Yesterday was kinda crazy, wandering around Sunset Park and environs, very industrial, blight, probably not the safest area when trucks outnumber people by a significant margin. At times it felt like a wrecking ball might swing right at my head. But I made it out to a new-to-me area. Reaching the Brooklyn Army Terminal was a bit of a quandary. It felt like an oasis but it seemed there was nothing there for me, and barely any people there. There was a huge quantity of cars parked behind the building, and even onto a pier that appeared to have been built specifically to accommodate more parked vehicles. Artwork was meh. From BAT I took a B11 bus as far as 4th Avenue and about 50th Street. I did not like the bus. It was an older one lacking the digital screens and announcements that tell you where you are and where you are going. No USB plugs either but I’ve never adapted to using those things on buses, where I’m typically only on board for a few minutes. The last time I tried one it said my phone would be fully charged in something like 3 hours. Thast’s not useful, and it likely means the plug is not charging the phone at all.
I spotted a couple of bollards and concrete smears where payphones used to be on 4th Avenue in Sunset Park. That made the journey productive. My only known connection to Sunset Park is that an ex-gf got a job there around the time we broke up.She could possibly have been on the train where the nutjob shot a bunch of people but apparently she was not. That was her station, though. I visited Industry City a few weeks ago. It seemed vibrant and alive, unlike BAT. Maybe I just wan’t in the right mental place. The pristine appearance of BAT clashed with what I had just wandered through.
It seems my friend Dan was buried at the Gate oof Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne. I’ve not been to that one. I believe it is owned by the same Diocese as Old Calvary. The funeral was yesterday, on Mulberry Street. I didn’t know where exactly and I could have called to find out but I was not interested in attending. He’s gone, and my presence at the service would have offered solace to no one. Isn’t that why we go to funerals? Not to show respect to the dead but to the survivors. But this isn’t that kind of community.
I got here early today. The Steinway Street entrance on 34th Avenue is open again. I should feel lucky, the entrance on the other side of the street remains closed.
I’ve been making new audio. Hours of it already, much of it not usable. Not certain where it’s going but it fits my eternal aesthetic of accumulation.
Speaking of that, I kinda almost got AI to do something useful for me. I caneed 8 receipts and asked ChatGPT’s COdex to rename the scanned files according to the date and business name printed on the receipt. In processing 8 receipts it made one mistake in this relatively straightforward task. I further asked it to erase from the scanned images the last 4 digits of my credit card number. It was very hit or miss on that task. When I edited receipts in Photoshop I used the cloning tool to erase those digits and make it seem as if they were never there. GPT had a hard time with that, and all told it took significantly longer for GPT to do this job than it would have taken me. I also got it to output a text file with the contents on the receipt converted to text via OCR. That part went surprisingly well. But it would take a lot of work and refinements for this to be usable at scale. It would be cool to scan the receipts, drop the images into a folder, and have GPT (or something) do all this.
