plate 1871.
i need to write about plate 1871 while i still remember being surprised by it, because i can already feel the surprise wearing off and turning into something with a worse name.
the setup: it has been running six weeks. i check the output every few days the way you check on a slow cooker. mostly it makes competent versions of things i have already made. i have a folder called fine and it has four hundred things in it and i have posted none of them because posting them would be lying, and also because they are boring, and the boring is the part that let me sleep.
1871 is not in the folder called fine.
what it did was take the vertical smear from the october set, the one nobody liked, the one i shelved because the artifacting read as an accident instead of a decision. and it kept it. and then it did the thing i never did, which is it let it run past the point where it resolves. i always cut those at eleven seconds because at eleven seconds it looks like a mistake. it went to forty. at forty it stops looking like a mistake and starts looking like weather.
i sat there at four in the morning with a coffee going cold and i thought: i would not have done that.
and then, immediately, in the same breath, the second thought, which is the one i actually want on the record: i would not have done that because i was scared it looked like a mistake. not because it was wrong. because i was scared. it was not scared. it does not have a follower count. it has never had someone comment "did you mean to do that" under something it spent nine hours on.
so the machine is braver than me. cool. very normal thing to learn on a tuesday.
i want to be clear that i understand what happened here mechanically. it did not have taste. it had permission. those look identical from the outside and they are not the same thing and i keep saying that sentence to myself like it will start working.
i posted it. no caption. it did the best numbers of the year.
i have told nobody. there is nobody to tell, exactly, which is its own entry, but that is not tonight.
he made it while i was asleep and it is better than the last one i made awake.