Big fish, small pond

 

The Internet is a sponge.

Cause it sucks!

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

No, see, because a sponge absorbs things, so it could be said to "suck" in a way, and when...

Yes, I agree Wikipedia is really nice.

I too find google maps useful.

Sure, street view is pretty amazing. I see where you're go...

Yes, I am on the Internet, and no, I don't think I suck.

So you didn't care for the joke?

The Internet is a sponge. 

A huge one! And if you go out to most places on the Internet and have something to say, it will affect absolutely nothing. It will just get swallowed up. I know. I tried.

However, if you find some place super tiny on the Internet you'd be surprised at how outsized your influence can be. This, right here, is a super tiny place on the Internet. And I am finding that unlike on Reddit, or on Amazon review pages, what I have to say here pretty much fills the place up. Whatever I say goes. I mean unless it's not funny, or p

No, I was getting to how it affects you. Hang in there.

Where was I?

Right. I was saying how it affects you.

Unlike on most of the Internet, around here if one has a comment, it has an extraordinary weight to it.

 Think of it this way:

If one is voting for President along with 100 million other people, one's vote has a lot of heavy lifting to do. It is a miniscule portion, full of compromise, and it is insignificant, hard to truly conceive of in its quark-like invisibility. 

Now imagine voting for President and being the only one voting.

We'd have some very different Presidents!

Anyway, that's how it is around here on this blog; write a comment on clerkmanifesto and one will be in a "one person voting for president" situation. 

Which is why this blog doesn't look very much like America.

One of my rare, appreciated, and regular commenters recently remarked on a series of photographs I posted, saying that they confessed to having a preference for the realistic pictures. Try that kind of thing on most of the Internet and you'll probably be banned for life for violating the terms of service. Around here it's just:

Oh, a vote for realistic pictures? How many votes are there so far for the abstract ones? 

Zero?

So, one to zero.

Checking my math and, yes, one vote wins.

Here are some realistic pictures I recently took then:

Magical blogpost

 

No doubt this blogpost will seem like magic to you. For as Arthur C. Clarke postulated: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

The advanced technology at play here is that this blogpost is entirely reader suggestion driven. Every bit of it is driven by suggestions and comments written in the comment section below. 

To take part simply suggest in the comment section what you'd like this blogpost to be about, and the post will slowly transform to speak to the very thing that was suggested. Thus, if someone were to write in that they would like this post to be about the Tokyo DisneySea Theme Park, readers here would soon find themselves reading about how DisneySea (along with Tokyo Disneyland) is the only Disney Park not owned by Disney, but is licensed by Disney and owned by the Tokyo Land Company. How instead of making these lesser parks, the personal attention thus lavished on these Disney Parks by a company whose (nearly) whole business it is, makes these, by most credible accounts, the best of all the Disney Parks, and specifically makes Tokyo DisneySea, with its seven themed lands based off of real and imagined "ports of call", to be generally considered the finest amusement park in the World. 

So go ahead and wield your magic pencil with a subject suggestion of your own in the comment section below to see how our complicated algorithms absorb and answer to them in the text of this post. They do this not just by artificial intelligence, adapting to keywords in your suggestions, but also through a direct neural interface with the author of this blog, me, and by tapping into my previous 3,000 blogposts for material, making it so that each alteration of this post, at your suggestions, is in a sense authored by me, by my past writings, and by the artificial intelligence program I have written to run this elaborate process.

If you write a suggestion and it doesn't appear to be promptly responded to in this post please give it time. While the automated rewriting process of this post should be instantaneous, the amount of computer processing required for it is generally beyond my means and so the AI changes have to be queued at a Super Computer in Finland that I have limited, low level privileges with. Please be patient and check back later.

Finally, if you see a suggestion or question in the comment section that already seems to be answered or spoken to in the text of this post, remember that this post adapted in relation to the comment. This post is in a sense written in pencil, ever erased in bits and rewritten in new pencil. People aren't being "obtuse" to what's already here, rather, none of this was here when their comment was made.

Have fun!

