Hi. Consider becoming a paid subscriber if you aren’t? Paid subs allow me to take a little time off to write this and help with my business expenses (a lot). The mid-month news links are below the paywall, along with the new “Esoteric & Weird” mid-month section. I open with a short article on something weird or cool, and then you get a roundup of AI art tools and creative NLP, with a focus on narrative and games. TITAA #50: Slow Grey Mares Stuck at Exit 8Books with Folkloric Plots - NiceAunties - TownsmenVR - Emoji2Text - Unicorns
A happy end of the year and start to the new one! This is Mari Lwyd, the skeletal horse of Welsh tradition that greets you (or peeks in your window) on New Year’s Eve. Yet another terrifying folk tradition for this time of year! (Last year I posted Krampuses.) Mari Lwyd is one of those with murky origins, most commonly associated with village mummers of the 1800’s in south Wales; it’s a “grey mare” or “grey Mary,” a ghost figure constructed of a horse’s skull, a white sheet coat, bottle top eyes, mounted on a stick. The “Mary” theory is tied to a legend that a pregnant mare was evicted from the stable when Mary and Joseph took it over. And, I guess, died? Naturally, she’s a prankster too. With jesters and other characters, she prances up to the door and begs entry with rhyming challenges (“pwynco”) for the occupants of the lucky house or pub. It’s a bit hard to find good records of the rhyming verse in English, despite the documentation of 20 pages of it (in Welsh) by the Reverend William Roberts in 1852 in his “Religion of the Dark Ages” (which was very anti-Mari). Carolyn Yeates, a modern Mari performer, posted some examples in Welsh, a few with translations, and summaries:
There is a lot of good artwork based on Mari. Clive Hicks-Jenkins illustrated poems by Catriona Urquhart based on his father Trevor’s fear of Mari:
Welsh poet Vernon Watkins (d 1967) also wrote a long and creepy “Ballad of the Mari Lwyd,” which I’ve excerpted for the Poem below. Mari might be related to the Kentish hobby horses, or “hoodening,” which look remarkably similar. Interestingly, the etymology of that one is tied to Odin, or Robin Hood, and nothing like the Welsh Mari stories. Maybe the names are red herrings here. Some links: Folk Wales, Hyperallergenic article with good pics and video, Wales.com on the Mari, pics on Instagram. This is a shorter than usual post, because of travels and tiredness. (Here’s a web link that should work, for reference.) For those of you contributing financially, there is a new Recs mailing of just the book/tv/games recs, so you can keep track of those. I will start that next month… since I just sent out the Best Of 2023 links on it to paid subs (with 26 books!). Recs will still appear in this end of month post but in a probably reduced form, because of length. [And FYI: I know about the Nazi problem and I’m trying to figure out a plan.] TOC (links on the web page):
AI Art & ToolsThe biggest news is that Midjourney’s v6 is in alpha/beta testing. As many have noted, there are a lot of great models right now depending on your needs, so not sure this is a huge step ahead. If you like photoreal, this is more your schtick. I do like the detail. Again, as usual, you have to use it through a Discord UI, another downside. Video stuff: Google’s VideoPoet announcement. No idea yet if it’s accessible anywhere. Pika 1’s waitlist is over. I always love what Fabien Stelzer posts from Glif.app and this video is good. A list of AI Video products/companies from Justine Moore, an a16z tech watcher. Yuntian Deng’s tracking of how OpenAI models handle the direction to “draw a unicorn in TikZ” — there are thousands and I think this is a genius project (h/t Clement Delangue):
“City-on-Web: Real-time Neural Rendering of Large-scale Scenes on the Web,” code coming soon. There are some interactive viewers. Level of detail blocks for nerf.
Text to Emoji and Emoji to Text translators, a demo on HuggingFace by Gospacedev. I’m embarrassingly entertained by the randomness.
Control Room 3D: generating 3d meshes using a 2D proxy and descriptions. Code coming I think?
