Raise and raised again

 

I have to admit, it’s not the worst thing in the world, and it's possibly even a bit churlish of me to complain, but now that I find myself on the edge of retirement here at the library, after so many, many, many decades, they keep giving me raises.

These aren’t raises given to me because they think I’m doing such a great job. I've... actually never received one of those. These are raises that are the result of all kinds of automated and union mandated mechanisms built into the system. But it is a bit shocking that I’ve now gotten what amounts to three large raises in less than half a year. These are raises that would have meant the world to me ten years ago, even five years ago, and certainly twenty years ago would have been even somewhat life changing.

But to receive one now, ten weeks before my last day, this one a three-and-a-half percent raise, after already receiving a raise in the spring, and one at the start of the year as well? It’s astonishing. 

And faintly appalling.

Am I supposed to work forever just to take advantage of these things? Can I give them to someone else? How do I extract any value from raises that are based on time alone?

I guess there’s no good answer to any of that.

I'm just going to be out the future value of these raises.

So I will hurriedly appreciate the late blooming of my wages, eeking out a few last moments of joy. There will come no more. And soon I will fade away and disappear from the library. 

I will rejoice and revel in that extraordinary freedom. I am sure of it, though it oddly comes just when the going is at its best.

All the wonders of wool

 

I should get together with someone on the Internet who raises AI sheep because I am going through a lot of fictional wool!

Things are pretty busy here in my house in the last few months of finishing 31 years of working in a library, and preparing for and applying for visas to live in France, and beginning the great and stressful clockwork of winding down our lives here. And I would love to talk about it all, but having spent every available free hour turning pictures into muppety felt versions, I don't have time for that right now. I only have time to show the pictures!

We'll skip categories today and just show a selection of various felted scenes. I'll try to just choose the best ones, which will make future collections worse, but who cares! Let's seize the day!

A city for puppets

 

As promised, here is the first real dive into my muppet world. While I have liked my muppetification of nature the best, I think my cityscapes have come out quite well in puppet form, so here is a collection of scenes from a felted Saint Minneapolis.

Non felt scenes of clerkmanifestoland

 

In my fever of felting, where I am relentlessly turning new and old photographs into muppetland versions of those pictures, one category of my pictures that I've industriously been felting has been images from Clerkmanifestoland. It is pretty charming to see my carefully constructed images of Clerkmanifestoland made into a puppet world.

I mean, it's not as nice as pictures of waterfalls, or co-workers, but it's neat.

But to make these clerkmanifestoland pictures into felt, the original pictures need to be really well put together. So I have been taking these pictures of my theme park, most of which you will have never seen, and I've been editing them and making them nice enough to felt.

For the most part, though, these improved, preparatory versions are better than the felt muppet puppet versions.

I mean, the muppet versions are nice, and I'm sure I'll show them to you in time, but the real photos of this exhaustively constructed imaginary place, improved and tightened up as they are, is way more interesting to me right now. And so, that's what you'll see today!

I have done a lot of explaining about the areas and construction of clerkmanifestoland, but these pictures, while reasonably varied, are not particlarly along any theme. So maybe think of them as a bunch of nice random tourist photos from Clerkmanifestoland. It you recognize anything, or it seems familiar, all the better.

How I felt

 

As you’ll have seen, I’ve been creating muppets out of all my co-workers here in Clerk Manifesto. These have been delightful, and strangely insightful, capturing elements of human personality in muppet form. It’s been an intriguing demonstration of the powers of my AI experiments.

These are original pictures that I’ve put through a process, persuasively asking a friendly, fake super-intelligence to have them turned into muppet characters. But once I started turning people into muppets with such joy, it was inevitable that I’d start turning everything into muppets.

The results were thrilling.

I was so captivated that I began taking pictures of everything I possibly could, and also going back through my vast library of photographs. There are thousands, literally tens of thousands, that I’ve taken over the years, and I've been applying this felted, yarn-based, fur-and-felt interpretation to as many of them as I can.

It worked best, I thought, in my nature photographs. But I have a lot of nature photographs. And soon, I was pouring all my efforts into creating more and more felt versions of them.

I think it’s historically true here on Clerk Manifesto that I’m prone to obsessions, to creative discoveries that I find deeply involving. I rush headlong into them, produce a lot, and then move on. This is no exception.

I think I’ve done hundreds of these felt pictures in the past three days. The temptation to show you tons of them is always there. But I also understand they’re more impressive in smaller doses. Even for me, I know it will eventually be hard to recapture that original sense of excitement or delight I had when I looked at the first really great ones that inspired the process, once I am surrounded by a deluge of variations and versions.

But when I’m excited about the felt process like I am now, I find pretty much everything delightful. Sitting in a little break room at the library at this moment, I could easily take a picture of my foot and some random corner of cinder blocks and a door, feed it through the felt process, and probably be delighted by it. 

(Yes, I am delighted by this)

But there’s really nothing like the local little waterfalls or Mississippi River scenes to show just how expressive and enchanting I find these images.

So, with that, I’ll start off by showing you a very small selection of some of my favorite felted images today. I don’t know how many I’ll keep it to. I’ll try for a smaller number, tiny even, if I can. We’ll see. You’ll see.

And as you view these pictures today, and in the days to come, I’m sure there will be more, and their impact may lessen. 

But… what can I do? I ride the wave. And if in the end that thundering wave trickles in spent to the shore, so it must be. 

We can always comb the wet sand to see what washed up.