Horizontal

 

The keen-eyed among you will have noticed that at some point pretty much all pictures on clerkmanifesto began to come in a vertical format. This is not out of any particular preference on my part, but has to do with the peculiarities of how pictures get formatted here. I either have to make the images smaller than I like when they're horizontal, or they spill unfashionably over the sidebar.

But in my endless Seussification of flower photos, including some images dating back many years, I have on my hands yet again horizontal pictures.

I'd really like to show them.

I just wanted to warn you today in case this is too much of a shock. 

If you are sensitive to these things may I suggest that you lie on your side to view today's images.

Customer feedback from back when clerkmanifesto was hilarious

 

Feeling that I can't in good conscience show you Dr. Seuss style pictures of flowers yet again, but also as yet unable to do anything other than take more pictures and convert them obsessively, I thought it might be a good idea to dig into the vast clerkmanifesto archives.

I quickly found something! It is a laugh a minute riot from another era.

You're going to love this. And it has no pictures of flowers whatsoever!

It's from eight years ago which weirdly seems not that long ago and yet insanely long ago. You know how time is, as you're held in its maniacal thrall just like me.

I've lightly edited this post as it was so close to perfection I could taste it.

Now it is almost as close to perfection as it was before I edited it. Enjoy!

It is time for our annual customer feedback review. If you would be so kind as to fill out this year's Customer Feedback Survey Form we can immediately begin to make the changes to this blog that you have been longing for. Unless you think this blog is already perfect, in which case we won't have to do anything. Which would be nice, because we're really very, very tired.

So tired...

Deeply tired...

Anyway, please do fill out our form:

Clerkmanifesto Customer Feedback Survey, 2026

My number one concern with clerkmanifesto is

A. None. I think it's perfect! Or like, perfect 30 percent of the time.

B. I'm concerned with how tired you are.

C. Ho boy, concern. Plenty of concerns! Pull up a chair. But I mean it in a good way.

D. There must be some mistake. I'm supposed to be here doing the Taco Bell Customer Survey.

E. The narrow and highly particular range of options on your multiple choice surveys.

I read clerkmanifesto

A. Yes.

B. Er, will I still receive a coupon for one of Taco Bell's delicious chimichilangalaquas?

C. EVERY SINGLE FUCKING DAY!!!!!

D. Answer "C" is making me uncomfortable.

E. Sorry I'm late. Has the survey started yet?

My favorite part of clerkmanifesto is

A. When you pretend you're joking.

B. "Favorite" is a very strong word in this context.

C. Its profound obscurity.

D. Is this clerkmanifesto? It's kind of cute. Do you have any flower pictures?

E. I'd really rather not be pinned down to a single letter choice answer. Oh, foiled again!

My least favorite part of clerkmanifesto is

A.When the hilarity dies down and I am left sadly and wistfully looking at my computer wondering painfully what it's all about.

B. The free kittens. But not so much the crippled ones. I know that doesn't speak well of me but I must answer honestly.

C. When it awkwardly inserts mentions of its corporate sponsor Taco Bell.

D. When it starts going on about how great it is, even if it totally is great, maybe the most amazing thing ever written for the Internet, a work of towering genius and a shining light in a dark world. It is a masterpiece of beauty, vision, and wisdom, and a gift, truly a gift to humanity like no other. I am ever humbled and inspired by it.

E. Yeah. Same as "D" for me. Or maybe "A", although I thought about "B" too for awhile. What was "E" again?

In conclusion I just really want you to know that

A. A customer feedback survey that is functionally impossible to fill out or submit is hardly likely to be a great font of improvement for your little blog.

B. You are undercharging for clerkmanifesto the blog, but overcharging for your wonderful (but expensive) Clerkmanifesto Tea Cosy.

C. Answer "A" is not a nice person, in case you wondered.

D. Your failure to institute any of my suggestions from your last eleven customer feedback surveys only makes me more optimistic that this one is finally gonna be it!

E. All my favorite answers were "E" up until the last one when, oh, curses! Foiled again!

On the problems of developing technology

 

I suppose this sounds like you're in for a real treatise.

