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Hi there! Do you like this newsletter? Would you like to stay up to date on the weirder bits of AI and the folk/art/news scene? This mid-month article has the regular AI art & NLP & games news, plus the weird & esoteric. It’s just as juicy as the usual, but a little stranger. Plus, lots of AI agent stuff!

TITAA #54.5: Lizards of Darkness

Alt Maps - AI NPC Sweatshops - Video Tools - Noclip Games - Narrative UI - Clustering

Lynn Cherny

May 16

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*The Magic Circle, John William Waterhouse (wikipedia)*

I have a stonking list of cool literature and apps/tools below, but wanted to say a word about Our Share of Night, by Mariana Enriquez. I finally heard enough recs to motivate me to crack open this Argentinian horror novel. It chronicles the life of a medium who channels “the Darkness” for a secretive sect of black magicians seeking the key to eternal life, on a backdrop of military coups and disappearances. Juan grows up a prisoner of the Order, holding bloody ceremonies in which his hands grow claws and he dismembers and brutalizes the ecstatic faithful. He will do anything to protect his child from becoming their next pawn, and this is that story.

The book is gory and has some vivid reports of child torment. I was genuinely unnerved by some scenes. But it’s also poetic and weird and narratively interesting, fitting for the mid-month newsletter with an esoterica section. A few of the things I marked—you know I like alternative maps:

Laura designed alternative cartographies. Lines on maps that were an underground text capable of divination and prophecy. You had to traverse those alternative paths without thinking, draw the seals standing up, and finally the way would be revealed. Like in alchemy, I told her: they seem like regular walks, but they’re a process. The meaning lies in the time spent on that process, not in the result: the discipline of repetition. That’s it, she replied, enlightened boredom.

And magical doors:

When he was the one who opened it, there was no longer a bedroom on the other side. No bed or paintings or sink. There was a dark tunnel, like an underpass, the kind you see in train stations. Something lit it, but it didn’t look like electric light. I immediately thought about Arnold van Gennep and Turner and liminal spaces, thresholds, internal or external. Crossroads, bridges, shores.

When I was researching one of the more horrible sorcerous tortures (really 😬) I found a Smithsonian article about the Chilean witches mentioned in the novel. Bruce Chatwin wrote about them in his Patagonia book, too. The Chiloé sorcerers and their organization “The Righteous Province” ruled their island (in another dreamy archipelago) from a huge underground cavern locked with an “alchemy key,” that held a magic book and a scrying bowl. The sorcerers could fly, wearing human skin coats, and used curse stones. Also, during a trial (bold mine):

The prisoners who testified in 1880 admitted that, on joining the society, each warlock was given a small, live lizard, which he wore strapped to his head with a bandana so that it was next to the skin. It was a magical creature from which the novice might imbibe all sorts of forbidden knowledge—not least how to transform himself into an animal and how to open locked doors. Among the islanders, initiates were also believed to use seahorses to convey them to a magical vessel owned by the society and known as the Caleuche—a word that means “shapeshifter” in the local language. The Caleuche was a brightly lit ghost ship that could travel under water and surfaced in remote bays to unload contraband cargoes carried for the island’s merchants, a trade that was one of the chief sources of the warlocks’ wealth.

I think the AI pins and glasses should consider the lizard form-factor. For instance, this OpenGlass boxy thing, could look so much cooler (yes, I whipped this up in PS with generative fill):

Welp, it’s a very interesting read (both the novel and the Smithsonian article).

Moving on to AI and tech… this is indeed a banger, with links to more tools and tutorials (I tried out Eden! I like!), a bunch of new fun agent and sims pieces (and tooling), game generation research and code plus some more narrative aid tooling, game engine updates, latent browsing code… while the esoteric & weird section has stuff on glitch tokens, tarot latents, the unsayable, mandrakes, reincarnation, and more. There’s a bunch of NLP links and tools for clustering and embedding work, plus a musical rap battle guide. You know you want to subscribe, if you haven’t!

TOC (links on the web page):

AI Art Tools (then Narrative & Creativity, Video Gen, Misc Procgen)
Games (and Agents)
Esoteric & Weird (including Non-AI)
NLP & Data Science & Vis
A Poem...

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