Who’d have thought BoredApe NFTs would be such an actual eyesore?
Shit, this isn’t really that funny when you find out what happened. Welder’s Eye can make you permanently blind.
Some ApeFest attendees posted on X (formerly Twitter) after seeking medical attention, with one person reporting that they had been diagnosed with Photokeratitis — aka, “welder’s eye,” a condition caused by unprotected exposure to ultraviolet radiation — and another saying the issue was a result of UV from the stage lights, leading to speculation that the injuries were caused by improper lighting used at the event.
“I woke up at 04:00 and couldn’t see anymore,” said @CryptoJune777. “Had so much pain and my whole skin is burned. Needed to go to the hospital.”
I’ve experienced this, though I aquired it the old school way; from welding.
Mine was luckily a minor case and went away in a day. Quite literally feels like you have sand in your eyes. Moved from safety squints to welding mask after that.
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Thank you for saying this, it’s what I was coming here to do.
I was laughing, until I read the article. It’s fucking horrifying. Schadenfreude should be proportional.
NFT morons losing their money? Hilarious.
Losing their eyesight? Not funny. Not proportional. Just horrific.
Now, if the Nazi fetishizing scam artist asshats that run Bored Ape were blinded by the light at their own convention? That, in my view, would be proportional Schadenfreude.
nazi fetishizing?
not doubting you, but… go on…
You can do your own searches if you want a surface level dive into it, or you can dive all the way in with Philion’s excellent video on the topic.
Schlag mich härter, Übermench!
Something can be both sad and funny.
Like it really sucks for the victims but it’s also darkly hilarious that every single time these libertariany scammy I’m smarter than everyone types do a thing they get an abject lesson in why communities have like safety rules and “red tape”.
This is such a good way of putting it. Yes it’s fucked up, but man it’s also funny as shit.
If they were libertarians they would sue the event so much that this never happens again. Unfortunately, this happens at nightclubs too.
what are you going on about libertarianism? this group is almost certainly not libertarian, they are more hypebeast/streetwear adjacent.
Shit hurts. It feels like you have sand in your eye. For days.
Thin slices of raw potato on your eyes helps.
blockchain verified proof that you own a link to the location of some unique slices of raw potato is as good if not better
You’d think they were already blind with all a crappy art they are shilling for
“art”
what the actual fuck
As a former welder, I’ve had arc-eye and it’s really unpleasant - like someone put sand in my eyes and I couldn’t get it out.
However, it heals pretty quickly, so I’m gonna carry on thinking this is pretty funny.
On job sites they told me that it was permanent, were they fucking with me?
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I mean, it worked right?
Yeah, they were. However, getting grinding sparks in your eye and letting them sit there for 24 hours because you thought it was just a bit of arc eye is a little more permanent, and you get told off by the nurse at the eye hospital while she’s picking rust off your eyeball.
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You’d have to be staring right at it for a protracted length of time. By the same token you can go blind staring at the sun.
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Infrared light of welding can permanently damage the retina, UV the lens.
Depends if it burned the retina too
I suppose it’s recoverable on low intensity, but they had to scale up the warning because of “manly job dudes” who ignore safety precautions all the time.
“All 5 attendees were treated on scene. Paramedics were originally very concerned about brain damage but were relieved when they saw the name of the event. ‘Can’t fry an egg that’s not there,’ stated one.”
the event’s DJ later discovering lighting used mainly for disinfection purposes had been installed at the venue
idiots
This was referring to a different event at a different venue. While it seems likely that they made the same mistake, it’s best we wait for more info before jumping to conclusions.
Similar symptoms, which include sunburn and waking up to severe, burning eye pain, were reported in 2017 by partygoers who attended a Hypebeast event at The Landmark commercial complex also in Hong Kong, with the event’s DJ later discovering lighting used mainly for disinfection purposes had been installed at the venue. The Landmark venue did not feature on the ApeFest event plan, and the two incidents appear unrelated.
Good news everyone! You have been permanently disinfected!
Read the full paragraph:
Similar symptoms, which include sunburn and waking up to severe, burning eye pain, were reported in 2017 by partygoers who attended a Hypebeast event at The Landmark commercial complex also in Hong Kong, with the event’s DJ later discovering lighting used mainly for disinfection purposes had been installed at the venue. The Landmark venue did not feature on the ApeFest event plan, and the two incidents appear unrelated.
