TITAA #21: Conical Houses with Magical Symbols

Trulli (conical houses) in Alberobello, Puglia, Italy. (My pic, August 2021)

I took a short trip to Puglia to test out being vaccinated and flying for the first time in 18 months... unfortunately during a severe heat wave. But one of my stops jumped right into my top 10 "most entertaining visits ever": the odd, hobbity, conical houses of Alberobello.  Traditionally built without mortar, using drystone stacking and painted with limestone, the "trulli" (plural of "trullo") were sometimes decorated with painted symbols on the roofs. 

I am all about the magical symbols.  I bought jewelry and a book and a tea towel with these symbols.  But searching since, I've had a hard time finding a good authoritative articles on them.  Most of the tourist materials recap the same symbols and the same origins, to whit, the symbols are religious, astrological/magical, or "primitive."  There's some debate about how old they are,  with some claiming they appeared relatively recently (20th century).  Yet not all the symbols seem to be well-understood.

Here's the contents of the chart in the tiny tourist book I got, which has amazingly Christianized interpretations of many of the marks:

I find slightly different but overlapping sets of symbols on commercial websites here, here, and here (which also suggests they appeared in the start of the 20th century).  

A trawl through Google Scholar and Google Books didn't get me much more info.  A book on Apulian society, Galt 1991, suggests, "Some inhabitants vaguely explain their roof symbols as having the power to ward off the evil eye, or the devil. Most just re-whitewash the symbol without having much sense of the meaning or function."  An old Italian travel memoir, Italian Days by Barbara Harrison (1989), says,

"Religious and folk symbols are brushed in white on some of the conical roofs. Some of them yield meaning readily; others do not. ... Italo Calvino says that Apulian folktales are informed by the 'enjoyment of grotesque malformation,' and that is no wonder, given the nature of trulli, which are both bizarre and cozy, fantastic and very much of the earth, organic."
 

AI Art & Creativity Stuff

A couple recent CLIP image generation libs:  Katherine Crowson (@RiversHaveWings) released her CLIP Guided Diffusion notebook, which produces higher quality content results.  It requires 16GB of RAM to produce 512x512 images. Her explanation on Twitter: "The diffusion models both have a high dimensional 'latent' (as many dimensions as the image) and (unlike VQGAN) can enforce global coherence in their outputs. Also the diffusion models I use are super big (~7x the size of VQGAN)."  However, Janelle Shane had a hard timing convincing it to make a unicorn cake.

Here's my usual test -- "a castle on a hill under a stormy sky, style of Arthur Rackham"; this algorithm seems less keen to duplicate the content, which is good. (Bigger cutouts?  You can see the previous attempt with this prompt on the older algorithm in my letter last month.)

If you don't want to bother with colab notebooks, you can use this simple UI for VQGAN generation (not guided diffusion) on HuggingFace (made by AK/@ak92501).

Max Woolf wrote a piece about generating art with CLIP models. Ryan Moulton did more good CLIP art (doorways).  Tom White made a pixel art generator (CLIPIT PixelDraw).

PaintTransformer.  Turn a picture into a paint-styled image.

Mark Riedl's good overview in Intro to AI Story Generation.  It also looks like some folks working on AI approaches to narrative generation are folding in planner stages, which is really good (e.g., Lin et al), found using my text generation ArXiv search engine, which I update once a week.

Building a Medieval City in Substance Designer, a tutorial by Jan Trubač: I haven't done this, but holy shit, do I want to. There's also this video tutorial on making a procedural building in Blender by Chong 3D, which I was going to do on vacation, and haven't gotten to. (Tnx Marcin Ignac, I think?)

There was a fund-raiser for OpenProcessing in which various generative artists sold work on some bitcoiny platform (blah blah blah, I'm not a fan) and I really loved these lightly animated sketches by Okazz:

Other Tool/Data Links

Two good recent syllabi on NLP and applied text analysis: David Bamman's and Lauren Klein's. 

The lovely "Pretty Maps" python lib from Marcelo de Oliveira Rosa Prates that will work with Open Street Maps to allow you to make colorful, and plottable, maps.

An overview of knowledge graphs as of 2021, by Gerhard Weikum.

A good article on why CAPTCHA pictures are so depressing by Clive Thompson.

A good-looking lib for triples/knowledge graphs in JS, Levelgraph.

Free game icons.
 

Game Related Links

A good article on the design and designer of surprise hit Wingspan, a tabletop game about birds which I have not played.  The article makes the point that the breakout came via a relative outsider with new ideas, who tested it mercilessly till it was just right.  And someone took a chance on her.  It made me think of the adorable award-winning PC game Alba: A Wildlife Adventure.  The birds in it are outstanding, but that poor kid on vacation in the Caribbean is overbooked with so many tasks and responsibilities (get 50 signatures on a petition, fix the panels at the wildlife reserve, pick up trash, photo and identify 40 new species...): her vacation exhausts me.  I'm playing it pretty slowly, because I need to relax with a cocktail after each job she finishes.

