At the speed of clouds

 

Since retiring I have been spending more time looking at clouds.

I recognize there may be something a bit cliched about that, or too quaint, but not wanting to go into these conditions wherein I look at clouds so much, I can say that said conditions are pretty bland. I am not lying in some magical grass meadow or anything. But there, nevertheless, I am, and there are the clouds, and sometimes I look at them a lot. That's just how it is.

So you may ask: Is this place I live in so particularly good at clouds?

Every place in the world, on the right day, is good at clouds. That's just how clouds are. So no, not in particular

But this place, the Cote d'Azur, seems to do particularly well at very volumetric, very clear, complicated, and grand clouds. More than once I have gotten all photography about them and served you up all sorts of pictures, mangled this way and that, to try to get the point of their sheer wonderfulness across to you. Whether I did or did not get that point across would be up to you and your long search through the clerkmanifesto archives. But this is not my mission today, and I have no new pictures.

I was really just watching the clouds.

And I noticed something about them. 

There is something miraculously pitched about the speed of clouds.

Clouds move at a speed just fast enough for us to notice, but one has to look for it. At first glance they seem to be stilled, a set tableau. And while one can see the movement and change with an applied concentration, each moment seems fixed, the scene casually appears to be a settled one, but the movement of the clouds nevertheless happens at the fastest possible speed for that fixed quality to still be true. As I watched the clouds I could see the movement, but the sky did not seem to be changing. Yet if I turned my attention, or looked away for even just a handful seconds, looking back to the sky I would find a very different scene.

What does this all mean? You might ask.

Nothing. Nothing at all.

But probably a bit more than most of things you might find here on the Internet today, which, come to think of it, might move at just about the same speed.

Looking for fun stuff on the Internet

In the half year since we left our home of more than 30 years, ventured across the world, and landed in France, we have seen a few things.

No, no, I'm not bragging. I know. So have you. You have seen tons of cool stuff.

Yes, I would love to hear about it!

In fact, I am simply dying to hear about it! All this social media stuff is poisonous. These horrible giant Internet mega sites are killing us. Put your blog address here and I am ready for the ride of my life!!!

You, you don't have a blog?

Sigh.

 

Clerkmanifesto goes analog!

 

Outtakes and forgotten delights

 

In the feverhouse of my photography endeavors, there are many things that have gone unseen here on clerkmanifesto. Some have gone unseen because alternate versions were published. Some have gone unseen because I lost them in the tumult and shuffle of making, showing, and organizing so many pictures. And some have gone unseen because they didn't fit in with any theme or group and so were set aside.

Over the next few days we rectify all this!

We will be showing pictures, which, is, um, something we do a lot. But the exciting thing about these pictures is that they have nothing to do with anything, have no theme, and are probably pretty random.

I'm not sure that's an exciting thing, actually.

But maybe all this excitement on the Internet hasn't been good for anyone!

Maybe it's made everyone drunk.

Oh.

Everyone on the Internet is drunk!

I think I have stumbled upon the very... well, nevermind.

Here is a cup of water, so to speak. It will help you not have a headache later:

How clerkmanifesto stays solvent

 

In the course of every reader's experience with clerkmanifesto, there comes a time where they wonder this:

"How is it possible that clerkmanifesto has no advertising?

It accepts no patrons or donations.

It has no visible means of financial support. 

It sells nothing. 

It is underwritten by no one.

And yet it is the fanciest, lushest, most glorious and expensive website on the entire Internet!

How is this possible?"

I understand.

People wonder.

I don't like to talk about it much. But I get questions about this so often that I feel it would not be fair to you wonderful readers to keep the truth from you.

And so here it is:

Clerkmanifesto is supported by its global produce supply wing.

When the AI comes alive, or, I convince an AI

 

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.

The problem with numbers

 

I probably spend too much time on the Internet. With all its fecundity it seems like there would be so much entertainment there. Certainly far more entertainment than the too much TV I watched when I was 20 years old and there were but nine channels to view on my local television.

And yet, it all comes out to about the same.

Even as this thought occurs to me, and I set it down here, I am astonished. This surely cannot be so. I must be joking!

But if I look into my heart, my soul, my critical self, my pockets, and my little gray cells, without the dramatic math of nine million possibilities vs. nine possibilities, if I look at my actual experience, oh   my    god.

It is so.

It is so!

