TITAA #90.5: Oven Impersonating Night

At the tail end of the umpteenth ("énième”) heat wave in France, when it’s still too hot in my apartment and will be until the heat death of the universe, I can’t think of anything I want to do less than take a weekend to write up the last 2 weeks. Also, I started playing Urbo on my steam deck and have 71K points for my current city and want to get back to that. So this is a terse one and even a little ranty on one cluster of links, blame the heat.

TOC — contents after a few intro comments on travel and an interactive fiction / gadget jam.

• AI Creativity (Video, 3D / Three.js / Worlds)

• Web Misc Fun

• Games (Mods & Fanfic, some ranting)

• Narrative Generation

• Weird Stuff (including LLMs being weird but not just; also fairies)

• Data Science / Infovis / Tooling

• A Poem about August

Having reached my limit on these heat waves, in the past two weeks, I’ve been in two different rental apartments to get a break — one was the Alps, near boutiquey Megève, seen above (no A/C but a good nightly temp, and 5 degrees cooler than home). The second was a new apartment with excellent A/C in a very old town that had almost nothing in it… except some friendly neighbors and old stones. (No, I saw neither the eclipse nor the Perseids. Lol, google that right now.)

One callout above the fold, my friend Tom Granger is doing an e-ink-Ink (interactive fiction writing tool) give-away for Inkjam, to go with his new eenk library, which just started. He’ll gift an xteink device (he doesn’t work for them, he works with me) if you win and otherwise, get your own and try running ink / intfic games on your little xteink. (I personally have loaded mine with books for the supermarket wait, including a challenging Jules Verne in French. But I am going to try his tools this week, on vacay, finally, I swear.)

Cutting to the news, which includes: 👉 Seedance 2.5, 👉 threejseval, 👉 3d splats becoming even more pervasive/easy, 👉 WorldClaw, 👉 Toolcraft tools, 👉 game mods and AI, 👉 fandom, 👉 friendslop games, 👉 organoids, 👉 quantum decisions, 👉 OCR contest on FineBooks, 👉 public domain images, 👉 words we teach English learners, 👉 more backrooms, 👉 agentic collaboration, 👉 persona bench, 👉 can LLMs stick to a (changing) narrative script, 👉 Unsloth desktop, and more.

It means a lot to me if you pay for this, it’s a shitload of work! I am taking a break the last 2 weeks of August, not sure if/how much the end of August will have, although definitely the subscribers Books/TV/Games, which is my favorite thing to write.