Decreasing benefits

My wife and I were taking one of our usual photographic walks in the town of Hvar yesterday evening, after the rain.

The tourist season is starting, so it’s more crowded than we’d like, but there were some quite nice sunset scenes and we came back with quite a nice catch on the memory cards.

As a curiosity, Rimac brought quite a show of Nevera cars.

This, combined with the fact that quite a lot of superyachts were parked there, made me think – I’m probably surrounded by the greatest density of people with order of magnitude more money than me, and it’s incredible how little they can actually show for it. In the real world, if you encounter a God who’s an order of magnitude more powerful than you, they are actually scary powerful – they can snap a finger and cancel some event out of existence by modifying its origin in time, or they can assemble a particle cloud back into the destroyed object, or they can create/modify universes. Here, they can buy a bigger boat or a faster car you can’t actually legally drive faster.

I mean, it’s nice, but I can’t but feel it as damning with faint praise. Once you solve all your actual problems that are caused by the lack of money, there’s precious little you can actually do with money. Buy a faster car with more expensive upholstery. Buy a bigger boat. Buy a bigger house. Buy more houses in many different places. Hire people to maintain it all. Have a space programme, or a charity fund, or something to give you the impression that it makes sense and is worth while. But basically, you do the same things you always did, just with no financial constraints. You still drive a car, only better. If you liked boats, you can get a better one. If you were into computers, you can get the best one. If you were into photography, you can buy the best cameras and lenses. You can get the house you actually like, instead of the one you could afford. But you still have all the human limitations, constraints and issues. There’s very little one of those billionaires can do, that a middle class person can’t. I mean, actually do, not just take a ride on a boat or have ten houses that require staff and staff managers. It’s like HiFi – you get to 90% of what’s possible with a few thousand euros. After that, ten times the money will give you the next 9%. After that, you can pay infinite amounts of money for utterly insignificant or even fictitious progress; essentially, you get to delude yourself for a hundred thousand dollars.

Money is absolutely crucial up to a point, and the difference between what your life is as a broke student or a homeless person, and someone in the middle class, can feel like magic. You can just pull out the wallet and solve things that would seem insurmountable to the other person. You can cash out a piece of real estate. You can go to a car salon and buy a new fancy car, cash. If you need a medical intervention, you can just deal with it because money is no object. However, after this miraculous ascent in functionality you can purchase, you get a weird situation where people can have exponentially more money than you, and they have to literally invent bullshit that does barely anything more, but costs insane money, just so that they could show that they can actually get something for that difference in wealth.

But that’s not how things work “up there”, in the real world. There, wealth/power is real, and it’s measured in soul-stuff. There, orders of magnitude do much more than buy stuff that’s invented so that you could pretend to be able to do more. The power differential is real, the way a power differential between a fire cracker, a 1 ton bomb and a thermonuclear device is real. Here, if you’re more powerful you can smoke an expensive cigar on your superyacht while you wait for the delivery of your new Rimac Nevera to complement your fleet of Bugattis. Among the Gods, if you’re more powerful you can correct the timeline, selectively freeze time, spend twenty years doing something and then go back twenty years in time to use the results instantly, you can create a universe to test a hypothesis, and you are actually spiritually capable of functioning on the same level with the fellow Gods. Here, it’s a silly game of pretence, where you act as if your power actually matters. There, it actually matters.

And the thing is, the effort it takes to earn a billion dollars, if we disregard luck which is actually hugely important, is actually comparable to the effort one would have to make in order to attain actual spiritual advancement that would produce actual, non-bullshit power differential in the real world, and this world so successfully hides those results, that barely anyone bothers with it.

Stories

I’ve seen photographic advice such as “your pictures need to tell a story”, and I’m thinking; nah, bro; I’m good. I mean, if I take a picture of a bee pollenating a rosemary bush, what story should that tell? I mean, other than the atmosphere of the moment, the light, the feeling frozen in time?

I’m freezing visual moments, you fit them into your own personal story any way you like. Sometimes there’s a story behind why I like to take pictures of a certain kind, but you will hardly see it in the picture itself. For instance, the horizontal light of the sunset taken through an innocuous object that just happens to be there:

The light is always out of focus, beyond reach and beyond resolution, and in a moment it’s gone, and magic is lost from the object that seemed to contain it. The story is the world itself – how it catches the light of God at specific moments, and then the light is gone and you see that it was never truly of this world, that there is nothing special here, and everything that makes it appear special is beyond it. Also, it’s the story about how I can’t go there yet, which is why those pictures always have a tinge of pain and nostalgia in them.