Yuga Labs says it’s currently investigating reports of impeded vision and skin/eye injuries believed to be caused by unprotected exposure to UV lights during ApeFest 2023.
Jesus Christ.
Anyway, I’m… Actually somewhat impressed they’re still having Monkey PNG meetups. I kind of assumed every NFT was a scam but this one is just a very expensive buy-in to a cryptonerd club, I guess.
I also kinda figured the people who are into the Monkey PNGs aren’t exactly the ones who go to meetups
I think it’s more that they tend not to get invited to non-monkey PNG meetups. Possibly in part due to their habit of turning any meetup into a monkey PNG one.
Have to go out there and put in the work to proselytize their Lord and Savior Blockchain.
Blockchain and NFT are not synonymous. All Camrys are cars but not all cars are Camrys.
Eh, the relationship isn’t quite the same as that one.
It’s more like the relationship between a video game framework and a video game. Pygame, Unity, or Godot are not games you can play; they’re tools for programmers to build games with.
Similarly, blockchain is a technology for implementing scams; NFTs are one specific scam.
Similarly, blockchain is a technology for implementing scams
By that logic the US dollar is a means for facilitating crime. It’s certainly used for that, a lot, but that isn’t what it is for. A blockchain is for keeping an immutable and verifiable record by way of cryptography. That there are a lot of scams doesn’t change what it is.
blockchain is a technology for implementing scams; NFTs are one specific scam.
No. Blockchain is a technology where you generate a hash of an event that happened - e.g. garage door opened at 7:00am, and then you hash another event - garage door closed at 7:02am, continue doing that for years, hundreds of thousands of garage door movements, and just by looking at the last hash in the event chain, you can verify, in less than a millisecond, that two copies of the blockchain are identical (e.g. the working data set and a backup copy of it).
It’s just a simple and efficient data integrity checker and it’s shit for scams - because there’s no way to hide your tracks when the feds investigate you… as Sam Bankman-Fried just learned.
Pretty soon the scammers will realise they’re better off with cash and paper books which can easily be doctored (or simply misplaced - “sorry your honor, we can’t find records for July 2021 anywhere!”).
Yep. It’s hard to feel sorry for anyone who got grifted, who knew that buying the equivalent of a graffiti’d up CVS receipt would turn out to be worthless.
It’s all the same to the cryptobros
Sure they are, they’re just always nervous Chris Hansen is going to be there already.
I kind of assumed every NFT was a scam
This one hasn’t yet proven that it isn’t, just that the people who bought in had a lot of disposable income to begin with.
Sunken cost fallacy at this point. They have to keep believing it’s a thing otherwise they have to face the reality that they were duped.
Or the opposite, they know it’s dropping like a stone so they try to keep it relevant for potential buyers to offload it to?
Sunk cost, I guess. A lot of people in the crypto industry are still here because they don’t want to admit that they were wrong about it.
Regardless of what you think of NFTs, somebody needs to held accountable for this. It could happen at any show or production. Someone clearly chose the Aliexpress special over safety. This is one of those things where fundamental trust in public infrastructure engineering is destroyed.
Right? I don’t know anything about Welder’s Eye, but I know ultraviolet light is invisible to humans, so I’d imagine that most people present wouldn’t notice anything wrong until hours later. Once you know this can happen, you just have to trust that all the places you go aren’t putting your health at risk. Insane.
I knew this could happen. Result is that I don’t go to events when I think the organizer is grossly incompetent.
Happens at nightclubs too
Though I’d say that this is completely on brand. Goes and does something without understanding exactly what they are doing, causing damage to others who had even less of an idea of what’s going on.
And a chance someone actually knew exactly what they were doing and did it to deliberately fuck over the attendees.
However you feel about NFTs… this is horrifying for the people who were there. They’ve been in some cases blinded by this absurd level of incompetence.
The suffering of others brings me no joy, but it does sometimes bring me amusement.
The funniest thing is the embedded tweet in the article that still has a stupid boredape avatar, has the “I simp for elon” blue checkmark, and the classic “[username].eth” username so you know they are really fun at parties while they try to grift their friends and family
Cryptobros are such a strange cult
No hate to the organizers they say after the organizers make them potentially blind with skin cancer.
If people who bought some pictures are renderd blind at a party about those pictures, that irony would be so perfect.
Imagine buying NFTs and then going blind.
