Peripheral

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I was just thinking about something that changed in the way I take pictures.

At some point, I used to try to take pictures that would show the equipment in the most advantageous light. Partially it was because I was writing equipment reviews for a photography e-zine, but also because I subconsciously tried to avoid criticism of not being a good enough photographer to get the best out of the gear. I tried to make the pictures look as spectacular as possible, regardless of what I actually liked.

At some point, I stopped caring about that, because it made me feel stupid. Did I buy the camera to do the stuff I want to do, or did the camera buy me in order to show off its capabilities? Sure, I like making spectacular images occasionally. However, something I like making completely unspectacular images of nothing in particular because it reflects my mood, or captures some idea. However, I initially took pictures without any regard for the audience, then started taking pictures in order to prove something and impress the audience, and now I’m back at doing it for myself and not giving much thought to what anyone would say.

For instance, here are two versions of the same place, from different parts of the summer. The first is when the lavender was blooming and I was taking pictures of butterflies there with an ultra-wide lens, which is a weird thing to do, but I felt like doing it because I got bored of doing it the “right way”, with a telephoto.

The second picture is at the end of the summer. The lavender is gone, the butterflies are gone, and even the sun is gone at the end of the day, and there’s nothing there but stone walls, fence, dry grass, and emptiness. This emptiness is the subject matter of the picture – everything that was worth looking at is gone, and what remains is what caught my attention, and I photographed it in very dark black&white tonality to showcase the total, utter absence of anything meaningful.

How am I supposed to do that? By using all the colour the camera is capable of capturing? Despite the fact that there’s nothing of colour there? Am I to try to capture it in a dynamic way, making a composition that tries to engage the audience? Why? There’s nothing dynamic there. It’s exactly the static, empty remainder of a once colourful scenery that caught my eye. Photographing it in the most static way possible, that accentuates the stillness that remains when everything meaningful is gone, is the exact point of that picture. It’s not supposed to evoke colourful and dynamic sentiment, it’s supposed to evoke the emptiness one feels playing Witcher 3, visiting Kaer Mohren after the main mission is complete, and everything is as you left it, only without anything that used to give it meaning. The people are gone, the meaning is gone, but for some reason the lights are still on. You don’t photograph this with Velvia or EBX; you photograph it with the most depressing kind of Ilford B&W. It’s not supposed to showcase the gear. The gear is merely a shovel that moves the manure. It’s not the subject matter of the picture. In some pictures, the gear is the obvious part of the composition; the first thing people will ask is what gear that was taken with, because it looks spectacular. In some cases, however, the picture could be taken with anything, and the gear is supposed to be the last thing on your mind when you look at it.

End of drought

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It started raining here, finally. I was really worried about the vegetation at this point because everything was dying, not to mention the increasing fire hazard, with wildfires breaking out sporadically, and it was only a matter of time when everything would go up in flames.

Last evening we went out to take pictures, and the silky texture of the sky was nice, but the colours were very poor, so we processed the pictures in b&w, for the most part.

It’s Sveta Nedilja, of course. Some time ago they finished the road from Dubovica to Sveta Nedilja, which means it’s now easily within reach, but unfortunately the road no longer feels like wilderness. It’s as if the humans extended their civilization to that part now by building the road, and the feeling of the place has fundamentally changed, and not for the better. We tried walking on the paved road but soon gave up.

As you can see, I’ve been doing lots of black&white photography lately. I’ve also been doing lots of strong colour photography lately, as well. Sometimes it’s a matter of mood, and sometimes colour doesn’t actually do anything constructive, so I remove it. Sometimes, like last night, colour actually detracts from the image; it would merely draw attention to the fact that the colours don’t look “clean”. The silvery gray tones, however, were lovely.

I took the 85mm lens with me, and it was probably too tight for some of the motives. However, the ones that did work ended up being very nice compositions. 50 or even 35mm would probably work as well, or better, but that’s the thing about using primes: they force you to think about what you can do with what you have, not allowing you to just change focal length instantly if it doesn’t seem to work. Also, when they don’t work, they make you remember why.

