Two moments with Bob Dylan

 

Coming soon to a flower blog near you!

 

An upcoming preview of future clerkmanifesto shenanigans, flower photos, lots of flower photos:

Library shelves revisited

 

A couple of years ago I made a series of images of library shelves coming to life. They were mostly constructions in photoshop with use of its built in AI. As I so often do after a few leaps in the capability of these generative photography tools, I revisited the project to see what kind of current iterations I could come up with.

That's what I'm showing you today.

With the better tools, are these better than the ones two years ago?

Mostly?

In some ways?

They were a lot quicker to make I think. They're neater, and more integrated. They would still dazzle a person from 20 years ago, but the road from amazed to jaded grows shorter every day, and now can be covered in a single step. So maybe just try to enjoy them if you can. Time is short.

An abstruse sense of humor

This morning, while working on the machine, I found myself trying to match the pace of one of my colleagues, not flooding her with too many requests for her to process and thus plugging up our work processes. But her rate of motion had slowed to something that could only be described as in a state of eternal regression, and to keep in sync required an act of delicate restraint, the kind normally reserved for meditation or endangered wildlife photography.

In this mode of slowed operation, looking for a patch of entertainment, I had a brief impulse to say something—something harmless and offhanded—to a different colleague quietly engaged in some task nearby. She has been ill recently, and she’s still working through the fatigue of that. So I thought I’d keep things light with whatever nonsense I could grab at hand. Seeing an uninteresting co-worker arriving in the parking lot I seized my opportunity: as a kind of performative announcement, I declared, in a tone of theatrical importance, that “Donald has arrived in the parking lot.”

Let me clarify: Donald arriving in the parking lot is not a major event.

Donald arriving in the parking lot does not signal a turning point in the workday. It does not coincide with a dramatic library policy alteration or portend a burst of delicious gossip. It is, in all respects, entirely ordinary. Indeed, it might be described, taking in the person and his qualities, as spectacularly uninteresting.

But I said it like it wasn’t. And this confused my colleague. She looked at me, genuinely curious. There was a pause—one of those brief silences where someone is trying to figure out what they missed. Finally, she asked with real interest, “Oh, what’s going on with Donald?”

I now had a choice. I could try somehow to lean into the absolute slightness of my joke, knowing that the spark of humor in it was so small a mere glance at it could be enough to snuff it out completely, or I could find a quick way to bail.  

Clearly the only way forward was the shortest explanation possible.

“Oh,” I said, “It’s just me being me.”

She nodded knowingly, with sudden understanding. 

Among the people I work with, that’s all the explanation required.

Three glimpses into how a library works

 

Mumble mumble mumble

 

The artificial intelligence that I am currently using, ChatGPT requires a lot of instruction from me in order to work, and though some of the results have been fascinating to me, it has not been feasible for me to type all of those instructions constantly into my phone. It’s too laborious. But I quickly learned that I could speak my instructions into the phone instead. Unfortunately, doing this anywhere remotely viewable by other humans, and especially at work, makes me appear unhinged. Nevertheless I am driven so strongly by my fascination with my projects, and by the expediency of dictation, that I set aside my looking like a lunatic, and hope instead to assuage the pejorative opinion of the public by showing them the thrilling results of my chronic obsessive whispered instructions into my Phone. Unfortunately the results of my obsessive whispering into my phone usually consist of comics about me not shelving books, or comics about my finding weird Kafkaesque travesties throughout our library. I have begun to suspect those images may not have the opinion altering powers I was hoping for.

Not only do the instructions that I issue to the artificial intelligence lurking in my phone tend to be long and complicated, but, unfortunately, they do not result in great success nearly as often as I hope they will. Don't get me wrong, the things that AI produces are triumphs of the most powerful creative tool I have ever encountered, when they work. When the Artificial Intelligence works like I want it to work it is like a dream of superpowers coming true, like flying, or shooting lightning bolts from my fingers. Unfortunately it only works like this about five percent of the time. Thirty percent of the time it works poorly, or not at all. And the remaining 65% of the time comes down to some version of tantalizingly close to working in a way that causes me to think it surely must be correctable, but probably isn't and will cause me to nearly lose my mind if I'm going to insist upon trying. I don't know how amazing or ridiculous this sounds as a venture. But writing it all out it puts me in mind of someone plugging dollars into a slot machine with endless fervor. And before we dismiss this with easy disdain as an image of the pathetic obsession of a gambling addict, it requires one analytical correction: I am playing with house money here! The gambler is a doomed loser as he or she grimly feeds the machine, but I grimly feed the machine and go home loaded every day. (Weirdly this is probably a pretty good analogy for most people's jobs, but maybe set that aside). The important thing is that perhaps you can understand then how this causes me to be persistent and to try over and over again, which causes me to whisper into my phone all the more frequently to get the desired result. 

