But you will probably never see it. As much as I want someone to see it I do not have anyone in my life at present who would be a suitable or appreciative audience. It is a picture of a quarter (25-cent piece) at rest on my balls. It’s really a work of art, raising questions of why there is not a testiculata genre of artistic expression. I suppose there is, in some form. In fact I remember now a series where men photograph their balls against the sunrise, or the sunset, or some “beautiful” horizon.

I’d like to show my picture, and the ancillary rough drafts that led to its crystallization. But I can’t post it here, even though this is my private dedicated server where I should be able to post virtually anything without getting kicked off. No rules here, save for avoiding obvious criminal enterprises.

I took a day off yesterday. It was a sanity thing. I was incredibly wound up and jumpy the night before, and I knew this would last well into the next day, and it did. I could do nothing useful. It was a day of waste. All I could think to do was upload a bunch of crap to archive.org.

In that spirit I guess I arrived at a useful inflection point for posting content to archive. I don’t know if it was always this way but it seems that possting a single book and having it formatted in the various DjVu and other formats is as simple as uploading a PDF. If the PDF is in good order archive takes it from there, parsing out the individual JPG files, parsing out the text, creating the torrent, and so on. In the past I went into uploading to archive with the assumption that I had to dump all the original scans, which could be a very time-consuming process. Turns out all I needed to do was scan the pages, turn it into a PDF, then upload the PDF. Add some metadata and you’re done. I’m just saying all this because archive has always struck me as kind of unforgiving, but I’ve come around on that.

Someone write yesterday inquiring about a particular article from “The Etude” music magazine, that old magazine I spent so many wasted hours slaving over in hopes of making a useful website. It was not useless but in the end it was not enough.

But I like getting inquiries about the content. She was looking for a particular article that her former mentor referenced in a dissertation. That article was out there on the open Internet but lots of luck finding it. It is among archive.org’s scans of “The Etude” magazine, and the quality of those scans varies tremendously, from perfectly usable and clear to barely legible and impossible for OCR software to recognize or process. I found this hidden-in-plain-sight article thanks to my index of articles published in The Etude, which directed me to page 54 of the June, 1954 edition. The person who inquired about this article thought it was on page 72, but that issue had less than 72 pages. The 72, referenced in her mentor’s citation of this article, was the volume number for the magazine that year.

So I helped somebody yesterday. That’s a good feeling. I’ve often sensed that Theodore Presser objected to my handling of etudemagazine.com, the website where I scanned most of the covers and converted hundreds of stories to carefully copy-edited text. I never heard anything from Presser in a spirit of cease and desist but there are caveats on the scans at archive.org which clarify that these scans were done with Presser’s approval. Was that caveat a dig at me for having done everything with no communication whatsoever from Presser?

Covers are generally “Fair use” but for text matter you don’t really need that approval for anything prior to 1924, which is where I focused most of my energies. It’s just too bad so much of the scans they put up at archive are barely legible.

What am I talking about? And why?

I am also attempting help somebody out with a payphone article for an East Hampton newspaper. It looks to be a lightweight piece but I’m giving it my all anyway. I’d ignored media inquiries since end of last year but something about this one struck a chord.

I am eating strawberries and drinking water. This is my morning ritual at this job, which continues to be a money-losing affair. There is so much going on in AI now and I could really behoove myself by getting involved somehow. I’d like to be one who controls it or trains it. I want to reign it in on all the bullshit lies it spits out so gleefully. \

I was messing with DALL-E yesterday, despite the moral problem with knowing that imagery is all derived from the works of others, including copyrighted content. But aren’t all things derived from earlier works? Would there be a poem without an earlier inspiration? A melody without a cantus firmus borrowed from another composer? Isn’t everything a watered down copy of something else?

My legs are sore after defrosting the freezer turned out to be a pretty athletic affair. My freezer is some kind of metaphor for my life. I let it accumulate frost and ice to a point where nothing can be removed or placed into the unit. It is just a cave of solid ice, with ice cube trays and boxes of frozen food trapped in the ice like fossils deep in the arctic. I have to attack the ice with knives and an ice pick, exerting myself and using muscles I guess I had not used in a long time. I’m sore mostly in the legs but also shoulders. Pointing a high-powered fan at the ice does much toward melting it quickly. But it is still an all-day project that cannot be simply ignored lest the water melt and get all over the floor. There may be a way to do this less strenuously by placing it in the bathtub and blasting the ice with hot water.

I was going to include a picture I took a few days ago but I am at work, and to access that photo would risk exposing co-workers here to the photos of that 25-cent piece on my balls. I would have to bring up the photo browser yo get to the photo I want, but that photo browser at present would reveal a lot of pictures of my cock and balls, and no one here needs to see that.

I once exposed myself in this way to a woman I knew I would never see again. She was fine with it. Accidents happen, it was not a deliberate attempt to harrass, and who doesn’t walk around with pictures of their junk on their phone? Well, actually, I never used to but some correspondences I entered into in recent years made having such stuff handy was good for some fun, at least. I get these monotonous emails from sources claiming they hacked my device and found all my dirty pictures, and without payment of a billion bitcoins all my cockshots will be released t the world. These emails are generic, from people no knowledge of what’s on my particular phone. But any time I see them I’m like, bring it on. Share my cockshots for all to see.

Time to go to work. I feel strange today. Was up early and at work early. Feel jumpy like yesterday but ready to embrace the tasks at hand.