The Sigma 85mm f/1.4 DG DN Art looks like a strange choice for this, since people think of it in terms of being a portrait lens, but to me, it’s mostly a lens that allows me to see in the dark while staying in the short telephoto range, and it also allows me to use depth of field to separate landscape into layers, rather than having everything sharp. In this case, however, I didn’t avail myself of this option, because the scene required everything to be sharp. I’m actually very satisfied with how the scene turned out, considering how unlucky we were with the colours. The bright part of the sunset throwing sparks turned out really well. Composing sun into a street lamp looks somewhat Instagramy, but I couldn’t resist. 🙂

Idiots

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I was going through some threads on the dpreview Canon R forum, since the new R8 II was announced and I wanted to see what people thought of it, and one thread in particular caught my eye. One guy literally asked what justification would one even have these days to shoot Canon.

How about, you want a 35mm camera system and you picked one of the two with the best lenses and cameras? I mean, what a stupid, arrogant question – asking people to justify their choices to you because you’re a fucking idiot who thinks people change the camera system every year based on the spec sheet of the current camera or whatever nonsense. This extremely annoyed me, and I’m in the Sony FE system myself. However, Biljana is in the Canon R system and so I know what it does. It’s absolutely excellent.

Canon R5, RF 70-200mm f/4L

So, why would you want to be in the Canon R system? Well, there’s a first-party adapter for the EF system, so all the legacy EF lenses will work great on the new cameras, and the EF system is so incredibly vast, and the lenses can be bought so cheaply used, it’s quite a gold mine of choices. Also, you can get excellent, cheap RF primes, such as the 16mm, 24mm, 28mm, 35mm, 50mm and 85mm, and the image quality from them is quite brilliant. If that’s not enough, you can get the L series primes and zooms, which are overpriced compared to Sony GM series, but they are top notch. Optically, they are perfect and I highly recommend them; I’ve seen what RF 24-105mm f/4L, RF 70-200mm f/4L, RF 135mm f/1.8L and RF 100mm f/2.8L macro do, and they are brilliant. So, you have excellent cheap options, excellent mid-range options and excellent high-end options. As far as bodies are concerned, there are plenty of entry-level options that can be bought cheaply used, such as RP or R8, and even R6 is reasonably priced. The higher-tier bodies are expensive, though, but they are excellent, and if you need them, they will do a great job. I’ve seen stellar work done with Canon entry-level stuff.

Canon RP, Sigma 105mm f/2.8 macro

So, basically, you’d want to shoot Canon R because you’re an enthusiast photographer who likes great equipment, you know what you’re doing and you like getting top notch results. The same goes for Sony, for instance, since the two are very evenly matched. One is always going to be better at something and worse at something else. That’s a given. However, like in the film days when it was between Canon and Nikon, both were so good and so similar, that the choice was essentially made by getting one and just staying within the system and working with it. There were people who sold their entire system and bought the other one, and then returned the next year. We used to call them “idiots”, their pictures were usually shit and they always nitpicked about stupid shit no normal person cares about. Some things, apparently, don’t change.

Scripts

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I mentioned “scripts” multiple times, and although I did define them, I think it went over most people’s heads, so I’ll try to do a better job now.

A “script” is a detached, autonomous astral agent of the world system, with its separate power supply, duties and order structure. It has permissions from the world owner to do a particular, very narrow thing, that can be inspected for sinfulness and injustices and is designed to pass the test. This is so that the owner and issuer of commands can not be blamed for the consequences. His fingerprints are never on the murder weapon. All evil is a result of complicated interactions of multiple systems, and each of the systems has an apparently innocuous, or even good apparent purpose.

For instance, there is a script that rewards you for respecting spiritual authorities and laws, and punishes you for disobedience.