Sometimes there is no story – the reason why I like taking pictures of insects in flight is simply because it’s hard and I like the challenge, and when I make it, sometimes it looks magical and I like it because of that.

No particular story there, but feel free to insert your own. 🙂

Rainbow light on cobwebs started without any high aspirations of storytelling either – I just found it pretty.

One would think it’s chromatic aberration created by the lens, but nope, you can see it with the naked eye. It’s something about the cobweb breaking light like a string of tiny prisms. The lens just kept it there without interfering, which is why I love those optically perfect lenses.

Later, I understood that it actually fits a story of this world and its creator, who makes his cobwebs attractive with stolen light, so that he could devour his victims here. The real spiders of course prefer to keep their traps hidden and invisible, but that one prefers his traps to shine with the stolen light of God.

So, you can find stories there even if they were unintentional. Whenever I deliberately try to tell a story with photography, it feels pretentious and cringy, so I try to aviod it.

Cringe. 🙂

About matters and seriousness

When I mostly wrote about politics for a few years, some people understood it as me “not being interested in spirituality any more”. When I started writing about spirituality again, shocked Pikachu face, I guess. So, what’s the deal?

Well, it’s kind of obvious. When I saw Western propaganda accompanying the Olympics in Sochi, Russia, I understood that such propaganda is something that would happen only if they had a long-term plan for a war with Russia. As I analysed the events from this perspective, it gave me such a good match that I started a political blog as a place where I can unload my thought processes as a form of a warning, because there’s no way for a war between West and Russia not to eventually go nuclear, and people should know about that well in advance in order to be able to prepare, and by prepare I mean be ready to absorb lesser impacts before the major one, and when the major one comes, be on good terms with God.

What do I mean by lesser impacts? Well, if you’re in Ukraine, you got to find out already. Likewise if you’re in Israel, or the region around Iran. It’s not particularly great in some parts of the West either; London, Paris etc. have turned into terrible shitholes that resemble Africa. America is also not a great place to be, and it’s getting worse.

I expected that, because the nuclear ultimate escalation isn’t something that just happens out of nowhere. You don’t attack Russia and China because you’re doing well. You’re doing it because your civilisation is at an impasse, and you’re looking for a desperate way out. Others react to your desperate measures in progressively more desperate ways, and it ends in mushroom clouds.

People have a silly idea about nuclear war – basically, both sides push a button and twenty minutes later there’s no world. I wanted to explain why this isn’t so, and why they will try everything else first, and why most people in the world won’t even know there was a nuclear war until much later. You need to understand the logic of those things.

So yeah, that was a priority. Also, the reason why I didn’t write about “spirituality” – God, I hate that word – is because I was thinking and meditating and figuring things out, and I don’t like talking just to hear myself talk. I basically needed a decade or two of processing to do, in order to get to the next level of understanding, and it’s not something you can copy-paste from somewhere, because, simply put, nobody has ever done it before. I did write bits and pieces as I was sure, and eventually “The Light Beyond” happened, as a culmination of all this. One of the more important reasons why I didn’t write much is because people who read it generate their own ideas that feed back into my perception, and then it makes it harder for me to figure things out and get a clear signal through all the interference. Then, as I got the pieces together, I could write it all down, since feedback loops no longer matter once I get it.

There’s another silly thing I found out recently; you see, I sensed that people ask Chat GPT and other LLM AI models about me. I asked Romana to try asking the questions I felt people are asking, and indeed, the answers came immediately, which means the system already had everything cached from recent inquiries. She copy-pasted some of it to me, and I found it incredibly silly. For instance, when you ask AI how competent I am, basically asking it to evaluate me because you trust a statistical evaluator of other people’s opinions more than you trust your own judgment, it tells you, essentially, that I’m quite competent at photography and programming, and less so at politics and religious philosophy – essentially, evaluating my deviation from the data pool that defines its primary neural networks as “being wrong”, while matches with consensus opinion are interpreted as “being right”. People who don’t know how that shitbox “thinks” will mistake it for actually having thought processes, which it doesn’t. The true interpretation of what it said is that my IT knowledge is generic enough that every competent IT person shares it, my photography knowledge is essentially what every competent photographer shares, and my pictures are composed along the lines of what is generally found aesthetically pleasing. My political opinions, however, are completely out of, what its western and leftist data pool of generally accepted propaganda defined by the CIA, defines as “normal”, so it’s “wrong” and “not substantiated by facts”, where facts are what the CIA tells the “journalists” to publish. Also, my opinions about spirituality are not the generally found copy-pasta; it’s actually the real thing, because I have my own independent access to the facts, which is orders of magnitude better than anyone else’s. In fact, some of the facts I have are my own memories from long ago, which are accessible only to me, and nobody else (with the exception of a few who also happened to be there); in simple terms, nobody else knows what actually happened because they weren’t there as it happened. I was. If someone didn’t learn it from me, they don’t know. So, Chat GPT thinks I’m taking myself too seriously, because it can’t verify my sources, so it thinks they are questionable. They are not.

