I ended up with three days straight not at the job. I felt unmoored and directionless, as i the noem for those days away from this place. That’s not to say I feel at home or at peace in this place. I come in every day with the assumption that I could get fired, or that I might just quit. I have limited ability to get away with doing that. I mean I guess you could look at it that way. Friday saw a trigger like none I can remember. It led to a Saturday on the phone with, of all resources, NYC WELL. They were the only ones that would answer. In referencing this swarm of other resources to call I refer to the new-to-me cadre of “warm lines.” It’s an odd sounding thing but it is a bunch of phone lines distinct from hot lines, where instead of being in crisis you just want someone to talk to.
But these people, who mean well, must stick to their scripts. I patiently accept a lot of answers and replies to questions and comments I did not ask or make. I am given referrals to therapists in my area, none of whom have appointments available until 7 or 8 months at the earliest.
Saturday sucked. That’s all I can say now. It’s done. Sunday and Monday were normal me, I guess. Try to work at home on web or text product but I get jumpy and impatient with no direction and no goal. No collaborators. No one wants to talk to me. I go outaide with a dim fantasy that people will come to me, or that I will become a different person just long enough open conversations and dialogues with influential people in particular realms.
Instead I just waste time. I gather video and photos of meaningless walks in the park. I walked across the High Bridge. That was actually kind of neat, The views from up there are pretty acerbic but the journey was interesting. New York City’s oldest standing bridge.
Today’s emotional existentia leading to ennui regards a survey of what content Google uses to build its AI. Virtually none of my ites are in there, haveing been deemed, I must assume, irrelevant or unrepresentative of the world’s store of human communication and knowledge. I simply do not deserve a place at the circle of life, that enormous table at which we gather to share influences and rub ourselves off on each other.
The only content commandeered by Google’s AI scraper was etudemagazine.com, which ranks 89,486; and wordswarm.net, at 52,814. WSBJ.com, this site and currently the one where I do the most, ranks at 12,668,011. I’m surprised it ranks at all. It’s not a new site but for most of its years online there was almost nothing here. Then I moved almost all of sorabji.com and sorabji.mobi and several other stray blogs under this one domain. With its bloated WordPress template and other design tics it has never ranked well save for the most particular type of content. The Johnston Mausoleum at Calvary gets clicks, as does scans from a high school yearbook bought at a thrift shop. But no one comes here to thinking of me. It doesn’t work like that anymore.
None of my stalwart sites are included in the C4 collection. sorabji.com, payphone-project.com, not to be found. It’s like they never existed, and that, it appears, is how history will record it. My sites that do rank higher are just recycled public domain content. I give myself a little more credit that simply “recycling.” With the Etude Magazine site I had broad ambitions to turn into essentially a trove of very focused search engines. There is no way to easily search the violin content, for instance, or the children’s corner stuff. You have to search the entire magazine, and that puts you at the mercy of the gobbledygook OCR conversions that characterize so much of archive.org’s output. They didn’t scan the pages tightly. They used the DSLR approach, which I’ve always found to be inferior. It is, no doubt, more convenient and quicker than laying down thousands of pages on a flatbed. But if quality is an issue I think doing it flatbed is a nobrainer.
Wordswarm.net ranks well, even though it contained not a single spark of original content. Just dictionary content found on countless other sites. Again, my initial goals were noble. I wanted to make this a highly specialized and focused search engine but, after months and maybe years of trying, I found I just didn’t have the chops for it. The only lasting impact that site might have would be the fact the Museum of Modern Art copied the color scheme and layout of my top page for some exhibit or promotional campaign.
What does it mean, not being included in the AI index? ultimately it must come down to popularity. I am linked to from pretty high-ranking sources but apparently it’s not enough. I shall be forgotten.
Where did I walk yesterday? I took a G to Broadway and decided to walk that piece of road for a couple of hours. I don’t know it very well. I also ventured away from that road, into what I think was a Mitchell-Lama complex. I spotted a couple of signs with old telephone exchange name phone numbers on them. That’s always good for a rise, or something. I don’t know what the SP stands for, since it’s not within the 5 boroughs. But FA is FAirbanks, and I believe that company was based in the Bronx. Interesting how they added area codes. I would guess these were made around the time 10-digit dialing was introduced but people still used or wanted to use the old EXchange names.
I also spotted an oddity, which looked legit at first but after giving it some thought seemed suspect to me: A couple of payphone enclosures mounted on a wall outside a place call “Baby’s” on Broadway near Bedford Avenue. By “suspect I mean they were likely put out as a gimmick of some sort, and not genuine remnants of former payphone locations. A quick trip through StreetView reveals this to be the case. These enclosure were not present until Baby’s opened a few years ago, and they never contained payphones. They do look like legitimate payphone relics but these are not locations of payphones past.