You're not in for a real treatise.

Today is just the usual nonsense. But I do want to talk about "the problems" a little. Over the many years of clerkmanifesto since I started playing with video and photography experimentation, I have noticed a couple of things:

1. The really experimental images and technology heavy work I have made is the work that ages the least well of anything out in the history of clerkmanifesto.

2. It's also the thing that I get most obsessed with, so there's plenty of it!

I hope you don't mind. 

I don't mind.

I mean, I don't mind if you don't mind.

But when I can do something entirely "new" in these realms I get very excited about it. 

But also every few months to a year there's usually a new iteration where I can do the exact same thing so much better. So I get excited about it all over again.

These Dr. Seuss pictures I've been showing are a good case in point. I've been taking certain of my images, sometimes because its the best way to make them work, and sometimes because I've become so enchanted with the resuts, and turning them into Dr. Seuss inspired style versions of themselves for probably a few years now. 

Here, this picture is already from awhile ago. Take a look at me with my Seuss Camera from the woods of Minnesota:

Of course, that is already the Seussified version that I showed here a couple years ago. Here's the original never shown photo of me taken with a regular camera:

As you know lately I have been seussifying some recent flower pictures because it turned out to be the best way to make them come alive and have the charm I saw in the flowers to begin with. I had used this technique before, and was happy with it. But this time around the ai image editors I employed had gone through a couple of notable generational improvements since my last experiments. My prompting and my own editing had also gotten better.

So I was a bit dazzled.

In short I had to now go back and look at how all the right kinds of pictures from my history would look through this amazing new lens!

So, I have a lot of pictures from the past few days.

Here are just a few random ones to start you off with. Hopefully we won't find these delightful wonders too painful when we stumble back upon them in 2029 or whenever:

Another post for bees

 

Yes, yes, I know it was all flowers yesterday. But because for some odd reason I decided to make them into super high resolution images, I really couldn't upload all that many. The blog gods only allowed for three flowers in a single post! So I still had quite a few of these new flower pictures left over.

Your mileage on looking at my seussified close up photography of flowers may vary, but the bees love it.

Come to think of it, your mileage on enjoying twee concepts like bees reading clerkmanifesto and getting super excited whenever I show pictures of flowers may vary too, although if it does, I'm a bit surprised you've made it this far on clerkmanifesto.

Maybe you're just an earnest, no nonsense bee who hangs in there for the flower pictures? If so...

Here you go:

There is still the Cote d'Azur

Even though it is in the nineties now where I live, we still go out during the day. We do okay if we stick to the shade and don't move, but that's not what we mostly do. We mostly walk around the city, hugging the shadowed sides of the street, looking for coffee or groceries or whatever we're up to. 

Nevertheless there is this fabulous central square in the old city that we have started frequenting, and, a bit limp from long wanderings in the city, we had a drink and a little food there today while we nurtured the scraps of relief we could from every breeze coming through. After a large beer I was almost dry and marginally comfortable. For a few minutes it all made sense.

But we were soon off again and dripping, looking around at the crowds wondering: "What are all these people doing here? It's so hot!"

I guess they were having a good time. It's a good time here really, right up to the heat death of the universe, which, I am happy to say, has not quite happened yet.

So, while awaiting the heat death of the universe, we walk around, and I still find new things around town after all this time. And sometimes we go to new places. 

Occasionally I'll take a picture or two. 

Today we went out on a hunt for some pants in an outdoor store past the Liberation Market. I had no real success there with the pants, but we did find an interesting Art Deco (sort of?) Jeanne d'Arc church with a golden statue out front. I took some pictures, figuring anything might come in handy for some quiet day on clerkmanifesto. This sort of thing happens most days, so I have a small accumulation of photographs and experiments on those photographs.

Rather than wait for them all to present and organize into their grand themes, or into cohesive collections, I thought it would be nice to share a sampler with you today.

And with that here are some random pictures, some being variations on recent images I've shown, some reflecting on what I've been talking about above. 

I'll let you sort it all out.