I failed to get icy and snowy shots of the Plitvice lakes; mostly because it was that kind of a year. When there was ice and snow, the roads were dangerous, and it all melted almost immediately, so I couldn’t plan anything. Also, we had much more serious problems to deal with. Also, I had a book to write.
No snow. Plenty of snowdrops, though:
The trees are still bare, and the wide compositions were harder to arrange:
Plenty of ducks, though:
Here’s the whole album.
I managed to finally find the hummingbird moth in proper context and for long enough to take pictures:
I usually just find them dead after they got stuck in the stairwell, so this is an improvement. 🙂
What’s the reason why I finally managed to get it? Nothing, really. I just kept doing the same thing that failed before. I went to a blossoming tree with a camera in hope the bugs show up. The lesson, I guess, is that failure isn’t necessarily a sign you are doing something wrong, and reading too much into either failure or success isn’t beneficial. It can be merely a matter of time, or statistics, or factors completely out of your control, such as bugs really liking that tree you chose.
What am I actually suggesting here? There was lots of quasi-spiritual nonsense floating around in the 1990s and I guess most of it kind of stuck with people, and they just assume it implicitly. The problem is, that stuff all mostly contradicts itself:
You see what I’m getting at? It’s all nice sounding motivational bullshit. Maybe the Universe is telling you something, or maybe the bugs just aren’t there that day and you’re doing everything right. If you persist, you might waste your life doing the wrong things, or you might eventually succeed, because it’s merely a matter of statistics, and the thing that led to success isn’t any different than the thing that produced failure before. If you give up, you might regret it, or you might find out that what you feared isn’t really a big deal. It’s basically all some kind of copium people like smoking because it feels nice and comforting. The problem is, in the 1990s when this nonsense was trending, everybody believed it, because they were all reading from the same script and copying each other’s homework. This is also the reason why all those supposedly enlightened people sound so similar. No, it’s not because “The Truth is One”, it’s because they are copying each other’s homework.
Also, if you keep succeeding at things, maybe you should try doing something hard for a change. Basically, if all you’re doing is adding single digit numbers and you keep succeeding, you may think you’re a genius, but there’s another word for an adult stuck in first grade.
I thought I was going to get some rest and recover from serious brain fatigue after writing the book, but somehow, the opposite happened, as I tried to get the book corrected and out in the final form as quickly as possible, and that meant proofreading it once, then having Marin proofread it using his AI tools as I vetted the suggestions, which meant basically somewhat proofreading it for the second time, and then after he was done, I went through the book for the third time, and all of it of course used the same parts of the brain as writing the book, since you can’t proofread it if you’re not experiencing it fully and so on.
But we got results: “The Light Beyond” is now properly corrected and published on Kindle as an e-book. The samples of the physical hardcover edition are on the way to Marin, because he’s closer, and then we’ll decide on whether to go with glossy or matte, how good the cover looks IRL and whether the inner margins are big enough. The classic typesetting stuff. The purpose of the hardcover is to avoid the situation where people will try to print it themselves and end up with all sorts of improvised and unsatisfactory solutions, the way it always happens when I don’t publish a physical book, which is how it always turned out ever since the early 2000s. That, however, is pure convenience, which is why it’s the second thing we went for. The first thing was the e-book, because in the era of digital media where everybody reads books from phones, tablets and other computer-forms, that became the book. In fact, I haven’t read physical books in who knows how long, simply because it’s harder on my eyesight to read from a non-illuminated surface where the text can’t be magnified to a comfortable size.
I’m making the PDF download available for free on this website in parallel. It’s mostly a failsafe against censorship; I don’t care whether it’s free or Amazon makes all the money, because those are the two only realistic options. The only way I could actually get some money from it, which would actually be nice, is to set up cryptocurrency donation on my website, which is something I might actually do at some point. Every other way, someone else is going to make all the money and people are going to be pissed at me for getting rich off of people wanting to read books. I mean, I wouldn’t mind getting rich that way, since it would be the most satisfying thing – I’d profit from doing something good.
As for how I’m doing – not well, I’m afraid. The guys “up there” stopped downloading stuff into my brain since I finished the book, but I’m transforming an endless river of karmic refuse from global sources, and it’s going on basically 24/7. Someone’s in a hurry, I guess, and I never got any rest whatsoever. Right now, I would assess my condition as pretty much critical, in the sense that this can’t go on, because something is going to break.
Occasionally, when I go out and take pictures, I do get some rest because that uses different parts of my brain, and that helps. This continued barrage of writing and proofreading exhausted my brain to a point where it automatically blanks out when I try to use those parts. This means things would get actually damaged if I pushed it any further. That, combined with the fact that I’m not allowed to rest because spending karma seems to be absolutely urgent and can’t be postponed, means I’ll try to take pictures of nice things while not thinking about anything, but of course, that won’t happen, because FML. 🙂
My photography has been on the back burner since I started writing down my most recent book, and part of it was also the weather.
But that doesn’t mean we didn’t get some pictures, regardless. 🙂
Both Biljana and I are really fucked by all this karmic spending, which actually increased in strength at some point and became really taxing on our physical condition. I did receive my newest lens from ebay, the Sigma 85mm f/1.4 DG DN Art, and when it’s not raining I can pretend to have a great time and annoy all who hate me:
Amazingly, I keep cranking out articles as needed, and some even touch on old memories.
Interesting times.