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TITAA 45.5: Stone Cuties and Crazy Agents

Statue-Menhirs - Haunted Gen2 - Efficient SDXL - Narrative Gen - Vanessa

Lynn Cherny

Aug 15

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Preview

Statue-Menhir of a woman, dated 3000-2000 BC, south of France, at Musée Fenaille in Rodez, France

Hi there. This is the mid-month, paying subs edition. Despite my recent road trip, there is a ton of stuff here on AI sims agent code releases, procgen art, games, narrative papers, model and tool news. For time reasons, I’m putting off some copious maps & nlp links to the end of the month instead. Please upgrade your subscription if you don’t want to miss anything after the short stone statue bit!

I took a camping road trip last week and was mostly off social media. My destination was Rodez and the Musée Fenaille, which I’ve been following on Instagram for the past year. They have a large collection of these little person stone carvings that date from roughly 3300-2000 BC (“ late neolithic”), found in the south of the Aveyron. There are others in Europe, but these are special and were worth the trip.

I had seen some similar carved stones in various exhibits (e.g., BM’s Stonehenge exhibit which I covered here) and in Corsica—on very hot hikes— but nothing as detailed as these. This diagram from Fenaille shows the general design for the male (left) and female (right). Note the little dangling legs… not scarves, because 5 toes! Female figures have faces with tatooes, evidently (and little button breasts). They all accessorize with cool belts.

*Design elements of the statue-menhirs from the Aveyron, at Musée Fenaille.*

The French wikipedia page has an excellent map of the types of similar carved stones in Europe and photos of examples. Needless to say, almost nothing is known about them, but they preserve some interesting attributes of society then (and evident gender differences in dress and decoration). I need to see more, so next year I will aim to see some some in situ in the south west.

Onto news — TOC (will be links on the substack website):

AI & Art Tools (Agents Galore, Procgen & Art Other)
Games-Related
Narrative
Poem...

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