TITAA #64.5: Chickens, Puppets, and LLMs
Gemma & MCP - Narrative Gen - Weird LLMs - Game AI - 3D & Video - Art
Opening with a little bit of chicken content, because of silly synchronicities. The Sunken Castles, Evil Poodles newsletter had a post about restless ghost chickens in German folktales. I verified via a few “deep searches” that ghost chickens are a widespread thing. Then two fantasy reads in a row featured good chicken content. Amal El-Mohtar’s newest book, a lovely novella about the borders of fairyland, has a riddle about boneless chickens and even has a couple pieces of chicken decor and a runaway hen:
Now I’m reading Thistlefoot by GennaRose Nethercott, which is narrated by a house on chicken legs (yes, Baba Yaga’s—and that Wikipedia article is really good). It’s also beautifully written. The author is a folklorist, descended from Ukrainian Jews. NPR did a very good piece on her and the book, which also features creepy puppets (more puppets in the Weird section below). Wow, there is some terrific Baba Yaga illustration work out there!
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Finally, this chicken tile grid game is a time-waster web app that I have spent too much time on in a brain-dead, tired state. Er, thanks, Matt Muir.
Lots and lots of stuff in the news below: in the past week, a bunch of models were released with interesting properties, plus a lot of MCP and agent tooling (I rounded up the hits); some new animation tools are out, including character and effects Loras, plus image enabled Gemini chat models; more fun 3D things, of course; a bunch of narrative/creative writing models were announced or teased, and I briefly tested one of those for $; there was a lot of weird LLM psychology/deception literature in the past month, bringing up the end of my Weird & Esoteric segment. Plus the usual weirder games news links and AI-related game testing…. and, you know, the rest of the fun!
TOC:
AI Creativity (Image editing, Video, 3D)
Games News (and AI Games-related)
Weird & Esoteric (Science, Art, Archaeology & Puppets, LLMs)
Data Science — really MCP, Agents, Models, and Tools
Let’s go!