While we have been showing you this ten-part series featuring the famous quotes of clerkmanifesto, we have been on a three-a-day schedule.
That is a lot!
Today's picture, posted finally at our regular daily time, and restoring us to our normal clerkmanifesto schedule, concludes the series. Fortunately it is one of the pictures I like best. I'm pretty sure we're finished now, but a gallery of outtakes, bonus features, and additions could be in our future.
I suppose one aesthetic thing I've been trying to do in this series of pictures is give them the look of a painting. But that's not quite right. I am not trying to make them look painted, more, I want them to look so real they seem fake?
I am trying to make them look like highly produced compositions. They should be a little too real.
Some of whatever success I have had with that comes down to how upscaled and detailed these pictures are. I was deeply impressed by a scene in the original Blade Runner where Decker, the main character, zooms in on a photo that has so much detail he can still find a clue in a tiny portion of the image. While I can see exploring this idea more in the future, these quote pictures don't have hidden messages in their details, but they do retain coherence even when highly zoomed in. Although at this point, that is a byproduct more than a feature.
I have made a lot of fox and skunk pictures with them standing arm in arm, and though this is the only one in this series, and the first one you will have seen on clerkmanifesto, it's something you'll likely encounter more than once here in the future. The quote is also almost new. It was never featured in text here, and only appeared sung late in a song for a YouTube video (actually at the very end).
If you would like to hear the song you can click the picture and be taken to it. I like it.
Your mileage may vary.
We start off the Sunday morning of our "Quotation" series by testing the limits. Last night's "Elephant" was easily one of my favorites in this collection, and, as these are shown in the order they were made, this image followed the adventurousness of the last in the spirit of: Anything is possible!
And certainly the quote we are working with today encouraged this approach.
But, the absurdity of the image made it a little bit less grounded for me.
Nevertheless...
This may be my favorite in this series. Not particularly the quote, though I am fond of it, but that blanket on the elephant! And those little yellow rain boots! And if you don't like it?
Well, hang in there as another is coming in just six hours!
Also, this might be the only one that doesn't have a cat. I don't know why it doesn't have a cat. Maybe the mouse man didn't want one?
Somewhat at the last minute, just before posting this up, I changed up the character in this picture, ending up with a cat person in a modernist chair. I had replaced a skunk person that I wasn't wholly satisfied with, and now, with mixed feelings, I am thinking of including the replaced image for you to compare. Then you can privately vote on which you prefer in your own head.
Did you know that 90 percent of the Internet is comments people make in their own heads?
OH!
New quote. I better get to work!
Anyway, here is the official image, which is cat heavy:
And here then is what it replaced:
You may recognize this "fox and skunk at a cafe table" motif from the short and very recent series these pictures grew out of: The Clerk Manifesto Cafe pictures. I brought quite a few things forward from that series, but then here on clerkmanifesto pretty much everything is borrowed, repurposed, or reused at any given time.
Yes, you could say that around clerk manifesto the cream rises to the top.
But we'd rather you didn't.
Posting these that I already spent so much time on, I don't feel it is absolutely necessary to include comments.
Or
I would like to feel that way, but mostly I don't, so... here I am commenting.
As I was preparing this particular picture for your eyes, I realized that "Accident" had three "C's" in it. Which was slightly amusing. I fixed it, and then I fixed some other things so tiny I can't imagine you would have noticed. The bug is much nicer now, for instance.
If you are following along in our quote series, which we are posting in a flurry, you will know that we are on picture number two. I am still finding my legs here in this design. I did several versions in this graffiti style, but this will be the only one that makes it through for you to see. All of the rest are kind of like old decayed advertisements, though still in abandoned graffiti areas.
Clerkmanifesto has always been interested in quotes, and not least my own! And so with this in mind, I have begun fiddling with a presentation of some of my old quotes. In that process a new quote emerged!
So why not begin with that new one as I introduce you to this series of pictures. This new quote is inspired by the very tagline of clerk manifesto, displayed on our masthead, though it quickly careens off into its own direction.
As it stands I have ten of these quote pictures and I am going to post them up here in a non traditional way that I have used in the past, making it a traditional non tradition. I will post a few a day until they're done! So visit often this weekend!
Or just look at them all on Monday. You've just gotta be you.
That is not one of the upcoming quotes.
Here is our first one:
It is my predilection in art to make things quickly. It is also my predilection to obsessively work on things and make things complex.
So sometimes things get weird.
Here are a few relatively simple pictures I worked on for dozens of hours.
Did they need a dozen hours of work?
I like to think "No" and use that as inspiration to cut it out. But that doesn't mean I don't like these pictures. And it doesn't mean that at some point I might feel like I should do it all again. After all, these pictures are made of many many pieces, and I have many more pictures in this vein if I can gather the strength for it any time soon.
But if this is their one moment in the sun, just for you, I'm okay with that too.
Something must be done.
Enough is enough, and I can no longer hold my peace. Something must be done!