DreamCreature: Crafting Photorealistic Virtual Creatures from Imagination — requires using codes from a code book to reference body parts and only does birds right now, but interesting! (Code but the demo hung for me.) Misc Artists and ProcgenI’ve become a big fan of NiceAunties (Instagram link) AI animation work. Surrealism and kawaii, they say :) They use DALLE-3 and Runway.
Jonathan Hoefler made a nice web index for his Apocryphal Inventions made with AI. Star Vector: Generating SVG from images, code coming. Yay! Anime, a JS animation engine, is being worked on. Taper #11 is out (low-fi digital art/texts). HF’s gsplat.js keeps being improved and is at 1.0 now. Incidentally, it is true that the AI art scene on Threads is terrific. Games and NarrativeJust a few links…
NLP - Just a few, so tired.
BooksAs noted above - if you’re a fan of the media recs and want to keep up better, paid subs are getting a separate mailing of these (optionally!) so you can save just those. That’s how I’d do it, personally. Titanium Noir, by Nick Harkaway (sf). Medically enhanced giants with money make things hard for hard-boiled detective. Good plane read. Liberty’s Daughter, by Naomi Kritzer (sf). A teen in an offshore nation where different platforms have different governments, composed of crooks and indentured labor. An interesting examination of abusive politics and families. A bit wandering though, I think I liked Madeline Ashby’s Company Town better (similar setting). Bunny, Mona Awad (fantasy/horror). A BookTok rec. Kind of dark academia — a piss-take of a creative writing MFA program at a Yale-like university, where the clique of cute girls who call each other “Bunny” make overtures to the outsider. It turns out they don’t just have Chardonnay with their book club, they also have ceremonies. And what’s with all the dismemberments in town? (CW: body horror, blood.) A Haunting on the Hill, by Elizabeth Hand (fantasy/horror). Set in Hill House, years later… a dysfunctional group of artists trying to produce a play rent it for workshop use. The House is not amused, or maybe it is… but they aren’t. There are 3 women in town who issue dire warnings, black hares (these are not “bunnies”), and a strange little door in the wall. I found the characters a bit irritating but I suppose they are meant to be so. The Spear Cuts Through Water, by Simon Jimenez (fantasy). A fascinating narrative experience, in which the son of an emperor and a warrior join forces to overthrow a magical regime, in a land where turtles talk and the Moon is the fallen empress. Woven throughout are first-person responses to events by side characters, like those killed during the battles, or shop workers who saw the warriors pass. And a meta narrative in the stage play recounting the historical events. Really interesting (but long) with a sweet gay romance. (Thanks to Shawn for the prod.) (CW: violence.) A Crime in the Land of 7,000 Islands, by Zephania Sole (thriller). A folktale infused hunt for a pedophile’s victims in the Philippines, with a kick-ass detective. Her young daughter is told the story as a child’s tale, with talking birds as airplanes and phones… It’s original, but very difficult subject matter (CW: child abuse, self-harm). Miss Pym Disposes, Josephine Tey (mystery). Interesting academic mystery, in which the crime occurs very late in the book. Miss Pym is a celebrated author invited to stay at a phys-ed girls’ school by an old friend. She gets to know the kids and the administration, and then Something Happens. Going Zero, by Anthony McCarten (thriller). This needs a movie: A private software company runs a surveillance escape competition to prove to the CIA that it can do work for the government. All but one of the contestants are caught almost immediately — but something is strange about the librarian Kaitlyn, who is really good at evading cameras. A great twisty read with a billionaire software asshole and the threats of privatization of surveillance data. Has Musk and Palantir all over it. Whalefall, by Daniel Kraus (thriller?). Hmm, described as “The Martian” inside a whale… Mostly a guy’s bitter memories of his awful childhood, with a series of poor decisions contributing to create the situation. The whale interior is not roomy. It’s mostly Bad Dad memories, so was not fab but was def different. Games⭐️ Oxenfree. A pretty, watercolor story game, 2D, about kids on a creepy island with a haunted cave, an abandoned military base, a recluse’s mansion, and strange