We just returned from Hvar town; I couldn’t resist taking the new lens for a spin.
My opinion? The lens did well, but I was at ISO 12800 too much for my taste. The f/1.2 GM would do a better job here, but I knew that already. This, however, was quite good, and not in anybody’s face.
And while we’re at that, I’m counting days until the season ends and we have peace and quiet back.
It crossed my mind that some people are wondering how come I’m reading fantasy novels where Demon is the main protagonist, every character and social role was intentionally written to subvert expectations and, in fact, reality, the central premise of the meta-series is the existence of a Multiverse which I am known for detesting as an idea, and where God obviously doesn’t exist in any way anyone who believes in God would recognize.
This will be sort of hard to explain, but not for the reasons one would suspect.
One of the reasons is that I have a good ability of abstract reasoning. I can, for instance, separate the literary form from the purport. I can read Harry Potter without thinking it’s about witchcraft and magic. Witchcraft and magic are literary instruments. The purport is the power of love to conquer even death, the purport is to attack white or even euro-centric purists as essentially Hitler and Satan by means of metaphor and literature. The purport is that J.K.Rowling doesn’t believe in God, but believes in good human qualities having cosmic consequences and is a raging leftist who got her comeuppance at the first thing she ever dared to disagree with the “tolerant” mob, which is now crucifying her for daring to state that being a woman is an actual thing and not something you can proclaim yourself to be if you feel like it, and there’s such a thing as actual biology which makes women have female genitals and give birth, and which makes “trans-women” just men with weird things in their heads, the way a “trans-black” would be merely a non-black crazy person. Basically, unlike that mob that’s so tolerant of all kinds of “minorities” that they instantly crucify anyone who’s clinging on to rationality and reality even slightly, I can actually accept that people are in all sorts of places and have all sorts of issues and ideas and I can work with anything for the sake of an argument; I can leave people be and sort themselves out. I don’t have to separate the world into people who are good because they agree with me in everything, and people who are evil because they have a different opinion on something. Even Gods will have different opinions on certain things. Different opinions are scary only to the dogmatic, ideological cultists, which is a description that fits the American left perfectly. They are completely fucking insane, and the only way to argue with them correctly is to reject absolutely everything they stand for without compromise.
One of those things that I absolutely reject is the concept of universal equality. It has no grounds in reality, it has evil outcomes and needs to be rejected outright. And, interestingly, despite the fact that the “Salvos” series and the “Deltaverse” in general are full of people with blue, green and pink hair, all kinds of good characters were intentionally made gay or trans for no good reason other than politics, and the worst hypocritical bastards were intentionally made to resemble Christian religious figures and clergy, there’s one interesting thing about that world. It’s meritocratic. There are quantifiable metrics of progress along different lines of possible evolution, there are Titles for special achievements, there are Classes that encapsulate specialization, and so on. You can’t just say you feel like being something and everybody is forced to pretend that it’s reality out of fear of a political mob destroying their lives. You can’t switch species, Class or just claim a Title or a Level. It needs to be real. You can fake things to a point with magic or artifacts, but there are people who can see through that and then you’re in trouble. So, basically, the world itself enforces objective, quantifiable metrics that oppose bullshit and fakery.
Also, unlike people who are afraid of reading books that don’t align perfectly with their ideology, lest they somehow lose their ideological purity, I read all kinds of stuff. That’s probably why I have a brain in good functioning order, and they are dumb cultists. I can separate layers of nuance and work with it until I see where it all leads, and whether I can find something useful there. I also don’t have to like the author in order to read the book and find it interesting or fascinating. I don’t feel the need to immediately draw conclusions and separate things and people along ideological lines. For all I know, Melas might be a raging leftist who got indoctrinated into the neomarxist cult while studying some social science stuff in America, and now he’s interweaving this ideology with whatever he touches, and he’s so socially interconnected with other such fanatics that it’s all completely evil and beyond sanity. Or maybe he’s trying to find his way through this by writing stuff that’s going to solve his problem. I can’t actually tell, and it’s his thing to deal with. However, unlike those leftist fanatics, I can let people be, and deal with their own shit as best they can. Also, I can read whatever the hell I feel like reading.
There’s another important application of the principle of having to own it first in order to be able to give it to God. It’s the concept of karma.
Essentially, if parts of your karmic body were created by all sorts of godless actions, they are deformed, impure and, essentially, broken, because they contain in themselves something that is incongruent with God, your soul will retain this incongruence in everything you do, so in order to come in alignment with God, you have to iron that stuff up. The evil that is contained in that structure needs to be removed – usually by a combination of understanding, remorse and suffering. This is a process of giving a part of your soul back to God, by making it free from the warping and defiling influences of all things that are incompatible with God. The process of purifying your soul and freeing it from evil is the process of bringing it back under God’s sovereign rule, because if sin and evil own it, God doesn’t.