But because, like with the person on the dollar slots, the volume of my entries becomes such a key element, I rarely examine very closely what I’ve actually said to my phone. I simply hope for the best unless I know that there is some kind of chronic misspelling mistake that I have to go in and manually correct. However, one evening recently, after issuing a long set of instructions into my phone, before entering that information I decided to read over what I had said. The AI seemed to be getting so many things wrong I wanted to see if part of the problem was on my end. Perhaps my minutes of rambling description, begging, and exacting clarification was not as articulate as I hoped. Maybe even the transcription of my voice into words was not working as well as I hoped- certainly my furtive whispering in dark corners couldn't be the easiest thing for my phone to interpret.

So I read what I said.

What do I sound like when issuing instructions to an AI? What do I sound like when speaking to an eager to please, lying, wildly idiotic genius assistant who is always eager to do what I want and is sure it can, but can actually only manage it about five percent of the time? 

Unfortunately, to my horror,  I sound a little like the current President of the United States.

It is not pretty.

There is nothing halfway about my presentation of this quote

 

Once upon a time in clerkmanifesto if I wrote a quote it was just a sentence somewhere that randomly happened in one of my daily posts, and if someone wanted to notice that it was especially pithy, that was their lookout. Then, as is so often the case in clerkmanifesto, I was that someone. I noticed a few pithy things here and there all by myself, and after a time, if I liked it enough, I might feature it as a quote in an end-of-the-year quotes post.

Oh lord we've come a long way from all that!

A quote recently occurred to me while walking across a bridge. 

Later I came home and started making pictures for it. Pictures, pictures, and more pictures. I COULD NOT STOP MAKING PICTURES! Six seconds to think of the quote. Five minutes to refine it. Seven hours to make vastly more pictures of it than anyone will ever need.

There are a lot of pictures I am not even going to show you!

You might get pretty tired of this quote. Fortunately, it is a quote, and thus it is super short. So I think you may be able to handle your weariness. Maybe when you get tired of the quote, focus on the pictures, which sometimes vary a bit.

"Is this your best quote ever?" You might wonder.

No.

Sorry.

It's a politics quote mostly, but like I said, it's short. So I think you'll be fine. Plus, some of the pictures are kind of nice.

What is that thing?

 

I first noticed it in this picture I had taken for other purposes.

Do you see it?

On the wall by the door?

I took some more pictures of it in the bathroom:

It seems to morph around a bit, but it remains recognizable as it slowly makes its way across the walls. I don't much like to talk with my co-workers about what I find in the staff bathrooms, but I asked around among my co-workers if they had noticed this... thing.

No one had. They looked at me blankly when I spoke of it.

No big deal. It seemed harmless enough. Maybe it was all in my imagination anyway.

Later in the evening, though, I saw it out in the main part of the library. It's not very fast, but it seems to be a steady mover. Give it half an hour and it can cover some distance. That is, assuming it was the same thing I saw in the toilets. It was a lot bigger now.

Later, one came right up over the front desk! Or maybe it was just the same one? I never saw two of them anywhere at the same time. 

I asked a library patron if they saw this green thing.

"What are you talking about?" They asked. "That black pad?"

"No." I replied. "This." I showed them this picture. They just looked at me nervously and wished me a good evening.

I felt better when it worked its way to the counter behind me, but it was always on the move. 

I don't think the thing was up to anything, but I kind of liked knowing where it was.

Then I had to help a family get a few library cards, which can take some time. I thought I saw one of the kids staring at the creature, but when I turned around it was gone.

Then I realized it was clear across the library, and much bigger! I gasped.

"What?" Asked the mother of the children I was getting cards for.

"Oh, nothing." I mumbled.

But I was certain one of the small children was eyeing the thing nervously.

When the mother was distracted with one of their other kids,  I whispered to the child "You see it, don't you?"

The child nodded nervously.

"It's probably fine." I said.

He nodded.

It's probably fine.

The picnic again and other stories

 

Making my way through another day