But they didn’t buy pictures… They bought receipts with URLs that direct to copies of pictures that they have no actionable rights on.
It’s funny how many people think an nft is owning the image, but you don’t even have that. You have a link to an image.
How on earth do you accidentally buy medical grade lighting? Like it must have been really expensive and no one at any point that “why are these light bulbs so expensive”. Also, why didn’t the shipping company think it was weird that a hospitality venue they wanted hundreds and hundreds of medical decontamination lights?
And presumably electricians fitted them and their non-standard design didn’t raise any eyebrows?
Literally everyone involved in this story is a massive idiot.
IKR? If anyone would have a good understanding of the value of things, it would be NFT buyers
“Says on the box ‘may cause skin to peel’, these should be good.”
Who would go to this?
Presumably people who bought NFTs. If you’re going to trick yourself into thinking your dumb, AI-generated piece of shitty “art” was a worthwhile investment, you might as well enjoy the perks of being in such an exclusive, stupid club.
They weren’t even AI generated. Is there a AI generated at least they’d be unique from each other, there were a series of randomly lead images. It wasn’t AI that made them, it was basically just a bunch of if statements.
AI generated NFTs would also be pointless because anyone could get them or something very similar by giving the same prompt to an AI but at least they’d have some merit, at least they would be interesting.
Yeah procedurally generated would be the correct description.
But the end result is kinda the same, it’s a lot of similar images generated with little effort.
The “AI” image generators aren’t real AI, they’re just called that…
the “I” in “AI” is not real intelligence either
Well theoretically AI may exist. We just don’t have it yet. Current image generators and LLM are called that but they ain’t it…
How are they not intelligent? You are able to put in arbitrary prompts and its able to return an image constructed to your specifications. Seems you are being pedantic
In my language the ability to abstract is part of the definition of intelligence and that’s something no current “AI” can do. To be considered intelligent the program would have to be able to derive solutions for previously unknown problems from it’s current knowledge only.
it’s just a party lol who doesn’t like parties
The enjoyment of going to parties typically relies on the attendees of the party and how much you like or dislike them. This specific party is full of people who bought monkey JPEGs and turned them into their entire personality. So, presumably, I would not like this party.
It’s not for you, that’s ok.
It’s not for anyone with a shred of sense. Lighting aside, anyone still being conned by the NFT image market is unfortunately probably willfully ignorant, impossibly stubborn, and unable to learn from their mistakes or the mistakes of others. There are plenty of working ways to tokenize images for an actual purpose, blockchain verification is worthless for individual images and literally always was.
The year is 2043, and Chumlee has been uploaded to the Metaverse.
“I remember those,” Chumlee said, his voice echoing through the virtual space. “Let me run this by my valuation expert, the all-knowing singularity.”
A moment later, Chumlee’s eyes widened in surprise. “Fourteen trillion?” he repeated.
“That’s what it says,” the singularity replied.
Chumlee shook his head. “I can’t believe it. I’ll give you two.”
maybe they’re just having fun. People purchase status items all the time and no one has a problem with it. There is nothing fundamentally different between showing off your 100k monkey picture with showing off your 100k watch.
Take less than five minutes out of your day to compare the impact of a rolex watch with the impact of a blockchain interaction. It sounds like you don’t understand how wildly different those two things are, either physically (one does not exist, the other does) or in an environmental context (one uses grid power with every verification, one is mechanical). “Buying status symbols for fun” would make a good album title for a boy band a decade ago.
The incurably stupid and grifters.
For anyone confused by the low-hanging-fruit NFT comments that don’t actually talk about what actually happened: The event was in Hong Kong and
here’s my speculative opinion about what the likely cause of the burns was:
UV disinfectant lights, accidentally used by ignorant, budget-conscious event lighting staff.
I like that you came to set the record straight, then just guessed. Confidence is sexy.
The article also came to no conclusion, though they did point to an event that also happened in 2017 where this happened and the culprit was… what I “guessed”. I’m sexy and I know it. 😜
Yeah above commenter is just making shit up, that was a different event
That’s not actually true, if you read the article more closely that’s referring to a different event where disinfectant lights were used. Not at this event.
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Far more likely they just used ordinary stage lights where “huh, if I set channel 4 to full intensity I get a pretty purple, lets use that one”. The manual probably included a safety warning with specs like “21.7 mW/cm² at 5cm and 8.9 mW/cm² at 25cm distance”… but who reads the manual? And even if they did would they know what those numbers mean?
