Recently we bought a coffee machine, after postponing it for 7 years or so, and Biljana looked up all kinds of coffee, and of course she went down one of those rabbit holes on the Internet, with scientific research of health benefits of all kinds of coffee, and the only kind that had no demonstrable benefits, but increased probability of some nasty degenerative eye disease in old age, was instant coffee.
My comment: “And of course that’s what we’ve been drinking for the last 20 years.” 🙂
I guess the lesson is that sometimes you shouldn’t postpone buying the coffee machine.
On a different note, the iPhone 17 just came out and there’s all kinds of talk about how its camera is great. Yeah, like the last seven or so models of iPhone, which tempt you to not to carry your proper camera around because you always have the iPhone with you, and as a result, years later all your pictures are taken with the iPhone and they are all full of digital and optical artefacts and unprintable to anything comparable to what a real camera would do. Also, a current iPhone costs around 1500 EUR. Do you even realise what a great camera and lens combo you can get for this amount of money? That’s a Canon RP with a RF 35mm f/1.8 lens. And in two to four years, you’ll do that again, just flush 1500 EUR down the drain for no good reason. Smartphones are such an incredible waste of money, because they give you absolutely no added value over the older model. It’s like a subscription service to being an idiot. Unfortunately, you actually need to have one today. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be a new one.
Today I finished installing the new glassy-looking OS on all my Apple devices. It’s not that I hate glassy look in general; Vista was actually quite nice and looked sophisticated. This, however, looks like something that was hastily patched up by people with no taste, and sometimes it actually reduces functionality. That’s the problem with “progress” for the sake of just fucking with things that work well so that you can tell people you did something new, because it’s expected that you do. How about designing a window manager that knows how to snap windows properly, or a file manager that isn’t dog shit? Something that would actually serve some useful purpose? No?
I heard some professional photographer talking how bokeh is bullshit invented by lens manufacturers so that people wouldn’t mind buying expensive lenses that create images that are mostly blurry. It just goes to show that being a professional just means that’s how you earn most of your money. It doesn’t mean that you know what you’re talking about, or that you’re good at what you do. You just know how to charge for it.
The blurry part cost a lot of money.
Sure, it makes sense to say that picture is about the sharp part. However, the not sharp part is the package that presents it. Flowers on a table in the restaurant aren’t the point of lunch, because you don’t eat them, but they are a nice thing to see.
There are several parameters that define usability of a lens, the way I see it. It’s how sharp can it get things that are in focus, how close it can focus, how much can you open the aperture to both gather light and vary the depth of field, what’s the focal length/range, does it introduce optical mess into the image (CA, flare etc.) and how convenient/practical is it to work with. The ability to blur out the background in ways that will look nice might not be important if you shoot only landscapes in ways that make everything sharp, or if you shoot portraits in a studio in front of a uniform background, then bokeh rendering doesn’t matter. If that’s all you do, great, you’ll save lots of money on lenses that are designed to render good bokeh. Good for you.
Another thing crossed my mind, regarding the last article. Someone is asking themselves why God allowed this trap to be created as a test for us, that it’s not right to subject us to such a traumatic and potentially fatal test. I’m rolling my eyes right now, because God didn’t ask us to do anything he, himself wasn’t willing to do, either male or female. Remember the guy called Jesus? Born into a carpenter’s family in a barn because they had no room in the taverns and his family wasn’t important. Taught things that irrevocably altered the Western civilization and got crucified for it, which is one of the nastiest ways to die. Then rose from the dead to show that death is not the end, and afterlife isn’t some vague shadow world.
Or Krishna and his girls? Oh, he had a super easy life, being born in a jail cell where his evil uncle imprisoned his parents because of a prophecy, and they smuggled him out and gave him to some peasants to raise, so he grew up as a shepherd instead of a prince. Also, everybody kept trying to kill him, and then his best friend and his family got exiled into the jungle, which ended up in a bloody mess. It’s all told like a nice story in the books, but think about how you’d have handled half of that stuff.
Not only was God here multiple times as male and female, but s/he also doesn’t actually pick fancy and rosy incarnations. Some are, just to show that s/he doesn’t get distracted by material wealth and power. Some are absolute shit, like that of Jesus, and still major world-altering scripture is written about how well he did. I won’t even get into the level of horror I had to deal with, or the stuff my girls had to deal with. That never stopped people from thinking we had it so easy compared to them, who had it so hard. God’s incarnations always look so easy and effortless – because God is so much more transcendental, holy and pure than you are. God doesn’t wallow in mud because there’s no mud in his path, but because he just doesn’t feel like wallowing in it. God doesn’t rise above temptation because s/he wasn’t subjected to it, but because s/he is holy. (I’m writing God as dual gender because it’s an equation with two solutions). You think you have it hard, but it’s not true. Satan used the absolutely worst, cruellest and filthiest tricks to deceive Divine incarnations. I think he was probably afraid he’d get killed immediately if he tried that shit on someone weaker, but he really took off his gloves with God, thinking God can take it. I don’t even wish to talk about that stuff, it’s that nasty. And yet, God did so well you think s/he had it easy. Sure s/he did; Sati for instance willingly entered a pyre and burned herself to death rather than listen to her sinful father slander Shiva. Biljana’s childhood was the siege of Vukovar, being shredded by tank grenade shrapnels, evacuated from the basement of the Vukovar hospital by the Serb war criminals who executed her uncle and imprisoned her father in a concentration camp, and she then had to live in exile, only to be told today how easy she’s having it, by some fucking asshole entangled in his self-inflicted worldly drama, who thinks he’s having it hard. Romana also spent her childhood in exile listening to spoiled teenage girls crying about their new shoes getting rained on while she was thinking whether her father, defending Usora in a ditch with a shotgun against Serbian tanks, will survive or get killed like the people in the neighbouring village did. Yeah, God had it so easy, you have it so hard, go cry me a river so that I can piss into the river of your tears, you treacherous bastards. You forget God when you’re doing well, and you forget God when you’re not doing well. Meanwhile, Rukmini and Jesus never forgot God, regardless of how they were doing, imprisoned or crucified or laughing, which is why people pray to them, and nobody gives a shit about you.
No, you’re not having it hard, God is having it hard having to listen to your crap.