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TITAA #49.5: Haunted Tools and Models

Tsukumogami - Weird & Esoteric - Literary Gen - Concordia - Text Game Tools - EMNLP Roundups - Cheap Mixtral

Lynn Cherny

Dec 16

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*Detail from a zoom into “Tsukumogami, Goblins of Tea Things and Utensils” by Ito Jakucho on Google Arts & Culture*

“According to Miscellaneous Records of Yin and Yang, after a span of one hundred years, utsuwamono or kibutsu 器物 (containers, tools, and instruments) receive souls and trick people. They are called tsukumogami. In view of that, every year people bring out the old tools from their houses and discard them in the alleys before the New Year.”

This is Noriko Reider’s “The Record of Tool Specters,” which walks us through a wonderful Japanese scroll about sentient tools taking revenge on their former owners. These tools are also called haunted relics, 99 gods, and artifact demons, among other names. Here are some of the discarded tools in the scroll, planning their next move:

“Tsukumogami” are a subtype of Japanese magical entities called “yōkai” (here’s a visual site for them). Old household tools at 100 years of age can receive a soul and thus become sentient, and if they were mistreated or neglected may be tricky or malevolent haunts. This belief goes way back to the 1500s or earlier. In Shinto and (Shingon) Buddhism non-sentient beings also have “Buddha nature,” and may achieve enlightenment. So, tools too! The most popularly portrayed are tea cups and pots, buckets, umbrellas, sandals, musical instruments, lanterns, swords. They even take on human attributes, like arms or tongues or hair or eyes. The umbrellas, or kasa-obake, are particularly excellent, with one leg, one eye, and one long tongue:

Of course there are haunted mirrors, to continue a newsletter theme: “Ungaikyō is a haunted mirror which shows demons and monsters reflected in its surface. The spirit which haunts this mirror, as well as the countless spirits which have been reflected in it over the years, can manipulate the reflection and cause it to appear as anything they like. People who gaze into an ungaikyō might see a transformed, monstrous version of themselves looking back.” (source)

Those of us who like ontologies are wondering: How many things do I own that are 100 years old or more? Are they watching me? Is a book a tool or a container, surely both? What about a house? We have plenty of evidence on that front, and a few of my recent book recs follow this thread. In the AI world, if I train a model on data that is 100 years old, is it a haunted container? Do I need to avoid kicking robot dogs (yes, for sure). Finally, I was struck by how much the mother goose rhyme “Hey Diddle Diddle” and illustration are tsukumogami-spirited:

*Randolph Caldecott illustration on wikipedia*

Hey diddle diddle,
The Cat and the Fiddle,
The Cow jump'd over the Moon,
The little dog laugh'd to see such Craft,
And the Fork ran away with the Spoon.

Some other good pieces on tsukumogami: JaponBox (in french), Journal of Japan (also french), the IG post that introduced me to them, the fab Yokai site, the Uncanny Japan podcast’s episode on tsukumogami. There are other fun links to haunted objects and oddly spirited AI tools in my new (pay-walled) Weird & Esoteric section below, along with a lot of new creative AI and game-related agents/creativity papers.

Reminder that every mid-month news section is paywalled, while the rest remains open. And the annual December round-up post on my favorite books, tv, and games in 2 weeks is for paid subscribers too. Here’s the link to this post on the web, where these TOC sections will be live in-page links:

TOC:

AI & Art Tools News
Weird & Esoteric (mid-month only!)
Games & Narrative & Agents
NLP & Data Science & Vis
Poem...

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