansey were laughing at a joke where the rest of the world was the punch line” when he’s talking about how cruel he thought Gansey was. I want a flashback of Gansey and Ronan being those best friends at the back table that came in late because they couldn’t stop giggling and now they won’t stop smirking at the teacher, and then Adam’s just at the front trying not to break his pencil in half

6. Ok imagine this: close up of Gansey, hands behind his head, glasses half sliding down his face. He looks asleep, but he definitely isn’t. The screen is relatively dark, tinted blue. He has AirPods in, and we hear muffled Phoebe Bridgers or Lizzy McAlpine or some other sad, wistful female artist BC GANSEY IS A SAD WISTFUL FEMALE ARTIST ON THE INSIDE. The music starts crescendoing, then there’s this loud screech over top of everything and Gansey’s eyes snap open and then we’re catapulted into the “what fresh hell is this?” scene

Um. *clears throat* Anyway.

[ilions-end]

Do you think it is possible to faithfully adapt the epic cycle and still keep audiences invested in the characters despite all of the moral differences with Archaic Greece's war? In the end, every single main character is a slave-owner who commits heinous atrocities at modern standards, which movies like Troy severely downplayed in some characters (Achilles) and amplified in anothers to make them the ones you are supposed to root against (Agamemnon, Menelaus).

nah definitely not. as much as i'd love to see an epic-accurate big budget trojan war movie (along with a movie series for the rest of the epic cycle) with the majority of the key scenes and concepts in it, i believe that's 100% never going to exist. like you said, the cultural differences are just too vast for mainstream audience appeal, both from the expansive mythological context to (as you point out) the very non-modern ethics and values of the main heroes. the initial conflict of the iliad is too morally distracting, i think, to a modern moviegoing audience and would have to be thoroughly rewritten (as it often has in the past).

i think the odyssey is probably the easiest to adapt to mainstream film, because odysseus' goals and circumstances are a lot more palatable and comprehensible to a modern audience than a feud over a concubine in the army of an invading force. there are definitely some disturbing (to a modern viewer) elements in the odyssey too, but they are more easily omitted.

i do dream of an appropriately messed up oresteia drama thriller though. something A24-ish. maybe one day.

i think troy is unintentionally an excellent example of a hollywood adaptation actually! i loathe that movie, i loathe its creative choices, but i understand the processes that led to each of those creative choices. i think it's a prime example of exactly the kind of thing you wind up with when you try to force the narrative of the trojan war through the hollywood strainer, forced to whittle all the elements down so they can fit into established movie conventions (i mean, it doesn't do that in a competent way, but that's what it's doing all through the film).

for a year now i've been cursed by the urge to watch epic cycle-related movie adaptations just to see what elements they consider central and which things they massively change (and with the iliad they always massively change a lot). i've actually got a dedicated liveblog tag for just those kinds of adaptations on my main blog (warnings for blood, my bad sense of humour, and at one point a genuine odyssey porn film). i don't think i'll ever see an ideal-to-me mainstream movie adaptation of any (non-ancient play) part of the epic cycle but it's at least interesting to see all the different ways to fail at it, and once in a while they'll even switch something up in a way i enjoy.

[dia-viller]

I'm still waiting for the "Eragon" adaptation series.....

......please?

[thearunadragon]

Okay the big one: IC characters reacting too...The Eragon movie

This honestly needs a whole structured little react book to answer fairly. That’s why it took me so long to figure out how to answer this. But, until I get to writing that properly, here’s a little rundown 😂

ERAGON wants to know why he’s blonde

ARYA wants to know why she’s blonde/ginger and wants explanations for literally everything else also

RORAN is angry because “this isn’t how this happened at all!” referring to joining the army and the conscription scenes. Eragon agrees.

ANGELA is obscenely amused and munching on popcorn.

MURTAGH doesn’t hate his character portrayal ENTIRELY, but wants to know why the FUCK the scar is on the side of his stomach and basically just a little paper cut of a sword wound compared to what actually happened. He also wants to know why it has two curves and why he was put in a cage.

NASUADA wants to know what’s going on with the strange ceremonial headgear in one of the scenes

AJIHAD find his portrayal accpetable

ORIK wants know where the actual f**k he and Hrothgar are

The TWINS are only in the special edition I believe and are very unhappy about it

SAPHIRA wants to know why she has feathers and why she grew in a half second and why her scales are not shiny. She will half-accept her personality in the film, though she thinks they could have captured her much better.

ORRIN is just here for the drama.