 

Reader questions

 

A reader writes in to clerkmanifesto to ask:

Hmm. Wait. No one appears to have written in to ask anything. 

Ah well, I can answer anyway:

Dear Reader:

First of all: Thank you for your kind words about my blog! I am touched. I know I seem amazingly self-contained and unaffected by success and by what anyone thinks of me, but...

Hmm, apparently I misplaced my second part of that sentence. Never mind. Let's carry on!

You ask a lot of interesting questions about my blog. I will try to answer them.

1. I am in no way obsessed with ferrets. 

2. I have never met a ferret.

3. What's with all the questions about ferrets?

4. I'm not the one asking all the questions about ferrets!

5. Well, these are the questions you would have asked if you actually wrote in thank you very much!

6. No, I don't think I just show pictures when I lose control of a blog post!

7. I am so glad you have taken an interest in my photography. Here are four random pictures I have recently taken.

8. No, oddly they're not of ferrets.

9. Yes, I agree it's a bit of a missed opportunity.

 

The silent majority

Dear Clerkmanifesto (a reader writes):


I have recently observed a number of your readers writing in to make themselves and their wishes known to you. This has spurred me on to say there are a great many of us out here, hundreds, perhaps thousands, who steadfastly read your engaging, quirky, sometimes challenging missives and would never write in. I for one consider your work to be literary as opposed to an object of common discussion and would no more "comment" or write in a letter to you than I would to Wordsworth or Yeats.

I mean all this as a point of reference for you rather than any kind of condemnation of the letter writers who have recently been offering their perspective and sometimes making their wishes known.


Thank you so much for your attention.


With fulsome regard, 


G. Markel Wittenberger Esq.







My Dear G. Markel:


Thank you, but is this not, precisely, writing into me?


With all due respect,


F. Calypso (for Clerkmanifesto)









Dear Clerkmanifesto:


Aha! Curses! Caught with my hand in the cookie jar!


Nevertheless, yours truly,


G. Markel Wittenberger Esq.

Writing in

Dear Clerkmanifesto:


Lately I have noticed a lot of people writing in with letters to be on your blog. I want to write a letter!




Please, go right ahead. What would you like to say?



Dear Clerkmanifesto:

I don't know what I'd like to say. I'd just like to write a letter! And then you'd put it in your blog and it would be all over the World and everyone would see it and it would be my letter!



We could do that.



Dear Clerkmanifesto:

Really?



Yes. Go ahead.



Dear Clerkmanifesto:


Oh. Ah, this is my letter and I am thinking lots of stuff. And I want to make it clear to all your millions of readers that this is my idea and I thought it! And I wrote it and everyone is reading it!



Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts. There is just one thing I think you should know: I don't have millions of readers. 



Dear Clerkmanifesto:

How many do you have then?




Best I can tell it's around 12 on an average day, a bit less when I do stuff like, well, this. So figure nine to be safe.



Dear Clerkmanifesto:

Nine readers? Is there a freewheeling sort of blog that I could write to that maybe has... more?




I'm sorry, no. Not anymore. Maybe you could try posting a comment to a popular Tik Tok video?




Dear Clerkmanifesto:

Oh. Now I feel a little sad.




How about this: I'll post nine of your letters on clerkmanifesto. Nine letters times nine readers is 81!




Dear Clerkmanifesto:

81? That's not a million, but it's pretty close, isn't it?




Yes, I think it's surprisingly close.




Dear Clerkmanifesto:

Okay then. Yes please. Thank you. I think then I'll rest for awhile now and ride on my laurels and all that. Okay?



Sounds good. Thanks for writing in.

More flowers

Dear Clerkmanifesto,


Quite recently I have noticed on your blog a rise in input from fictional readers. As a fictional reader myself I have taken comfort in this. The burden of being fictional is that unlike characters of the actual world, we fictional characters cease to exist without context, or, as I and my imaginary friends sometimes like to joke, we are "Dead if not read". So as I watched imaginary people weigh in on what you might provide on clerkmanifesto I thought "Hey, that could be me. I too could come into existence."

I am existing now. I am having a peach. It is sweet, but a bit messy.

