On the problems of developing technology

 

I suppose this sounds like you're in for a real treatise.

You're not in for a real treatise.

Today is just the usual nonsense. But I do want to talk about "the problems" a little. Over the many years of clerkmanifesto since I started playing with video and photography experimentation, I have noticed a couple of things:

1. The really experimental images and technology heavy work I have made is the work that ages the least well of anything out in the history of clerkmanifesto.

2. It's also the thing that I get most obsessed with, so there's plenty of it!

I hope you don't mind. 

I don't mind.

I mean, I don't mind if you don't mind.

But when I can do something entirely "new" in these realms I get very excited about it. 

But also every few months to a year there's usually a new iteration where I can do the exact same thing so much better. So I get excited about it all over again.

These Dr. Seuss pictures I've been showing are a good case in point. I've been taking certain of my images, sometimes because its the best way to make them work, and sometimes because I've become so enchanted with the resuts, and turning them into Dr. Seuss inspired style versions of themselves for probably a few years now. 

Here, this picture is already from awhile ago. Take a look at me with my Seuss Camera from the woods of Minnesota:

Of course, that is already the Seussified version that I showed here a couple years ago. Here's the original never shown photo of me taken with a regular camera:

As you know lately I have been seussifying some recent flower pictures because it turned out to be the best way to make them come alive and have the charm I saw in the flowers to begin with. I had used this technique before, and was happy with it. But this time around the ai image editors I employed had gone through a couple of notable generational improvements since my last experiments. My prompting and my own editing had also gotten better.

So I was a bit dazzled.

In short I had to now go back and look at how all the right kinds of pictures from my history would look through this amazing new lens!

So, I have a lot of pictures from the past few days.

Here are just a few random ones to start you off with. Hopefully we won't find these delightful wonders too painful when we stumble back upon them in 2029 or whenever:

Another post for bees

 

Yes, yes, I know it was all flowers yesterday. But because for some odd reason I decided to make them into super high resolution images, I really couldn't upload all that many. The blog gods only allowed for three flowers in a single post! So I still had quite a few of these new flower pictures left over.

Your mileage on looking at my seussified close up photography of flowers may vary, but the bees love it.

Come to think of it, your mileage on enjoying twee concepts like bees reading clerkmanifesto and getting super excited whenever I show pictures of flowers may vary too, although if it does, I'm a bit surprised you've made it this far on clerkmanifesto.

Maybe you're just an earnest, no nonsense bee who hangs in there for the flower pictures? If so...

Here you go:

In the final moments

 

As I write it is Sunday. This morning the worst heat of the city broke back a little, and we went out down to the beach to find a steady breeze blowing in. A bit of cloud cover helped too to keep us cool. It was even cool enough for us to sit in the famous blue chairs of the promenade to look out at the ocean. But it's not the same in the Summer as all the wildness and beauty of it gets covered over by the thousands of people frolicing on the shore, bobbing around in the tiny Summer waves, and boating about the sea in every possible size craft there is. When I'm not driven hostile by the heat I can see their good time and wish them joy in it, but I am always ready to walk on.

We went to the Cours Saleya market for some arugula at one of the sellers we like. I got a garlic, two onions, and some basil as well. At another seller I got an avocado and a surprisingly cheap french olive oil (8.50!), and at a third I bought a very nice looking lemon that was unreasonably expensive, but that's a little bit how they are out of season here.

We had coffee and I a pain au chocolat at the large italian restaurant/cafe on the market that we go to a lot lately enjoying its corner scene, large spaces, and agreeable bathroom. Afterwards we walked through the old town looking for assorted things we needed but didn't find to our satisfactions. With the old city exhausted we headed back through the long Paillon Park that was full of children playing in various spouts and sprays of water.

I took some pictures of flowers along the way in there, and since we've been home I've been playing with those. Though my modification style I developed for these pictures has lead me to employ it with all sorts of other images, I'll stick to my various flower pictures for today's display.

But tonight for me is The World Cup, and the truth is, a World Cup Final is a pretty big deal for me, and so some of what I'm doing today is simply waiting. I am curiously agitated and full of nerves. With the right attitude I could surely see this as winning either way. Although, alas, with the wrong attitude I lose either way.

I'll try to have the right attitude, but for whatever reasons I still have butterflies.

Predictions?