There’s another script that tests you through temptation, so that the falsely spiritual people are weeded out, and the genuine ones are rewarded.

There’s a script that gives access to worldly wealth to those who have sufficient permissions.

Another script awards permissions based on the level of useful service to the world system.

The third script tries to persuade spiritual people that giving up permissions on the worldly systems is a sign of transcendence and liberation.

The fourth script attacks parasites who have low level of permissions, in order to punish freeloaders who earn money by fraudulent means and don’t give back to other people.

It all checks out. Every particular script can be tested for action and intent, and Satan can prove that their purpose is something good. However, the way they interact in practice will instantly deprive of resources anyone who is a threat to him, and then the anti-freeloader scripts will kill him. He will have clean hands, and won’t even have to issue orders. In fact, he only intervened personally in a negligible number of cases throughout history. The scripts do all the work. They are like AI that is so narrow in function that it perceives only certain things, and does only certain things, and is not allowed or able to do anything else.

Let me use Asimov’s three law Robots as an example how to commit crimes using means that are arguably designed to prevent the possibility of crimes. The Robots have three laws: don’t harm a human through action or inaction; obey orders by a human unless it breaks the first law; protect your existence unless it breaks the first or second law.

A Robot is smart, and distinguishes between the levels of authority. One would expect that its owner has the greatest authority, but that is not the case. The greatest authority is that of the legal authorities. For instance, if the owner tells the Robot to make him coffee, but a police officer calls the Robot on the radio and tells him that his owner is in immediate danger of attack within the next five minutes, the Robot will immediately obey the officer and act to protect its owner according to the first law. The contravening order to make coffee is completely ignored, based on the legitimate first and second law priorities.

So, how to kill someone using robots, who are designed to protect him? You call a person’s Robot concierge when you know that person is not at home. You apologise for the disturbance, and ask whether the Robot has any existing orders, or is free to do something for him. The Robot says that he needs to monitor incoming calls and things around the house when the master is absent, but a subordinate, lesser Robot is available. You thank him and ask to “borrow” the subordinate robot, or even several, because you want to perform a scientific experiment, that will nor be harmful to humans, will not expend resources and will only use some robot idle labour. The concierge agrees on those terms, leaves and sends you a subordinate robot. You then ask that Robot whether they received a package in the mail labelled “for scientific experiment”. The Robot confirms. You then ask the Robot to bring the package and open it, and bring a bottle of milk from the fridge. The robot complies, because all commands issued are safe. You then tell the robot to open the bottle that was in the package, and pour its content into the milk bottle. You tell it that it is by no means to return that bottle of milk to the fridge, because it is to be used for the scientific experiment only, and is not to be used by humans. The Robot complies. You then issue it orders to expose the tainted milk to light, sound, water and so on, in order to pretend that you are testing it. Then you order it to leave the bottles here, so that they are not used by humans, forget about the experiment and send cleaning robot here. The Robot complies and leaves. The cleaning Robot arrives, and you tell it to dispose of the empty bottle and package, and return the milk bottle to the fridge because the other Robot left it here by accident. The cleaning Robot complies. The human comes home, pours himself some milk, drinks it and dies.

That’s how the scripts work.

They are designed so that a terrible, lethal action can be broken down into an infinity of small, fragmentary actions that are each safe, legal and apparently beneficial, and they are implemented by “servants” that are partially blind, deaf and dumb, unable to see the bigger picture and unable to do anything that exceeds the spectrum of their design. And their master and author doesn’t ever have to move a finger to do anything; it’s all done automatically, by a horde of astral “robots” that are designed to do just one thing and not think about anything other than their job, and when something manages to survive the trap, Satan makes another specific script that handles this kind of an exception.

Wishful thinking

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I’ve been thinking about something that keeps popping up, in both literature and reality.

Basically, people portray the enemy as a diminished caricature, thinking this is already half the way to victory. Portray the enemy as a caricature and that will make him weak, and you strong. Then, as you lose, your entire world falls apart.