Gruescript, a tool for making point and click text-adventure games, by Robin Johnson.  No need to worry about what the hell the allowed verbs are, it's all in buttons.  (Also, this Vorple library for building web front-ends to Inform games looks nice. Popular in France!)

Emily Short's article on writing plot in games, and why it's hard. With some good reference links.

The proceeedings of the Conference on Games (COG 20201) is online, if hard to sort through.

Excellent slides from Chris Martens on relational procedural content generation (using planners, etc).

Richard Bartle's book on Designing Virtual Worlds (that's a pdf link) is now free. He's famous for early MUD/MOO work. Here's a good overview with his input on what's still relevant today.

Minecraft: Chinese fans have made animated versions of The Three Body Problem in Minecraft. (Movie links via Clive Thomspon.)  Also, the Minecraft settlement generation competition just ended again, and this time there is an interesting overview article about it (via Mike Cook as usual).  This agentcraft library by Aith is one of the tools created for it; it allows you to watch the settlement being created (via advisor Max Kreminski).

Roblox: Fantastic article by Everest Pipkin about building in Roblox, I Know A Place.  Another interesting take on Roblox as a platform appears in this piece, How the Designer of VVVVVV and Dicey Dungeons Fell in Love with Roblox. Here's an overview intro article, "So, What Exacty is Roblox?" with some game links.

"Roblox has proven to be a wonderful and deeply funny place to play together. Reminiscent at times of the way I played as a child; with nonsense themes, strange rules and pastiche-like roleplaying of the imagined adult experience."

My first attempt to investigate a Roblox server landed me in a game that promised me I could be whatever I wanted to be (I don't know what that is?); but I ended up somehow generating myself a kid along with my free outfit, got attacked by an axe murderer 1 minute in, ran across the street to a diner to escape, where I immediately landed a job as a waitress.  I browsed online housing ads from the gig and tried to buy land, but was told I couldn't because I was currently sitting (it's true, the kid and I were slumped at the diner bar, my head in my hands).  It was a much realer experience than I expected, all in 10 minutes.

The kid is attached to my shoulder and has hearts on her top. Cute.

Books

I had an excellent month of reading, in part due to 10 days of vacation.  All of these are good.
  ★ The Exiled Fleet by JS Dewes.  Sequel to my previous rec, The Last Watch.  A good sf adventure with derring-do, secret missions in stealth ships, tragic pasts revealed, and enemies confronted. I rate it 4.5 with a minor discount because Cavalon, the heir in exile, is a bit whiny and his relationship with super-star Rake felt more cloying than previously.  Good read, though!

Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots.  Cory Doctorow recently rec'd this on Twitter, too.  Mine is a rec with a serious warning for body horror content.  Our heroine is a minor villain, a "henchwoman," who does data analysis for Bad Guys she finds via a hench temp agency.  She is injured being diversity eye candy at a villain's live tv event, and then goes on a crusade to expose the toll of human damage caused by the superhero who hurt her.  She scales up the operation into social media manipulation with the support of a Very Bad Villain who hates the same dude.  She hires a hench guy nick-named the "Excel Pervert" and basically this book had me then. Interestingly, the primary attribute of the villains seems to be running large unsavory businesses, while mostly we understand the heroes as state PR machinery.  If you like The Boys on Amazon, you'll probably like this.

All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai.  Time travel science fiction I thought I would dislike because it is based on a romance (save the one who got away/died) but actually, it's really very good!  The time travel and parallel universes discussions become philosophically interesting, and one of the time travel episodes is absolutely hair raising. I rec.  

The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern.  Another interesting time/universes story, about fated stories.  If you like fairy tales and magic doors in wardrobes (with an LGBTQ component), this is an interesting take with lovely style... but it hosts a lot of characters in various guises and is a bit complex.  I needed diagrams.

The Prince of Milk by Exurb1a.  Three deities get in a fight and take it to humanity, over many incarnations.  The battle wraps up in an odd little English village, which is populated by not entirely pleasant characters (Midsomer Murder-y).  There is an excellent cat in it.  I docked it a star for being a bit surreal in the final setting, but it's very well-written.

★  Gentlemen and Players by Joanne Harris.  A thriller set at a British boys' school. A new teacher with inside knowledge of an upper-class private school joins the faculty to destroy it from within.  The old classics teacher, who is being forced closer to retirement, notices something odd is going on.  Observations on class and gender.  I really enjoyed this, she's a good writer.

The Lamplighters by Emma Stonex. Three lighthouse keepers disappear from a remote stormy lighthouse. What happened?  Years later, a journalist interviews the wives/girlfriends to try to profile and come to a conclusion.  One of those books in which everyone has a secret or two, and there might be a ghost.  I enjoyed it except for the animal cruelty story I felt was extremely unnecessary (CW).