No thank you. If you've been following along in my World Cup coverage I started out with no predictions, developed predicting into a magic trick to alter the future, and now return back to no predictions. It's Schrodinger's World Cup after all. From my side, both teams won, but you, sometime on July 20th or later?

 

That is the winner that was always meant to be.

So let's just look at some flowers, and breathe.

Another day in paradise

 

You may drop in here to clerkmanifesto once in awhile to see what it's like living in a vacation paradise.

It's very nice, thank you.

The ocean sparkles. You sit down somewhere in your neighborhood and look over at some tableau you've passed hundreds of times now and suddenly realize:

Whoa, that's like, incredibly charming!

Which is fun.

People say that when one moves to some fantastic vacation spot as a retired immigrant, there is an amazing honeymoon period that lasts for, I don't know, a few months. Everything is strange and beguiling and better, so much better! The food is amazing! And it's such an adventure. Winter is a joke compared to where you came from. Getting around is a charm and car free. Life is just vacation all the time somehow.

And then suddenly it all comes crashing down, you have a fall, your spirits sag, and oh the work of it all, the daily struggle, the fact that you're in your sixties and have all the pains and struggles of any human. The incredibly slow pace of language learning and the constant confusion and challenge of talking to people dogs every interaction. You can't get a decent corn tortilla or a taco. And suddenly you realize you only know a few people in the whole of your huge french country. Everything is bewildering and uphill.

This lasts for awhile, definitely longer than phase one.

And then, according to this standard charting of the experience, one slowly starts to adapt, to become part of life in your new wonderland. Light slowly starts to seep back in to this dark adventure and one can truly build one's new life over. You begin to understand the language. You accept the place on its own merits. You learn to take the bureaucracy in stride though maybe not with affection. It's just life, but now maybe in a little bit more liveable place than where you came from.

This takes, I don't know, the next twelve years?

I read about this scenario a lot when we were planning to come over. I thought it sounded inevitable.

And it's not entirely wrong.

But, also, it's entirely wrong! 

Which, I admit, is weird. The thing is, none of it goes away. It's all here at once. Nothing about the utter delights of where we are has ever crashed. Nor was the adventure ever not terrifying and difficult. What it really is is that I am still me. I can wake up in the middle of the night with some pain that terrifies me, and that makes me feel that we are spinning a million miles out in space connected to nothing, dreading everything we may soon have to deal with. And then by eleven in the morning I can be being served a cappuccino and a pain au chocolat facing a quaint market that probably started a quarter of a millenium ago and suddenly feel like the luckiest person on the planet.

We're all lucky and damned.

It's just sometimes you can see it really clearly here.

 

There is still the Cote d'Azur

Even though it is in the nineties now where I live, we still go out during the day. We do okay if we stick to the shade and don't move, but that's not what we mostly do. We mostly walk around the city, hugging the shadowed sides of the street, looking for coffee or groceries or whatever we're up to. 

Nevertheless there is this fabulous central square in the old city that we have started frequenting, and, a bit limp from long wanderings in the city, we had a drink and a little food there today while we nurtured the scraps of relief we could from every breeze coming through. After a large beer I was almost dry and marginally comfortable. For a few minutes it all made sense.

But we were soon off again and dripping, looking around at the crowds wondering: "What are all these people doing here? It's so hot!"

I guess they were having a good time. It's a good time here really, right up to the heat death of the universe, which, I am happy to say, has not quite happened yet.

So, while awaiting the heat death of the universe, we walk around, and I still find new things around town after all this time. And sometimes we go to new places. 

Occasionally I'll take a picture or two. 

Today we went out on a hunt for some pants in an outdoor store past the Liberation Market. I had no real success there with the pants, but we did find an interesting Art Deco (sort of?) Jeanne d'Arc church with a golden statue out front. I took some pictures, figuring anything might come in handy for some quiet day on clerkmanifesto. This sort of thing happens most days, so I have a small accumulation of photographs and experiments on those photographs.

Rather than wait for them all to present and organize into their grand themes, or into cohesive collections, I thought it would be nice to share a sampler with you today.

And with that here are some random pictures, some being variations on recent images I've shown, some reflecting on what I've been talking about above. 

I'll let you sort it all out.

Only one team wins a World Cup

 

This may be my last post about this world cup. Maybe not, but what else is there to talk about after this?

The final?

Okay, let's talk about the final right now.