The counter-argument is always: “but if we say good things about the enemy, that will be just spewing their own propaganda”, as if stating facts about the enemy is somehow a hostile propagandistic act. Don’t let facts and evidence stand in the way of good propaganda, right?

People weren’t always this stupid, naive and indoctrinated. I watched WW2 films made by the US military, describing German air defence. It was excellent, and I don’t think anything of the sort could be made today without the author being accused of working for Hitler. The film starts by describing the mathematical and technical methods used by the Germans; basically, they will observe your aircraft, notify the air defence battery, make the calculations of your speed and direction, speed and direction of their FLAK ammunition, and calculate for the intersection with some statistical spread. Essentially, if you allow them to do this, you die. You will absolutely die because yes, those FLAK cannons can absolutely hit your aircraft all the way up there, they don’t make mistakes and they don’t miss. The only way for you to survive is to listen to these instructions and apply them diligently. You will pass their observation posts here. Then, change your direction according to the instruction sheet you received. Absolutely follow this to the letter, because our mathematicians did the calculations to thwart their mathematicians, and both know their stuff. Then fly for as long in that direction as that sheet says, and then at the exact moment it says change the direction again. What is that for? Well, you need to allow the German observers to notify the FLAK guys about your direction, speed and altitude. Then, you need to make sure that those numbers are incorrect by the time the guns fire, and when those shells explode up there, you will be elsewhere. If you’re not elsewhere, you will be dead because the Germans are excellent mathematicians and marksmen and they don’t miss. Have a nice day now.

Imagine this today – NATO stating something factually correct about Russia and China. That will never happen. You always have stupid stereotypes, people get promoted for making fraudulent, diminished reports about the enemies’ capabilities, and so on. Then, when their strategy fails, they make a surprised Pikachu face – how is it possible that the Russia didn’t go bankrupt, that they are economically thriving, that they are making all those superweapons? They must be getting the drones from Iran because they can’t possibly make it themselves? After all, they are a gas station masquerading as a country. The fact that they are routinely flying people to space longer than America, let’s ignore that. Also, how is it possible that Iran just closed the strait of Hormuz? Yeah, it was the obvious and expected move, but the people in the CIA who reported obvious and expected moves by the enemy got fired long ago, and the still employed people know how it’s done properly. Tell the politicians what they want to hear.

I always remember that key sentence from “Salvos”, Sicar’s response to Manos’ question as to how this whole mess is possible: “We must have underestimated the power of the Enemy and the Traitor. That is why Venas is dead, Hartia is defeated, and over half the legions have been freed.”

Yes, that happens when you underestimate the enemy. The enemy doesn’t become weak and stupid because you made statements to that effect. The Germans don’t start missing your airplanes because your propagandists state that their marksmen are all slaves from concentration camps who can’t aim. The Russians don’t run out of ammunition because you dreamt about it.

But let’s use the “Salvos” examples rather than the real world, lest people be too upset by the offence committed against their beloved propaganda. For instance, Salvos very early on notified the Adventurers’ Guild about Belzu – what level he is, that he uses curses and illusions, that he uses Mindreapers to amplify his magic and control hordes of monsters and the undead, and so on. It would be obvious to any rational actor that they are dealing with a very dangerous, rational strategist. Instead, everybody kept talking about a “rampaging Demon”, as if he’s another Lucerna who goes around and kills everything because he’s insane. They didn’t investigate his capabilities properly. Instead, they kept sending people to fight him, and everybody ended up dead. They kept calling him “the Primeval Demon”, as if his name and capabilities don’t matter, just his level. The problem was, his level was the least of their problems. It was his capabilities that got people killed. You approached him, and you found yourself in an illusion so convincing, you thought it was reality. It was like fighting Lord Mara from Zelazni’s “Lord of Light”. You are inside a dream, you fight fictions, don’t see actual attacks, don’t see the enemy where he is, see him where he isn’t, he fakes being injured or killed to deceive you, and then you are dead. Or, he curses you with something so strong it completely incapacitates you and you don’t know where it came from or how to fight it. People who had no business fighting Belzu got killed because they didn’t wear amulets of Greater Curse Resistance, or Aura of Greater Protection, or they fought him when he wielded the Sword of Alexander and they didn’t have a Divine weapon or shield. Or they didn’t have spatial senses or premonition to counter his illusions. Basically, they went with strength against deception and were easily defeated.