Many fictional characters say that the actual people take existence for granted, but not me. I think that that is exactly what we should do with existence, take it for granted. That's no dis on existence. It's more of a way of saying that maybe we should just leave existence alone. It seems to like taking care of itself.

But who really am I to give advice on existence, whose own is so tenuous?

Anyway, I did have a reason for writing you that was more specific than waxing philosophical.

Being a recently imagined into existence fictional character there is much I have not seen or experienced. I am currently well acquainted with peaches oddly enough, and I know about squirrels, bunnies, and bugs all from the fictional readers of the first paragraph here who awakened my consciousness. But all of those fictional readers seemed to reference flowers in their comments, and this has piqued my curiosity. I have come to understand you photograph flowers. Could I possibly see some of those?

Thank you so much. I'll take my answer off the air.




Kindest of regards,


Addison






Addison,


My answer to non fictional characters on this blog is "Yes, if at all possible". My answer to People of the Imagination like yourself is "Yes without reservation." I am honored to show you your first flowers and hope you enjoy them.



F.

Bugs

When I started clerkmanifesto seven years ago I imagined at some point I might have a large, engaged readership.

No, wait, that's not right.

When I started clerkmanifesto seven years ago I hoped it would bring me worldwide acclaim, but mostly I suspected it wouldn't, and that it would all be too much for me to keep up with, and I would slowly fade out of writing it over a couple of months until I quietly just dropped it without anyone much noticing.

Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that its level of popularity would remain so tenaciously tiny, all while my dedication to it would be so devoted, involved, and steadfast. My process of coping with my lack of popularity has been a long and complicated road. I started with glimmers of hope, followed by periods of frustration, occasional moments of rage, mildly depressing periods of stunned disbelief, then bouts of mature disappointment, then bemusement, rage again, glimmers of understanding, refusal, acceptance, then irritation, and then, perhaps most helpfully, sections of genuine disinterest. 

At this point if I really, emotionally and structurally, need a larger, more engaged audience I just make it up.

Which is how I came to receive this letter written by myself over the course of the next several minutes:


Dear Clerkmanifesto;

I have been following your interesting and wide ranging blog for a couple of years now, but have kept my appreciation and regard mainly to myself. Your regular posting is sustaining enough for me, and certainly I like some of your whimsies and musings better than others. Every once in awhile, with time on my hands, I delve into your rather deep back catalog, and I have passed a few edifying evenings here or there in such endeavor. 

It rather caught my attention when you began adding photography to your missives, and I am surprised and delighted by how compelling I have found this to be. I mean this as no slight to your writing, which I enjoy, but I merely consider these pictures an added dimension providing more to appreciate as I peruse clerkmanifesto. It is also your photography that has elicited this first letter of mine to you.

A scant few days ago a young gentleman reader of yours (he seemed quite young indeed to be a reader of your rather complicated blog) expressed in no uncertain terms that he was interested in pictures of bunnies. He was very interested in bunnies. He was charmingly passionate about his interest in bunnies! I pleasantly delighted in seeing you so fully indulge the young chap, and it quite got me thinking.

I am not a tremendous fan of bunnies (though I still enjoyed those pictures). However I am something of a very amateur entomologist. And I couldn't resist breaking my usual silence here to inquire as to whether you might have any photographs in my line. Surely a bug or two must have wandered across a couple of those flowers you so beautifully photograph? If so I would be extremely appreciative if you considered sharing some of those "bug" pictures with us. I don't expect much, but I would be so thankful for anything along the six-legged line. Wings, of course, are always a plus.

Thank you again for anything you can provide.

I remain your devoted reader,

Adley Cameron Brutus Wanderwillow III









How very kind of you to write Adley. I am happy to provide a selection of pictures of insects that I have taken in my wanderings. I am ignorant as to all but the simplest of names for any of these (e.g. a kind of a bee, a dragonfly, moth...), so feel free to identify as you like. As ever this comes from my rare collection of pictures that are "mostly in focus". The last is a shot of pure luck, perhaps even my luckiest so far (yes, he's flying). 

I hope you enjoy them!