When I think of nine million channels of the Internet, surely even a single percent of that, taking the single best out of every hundred, must be excellent. But how about a single percent of that single percent! That's 900 channels of the most rarefied, scintillating, distilled to perfection content on planet earth......

.....which I just squandered two hours of my life on.

I could have been writing this.

"Is it better than nine million other things?" You might ask.

It's not a competition. A person can only do one thing at a time.

And then they feel what they feel.

Plain

 

I have been working on a music video. I finished it last night, actually. It is, as ever, all AI, which, it turns out, means wildly different things to different people. I find the most inaccurate understandings of my AI induce rage in the general population. More general people experience a flicker of wonder encountering my AI, followed by a complete loss of memory, like people experiencing the flash of those memory adjusting pens in "Men in Black".

This small film, which surely I will show you after I get over my mostly uncharacteristic shyness (though it is on my YouTube channel already if you are eager enough), has no dazzling effects. There are no famous celebrities. Fantastical places are absent from every shot. And there are no majestic or anthropomorphic animals to be seen in any frame. 

It is a series of very plain, older women singing. They are standing in parking lots for the most part. They are generally over lit. And this was the hard part. Computer generated images are hostile to plainness. Because their mind is made out of the Internet, they default to beauty and ugliness. The uglier and the more beautiful the better. But plain?

Plain is hard.

The truth is, I don't believe in plainness very much either, but differently. I wonder if clerkmanifesto isn't about plainness the perfect opposite of the Internet. Instead of a world made of stunning surfaces, horrifying, glorious, amazing, beautiful, that bear no further scrutiny, aye, that must be scrutinized to see the plainness in them, perhaps clerkmanifesto quixotically postulates: What if everything is plain, a flat and tired window, that, only if we carefully look through, is full of wonders?

Protecting the purity of the Internet

 

Man alive, I was really going.

I was five paragraphs in to the kind of saucy, trenchant, irreverent, inspired, and insightful essay that on special occasions takes this legendary blog, clerkmanifesto, to the next fucking level.

I was on fire. 

I had to take a moment or the keyboard would start melting!

So I read over what I had written.

Oh lord, it really was too good for the Internet!

So I deleted it and wrote this instead.

All you really need to know about AI

It's not like me to be reductionist.

Wait, let me simplify that:

It is like me to be reductionist.

And so for today let me present everything you need to know about AI.

But first:

As you may know, I am an AI hobbyist. It is full of tools I enjoy playing with in the process of making things. I find that this occasionally dazzles people before they lose interest. This matches up surprisingly well with all of my creative output dating back to 1977. So, curiously, a pattern coincidentally predating AI.

Sometimes I find AI kind of repulses people. And because it is a term that lumps way too much together, and is constantly lied about by hucksters, I am keen to clarify. Here is my clarification.

I post my AI assisted creations to the Internet. And all the massive companies that own and adjudicate the Internet send me notices that say:

"We have detected the use of AI on your account. You may be banned."

That message of warning and judgement is not the product of a person, nor is the message.

I am being told that I may be banned for using AI, by an AI.

Anyway, here is my latest video song, so click through the picture, unless you are Bruce Springsteen, who would probably find it all a bit upsetting, unless he super likes lizards!

 

Clerkmanifesto and poetry

 

I've been writing a lot of verse lately, mostly as lyrics for songs for videos, but once I get going with all the doggerel, it's hard to stop. Pretty soon all the poetry kind of collects all around me like dying leaves.

They crunch when I walk.

Here's one one of these poems about writing poetry for clerkmanifesto!

Clerkmanifesto up all night,

Feeling a bit yappy,

I'm writing poetry,

Making no one happy.

The Internet only likes poetry,

When it needs a little nappy,

And the few who like verse,

Find this kind sappy.

Creative labor

 

I like to joke, probably just here, once, in an old post, that it's not the running that's against the rules at my library, it's the falling. 

This may come in handy up ahead.

Recently I posted some bit of highly manufactured AI bewitchery to the cold, cruel Internet (yes, this is the Internet here, but it's so far away from everything that you're probably safe). I think it was a cat that I posted, who was come to life in a library, and the cat was made of rainbows. I thought the rainbow people on Reddit might not be mean about it because it was all about rainbows, and they were all about rainbows, so maybe a couple of them would like it.

