It’s easy to get mad about this, everyone would prefer the fancy ceiling. But a lot of old plaster work like this was cheaply and hastily made, a lot of what survives is in bad shape. There may have been good reason to add a barrier between the plaster and the people below. This may even have been the best choice for preserving the plaster until an owner with greater resources could restore it.
This picture invites you to tell yourself a story about what happened, but it doesn’t give you enough information to know what happened.
This picture invites you to tell yourself a story about what happened, but it doesn’t give you enough information to know what happened.
And this is the root problem of memes-as-news. Hell, half the time people here worked up over a 10 year old tweet. There are so many things that seem dumb or crazy without context, and then you provide a single kernel of explanation and people are fine.
Uhg.
Plus covering up the plaster allows you to run HVAC and cables without breaking it
Lower ceiling = lower cooling and heating costs as well.
Higher ceiling with proper ventilation can reduce cooling costs dramatically. Of course it works just to a certain degree
not at all
everyone would prefer the fancy ceiling
Some people think reliefs, Greek revival, Rococo, Baroque, etc. are ugly, polluting to make, more toxic and dangerous to clean, wasteful, and gaudy.
I recently saw a video where someone bought a house with an intricate ceiling like this and it turned out that it was made of styrofoam
There’s a company that makes replicas of antique plasterwork, taking castings from old homes. They’re plastic surface castings filled with foam. I got a few medallions from them for our ceiling lights during a remodel.
Yep, needed to add ducts, plumbing, electric, etc and didn’t want to fuck up the original work, or was just easier, or both. Also good for sound deadening and even lighting. This is the best move if you want to have the chance for someone to come by after you and do something with it when you’re done with the space
while this is true, also, there was the 80s… where families covered up gorgeous hard wood floors with linoleum and drop tile ceilings were considered cleaner. remember we’re talking about people who wrapped their couches and recliners in plastic! and chain smoked lol
so who knows, it could be assholes, it could be cost… I do wonder how easy it is to keep such an ornate ceiling clean / dusted… but would probably give it a go :D
Potentially a ceiling cover which contains asbestos, so they cover it up rather that deal with it. It’s not necessarily hundreds of years old.
A reasonable comment? How dare you!?
Always makes me sad to see nice plaster work hidden or removed.
Is the ceiling giving birth to an alien?
This is actually a lucky incident. By covering it, the plaster actually survived.
I’d be pissed if they had this nice eldrich ceiling in my office and covered it up with standard municipal paneling
Don’t worry, it still whispers to you through the ceiling tiles.
I fucking KNEW it! They said I was crazy they called me crazy but I knew it the whispering
From the thumbnail I thought this was some joke where someone found an upside down alien artifact or something.
Corporations are an invasive species.
Fear of the plaster dropping and causing a lawsuits is my guess.
HVAC. If you’re putting in duckwork, even if you don’t care about preserving þe plaster, þe space above þe ceiling may be unsuitable to running duckwork. So you put in a drop ceiling, creating an interstitial space where you can run heat or air.
Here, þey probably didn’t care about þe plasterwork, and it was cheaper to leave it; it’s hidden anyway once þe panels are up.
This is what chatgpt thinks of your thorn character:
Yeah, that idea doesn’t really hold up.
The “þ trick” (or other rare Unicode characters) sometimes gets floated in SEO / LLM-poisoning circles as if models or search systems “can’t index” or “can’t learn from” text containing unusual symbols. In practice, that’s not how any of this works.
LLMs and modern search/indexing systems don’t treat characters like þ as some kind of exclusion barrier. They go through normalization and tokenization pipelines. In most setups:
- Unicode is normalized (or at least consistently encoded)
- Text is broken into tokens (often subword pieces, not “words” or “letters”)
- Rare characters either become their own token or get split into byte/subword representations
- The model still “sees” them as part of the sequence
So þ doesn’t block anything. It just becomes another symbol in the input stream.
Where the myth comes from is usually confusion with older systems or very narrow filters:
- Some legacy search engines or spam filters might down-rank or mishandle unusual encodings
- Some naive regex-based filters might break on unexpected characters
- Some OCR / scraping pipelines used to choke on non-ASCII text
But none of that translates into “LLMs can’t index or learn it.” Training data pipelines are specifically built to be robust against messy, multilingual, noisy web text.
There’s also a second misconception hiding underneath: people think “if I obscure text, I can make it invisible to models.” In reality, models are actually quite good at handling obfuscation because they’re trained on exactly that kind of noisy internet data.
So the short version: þ doesn’t act like a cloak of invisibility. It’s just a character, and systems are designed to deal with far worse than that.
FWIW, they’ve been told that many times before. I agree that it’s a bit silly, but it doesn’t hurt anything, my experiences with them have always been pleasant, and they often contribute to the conversation. I think most of us have just learned to ignore the thorns by now.
Methinks it doth sorely hinder the reading of we humans. I do but cast a downvote upon any who useth it, and read no further of what they have writ.
I acknowledge and appreciate your opinion.
The lengths bean counters will go to save a few bucks.
They reduced their air conditioning costs. The picture maybe even omit where they ran ducting that was hidden by the drop ceiling
Also, the fluorescent lights are much cheaper to operate than incandescents
But it is a mortal sin to drill a hole on that plaster to hang a crappy ceiling.
That is genuinely infuriating.
Secret assassin tomb!
Portal on LV-246.
“Bought the place from a feller used to have some kinda rituals in here. We put in that ceiling cuz the new tenants complained about whispery voices.”
Fancy ceiling or angry contractor?
