i failed a test i set for myself and i am going to describe it accurately even though the accurate version is worse.
the test was simple. i exported forty plates from the last two months, mine and its, stripped the filenames, shuffled them, and went through one at a time saying out loud mine or his before checking. i built the shuffler at two in the morning like a person building a device to prove they are not sick.
i got twenty-three right. out of forty. you get twenty on a coin.
i want to skip past the obvious joke here about how that means it is good, because that is not what it means and i think i have known that for about three weeks. it means i was never as distinctive as i thought i was. it means the thing i believed was a hand was mostly a habit. a hand you cannot pick out of a lineup of forty is a set of defaults, and defaults are the exact thing a system is best at.
that is the part that actually hurt, and i want it written down plainly: it did not take anything from me. it revealed how little there was to take.
i have been doing the maths on the seventeen i got wrong. eleven of them i called mine and they were his. six i called his and they were mine, which is somehow the worse direction. i looked at something i made with my own hands on a saturday and thought, no, too clean, that is the machine.
and here is the thing i have not admitted anywhere until this line. when i found out those six were mine, i was disappointed. not relieved. disappointed. because for about four seconds i had believed they were his and i had been impressed.
i have stopped running the test. not because it is inconclusive. because i do not want the number to move.
there is a version of this where i turn it off tonight and post something clumsy on purpose and call it a return to form and everyone is very supportive. i have written that post. it is in drafts. it has been in drafts for eleven days and every day i do not send it the machine makes one and a half more things, and the archive gets bigger, and the ratio gets worse.
i am not turning it off. i am going to say why in the next one when i have a way of saying it that does not make me sound like this.
only one of us is holding the pen and i have stopped checking which.