It’s not that the people who knew how it is to fight Belzu didn’t talk. It’s that the others didn’t want to listen. They didn’t ask. Edithe fought him, and nobody asked her for tactical advice; instead, they underestimated her for her levels, because a lvl. 170 must know better than a lvl. 100 even though that lvl. 100 is the only person with a Skill that’s a total antidote do Belzu’s illusions. Like, what could she possibly know that would be useful to us. Also, what would Salvos possibly know that’s useful – she just faced him multiple times in battle and lived, when higher-levelled people died. “We know everything there is to know about Demons”. Yeah, right. Also, it was constantly repeated that Belzu killed Mori Gladius – that was completely untrue. Mori Gladius and Salvos defeated Belzu in battle. He was forced to use up his best curses to fight Salvos clones, and he used up his Grand Skill to fight Mori Gladius. Mori defeated it with his own Grand Skill and was about to kill Belzu, when Levithus intervened and stabbed him behind his back. Mori and Salvos actually won, and the battle was lost when it became a completely different battle, against the general of Regnorex’s forces in the Mortal Realm. They keep misinterpreting the evidence and fighting against imaginary foes with imaginary properties, instead of just facing the facts and dealing with them properly.

Let’s return to this world. The Christians have all those ideas about fighting Satan, not being deceived by him, and so on. They read the Bible, see how he offered Christ things as temptation, and Christ refused. They see this as encouragement – they would do the same, or at least Christ would do it for them, as they live by his name. Oh, really? They would never kneel before Satan, accepting him as their God? All the while, they pray to the One God Creator of this world, who has all the power here, thinking that they are praising the Lord and giving proper credit where it is due. Somehow they manage not to see the part of the scripture where Jesus doesn’t contradict Satan when he offers him all the kingdoms of the Earth. Did Christ say “they are not yours to give, because that is the dominion of the Lord”? No, he didn’t. Instead, he called Satan the Prince of this world. So, when the Christians are praying to the Lord of this world, who are they actually praying to? In their desire not to give Satan power, they are completely misreading the battlefield.

Wishful thinking and diminishing the enemy doesn’t result in victory in a war, and it does nothing to diminish the enemy. If you want to diminish the enemy, you need to recognize where his assets are, and attack them. You need to be able to read the facts and reality correctly, and act accordingly. If the Enemy is too powerful or too well protected for Jesus and the angels of the Lord to attack him directly, then shut the fuck up about fighting him and try not to be here in the first place. If Satan is protected by the Word of God, who gave him power until his given time runs out, this means that during that given time no external force can touch him. Only his own sin can harm him. What you can do is not be a target, not be on the battlefield, not delude yourself with silly ideas about winning with power and virtue. Oh, you’ll say, but if we admit that Satan is that powerful, would that not make us afraid, and thus in his power? Of course it would make you afraid. You need to be. You could use a good dose of fear. People who are afraid of Satan and sin are less likely to foolishly do things that will make them his slaves. They will tremble in realization of their circumstances and pray to God for salvation, which happens to be the best course of action available to them. Who even told you that fear is bad? It’s the lack of fear in this place that makes you but a hapless victim. You have no basis for courage or self-confidence. Fear is your shield and prayer is your weapon. Stop acting as if you’re on a vacation in some amusement park. You’re in hell, in the dominion of Satan, and the only way out of his total control is through humble and sincere prayer to the Lord.