Purifying external karmic substance, after having purified your own, essentially means to bring it back to God, by owning it yourself, claiming all the impurities and sins contained therein for yourself, and then purifying it with understanding, remorse and suffering the way one does with parts of their soul, because once you’ve integrated it into yourself in the process of purification, you own it. It’s your impurity and sin now, and once you purify it, it’s your pure karmic substance, to grow your soul, one kalapa at a time.
So, as you can see, people talk about surrendering everything to God, but reality of it is both more simple and more complex than what they envision. They would usually think it means giving away your wealth to poor people, while in reality it’s more akin to doing things with it that God would do in your place, and the only good way of doing it is by purifying your soul first, so that it is aligned with God and contains no parts that belong to the world or, even worse, to the Evil One.
There’s also a misapprehension some Christians seem to be under, and that’s the belief that “helping the poor” can justify some highly questionable actions. Let’s imagine an example of a man whose son is a self-serving satanic narcissistic bastard, who spends all his money on expensive shit, on his fellow sodomites, and on other evil activities. Since he’s constantly in debt and out of money, he keeps asking his Christian father to give him some. Since the father can’t deal with this situation properly, he gives him the money and rationalises it to himself by saying that Christ wanted us to give to the needy.
That’s not at all what Christ meant. Christ didn’t mean giving money to a whoremonger who ran out of money for whores and drugs. Christ didn’t mean giving money to a guy who wants to buy a gun to shoot his wife with but he ran out of cash. No, Christ meant giving money to the guy whose house burned down in a fire and whose children are now on the street. That’s what he meant. Financing sin is claiming its fruits for yourself. Financing evil people in their evil and debauchery is not very different from partaking in them yourself. You’re supposed to finance people of God who do things of God, because this way you will live under the Throne of God and partake in God’s glory. You’re supposed to remedy the evils of Satan and this world. You’re not supposed to give money to the needy criminals who fight God. That’s what I have to say about that.
There’s something that’s on my mind at the moment; the concept that some religious people have of wanting to give things to God.
That’s a nice sentiment, but let’s see how that would actually work. You can’t actually give things to God if you’re getting them from God. Essentially, that just means closing the circle of being in God – you get love, wisdom and other things that are of God, and give them to God by some form of service.
In order to actually give something to God, something God doesn’t actually have already and give it to you so that you could play the lila of giving it back, you would actually have to win it from Satan. You would have to win a battle for some resource that God lost, defend it as yours, and only then you even get the option of giving it to God.
It doesn’t have to be something of cosmic importance, like conquering the lost astral subplane and bringing it back under the Throne of God. It can be something more basic, like your mind. If you don’t have control over it, if it’s not under your own sovereign rule, if all kinds of worldly or demonic energies are controlling it, it’s not yours to command, and if it’s not yours to command, how can you give it to God? A mind that’s not completely yours and under your command cannot be surrendered to God.
Also, some people get the idea that they’ll start a business, make money and then finance their guru or other high spiritual endeavours. Let’s see how that would work. First of all, you need to make a profitable business, which is hard, because you have to fight others who are attempting the same. Then you need to take care that you’re not doing more harm than good with your activities, because if you sell your girlfriends as online prostitutes, which is an obvious reference to a certain very public someone, you can’t ever claim to do more good than evil with the money you earned. If your methods are satanic, the results cannot be Divine.
Also, if you lose control of your company, by yielding it to employees or partners who try to wrestle it away from you, you become an employee in that company, if even that, and then you can’t control where the money goes because other people have a say, and you basically lost the ability to do what you initially planned.
So, obviously, this is another case of first having to win it from some aspect of the world, in order to claim it for yourself first, and only then can you even be in a position to surrender it to God. Everything else is a mere ego boost, self-serving and useless.
I was thinking about the difference between how I perceive technology, and how those gen-z and gen-alpha kids perceive technology. When I started with this, it was on Commodore 64. That thing gave you an empty screen and you had to figure out how to make it do anything, useful or not. If you wanted to write code, you needed to figure it out in your head and then go through the entire process of writing it in computer’s language. If you wanted it to count to ten, you had to FOR X=1 TO 10 PRINT X NEXT X. You couldn’t just turn the computer on, open the web browser and be flooded by an eternal deluge of inane crap that vies for your attention. Even later, as computers got better, you needed to really learn how to create a space in your mind where you’ll hold the pieces that need to interact and keep juggling lots of apples in the air simultaneously. It was easy to be stupid, but it wasn’t cool. If you wanted to be cool, you needed to work for it.
