Assembling a team

You may have noticed that I have been assembling a sort of team around here.

Why?

I don't know.

Maybe to go to clerkmanifesto?

I have been here for thirteen years and I am still looking...

Street scenes

 

While I am here in our apartment coughing my lungs out, I thought it might be simplest to show you a scattering of local street scene experiments I have been idly playing with. I don't manage to get out much into the city lately, what with the hacking and exhaustion from lack of sleep, so we can count these as more imaginary trips, or even hallucinations brought on by my illness. 

That sounds about right...

T Shirt designs

 

I have been working on t-shirt designs for some t-shirts I want to order and the process has become so involved that I have no recourse other than...

to show you them.

I don't make these in an attempt to sell them, though occasionally people have bought them and I get a tiny commission. I make them so I can buy my own designs on a site called Redbubble. And though I did not buy the t-shirts for all of these, I did get four!

These are all, or almost all designs from things that have at least partly appeared here in the past.

forty

 

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:

There's a lot of old, repurposed artwork of mine to show you, dug out from storage and discarded after a minute of photography (actually, some of it I left behind in back files of the Roseville Library). Some of these old pictures and paintings couldn't be improved with an AI gloss, but some of it was able to be shown more as it really was than any poor pictures I've ever had of it could. Today I get to show you a few pictures of one of these. 

At the end of my time in art schools I made a five foot tall, obsessively painted ceramic sculpture. I spent hundreds and hundreds of hours on this in a small apartment in San Francisco. The sculpture long gone, I came across two rough pictures of it. With a reasonable amount of effort I was able to get AI to make an almost proper picture or two of the piece almost as it was.

This sculpture was lambasted by a mean art teacher and shown in a shiny new art gallery in San Francisco by a nicer art teacher, an odd juxtaposition, or so it strikes me now.

And here is a detail from the above piece. If anything these underplay the number of dots:

Capitalism sucks, but there are worse things than democracy

 

In my flurry of t-shirt designs, most of which involved the clerk manifesto cafe, and a few "Library Card Cafes" for yesterdays missive, I did make a couple "capitalism sucks" cafe designs as well. These were a reference to a bit from my weekly cartoon from 30 years ago where I pretended to sell very expensive "Capitalism Sucks" t-shirts. And why not? It's a fine bit of satire standing the test of time!

Anyway, here's one or two of these designs:

I know, so cute!

I'm not sure though how much punchy economic criticism I was going for here though. These might be as much a fit of pique over how I keep making t-shirt designs and want to order more t-shirts but can't quite afford it because I keep buying more and more tools to help me make better and better t-shirt designs.

Is this Capitalism's fault?

Probably. Most things are. But I've got some of my own things going on here too.

Ah well.

If I get really down about it, I can head on over to my local clerk manifesto café and grab a cup of coffee.

For like, eight dollars!

Bughearts on my mind

 

 I usually have some kind of AI subscription going, and the capabilities of that subscription tend to inform the pictures and movies one might see here. I am currently burning through a month's allowance of credits on a dizzyingly misnamed AI platform called Freepik.

It costs money! And it's called Freepik!

But it does give access to a lot of different tools, the main ones I've been using being its image generators, editor, and upscaler. And though I began making bughearts for T-shirts, well, I've bought all the T-shirts I can manage right now, and I am just making more bughearts because...

because...

I can't stop!

So maybe it's lucky I'm almost out of credits. I've got bughearts on the brain!!!!

Wait.

That gives me an idea.

Wait here for a minute will you?

Well, that's intense.

Anyway, the rest of these shouldn't be so gory. Also, they're still designed as t-shirt logos, so they basically have clear backgrounds (unlike the one above). They also have kind of a porous quality to them because I have found that if the image is too much of a solid decal, it feels like it's plastered on the shirt, and also it falls apart far more quickly.

On the websites where the designs are or will be available, one can change the color of the t-shirt and see the significant differences of how the designs look on different colors with the different color coming through the back of the design.

I'm afraid here we just automatically default to a white background color. So it will have to do.

You will find a strong vein of product placement in this collection.