TITAA #77.5: Mirrors and the Homunculus

Here we are mid-month already (and already past mid-week, what even is time). So many new things; I have a bunch of “I’ll report back on this” notes in here… but I did play with Seedance 2 for a few hours last weekend. The mid-month newsletter also brings the weirdness links, which I personally really enjoy covering. I hope you do too, and if you are a fan of the newsletter, please subscribe to help out with the time it takes to compile this!

Table of Contents

• AI Creativity (Image Gen, Video & World models, 3D and web 3D)

• Misc Web Fun Stuff

• Weird News (Art, Folklore, Archaeology, Science, LLMs being weird)

• Games Links

• Narrative Gen (AI and not, writing)

• Data Science / Infovis / AI tips

• A Poem

This issue, as usual packed, a few samples: AI models protecting each other from deletion 👉 good texture generation 👉 Seedance 2 video gen 👉 Stone Tape theory 👉 the Wheel of Ghosts in Israel isn’t unique 👉 raining blobs of goo 👉 Homunculi (in alchemy & Small Prophets) 👉 3 more new World gen models 👉 AI narrative failures 👉 James Ryan’s procgen narrative agent toolset 👉 Is there lots of stuff under Giza? 👉 3d space tracker sites! 👉 FEMA official teleports to Waffle House 👉 Arc Raiders players who are helpful 👉 Mirror minigames 👉 UMAPs of movies and Open Library 👉 web minecraft and other games 👉 Gemma 4 👉 Hermes agent ecosystem 👉 reversing clocks 👉 OCR’ing arxiv papers, and lots lots more, as usual.