How do you get to be cool today? You need to know the latest meme. The one from last week makes you look slightly retarded. The one from last month means you’re a “boomer”. So, you essentially join a race where the timestamp means everything and content of the data chunk means nothing. I’m perfectly sure that knowing what Chimpanzini Bananini is won’t help you in any tangible way, but at some point it bought virtual coolness points in a peer-group of abject fools. Today, it’s likely boomer lore.
Of course, everybody with IQ above room temperature very quickly realised that they are trading their actual lives for unattainable approval in groups whose members figured out a wining stratagem: remain skeptical and unconvinced regardless of any arguments you provide in evidence of your worth. So, the only winning move in this game is not to play.
And how do you not play? Well, the kids don’t see the computer the way I do. To me, a computer is something that does things for me. I want to write text, I open the word processor, write, save, post on the blog. Or I want to do something else; the process is the same. But to them, a computer is something else. It’s a judgmental real world where people will laugh at you if you dared to spend time on “boomer activities” such as anything with any pertinence to the real world and actual people that live in it. Knowing what I actually think about the physical world, that is quite telling: they are in fact managing to live in such a profound illusion, that the physical world itself feels like reality in comparison. And so, lacking the mental discipline required not to alt-tab into some toxic online environment that seems to draw at them with the Sirens’ call of offering approval and self worth, and yet never providing it, they decide to do the only realistic thing left at their disposal – turn off the computer altogether and find completely analog ways of doing things that interest them. They buy a film camera, shoot Tri-X, develop it in Rodinal, print it on actual photo paper and hold the physical image in their hands, pleased that no computers with vitriolic mobs of eternally critical bastards were at any point involved in the process, and that the result exists exclusively in the physical world, invisible to anybody online.
I don’t have that problem – basically, I don’t give a shit about those online crowds, and I don’t see why a digital camera is a problem in any way. Things either stay on my computer, or are printed if I feel like it, or I send them online if I like it. I don’t get ego validation based on what other people do or how they react. Going analog, from my perspective, is merely a hassle without any useful elements. So, I pretend to be surprised at their fascination with analog things, and their fake nostalgia over things they never actually experienced; I do, however, know what their problem is.
People assume that kids spend days doomscrolling brainrot online because they find it entertaining. I sincerely doubt it. I think they are doing it in order to be able to impress their peers with new and fresh brainrot, which they think will get them coolness points within the peer group; they are basically mining online karma, where the intermediary goal is to avoid ridicule for not knowing the freshest brainrot, and the ultimate goal is to win acclaim for being cool.
How is being praised for knowing the buzzword for the freshest chunk of brainrot going to help you deal with any actual issue? If you run out of money, are those fuckwits online going to pay your rent? If you get sick, are they going to get groceries for you and make you tea? Are you even on the level of friendship with any of them where you actually do anything real together and enjoy it? No? So why the fuck do you waste your life on that inane nonsense? And so we get to why people read physical books, listen to vinyl records, take pictures with a film camera, drive a car without airbags and computers and so on. They are gradually deciding they are done with the perpetual circle of seeking validation online and learning how to live, instead. For my generation, it was the other way around. We learned to read physical books, listen to audio tapes, ride a bicycle and go pick mushrooms and hazelnuts in the forest first; then, later, came the Internet, and we learned that you can download books, music and movies, and that was cool. We also learned that fucktards exist online. We tried talking to them. It proved pointless, so we stopped. We wonder why it’s so hard for the younger people.
It’s hard because they don’t know how to do anything real. Internet is all they know. They learned to talk in increasingly cryptic and nonsensical abbreviations with their peers, until they have now reached the point where the AI can pass the Turing test, and they can’t. If I want to talk to someone who will make sense, the AI is a better choice than anyone born since 2000. That is, at least until the next generation of AI gets trained on gen-z outputs and loses all mental faculties altogether, at which point I expect to despair helplessly and experience actual nostalgia for the times when people talked in full, coherent sentences, and had the foundation of knowledge necessary to say something worth reading. I used to think that, as I grow older, the new generations that grew on the Internet will learn so much stuff that I’ll feel like a chimp among humans. Instead, I feel like a human among chimps.
At this point, we can tell that something was likely made by the AI if it’s good. If a text is coherent and longer than a sentence, it must be AI. If a photograph looks good, it must be AI. The way to tell if a human made something is to see if it’s shit.
Fuck my life.