If you read and liked Rabbits, which I rec'd last month, you should read Aaron A. Reed's article on The Beast, the ARG that surely inspired it.  (Which also gobbled up one of my favorite sf/fantasy writers, Sean Stewart.)
 

TV

The only TV I'be been enthused by is Ted Lasso s2 (the rom-communism ep made me tear up), although a few eps of Reservation Dogs have impressed me so far. You get the small-town wackiness of something like Letterkenny, but focused on teens, more bittersweet and less flashy.  The writing is sharp.

Otherwise, Requiem is an ok ghost story set in north Wales, in a small town where a girl went missing as a child and recently a number of people connected to the town have killed themselves (CW).  The end left me a bit unsatisfied. It bridges supernatural and thriller.

Finally, I, too, am watching all the shows about rich-people-behaving-badly-at-resorts-and-spas.  In an about face from apparently everyone, I've decided I like the characters of Nine Perfect Strangers at their culty spa much more than the awful folks on White Lotus, which I found cynical and unfunny even while I couldn't look away from recognizing people.

Mostly it's been a bad TV month.  Help?
 

Games

Her Story:  This is a classic by Sam Barlow, which I bring up for game play mechanics.  Lots and lots of games have you "discover" a narrative in a space, by wandering it and finding clues and documents and unlocking more clues with environmental puzzles, etc (e.g., Gone Home, Obra Dinn, Edith Finch, Red Matter...).  Her Story gives you access to a an old database of short video interview snippets of a murder suspect, which you search by keyword tags. You're a search detective, and it's up to you to make sense of the narrative as you find it non-linearly.  I promise there are plenty of "holy shit" discoveries. It only takes a few hours to play, and it's a good example of a data-oriented interface, rather than spatial. (Here's the 5-star review from The Guardian in 2015.)

Image of the video search in Her Story from The Guardian review.

VR: Maskmaker.  Made by the company that made A Fisherman's Tale, which I really liked, this was mixed for me but still fun overall.  The story is muddled, especially at the end, but the gist is that you are a mask-maker in training, learning how to make carnival masks out of various "native" artifacts you steal from 3 different magical foreign lands.  When you put on a mask you made, you inhabit and control the body of the local who was wearing that mask design.  There are many icky colonial elements here, and the old maskmaker voice-over dude is fairly clear that he destroyed the lands he stole his supplies and designs from-- which you are now also exploring and stealing from.  Politics apart, the activity of exploring the pretty lands, solving their puzzles, and replicating the masks in the workroom is amazingly soothing.  At least you are undermining the evil old narrator in the end?

Maskmaker scenes I snapped - some of the conical houses reminded me of trulli :)

★ VR: Lone Echo is the space game I wanted after hating the UI on Star Shelter.  As an android aide to mining ship captain Olivia Rhodes (well voice-acted), you get excellent controls and tutorials on how to use them, plus nice AR-style labels on items in your environment that you can interact with.  There's even dialogue options on a panel off your wrist.  I love this game, love love love it.  I like the physical puzzles, navigating in zero g, the rings of Saturn backgrounds and mining asteroids, and even the creepy ship. I can't wait for the next episode coming this year.  (Note: It's not for sale on Steam, I had to get it off the Oculus store-- for a measly 10 Euros, it's a steal-- and stream to my Quest 2.)

Poem

I was just beginning
to wonder about my own life
and now I have to return to it
regardless of the weather
or how close I am to love.
Doesn’t it bother you sometimes
what living is, what the day has turned into?
So many screens and meetings
and things to be late for.
Everyone truly deserves
a flute of champagne
for having made it this far!
Though it’s such a disaster
to drink on a Monday.
To imagine who you would be
if you hadn’t crossed the street
or married, if you hadn’t
agreed to the job or the money
or how time just keeps going—
whoever agreed to that
has clearly not seen
the beginning of summer
or been to a party
or let themselves float
in the middle of a book
where for however briefly
it’s possible to stay longer than
you should. Unfortunately
for me and you, we have
the rest of it to get to.
We must pretend
there’s a blue painting
at the end of this poem.
And every time we look at it
we forget about ourselves.
And every time it looks at us
it forgives us for pain.

Monday, by Alex Dimitrov.  September is the Monday month of the year, amirite?  (Let's leave January out of it.)  I always dread "la rentrée" to work/school, as the French call it.

Ok, if that was depressing, here's some encouragement:

Write a fucking poem, by Mike Golden.

every fucking time,
you don't know what to do.
You'll have a body of work
despite yourself.

Via @poetryisnotaluxury on Instagram.

Hope you are all well.  It's hard to go back to work with fall delivery deadlines, given all the news in the world right now. If you like this newsletter, which is free but takes a shitload of time to write up, please reply and let me know, share it, say hi on twitter, or buy me a coffee?

Best, Lynn / @arnicas