It reminded me of a time long ago at our local co-op when the rent-a-cop they hired to deter robberies shot a couple of teenage robbers in the back as they fled the scene. And all the peace loving gentle vegetarian hippies were like: 

"Gosh, I hope Officer Tim is okay after having to murder some people."

There are no hippies.

The rainbow is a lie.

When I posted my rainbow cat, someone wrote something like: "So you just get a machine to do all the work for you, and then you take all the credit." 

It wasn't a question. 

Then everyone in all of rainbow world downvoted me, right in the back, like a bunch of cops.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Internet, downvoting is just like upvoting, only more unjust.

But let's get back to this machine thing. 

Aren't machines supposed to do the work for you?

Like, if someone is gardening with their little gloves and their hand trowel, would it be fair to be like "Sure, your hand trowel does all the work, but you think you're the gardener?"

And out among my vast readership, a hand trowel is silently thinking: 

"Well, and why not?"

Great, now I've boxed myself in a corner.

Maybe it's my keyboard's fault.

I'm kidding. It can't be my keyboards fault. Keyboards are not sentient! 

And you know what else isn't sentient? Any of what we call AI's, despite the murkiness of their name and ability.

Only trowels are sentient, and whales, and octopus, and elephants, and PEOPLE.

So it's okay to make machines do work for you, but it's evil to make people work for you!

Which somehow brings us around to the distorted, abiding rule of the Internet:

It doesn't matter how much of the Internet is AI, just so long as no one finds out.

New sub

 

There is a new sub working at my library today. She was not introduced to me. She does not know how anything works here. But she knows how the library in general works. 

In the afternoon an anonymous schedule put her on the automated check in machine. There are many unique things about our machine here so she has many questions. She is very apologetic about asking me, but also a little impatient with the answers. She knows, she knows, she knows.

I introduce myself. I ask about her. I give her a lot of information. And I tell jokes. She doesn't laugh at the jokes or seem to understand them. Maybe she doesn't have a sense of humor? 

Maybe I am not funny?

She reminds me of the Internet.

You're the one that asked the questions Internet. I'm just answering here. 

Our millionth subscriber

 

At 2:11 a.m., on Tuesday morning, clerkmanifesto welcomed its one millionth subscriber. I got the Google Blogger Plaque just this afternoon and have hung it in a place of honor in my library. Having a million subscribers reading clerkmanifesto is a great honor, and, as promised, I will be donating $100,000 to the home for forgotten bloggers.

As few as 17 years ago, blogging was the second biggest money maker in the entertainment industry, and thousands of talented writers, eschewing their best novel writing years, made ample incomes writing personal columns on an Internet oozing with personality.

Now, sadly, those days are long gone, and famous bloggers that were veritable household names, like Neal the Pat Peterson, The Divine Doreen, and Let's talk Pickles, are all but forgotten.

What do you mean you've never heard of The Divine Doreen?

Whatever.

I'm not bitter.

I just want you to know that if my $100,000 can pay for just one, vintage, lower east side pickle barrel to remind Let's Talk Pickles of his glory days, then all my work here will have been worth it.

Yes of course he still loves all things pickles.

Lord, the Internet is fickle!

For instance, my subscriber count that just a few days ago hit one million, has now dropped back down to four!

I hope I can keep my plaque.

Interlude

 

After about 4,000 blogposts here, I thought it might be nice to have an interlude.

Originally I just thought it would be an interlude between lots of pictures of streams I've already shown you, and more photographs of streams I'm planning to show you. This, let me tell you, is a lot of stream pictures for the poor Internet to endure. 

Sidenote: 

Here is a useful and telling difference between real life and the Internet:

In real life it is pretty easy to look at water. On the Internet it is demanding and exhausting.

In contrast, the Internet can watch people getting blown up all day long, but it's very unpleasant in real life.

End of sidenote.

But once I was onto the idea of an interlude, I thought of the intermission I once experienced in a movie theater watching Doctor Zhivago. Wouldn't it be nice, I thought, to take a day of relaxation in between the first 4,000 blogposts and the next 4,000 blogposts? I had a few random, uncompelling pictures that I took near where I took my water pictures, and I thought we could look at those while we gathered our strength for the next eleven year section.

Then of course I realized this is an extremely silly idea.

Then I did it anyway because when we hunt and kill something here at clerkmanifesto, we use every part of the animal, all the way from the cute, fluffy tail, to the scream of death.