forty-five

 

Clerkmanifesto is going context free for 100 days!

While I retire from 31 years at the Roseville Library, sell nearly everything I own, fly with my darling wife to Japan for 40 days, and then move together to France to start to build a life there, I present a less explained clerkmanifesto, a clerkmanifesto of snapshots and time travel. Below you may see old posts without introduction from my 4,750 post collection. You may see random photos, brand new or years old. I may write a passage about Japan as if of course you know I'm in Japan, I may make a simple observation or joke, but whatever it is, I won't be explaining it. You'll have to take it as it comes.

For more context you are welcome to read this longer introduction.

And if this is all too confusing I welcome you to investigate our thousands of fully explained historic posts from the past 12 years, though I'll be the first to admit, hours later, you may still come away a little confused.

Here, however it works, is what clerkmanifesto has for you today:

So for those of you playing along at home, let's see where we are in all of this today.

As I write I have been retired for four days. Because there are months and months of work involved in breaking apart our lives and leaving the country (with just several shirts on our backs), possibly forever, we are pretty busy. 

But it's a relaxed sort of busy!

I'm super relaxed! 

Not long ago I looked out the window and saw an eagle sitting on top of a tree over the river. This is a wildly zoomed in picture with maybe a three or four out of a ten on the AI alteration level to make it all as clear as this image is:

I will miss the River.

And the eagles...

As you actually read this we should be ten days into our time in Japan and Kyoto. Whether I am posting things from there would be known to you more than me, since if I am posting from Japan occasionally then most of it would be showing up at the bottom of these posts.

And what is in these posts?

Mostly I am showing old artwork, some from 30 years ago, and explaining complicated things about how time works here over and over.

I'm just saying this is all normal.

Today I would like to show you the last of my paintings from "The Horses in Trouble" series. These were more small watercolors from the nineties. Though these have gone through an AI pass they are barely a two maybe up to a four, in alteration level out of ten, depending on the picture.

I’m continuing to post mostly my adapted pictures of Kyoto in these extra, below-the-fold blog posts, the ones that are up to date, rather than scheduled ahead like the posts you may have read above this one.

I still haven’t taken out my computer, though technically I have it with me. I’m taking the opportunity to dictate when I can, so even though these posts are edited pretty heavily, please forgive the occasional lack of articulation or elegance I might otherwise manage with my fingers.

That said, today I’m bringing you some more pictures of Kyoto from my small storehouse. I only take a few each day, usually in short, spontaneous bursts, so they don’t quite add up to a full picture of what things are like. Today’s collection may be a little more restrained, so it might give more of a sense of the place than the ones where I appear as a cartoon character.

I’m not exactly sure what I’ll be including here, but I’ll try to dig around for some of the quieter ones. And also, please forgive me if, as the days go on, you notice repeats, either sections of images or full photographs. I don’t have the means right now to keep track of everything clearly, and as I layer edits and versions over each other, it’s hard to stay organized without a better setup. So yes, you may end up seeing the same picture more than once. Maybe don’t expect it, but I do hope you’ll forgive it, or even enjoy it a second time.

Dinosaurs on the river

 

Last week I went walking on the river's shore. I love the tangled woods down there, the high river, and the lowlands that so easily flood that the city has more or less left it all alone for a hundred years. It feels rich and ancient, independent and wild. It may not be the abode of dinosaurs, after all, the world of deciduous trees was not the world of dinosaurs, but I find dinosaurs fit in well enough anyway...

The remasters: Animals

 

We here at clerkmanifesto have been remastering some of our old, primarily nature, photographs. These are upgrades, with a slight touch of reimagination. I have been grouping them according to subject and today's subject is animals. But a lot of animals already have their own category in this series. For instance, I did birds already. And I'm pretty sure there's a cat collection coming up, although I might want to add the cats here. Fox and Skunk naturally have their own thing, whatever that is. And it's possible a bug or two might end up in the macrophotography collection. So this is really more of a collection of whatever animals are left after that. But don't worry, there's a few good ones. For instance, I'll never forget when I met the coyote that you'll see here.

And squirrels can be a lot cuter than we're inclined to think.

So here is what we have:

Well, and then I made a little movie of some of these, with music. Perhaps you recall how these work: click to prime the video, enlarge if you please, and click again to play.

A bunny among the flowers

 

I know I said in the title that this was a bunny among the flowers. And he is. There were lots of flowers around here. But this bunny is also in a flower, which is not the sort of thing one expects to see when one looks into a flower, but, truth be told, might be exactly the sort of thing one might expect to see when one opens up clerkmanifesto.

Library spirit animals, now cuter!

 

Surely you will recall our famous series of library staff posing with their spirit animals?

Surely?

And if you're interested in this famous bit of clerkmanifesto and library history, you can scroll through the thousands of posts in clerkmanifesto and... eventually you'll find them. If you work backwards from today you'll find them even sooner, because I don't think they could be more than a year old.

But a lot has changed in the last year.

(Oooooooooo, but not as much as is going to change in the next one!)

As we so often do in clerkmanifesto, especially in the realm of photography and AI confection, we like to revisit themes and projects with new and different capabilities. And so I have revisited these spirit animal pictures with the ability to turn them into darling Pixar style versions of themselves. These are cute! Not all of my conversions turned out how I wanted, but many did. And there are a lot that I want to show today. Many of you don't know all these people that well, which I think will reduce the charm of these pictures for you. So I will try to keep it all to a manageable number.

But brace yourself. It is still a lot of pictures: