What I Think Works…as of This Evening

I keep working on my photo skills as well as my gear. I am strongly aware that my baby son’s first year will never happen again, so I am doing what I can to produce quality photos and edit them well.

I’ve learned a lot of things since 2023, when I finally bit the bullet and started buying new equipment and learning to use it.

When I found my wife in 2021, I had a 2006 Canon 350D, a Samsung Galaxy S8, a Yi action camera, and a Gopro Hero 8 Black. The 350D was a decent amateur DSLR for its day. It had an 8-megapixel APS-C sensor, meaning it was smaller than a full-frame sensor, which would be about the same size as a rectangle of 35 mm film. In 2006, putting 8 megapixels on an amateur-level camera was fairly impressive.

We started traveling in order to see each other in 2021. We made three overseas trips with phones and action cameras. The 350D stayed home, covered with the cockatoo dust it had accumulated after years of hanging near a bird cage. I don’t recall why I didn’t take it with me. Weight, maybe.

We got acceptable photos and a little video that year, although I screwed up more than once and ruined videos. I found the Yi to be difficult to work with. I have a video about 10 seconds long which I accidentally shot so it would be sped up upon viewing. I would guess it was supposed run more like 5 minutes. All that’s missing is the Benny Hill music.

In 2023, instead of taking the 350D on trips, I bought a used 200D. This is a more advanced camera from about 2017. I was under the delusion that my 2006 zoom lens needed to be saved, so I stuck with Canon. The lens fits the 200D. This was a bad idea, since I turned right around and bought a better zoom. I should have gone with Sony or maybe an Olympus.

I also bought a Sony A7IV and a Sony ZV1-M2. The A7IV was my no-holds-barred (few, anyway) quality-gear splurge. It’s a full-frame camera. I thought I should have the gear to do a truly top-notch job of capturing things. The ZV is a compact camera made to appeal to vloggers. It has a built-in zoom lens, and it’s very handy. Much better photos than a late model Samsung Galaxy, too.

I have never taken the A7IV anywhere. It’s heavy and expensive. I don’t want to carry it on trips, and I don’t want to have it stolen. It’s great when air travel is not in the plan, however.

When we went to the Far East for the second time, I took the ZV and the 200D. I was not ecstatic about the shots I got with the 200D. It was like I had forgotten everything I knew about composition, and I didn’t think they were sharp enough. The video was also extremely amateurish. I don’t know how I managed to perform so badly. The ZV gave me good video, but the stills were not always great. I relied mostly on my phone for stills.

I learned something interesting: the ZV1-M2 quits in hot weather. My wife and I were on a food tour in Singapore, and I noticed the camera’s monitor would go dark during video shooting. At first I thought it was saving energy, but in reality, it was turning itself off, without so much as a warning beep. It was overheating. Black camera that absorbed heat. Hot equatorial sun. I later learned that the ZV is just about useless for video in hot, sunny weather. Oddly, Sony does not trumpet this fact in ads. You find out after your videos of your priceless trip are ruined.

In retrospect, I find it amazing that anyone recommends this camera. It’s like buying a car you can only drive 10 miles at a time. Its primary purpose is video, and that is the only purpose at which it fails.

It is helpful if you remove the battery from your ZV and power it using a cable. The battery contributes a lot to the heat. But it’s still a very poor video camera for anyone who shoots videos in hot weather, unless they’re very short. If you have this camera, it’s fine for short indoor videos. Other than that, stay away. And it’s not cheap. I think they still cost about $900.

Since I began to buy better stuff, I have drawn a few conclusions, which may very well be wrong. And they overlap.

1. The most important thing is equipment that works, not equipment that works perfectly.
2. A handy camera you use is better than a heavy, complex camera you dread taking out of the bag.
3. Useful lenses are more important than buying the best camera.
4. Unless you want to spend a lot, don’t buy a few pricey lenses with top optical quality. Buy lenses that shoot well in low light.
5. For video, and maybe photos, you want some kind of stabilization.
6. A very good camera phone will do everything 95% of the population wants.
7. You absolutely must use wireless external mikes.
8. Good photography is almost completely about choices.

I guess I’ll start with 1.

Consider 2015. Ten years ago. They made pretty nice cameras. Twenty megapixels and more. Good connectivity. Good features. Excellent accessories. You can spend maybe $600 and get a very good, lightly-used camera from 2015, with a nice low-light prime lens that will be useful in lots of situations. On the other hand, if you buy a very, very good newer camera with a truly excellent low-light lens and a big sensor, think more like $4,000. Will the photos be 4,000/600 as good? No.

If you want to take photos that are optically very good, and you aren’t a perfectionist, buy a very good camera and lenses. If you want to take photos that are technically superior, spend 6 or 7 times as much for superior equipment. But consider the fact that many of the world’s great photographers used cameras and lenses that were, objectively, bad by today’s standards. Most of photography is about content and exposure, not corner-to-corner sharpness or minimal chromatic aberration.

2. I would guess my A7IV weighs over three pounds with the big zoom attached. There is no way to have a normal day with that hanging on you from breakfast to bedtime. You’re not going to drag it around with you unless you take pictures for a living. The a6400 weighs much less. It’s doable. The 200D also weighs less. All the other cameras weigh less. Then there is the phone, which is pretty good. Figure out what you are willing to lug around and use, and concentrate on whatever that is for day-to-day photography. If you insist on heavy cameras, you are going to end up using your phone nearly all the time.

3. Any 20-megapixel camera made can shoot excellent photos, but not without the right lenses. A $10,000 camera with one crummy zoom is less useful than a used $200 camera with several good lenses.

4. You can spend $15,000 on one amazing lens, but when people look at your photos, almost no one will be able to tell the difference between the photos it takes and the ones you can take with a $500 lens. You’re better off with several okay lenses than one lens that makes photo nerds cry when they see it on your camera. If you can afford it, get very good lenses, but if not, get lenses that will take okay photos with the exposures you want. It is EXTREMELY important to have lenses that shoot well in low light. You will find this out when you try to use your $1,500 f/3.5-5.6 lens to shoot a once-in-a-lifetime event in a dim restaurant. Go for 1.4 primes, at the highest.

5. Shaky video is annoying to watch. You can buy a thing called a gimbal, and it’s a big, cumbersome device that holds your camera and moves it up and down to cancel out your shaking, but it’s a royal pain to use. There are cameras that stabilize, and there are lenses that stabilize. Stabilized is better. My understanding is that a stabilized system will also let you shoot images in lower light (if it stabilizes images as well as video), because you will not move as much, and you can use a lower shutter speed without getting blurring.

6. If you don’t want the hassle and expense of getting camera gear, get a phone that does a very good job. Some phones are much better than others.

7. Buy external mikes, like Rode or DJI. My wife has the speech volume of a turbine-powered helicopter at home, but getting her to speak up on videos while traveling is nearly impossible. I have videos where you can see her lips move, but that’s about it. You, too, will find that ordinary situation noise kills speech, so buy external mikes. You can even use them with phones and selfie sticks. And use dead cats (wind noise suppressors) unless you like listening to wind instead of people.

8. Choice, not gear, is what makes photography an art.

I came up with my own system for categorizing photos. There are two kinds in the system: documentary, and artistic. A documentary photo’s main purpose it to show that something happened. “Wayne Newton kissed me at his show.” “This is really my driver’s license.” An artistic photo is, well, art. A documentary photo doesn’t have to have artistic merit, and it doesn’t have to be done well. An artistic photo has merit, and generally, although not always, it should be technically good.

A lot of people think photography is not an art, because you don’t have to draw or paint something in order to take a picture of it. They think it’s like having a sprained finger x-rayed or Xeroxing your behind at the office Christmas party. Of course, this is not true. An artistic photo evokes emotions. It usually seems to tell a story. It may tell a story that has nothing to do with what was actually happening in front of the camera. For example, a photo of two strangers at a bus stop, who don’t even know each other, may seem to be about dramatic events taking place between two people who have some kind of relationship. The mind and heart of the beholder fill out artistic photos with backstories that may be completely imaginary.

You choose your subject. You choose your camera. You choose a focal length, f-stop, ISO, and shutter speed. You choose the angle. You may be able to choose the lighting. You may shoot a number of shots and then choose the only one that says what want to say.

This is what makes photography a legitimate art.

If you want to take artistic photos, which is what I want to do (even when shooting my family), if you master the art of making choices, you will not be blocked by your equipment’s limits. You may not perform as well as you want to, but it’s better to have the right choices and the wrong equipment than the wrong choices and the right equipment. Bottom line: you should use whatever equipment you can get, today, instead of moaning about being unable to take pictures because you don’t have the gear you want.

I say all this stuff, but I keep buying gear. I got myself a couple of f/1.4 lenses for my a6400, and they have made a huge difference in my life. I can take shots now in light that used to produce noisy photos that looked awful. I also replaced the Sony ZV1M2 with a Canon Powershot V1. It’s bigger and heavier, but it will do everything the Sony will do and more, and it has a built-in fan.

I like the small size of the Sony, and it’s a little annoying to put the Canon in my pocket, AND I just wrote that handy is better than not-handy, but I’m willing to put up with a little more bulk in this case, given the enormous advantages the Canon offers. It shoots better in low light, it’s not going to overheat as fast, and it has image stabilization for still shots.

It’s too bad I don’t put photos of my son on the web, because he is extremely cute and possibly the most photogenic person in history. I’m not just saying that as his dad. He is really something. And I don’t consider “photogenic” to be a compliment anyway. Many ugly people are photogenic.

If I could post some of the shots I’ve taken lately, I think people would see how helpful the 1.4 lenses have been, not to mention how much better the ZV1M2 and the Powershot are than my phone.

I’m continuing to work on my editing. I just got a new PC. I bought a gaming computer because it happened to have a lot of parts that were excellent for editing photos and video. I am learning Affinity 2 and Topaz AI. I have Photoshop Elements, but I find it annoying and not noticeably better.

Editing photos is shockingly relaxing and satisfying. I don’t know why. I honestly think it’s one of those things that will improve your health if you do it regularly, like spending time outdoors.

I am going to put two very large hard drives in the new PC to store photos and video. One will back up the other, and my hope is that no catastrophe will wipe both out at once. I am hoping 10 TB will keep me going for a few years. It would be nice to have two huge, fast SDD’s, but that would run around $1600, and I don’t think I really need them.

I don’t like the idea of cloud storage. I don’t trust it, and I have an irrational (I hope) fear of having hostile people root through my files in order to harm me or my family. I also think it would take a decade to upload a single terabyte.

Now you know my current stance, valuable as it may or may not be, on the subject of photography.

From Creampuff to Marginally Able

My sparing efforts at building my strength are paying off.

I decided to try adding one resistance exercise to my life. This was several weeks ago. I knew I would never go to a gym again or do long workouts or do multiple sets of anything. I wanted something sustainable. It was okay with me if I never maxed out my potential. I am old. I just want to be pretty strong as well as resistant to injury, and lifting also improves cardiovascular health and strengthens the skeleton.

I did a bit of research, and I learned something I should have realized long ago: there is no fitness industry. There is a vanity industry for men who want to look good to other men.

I exaggerate, but I won’t retract what I said. I learned that nearly everyone who gives “fitness” advice involving weights is really giving muscle-bulking advice for guys who want other men to admire them. It’s kind of gay, really. The gurus constantly use the word “gains,” but it rarely refers to strength gains. It’s about having big, puffy show muscles that aren’t as strong as they should be.

I found out what I really needed was to lift very heavy weights no more than 5 times per set. When I was young and even more stupid, I was taught to lift 8-12 times, and that builds man-love muscles but doesn’t maximize strength.

If you look at competitive powerlifters, including the ones who use drugs, you will see that they don’t look like bodybuilders. They outperform bodybuilders without gaining useless mass or prancing around in locker rooms in their underwear taking creepy selfies.

Even powerlifters do things wrong. They lift to win at events involving very specific muscles. This isn’t the way to build the most functional strength. If you want to be able to lift furniture and carry luggage and so on, you should do exercises that involve more than one muscle group, because that’s what life involves. Otherwise, you end up with weird gaps in your strength.

I decided to do one exercise, which I made up. I put two dumbbells by my feet. I lift them to my waist using my legs and back. I curl them to my shoulders. I press them overhead. Then I do things in reverse.

This works pretty much every leg muscle. It builds up my back, arms, and deltoids. It’s supposedly good for my core, which is what you use to do things in real life when not wearing tiny, shiny thong panties and competing for trophies while smeared with oil.

I started out with horrible form, swinging the weights and whatever else is bad, but I did not care. I figured the weaker muscles would catch up with the stronger ones, and from then on, I would be okay. This has turned out to be true for the most part. I will never be able to give my back and legs a real challenge with dumbbells I can press over my head, but my arms are catching up to my deltoids and pectorals and whatever else I use to press dumbbells.

I am not Charles Atlas. I started out with two 42.5-pound dumbbells, which is not impressive, and I am still using the same weight. I went from three terrible reps to 4 pretty good ones.

It doesn’t sound like much of a routine, but I am not the same person I was. I don’t make old man noises when I bend over to pick things up. Things feel lighter. Squatting is no longer something I think of as dangerous or a major challenge.

I have continued researching, and I was told I should use my legs and back to toss the dumbbells up to shoulder level, reducing the awkward strain on my back. This is safer, supposedly, and it produces something called explosive strength, which doesn’t sound good but allegedly is. So now I’m exploding, as instructed.

I use dumbbells because they give a better workout. A barbell does a lot of the work for you, just as a machine does. If you can press 200 pounds over your head on a bar, don’t even begin to think you can do it with dumbbells.

Also, dumbbells are cheap and easily stowed, and they don’t require a bench.

I considered getting something called a trap or hex bar, which has a big back-and-knee-sparing loop you stand inside, but they’re not as effective as dumbbells, and they take up room.

Now that I’ve found one quick, productive exercise I like, I am considering adding two more: deadlifts and squats. Sort of.

My understanding is that unless you use a straight barbell, you’re not doing real deadlifts and squats. There are other names for what you’re doing. Anyway, I am considering doing similar exercises with the biggest dumbbells possible. Weights I will never be able to lift over my head. This should make my back and legs strong and help me make it through old age without spine issues, broken hips, and knee problems.

Oddly, dumbbells like the ones I have are cheap, but big ones are very expensive, whereas fairly heavy barbells and weights are less expensive than huge dumbbells.

Based on what other people are doing, I think there is no way I will ever need more than 200 pounds per dumbbell. I doubt I’ll even get that far. I figure if I get dumbbells that hold 200 each, I will never have to replace them.

I would be amazed I ever needed 400 pounds of weight. If I manage to deadlift 200 pounds, total, I’ll be thrilled beyond description. I may be able to get up to 85 per side with the dumbbells I have, so I should be in no hurry to look for bigger ones.

Learning the truth about strength training has lowered my esteem for the human race to new levels. It should astonish us that men all over the world, overwhelmingly, are more concerned about looking good (to a limited population segment that likes that kind of thing) than being strong. Ordinarily, you would expect that kind of thing from women.

I love doing one set and quitting. This has been my MO for years, during the brief periods during which I have exercised. It works. I don’t like exercise. I hate the smell of a gym. It’s like smelling a big pile of underwear mixed with soured bologna. I don’t like that “two more sets to go” feeling. My goal is to keep my one-set philosophy and refrain from adding any more exercises than I have to.

Another great thing about strength training: you can do it twice a week and get results. I have been doing my little exercise three times most weeks, but the pros say it’s not necessary. They say two will work.

If they are right, I should be able to get 75% of the benefits of three-set exercises, working out about 30 minutes per week. That may sound bad to fanatics, but I prefer to compare the results to the results of doing nothing. By that standard, they look amazing.

Very few people exercise consistently all their lives. Arnold Schwarzenegger let himself go to the point where he had moobs and looked like he had never touched a weight, and he was only in his fifties. Sustainability is better than maximal results you can only maintain for two years.

I will be more than strong enough. I already am, for that matter. You don’t really need to be able to bench 350 pounds in order to get through life. A person who has no trouble with 150 is prepared for just about anything life will put in his way.

Not that I think benching is a good idea. I agree with the people who say it’s silly. How many situations require you to push things away from yourself with great force? Nearly none. On the other hand, my exercise simulates the exact type of task most men have to do over and over. Lift from ground to waist or chest.

Groceries. Luggage. Furniture. Fat babies. Packages. Appliances. You know I’m right.

Benching requires equipment that takes up half a living room, and it doesn’t do you much good. Besides, if I benched regularly, I would have a 50-inch chest in a year. I hit 48 in law school with limited machines. My chest blows up and leaves the rest of me behind. I would like to be able to fit in a jacket.

I will never take drugs. It’s amazing how many boys and men are on them now. The boys are stunting their height, making their hair fall out, and covering themselves with acne scars. The men are encouraging cancer, strokes, heart attacks, and joint and muscle destruction.

I guess I see at least one drug user every time I run errands. Yesterday I saw an obese bald guy who looked miserable and appeared to be on drugs. His arms looked swollen. They stuck out sideways over his gut. He swayed from side to side as he walked; I guess his thighs rubbed together. He had a pained expression as he walked. His mouth was open. What is the point of doing that to yourself?

I think the guy two houses down is on roids. He looked normal the first time I saw him. A couple of years back, he came out of his house, and he was grotesque. I couldn’t believe it was the same guy. He was bald, of course, with one of those creepy convict beards. Tattooed. Way too tan. Scary-looking. Pumped to the max. He must be pushing 60. I don’t know what possessed him.

Testosterone replacement is normalizing drug abuse among American men. Everybody wants to be big and intimidating, not that bodybuilding is in any way a martial art or helpful against people who can really fight. I’ll bet we see a wave of strokes, heart attacks, and cancers starting 5 years from now.

I would guess the guys on testosterone claim they don’t take drugs. Yeah, okay. Doctors call testosterone a drug, and so should you. Having enormous testosterone levels is not okay. Check out photos of the faces of men who take it.

Men claim they take it because they have medical issues. Yeah, they say that about weed, too. Kids in their twenties are taking testosterone, from doctors, and posting muscle photos. Guys who looked perfectly normal before they started.

Men always want people to think they’re naturally big and strong. Somehow they think it’s more impressive if it doesn’t come from a vial. I think they want people to think they’re genetically superior to everyone else. Has kind of a Nazi smell to it.

It reminds me of the story of the Chinese guy who sued his wife for not telling him about her plastic surgery. He married her, and they had kids who took after their pre-surgery mom. He was not pleased.

When I was in college, I lived on a crew floor, and some of the guys took steroids. How do I know? Well, there was a guy we called Mongo. He was loaded with muscle. Saw him a couple of years later, and he was smaller than I was. He was actually kind of a little guy. Explain that without drugs.

Another guy had legs like Earl Campbell. You could stick your hand in the ruts of his thigh muscles, not that anyone ever did, I hope. Our floor counselor was skinny in high school, and other kids beat him up and broke all his ribs. As a rower, he had biceps like honeydew melons. Not from rowing.

He ended up rowing for Puerto Rico in the Olympics. Yeah, that was legit.

I think a lot of testosterone users are letting quacks kill them slowly. “My doctor said it was okay, so TIME TO GET PUMPED!”

Go look at Alan Ritchson’s photos from his The Hunger Games days, and then look at his post-drug Reacher face. He admits he’s on testosterone. Somehow he has managed to lose body fat and end up with a puffy face. He looks constipated and crusty. His eyes look dead. He looks like he’s straining in the bathroom, to be graphic.

Still photos can be doctored, but I saw the show, and he looked very bad. Aged. Like his heart could stop at any minute. And he walked like his legs were glued together.

How is he going to come back from that? He can’t take that stuff forever. Sooner or later, he’ll have to get off the needle and go back to being a skinny guy with a 15″ neck, just like the new Dwayne Johnson, except even smaller. That’s not easy for everyone. Drug muscles are addictive.

When he was young, he was a slender guy who looked like the picture of health. His skin was very smooth. Now it looks like a gravel road.

Harvard Medical School says that when you take testosterone, your body stops making it. When you come off it, I guess you turn into Richard Simmons until you recover. And then you have whatever to-you unsatisfactory levels you had before you started.

I’m sure there is a legitimate use for testosterone therapy, like when you’ve had parts torn off in an industrial accident or you’ve been married to a feminist for 25 years, but as for elective users, I think any therapy that requires constant bloodwork and vigilant monitoring of one’s circulatory health is suspect.

I don’t think my level is a problem. I have tons of energy. I sleep well when my baby son allows it. I’m far from depressed. I am still fertile, or at least I was in early 2024. I respond to strength training. I don’t feel tempted to vote for liberals.

I want to be able to cope with life’s minor challenges. I want to get through this life without new joints or a back brace. I do not have to be super-strong to be satisfied, and I do not expect to look much better than I do right now. I think this is the best attitude.

Let the Light In

I take a lot of photos of my son using my phone. I also shoot video. It’s very convenient. It’s quick. My phone is always in a handy pocket on the side of my leg. It’s not heavy. It’s not in the way. It takes around 4 seconds to get it out and get the camera function working.

The photo quality is amazing I don’t mean it’s good. I just mean it’s amazing. The phone is around 1/4″ thick, the lenses are smaller than Cheerios, optical zoom is a mechanical impossibility, and yet somehow, I get photos that are more than good enough to blow up to three feet wide and hang on my walls.

Does that mean they’re “good”? Well, no. Not if you judge them by camera standards.

The other day, I shot some photos of my son, using a Sony ZV1-M2. This is a camera that cost me around $900. If you’re not a photo buff, you may not know it, but $900 is not anything close to what new professional-grade cameras cost, so I’m saying it’s not the best camera there is.

It has a built-in mechanical zoom lens. It has an APS-C sensor, meaning it’s smaller than a full-frame sensor. It has an articulated touch screen on the back. It has two microphones. You can also plug external mikes into it. It has a hot shoe.

It’s aimed at the video-blog market. It will give you better videos than a phone. It’s not intended to be the world’s best still camera, but of course, you can use it for stills.

I bought it for travel. I found it to be good for video, albeit cumbersome with all the audio stuff and the mini-tripod or gimbal attached. It overheats quickly in the sun, however, and the Rube Goldberg nature of adding mikes led to me making a number of videos without sound. Unintentional silent movies. The stills were okay, but I also took a DSLR to see if I could do better.

When I put the shots of my son up on the 65″ TV I use as a monitor, I saw that I had been missing out. Even though I was using a compact vlogging camera with numerous limitations, the photos were clearly superior to anything my phone could produce. Better subject separation. Better sharpness. He just plain looked better.

Last night, I wanted shots of my son at Thanksgiving dinner. I grabbed a Sony a6400, figuring it would be better than the ZV1-M2. Problem: I didn’t have any lenses that combined a suitable focal length with acceptable light-gathering. In other words, I wanted a wide-angle lens that would give noise-free shots in my kitchen at night, and my only option was 9mm, which is over the top. I gave up and grabbed the ZV1-M2, which can shoot as wide as f1.8. The shots are probably pretty good. I have not seen them.

This experience made me realize, once again, that I had been looking for, and buying, the wrong lenses.

Photo gurus really push handy zoom lenses for travel, as well as sharp primes that don’t do well indoors. I listened to them, so now I can’t use my expensive cameras to shoot family photos without additional lighting.

Seriously, am I going to run and get a complicated lighting contraption and set it up every time I want to take a candid shot of my wife and son? Am I going to fiddle with my complex on-camera flash and hope I don’t end up with what looks like a bad amateur wedding reception photo? No. I’m going to grab the phone or the compact.

As fate would have it, things aren’t all that bad. Help was on the way before I realized I had the wrong lenses. Before Thanksgiving, I ordered a 23 mm Sigma f1.4 prime lens for the a6400. This would have been perfect for last night. It’s very sharp, it’s not terribly expensive, and the focal length is just right for most indoor people shots.

Before I bought it, I took my 18-135 mm zoom and took shots inside the house. I simulated 23 mm and 35 mm shots. The 35 mm shots were claustrophobic. They left things out. This is how I landed on 23 mm.

By the way, I put a space between numerals and “mm” for a reason. The convention of putting them next to each other is stupid and anomalous, and it causes all sorts of problems for search engines. It needs to stop.

Sigma makes a family of low-priced, good-quality f1.4 lenses, and that’s why I had to take the test shots. I could have gone wider or narrower.

The lens arrives today, and I expect it to revolutionize my a6400 game. I should be able to keep the camera sitting out where I can grab it, and I should be able to get a lot of very nice shots with it.

I also found a useful video about low-light shooting. Finally.

Why didn’t I know what I needed sooner? Well, I did study up. Quite a bit. But there is a lot of bad advice out there, from people who claim to know what they’re doing.

There are a bunch of camera courses on Youtube, and they must be pretty good, because people say nice things about them, and some of them used to cost a lot of money. I picked one, and I started watching it.

I have not seen the whole thing, so maybe the host will eventually get around to really useful information, but so far, he has not done all that well. He has spent considerable time talking about the Rule of Thirds, a maxim (not a hard rule) which seems useful when you first hear about it and then turns out to be disappointing.

It works like this. You divide your frame into 9 boxes. When you frame subjects, you try to arrange things so each third (bottom to top) contains something different. For example, ocean at the bottom, blue sky in the middle, clouds at the top. If you have an important object in the frame, put it near a corner of the middle box; the Paul Lynde box.

This is considered aesthetically pleasing, and it definitely works in many circumstances, or nobody would teach it. On the other hand, the vast majority of photos I enjoy violate it pretty vigorously.

I like watching Youtubes featuring the works of great photographers, and when I watched a few after learning about the Rule of Thirds, it seemed more like the artists were obeying the Rule of Avoiding Thirds. Makes you wonder if they ever heard of the rule. Go look at some great photos, and you will see I’m right.

I’ve watched other advice and instruction videos as well.

My impression is that most instruction videos are useful but not terribly so, and they can push you into formulaic approaches that obscure whatever talent you may possess. Photography is an art, so talent is the main thing.

I listened to Youtubers when I chose lenses, and they talked a great deal about things that aren’t nearly as important as getting the shot in the first place. Vignetting. Barrel distortion. Sharpness. Focus breathing, which, I believe, only applies to video.

The sharpness obsession got me excited, so I bought sharp lenses. I think they’re just swell, but I also realize I got too caught up in sharpness. Even as I was shopping, I thought I was probably focusing, if you will, too much on the wrong thing.

If you want to see how right I was about being wrong, go look at photos from Vivian Maier.

Maier was a nobody when she lived. She was a professional nanny. She owned an expensive Rolleiflex twin-lens camera that shot square photos. Guess how many photo lenses she had. “Two,” you’re thinking, because I just called it a twin-lens camera. Wrong. It had one. The other lens was just for feeding the viewfinder to set up pictures. The images it passed never touched film.

Guess how sharp the shooting lens was. I’ll tell you. Not very.

Maier had a one-lens, one-focal-length, unsharp camera that shot square photos, and her work was magnificent.

She used to shoot photos on her days off. The families that hired her traveled, so she shot in exotic locations as well as around New York and Chicago, where she lived. She left 150,000 negatives behind, that I know about. Maybe there are more. She was discovered posthumously in 2007, when a guy looking for useful old photos of Chicago bought a box of her negatives for $380. It had been left in an abandoned storage unit.

I will take the liberty of posting a photo or two. I don’t think I can be accused of infringement, since this is pretty clearly fair use, and it’s not like anyone can blow up a grainy resized photo from a blog and sell prints to the public or charge money to see them. There are a bunch of photos on the site named for her, and they advertise books you can buy on Amazon. My understanding is that the site is legitimate, and the profits go to people who are entitled to them.

It seems obvious that most photographers default to cameras that shoot 3:2 frames these days, and maybe Maier would have done so if she had had access to the variety of quality cameras we have today. In fact, she moved to 3:2 later in life. But she did just fine with square photos. It didn’t matter what shape the photos were as long as she was behind the camera.

Also, she didn’t seem to care about the Rule of Thirds. Maybe she didn’t know what it was.

The low-light video I found was made by a guy named Jason Vong, and he provided some simple rules I had never heard of before. He said there was one set of rules for handheld photos and another set for tripod use.

He says using the “auto” function on a camera will give you poor-quality low-light shots. You’ll preserve your precious memories, but they won’t look very good. I think it’s a waste of money and potential to use a good camera in “auto” when you don’t have to. It’s like driving a Ferrari with the valet key.

Handheld: set your aperture, your speed, and your ISO, in that order. “A-S-I.” Use the lowest f-stop you can. Use a shutter speed that matches your focal length for full-frame, and double the focal length for APS-C (example: 60 mm and 1/120 second). Use an ISO no higher than 3200 (APS-C) or 6400 (full-frame), and try to stay below 800 APS-C or 1600 full-frame. If you have to go higher than 800 or 1600, but you stay below the upper limits, software should give you an acceptably clean photo.

Tripod: S-I-A. You can set your shutter speed to be very low because the camera won’t shake.

Is Vong right? Probably. I haven’t tried his suggestions yet, but he is talking about basic theory, and he does photography for a living. I will find out.

Most instructors give vague advice. “This is what aperture does.” “This is what shutter speed does.” They don’t present information about exposure in a systematic way, as Vong has.

Maybe the longer video I haven’t finished watching will eventually cover the same points.

So what do I take away from all this?

Learn the Rule of Thirds, but remember that it’s just a suggestion. Learn what composition is, and get good at it. Then you can forget the Rule of Thirds. Don’t let a rule ruin your photos.

If you want to take candid photos instead of having people line up unnaturally and give creepy smiles in unison to produce bad flash photos where everyone has red pupils, you should get a couple of low-light lenses. I think this is probably a good conclusion.

I think you are better off with a bad camera and a good low-light lens than you are with a fantastic camera and a lens that quits at f3.5. When I started upgrading in 2023, I had a 2005 or 2006 Canon 350D with an 8-megapixel sensor. I thought moving to a 200D with way more resolution was the best move, and for $200 or so, it was a good buy, but now I believe faster lenses would have had more impact for indoor work.

I took some surprisingly excellent photos with the 350D back when it was young, and in the 80’s, I took some great shots with a Yashica FX-2 that only had one lens.

If you have to choose between optical perfection and low-light performance (or whatever other kind of performance you need), go with performance. People will care more about the quality of your photos than they will about “softness in the corners” or whatever other flaws they may have, and you will miss far fewer shots.

I think these are sound conclusions, but I am still fairly uninformed as photographers go, so anyone who knows more is welcome to chime in.

Here’s a great suggestion: don’t take advice from bad photographers unless you’re sure their badness is unrelated to the advice. I keep seeing videos and articles from successful photographers, accompanied by images I would delete instantly. It looks like there is, quite literally, no substitute for talent. No amount of experience, training, or equipment can help someone who is just not wired to take a good photo.

I am planning to work with the 23 mm lens to see what it can do, and after that, I will consider other low-light primes.

By the way, that little ZV1-M2 is not bad at all for travel stills. If you can’t stand the weight and size of a more serious camera, you can put it in your pocket or purse, and it will definitely outdo your phone.

God has Definitely Tabernacled With Us

I hope everyone who reads this is having a pleasant Thanksgiving of prayer and shared love. I didn’t get our turkey into the oven until about 30 minutes ago. Lots of setbacks. The packer left maybe 300 pinfeathers in it, so I had to pull them out, and when they prepared the bird, they ripped the skin up so there was a lot of sewing to be done when the bones had been removed and it was time for the stuffing.

This will be my son’s first Thanksgiving. Outside of his mom, I mean.

I don’t know how much love he is feeling from me today. I had to get my wife to confine him to the bedroom. Sharp knives. Hot cookware. A waste can full of raw turkey parts and the associated bacteria. A Thanksgiving kitchen is not a good place for a baby who opens every drawer and door he sees, turns over garbage receptacles, and will put anything into his mouth as long as it’s not edible.

He managed to get into the waste can and put turkey bits on the floor. I was busy, so I didn’t know what was going on. We are hoping he didn’t put anything in his mouth. I had to make double sure my wife understood that she could not be on the phone or watching Youtube while I was cooking.

He is a wonderful boy. Most parents will say similar things about their sons, but he really is. He is still extremely cute. We go to Costco once a week, and the ladies who check receipts at the door know him and say they want to take him home. We went on Sunday, and the receipt lady who was working that day expressed her joy because we had brought “the cutie” with us. I said we had also brought my son, but she failed to see the humor.

He makes weird noises all the time. He growls like a monster in a horror movie. He makes a sound that resembles the wind whistling around buildings in the winter. He giggles. He sings, sort of. He can whistle, but he doesn’t do it much. He has joy sounds that are hard to describe.

He hasn’t said anything we can be sure was a word. He vocalizes constantly. He says things that may be words as far as he is concerned.

Today he gave one of his toys what seemed to be a stern lecture, but it was not in English or Nyanja, his mother’s first language. He may think he’s talking already.

When he smiles, he smiles with his whole face.

He is crazy about his mom. He spends a lot of his time lying on her. She sings to him and tosses him around. She talks to him all day.

Although he enjoys using his mother as furniture, he is very independent now, for the most part. He speed-crawls around the house. It sounds like two people running. He leaves the bedroom and goes where he pleases, so we have to make sure everything dangerous or expensive is out of reach.

He is scared of airplanes, so when he hears one, he forgets all about his independence and crawls back to Mom so she can hold him in her arms.

He sometimes cries when people sneeze. We haven’t figured that out yet. On the other hand, he loves watching people drink. He stares with a big grin on his face.

He wakes me up most of the time. A couple of months back, he used his voice. Now he climbs on top of me or comes up behind me and starts pawing and hitting my back with his big, meaty mitts. He’s so strong, sometimes I think it’s my wife.

He likes it when I pound on my back with his fist. When I do it, he opens his mouth and makes long noises so he can hear the effect. “Wuh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh…”

He loves being thrown in the air. He likes being swung around. When he was smaller, my wife thought I would kill him by picking up by one leg and one arm, but he loves it. He hangs there smiling, making incomprehensible happy noises.