Let me put it this way. Only a few people have been on the Moon. A few more have been in orbit around it. They have a unique perspective on it, and others are not really in a position where they can verify it independently. If they tell Neil Armstrong that he shouldn’t take himself too seriously with his stories about walking on the Moon, my answer is that they, in fact, are the ones who are taking themselves too seriously and they shouldn’t, while he’s taking himself exactly as seriously as he should, as he has an independent source of experience that they can’t access, duplicate or independently verify, so they should shut the fuck up.

Puzzle

I’ve been thinking a lot lately, and writing only some of it down, while the rest of it remains work in progress.

I also made some interesting pictures:

It’s just that I’m having trouble figuring out what’s going on. The wars seem to be escalating, but contained within a pattern – none of the actors wants to disturb the world that holds the foundations of their power, and yet as the predictable certainties slip away, they seem to be forced into actions that they don’t actually want to make, with consequences they don’t want to accept. America wants to remain in power, but its economy is inherently broken, their soft power is all but gone, and their military is a one trick pony. Europe would want to act based on principles, and yet this sounds so ridiculous when it comes out of the mouths of atheists whose principles are something they themselves made up and is worth less than the paper it’s written on. Based on those principles they act in ways that subvert the foundational architecture that defined them.

Russia and China would want to be powerful and prosperous, and yet they don’t want to pay the price of that, which is to fight America and win. America abuses everybody and says “so, what are you going to do about it?” So far, nobody came up with an answer.

People seem to have found another source of religion. First they followed prophets and revelations of God. Then they followed science. Then they invented social media to receive validation from other humans. Now, they seem to chat with LLM AI, trying to get it to clear their confusion, answer their questions, and be their God. Considering how LLM is merely re-hashing the ideas of their own making and giving them what it sees as normalised results, this newest exercise in navel gazing is as pathetic as it is desperate, and reminds me very much of coprophagy.

But people, stupid as they are, will sooner ask Chat GPT about me, than ask me about Chat GPT. The Great Oracle will tell them what to think. That can’t go wrong.

It’s already very hard to find sources that are not contaminated by AI. With enough iterations, it will become completely impossible, unless you already know what you’re looking for, which makes it moot because searching implies finding new stuff, beyond what you already know. Younger people are destined to ingest the excrement of AI, thinking it’s information. It’s not. It is to information what a turd is to a hamburger that someone else ate.

I’m not saying AI is completely useless. I use it to remove noise from my images, and also for large-object generative cloning. Also, my camera uses it to detect people, birds and insects, and to focus on the eyes. I just don’t ask it for opinions, especially considering how often it fails to identify insects.

 

Chasing butterflies

I took a very weird setup for a walk yesterday – A7CR and the FE 50mm f/1.2 GM; the light camera and the heaviest 50mm. I expected to get pictures of poppies, so I took something that’s neither too narrow nor too wide, and can slice through the chaos of the brush. Unfortunately, we found no poppies, but lots of butterflies, for which 50mm is way too short.

The thing with butterflies, however, is that sometimes you get lucky and one just rests there and you can get as close as you want.

When you manage to get close, the 50mm f/1.2 absolutely rules. It’s completely sharp wide open, and that means very short exposure at base ISO, which means super clean image. I even had enough time to compose a branch between the lens and the butterfly, giving it a green haze for atmosphere.

It’s a bit weird to use this lens for that, but I did get it for something similar – cutting through chaos of the brush, while still retaining enough of a wide angle. That I managed to get the butterfly with a short portrait lens was sheer dumb luck.