What it means is a “safe” exposure time of about 11 seconds (per day)… and that’s if you only have one of them. They might’ve had 20. And by the way I took that number from real equipment you can buy for events like this one. Professional operators would be very careful using them.
Pro tip from someone who works in the industry: if you see the white or fluorescent colours glow really bright… get the fuck out of the room unless you have absolute faith in the OH&S chops of the venue and lighting operator.
I’ve never encountered lights that don’t have UV filters in them.
There’s no way to control the UV filter via DMX/Artnet/sACN. It’s a fixed dichroic filter in front of the discharge lamp. It’s an extremely cheap filter, as well, so I doubt it would be excluded from cheapo knock-off brand lights.
Certainly on any light available in the US and EU. It just won’t get certified for sale.Besides which, I haven’t used a discharge lamp in years. It’s all LED now, even the cheap stuff.
There is no way “set channel 4 to full” would disable any safety features in a moving light that would allow it to output damaging UV light. And the only other way it would hurt someone is if it was focussed on them, and they actively stared into it. Like, staring at the sun kind of level of staring at a light.
So, get rid of that “ordinary stage lights” pish.
This is absolutely a case of “we should get UV lights”. And instead of getting safe UV cannons for fun florescent paints, they got UV disinfectant lights. Probably still makes florescent paints glow, but it’s the wider band UV stuff designed to kill biological cells (ie disinfect). Which is exactly what it did to people’s skin and retina.
Nice. Thanks for the insight.
I work in the film industry side of lighting and we use HMI’s all the time (sometimes without the UV protective glass if the gaffer is a cowboy…). I’ve never really run into this with theatrical/event lights when we do use them…but then again you seem to know about situations like this.
There are so many old gaffers who have cataracts now because of all of those years looking directly into the hot spot of a carbon arc.
You’re probably correctly blaming the board while I think it was Aliexpress lights with actual UV emitters.
No, some event organizers will absolutely use disinfection lights because they’re pretty. I found the bigclive video where he talks about that happening at a Hong Kong fashion show.
UV disinfectant lights were likely used by ignorant, frugal event lighting staff.
That’s some really low tier event planning. That would be like if you went paintballing and the owner included a few live hand grenades amongst the paint ones. It’s almost impressive how badly they fucked up.
Atleast the onion writers get a break from writing headlines. Job is done for em already.
It’s more like using some “long distance extra penetrating paintballs” instead of the usual bursting paintballs.
It’s most likely “let’s get UV lights for fluorescent paints and stuff”.
Except getting disinfecting UV lights (probably popularised due to COVID) instead of safe UV Cannons.
This isn’t even the first time this has happened. bigclive talked about how event organizers at a fashion show setup disinfectant lights for the pretty purple light. One of the attendees figured out what happened quickly the next morning and rushed to the venue to take pictures before the lights were thrown out.
I dislike NFTs as much as the next person but this is messed up. Even worse that it isn’t the first time. And how the heck did they get their hands on germicidal UV lamps without being aware of the difference, and the safety concerns?
Well their corneas are now free of germs
This happens at nightclubs too. Why I always look away from blue/purple lights.
Happens more often than you think at tanning salons etc
Aren’t germicidal lamps specifically UV-C waves or something? How cheap do you have to be to buy these lamps instead of safer lights. Or even use the cheap lights but install the proper light filters on them, they’re just thin tinted plastic sheets.
You guys know that bug when lemmy throws a 2 year old post into your feed? That’s what I thought happened when I saw this post. Huh.
New DRM tech prevents safe viewing without express written consent from the owner.
I have a feeling the internet is going really enjoy sharing the “Crypto fans have eyes burned by NFTs” headlines. It’s a perfect storm of schadenfreude
It is perfect. I feel bad for these idiots, but not quite bad enough to manage not to laugh at them.
“‘I woke up at 04:00 and couldn’t see anymore,’ said @CryptoJune777.”
The guy with the red cap ape profile picture casually asking if anyone else ended up in the ER.
crypto_birb thanking for “great apefest logistics”, while encouraging his peers to seek medical attention ASAP.
Comedy gold.
I usually consider “great logistics” and causing a medical emergency to be mutually exclusive.
schadenfreude
Damn I just learned this word today from the latest Tom Scott video. Baader-Meinhof phenomenon in action.