radio signals. (I have written a lot about magic radio by now.) Fabulous weird paranormal content, with time shifts and maybe ghosts. Or maybe not. The kids have lots of history—”your” brother drowned and his ex is here and blames you—and at the end there are charts telling you how your play differed from other people’s, which was really interesting to me as a data geek. I’ll definitely do the sequel. Dave the Diver. Pixel art 2D; I actually picked it up for the Switch for holiday travels. This is a weird but charming game, with maybe too many elements? You are a diver named Dave, rather bullied into supplying sushi for a restaurant where you also work nights making the menu and delivering to customers. The mechanics in the water are shooting fish (aim, fire) and picking up ingredients and loot; you gradually get more and more fire power (guns? weird!) and can afford better suits, kind of Subnautica-like. I do not understand the gun bit. There are also research missions to find odd underwater life and archaeological remains. The sushi bar is its own mini shop sim. I might need to play on a bigger screen to better assess this but it sure passed time in airports, I’ll give it that. The Exit 8. Epic weirding: try to make it out of this sequence of Japanese subway halls; if you see something anomalous, turn around immediately. Otherwise, continue. The exit signs count up if you make the right call, but otherwise reset to 0. I haven’t succeeded in escaping.
⭐️ Townsmen VR: Incredibly cute and nicely detailed. You can zoom in and out of the island as you direct your little people to set up a town on a deserted island. You may pick them up and move them somewhere helpful, or pick up logs and bricks speed up their building. There are nice instructional tips, and it’s not super complicated, unlike some city/civ builders. I also got Deisim but I like this one more, especially the ramp up and many design details. Strong rec for casual cuteness!
TVFargo, Hulu. I am enjoying this but it’s a hard watch, with the toxic masculinity and abuse of women. Go Dot! I ended up less thrilled by Murder at the Edge of the World (also Hulu), the latest Brit Marling (should we be worried about her?) with a reclusive control freak AI billionaire and his underground bunker in Iceland. It was a fun setting, but Darby, the main POV character, made me crazy. (CW for both: abuse of women.) For All Mankind s4, Apple TV+. I still love this — this season has a speakeasy, workers’ rights, mining an asteroid, sad Margo stuck in Moscow but climbing the ranks, and—a heist? Geez! Slow Horses s3. Apple TV+. If you like espionage, get yourself over to this show. Fab latest season, with some great lines and some fantastic combat. Vortex, Netflix. A French VR time travel murder mystery. The premise is ridiculous; a cop reviewing a crime scene on a Breton beach in VR discovers he can interact with his dead wife who died in the same place. They wonder if they can change time and save her. It’s extremely emotional but ultimately worth it. Similar concept to Aporia (a movie). School Spirits, Netflix. What if the Breakfast Club, but they’re all dead and one of them can’t remember how she died. Stuck in a high school with a dead counselor who wants them to talk about their feelings. I enjoyed it even if the premise isn’t original. Poem: Excerpt from Vernon WatkinsMidnight. Midnight. Midnight. Midnight. Hark at the hands of the clock. A knock of the sands on the glass of the grave, A knock on the sands of the shore, A knock of the horse’s head of the wave, A beggar’s knock on the door. A knock of a moth on the pane of light, In the beat of the blood a knock. Midnight. Midnight. Midnight. Midnight. Hark at the hands of the clock. —Vernon Watkins, from the amazing and grim Balland of the Mari Lwyd Phew… I hope your holidays are relaxing and illness free. I’m still waiting to see if I caught stuff while flying. As I said above, I’m still working on the Nazi-Substack issue, but it’s tough when there’s money involved (that does matter to me as a consultant, for various reasons). Best, Lynn (@arnicas on the sfka twitter, mastodon, and bluesky and now Threads) You’re a free subscriber to Things I Think Are Awesome. If you’re a fan, and you want to support me in writing this, consider becoming a paying subscriber in order to get the complete mid-month updates including the new esoterica section, or buy me a coffee to express your appreciation.
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