For all my machinations about manipulating the future with my pessimism (which actually worked for once!), we have come to the end of the line. There are no more results to manipulate. Yes, there is another game, but, even understanding myself now as controlling fate, I don't know what to do with it. My magic power has become moot.

Going into this particularly thrilling and enormous World Cup of 48 teams, there were two teams that I loved. Two teams that I desperately wanted to do well. I was happy for some other teams to succeed to a point, and also a few teams I disliked greatly for various reasons that I wished failure upon, but there were only two teams in my heart, all pain and glory and desperate hopes.

There probably should only be one team, but when a person follows a sport with a great and avid interest for many years, and the sport is as sprawling as soccer, things can spread out a little. I have managed to keep to just one team in what is known as club soccer. I like to see other teams do well, but I only live and die on Barcelona. I am crushed when they lose, elated when they win. I love their history, though there is a lot of pain in it, their style of play, nearly all of their players, and, of course, their greatest player of all time, Messi.

But Messi has been gone for years now, and though the spectacle of his time in Miami is great fun, he has been, for maybe five years now, primarily Argentina's Messi. Meanwhile, in Barcelona, their brilliant young team is the backbone of the Spanish national team, with Lamine Yamal, Pau Cubarsi, Pedri, and Dani Olmo shining particularly bright in this World Cup, but with many other important Barcelona players in the team contributing at various levels. Indeed, Spain feels almost like an extension of my own Barcelona club team.

Argentina, Spain.

Even if you are barely paying attention to this world cup, those teams may be faintly familiar sounding to you about now. They are playing in the final Sunday.

Against each other.

Whispering behind my pessimistic plans and my conviction that all must be hopeless before France, was one insane, almost impossible seeming dream:

Spain vs Argentina.

What if it was Spain vs Argentina? 

Trust me. I didn't think about it. It felt like the faintest light could kill it. But there wasn't a single moment where I could fully keep it quiet.

But I guess I kept it dark enough, because here it is.

And now that I have it, Spain vs Argentina, I, who usually have some kind of an answer to everything, don't have an answer. And so I ask you.

I ask you!

I ask you:

Like the dog who chases cars, I have caught one.

What on earth do I do with this?

Mighty Casey

 

I fully expected France to win The World Cup.

And I can admit now that it is not just the phenomenal talent on the team: Dembele, Olise, Mbappe, etc., but it is also that, and this is important, I didn't want them to win.

I DIDN'T WANT THEM TO WIN!

It is a well known and classic strategy to concede the loss ahead of time in these sorts of situations. If one has already accepted defeat, the theory goes, then if one loses it is a mere continuation of the status quo, and if one wins?

It is the most glorious miracle of all time!

So, it is the most glorious miracle of all time then. 

Spain beat France.

Of course, this strategy only works well if one can make a reasonable case for being the underdog, if the neutral press and the bookies are strongly favoring the other side, and probably if the dread team, in this case France, has sailed with terrifying efficiency and sparkling brilliance through the Cup, while my team here, Spain, has merely... er, steadily improved? 

It should be noted that this method only works if you actually believe it. An eeyorish disposition is also a useful asset.

Because Spain looked like the most brilliant team in world soccer, and so also like a seriously better one than France in this semi final, it is worth remembering that this same Spain team kind of only got it together against Portugal when Portugal's best player, Nuno Mendes, went out injured, and then only really managed a win against Belgium when their best player, Thibaut Courtois, also went out injured. 

But I guess we should also note with the wisdom of hindsight, it might be a more ideal situation to start peaking late in the tournament, to improve, rather than to imperiously crush teams you just weren't going to lose to anyway.

Do you want to see me try this trick again?

Argentina is going to lose to England. 

I think they will. 

I believe they will.

Argentina took the opposite strategy to France, they came within a desperate hair's breadth of losing to all those teams they were "never" going to lose to. Like the proverbial nine lived cat, they have died more times than I can count.

I think they might be out of lives. 

And like a clock ticking down, I have been watching the great Messi's moments shrink. When I started watching him well over a decade ago now, there were 15 minutes of Messi magic a game. Through the years it dropped down to a few minutes a game, still amazing. Now, though they are still magical and brilliant, they can be measured in mere seconds.

It is getting very close to dwindling down to one, super dense molecule of the purest brilliance, and then blinking out all together.

Is this expectation of defeat a trick that magically makes it not happen, like with Spain and France?

Oh, I wish.