We can all sit around like frogs in boiling water, but there comes a time when one has to boldly speak out. I am not afraid to say it!
I think we all understand how serious the situation is. And though we may have hoped it would all take care of itself we can see now that things have only gotten worse. I did not want to overreact, and I held my tongue, but I can no longer. The circumstances have intensified. The problem will not be put to right untended. It is clear to me now that what is going on is untenable. The set of conditions are not going to resolve themselves. We are in a crisis. This is the tipping point. The emergency has never been more extreme. Something must be done.
Something must be done!
It is bad. And it is only going to get worse if someone doesn't do something soon. The time for sitting on the sidelines is over. The time for angry letters is over. The time for careful diagnosis of the problem is finished. No more can we come on to the Internet and exhort others to action. We cannot rely upon others to take action. No! That time is of the past. Now is the time for something to be done.
And so I boldly say again, throwing all caution to the wind:
Something must be done.
So I hope someone does soon.
For many years my library has been understaffed. There is so much complexity in that statement that I despair of conveying it in all its nuance and meaninglessness. So let us simplify:
1. We were increasingly understaffed in the sense of losing staff hours, that is, losing hours of people working in library circulation, and not replacing them.
But...
2. We were mildly understaffed in terms of people not working all that hard to be occasionally almost caught up and usually a little behind in a non-problematic way.
And in those years of being either severely understaffed by five or so employees, or mildly understaffed merely by our need to complain to each other instead of working, the quality of our staff got... pretty good?
As good as it has ever been?
But like in those fantasy books that always faintly annoy me, where the sage wizard talks about how good and evil are always in balance, and if something good comes along in the great scheme of things, so must something bad come along too, our small, but mildly competent staff, that was slightly too small, has suddenly been engulfed in a flood of new hires. Positions that have been open for half a decade have been filled along with ones that have been open for a couple months. And every other position in-between.
It is a lot of new people!
Is this the good thing, or the bad thing?
Though there are different skill levels so far among these four or five new hires, they sadly range from the tragic level of the worst person I have ever worked with, whose like I mistakenly thought I would never see again, to...
A little better than that?
And yet, it is a lot of people to throw at any problem. If the shelving backs up, it doesn't stay that way for long when there are always four people to send off to the stacks.
And if when I am off to shelve all I really do the whole time is fix terrifyingly shocking mistakes, ah well, the wizards all say:
Something good is coming my way soon.
As the world ends, what better place to make a final visit than Clerkmanifesto! Or so goes the theme of these exquisite travel posters that I urge you to hang up in your local travel agencies.
Yeah, I guess there aren't much in the way of travel agencies anymore.
If we could make the world five percent better it would at least be something. Maybe fascism would still be slipping like a corroded shadow through the world, but in this slightly improved world one might come across a copy of The New York Times and they would have had enough of it.
What is a fact and what is a judgement? It is the opinion of clerkmanifesto that more things are facts than we think, not less.
There you go: One post of clerkmanifesto is greater than all of Nietzshe.
Now some pretty posters for everyone. These are the refinements and extrapolations of the poster design we discussed yesterday:
Though I am obviously a huge fan of AI as a creative tool, I have had little to say about all the language and research and chatbot AI's. The things I have been interested in these tools doing, I have not found them to be successful at, and I have also found that no matter how sophisticated these tools get, they always seem to get stuck in the same way all automated systems get stuck. It's like when you call an automated voice system and it works perfectly if you are doing all the things it wants you to do, but as soon as what you need goes slightly off script, the supposed tool becomes a wall to beat your fists bloody on.
If you're that sort of person.
But something unusual happened today.
For reasons I'd rather not go to far into, because it is a bit off topic, I was working on some images at work. These were inspired by an old Randy Newman song called "Political Science". The extraordinarily topical tagline of the song is, well, let me show you:
I was making some images of this, but what I really needed was my home set up. I wanted to layer a beetle on top of my nuclear heart and I couldn't do it without my photo editor.
But I was on lunch and heard about a new AI system that could edit pictures in the chat with simple written instructions. I could thus try uploading my picture to our chat and ask it to, I don't know, put a beetle in it.
So I tried it out.
It was the above image, but without the beetle.
It didn't work. The AI came back blank, and with an exclamation mark that meant that my image was harmful or dangerous.
I said to the AI that it wasn't harmful or dangerous at all.
The AI still wouldn't do it. It explained that it was trained not to produce harmful or dangerous content.
So far this is consistent with every AI usage case I have ever had, and was completely normal and frustrating. But because I am more of a bloody fists against the wall person, I exuberantly explained satire to the AI. I asked the AI to go listen to the song by Randy Newman. I told the AI I wasn't doing anything harmful, but was rather working for goodness.
So the AI went and processed for nine seconds and then came back.
"I understand now." The AI said. "I see what you mean. If you will resubmit what you wanted I can do it for you."
So I told the AI again.
And it did it.