He took three steps the other day, and he can push a walker, but he doesn’t seem very interested in walking. Why should he be, when his mother carries him all over the place? He spends a lot of his day standing, but when it comes to locomotion, he flops down on all fours and sticks with the old reliable.

He can reach things now. He pulls things off of other things. Every week, he reaches a little farther. He can’t grab things that are in the middle of my nightstand, but he can pull things off the sides.

My bed has a drawer I use for socks and underwear, and he opens it and throws my stuff out on the floor, one item at a time. He also removes drawer knobs and leaves them in interesting places.

We got him a little plastic activity table with lights and sounds and things to move around. He loves it. He used to sit on the ground and use it, so at first, I didn’t attach the legs that came with it. Then he started standing, so I put them on. He stands over it and works at it very seriously. Today, he picked it up and threw it, and then he was mad because it was upside down.

His curiosity is exhausting. Hold him in your arms, and he stares at the ceiling fans. Put anything down, and he wants to pick it up. He never stops. He zooms around the house like a pinball. I am constantly taking things away from him. I think I say, “Give me that,” more than anything else.

When we open the refrigerator, he makes a shriek of joy and starts speed-crawling for it. We have to close the door before he puts his whole body inside and refuses to move while he gropes things.

He stands up and hugs my thigh when I’m trying to do things, so I have to pick him up. I make the usual dad noises on his skin. I tickle his feet. I show him numbers with my fingers. I whistle at him. We play airplane baby. Sometimes he finds me overwhelming and has to hide his face.

I make sure I play with his toys. He loves that. I put his walker in front of him so he can push it across the room, and when he hits something, I turn it around so he can keep going. I tell him how amazing he is. We use the activity table together. I show him how to put the rings back on the ring toy, but so far, he mainly likes pulling the top of it off. The top is a stuffed rabbit head, and he can’t stand it when it’s on the toy.

He beats his parents. He likes banging on us with his palms, like a guy trying to get a bartender’s attention.

He cut his mother’s lip the other day. Banged it with his head while she was trying to sleep. He has Mongolian blue spots, which are birthmarks that look like bruises, so I hope the police never spot us when his mother has a busted lip and then ask me why he’s bruised up. Mongolian blue spots usually go away with age.

His mother is 100% African, but he looks like he’s mostly Caucasian. His skin isn’t very dark, his hair is curly but not kinky, and his features aren’t strongly African. My genes really bleached him. So much for dominant African DNA.

He may be getting a little spoiled, but we are working on it. Or at least I am. He has a playpen (for our sake as well as his), and he throws a fit when I put him in it. He will stand outside of it and push the sections back and forth, but if I lift him to put him in it, he starts screaming long before his feet touch the ground. My policy is to put him in it once a day and let him yell. He has to learn.

It has been very hard to get him to eat food that isn’t mushy. He is perfectly capable of holding it between his thumb and index finger and putting it in his mouth, but he still prefers mush. On Sunday, he put a little piece of Costco pizza in his mouth and sucked the sauce off, and we were thrilled.

He has no problem drinking. He can drink from a water bottle (not the baby kind) and a cup. The other day, he crawled across our bed, grabbed his sippy cup from my wife’s nightstand, rolled over on his back, and started drinking. He also drinks from a straw.

His eating habits are more my wife’s concern than mine. I know he’s not going to be eating baby food in 2055.

He is advanced for his age. He is bigger than a typical 15-month-old, and he is doing nearly everything ahead of time. We get excited as we see him change. Suddenly, those little bow legs are not so little and not so bowed.

He gets kissed and squeezed all day. He must think this is what life will always be like. If only Earth were like that.

He is a very happy baby. Why shouldn’t he be? His family isn’t dysfunctional. How many kids can say that? I couldn’t when I was young. Most of my friends couldn’t.

Truthfully, I consider our family bizarre in its lack of dysfunction. It’s an extraordinary thing. When I was a kid, every family on our block except one was dysfunctional. My dad’s partners’ families were all dysfunctional. I had 10 aunts and uncles, and only one pair raised a somewhat healthy family.

We pray in front of my son. We do all our Christian stuff in front of him. I put my hand on his head and bless him. I do the same for my wife. He will know supernatural Christianity is normal.

Things are working out well.

Even as a teenager, I wanted marriage, fidelity, and a family. I was not interested in taking down as many women as possible and staying free. Something always went wrong. I went after the wrong women. There were relationships I could not start, and there were relationships that were taken away from my suddenly. I know now that I was cursed. Supernatural enemies did their best to ruin my life and get rid of me. My own efforts didn’t matter. The spirits that hated me were stronger than I was. They always won.

I didn’t understand anything when I was young. I didn’t know how to align with God and defeat the failed spirits that destroy human lives.

I wish I had been raised correctly. I would have grandchildren by now. Life would have been much better. But God is restoring the years the locust ate, and my wife and son are wonderful. Would I trade this beautiful boy for the kids I might have had in my twenties? An unpleasant thought.

We are trying to have a real Thanksgiving today, praying, thanking God, and enjoying each other’s company. It’s not easy, with all the added work of cooking. At least we’re not going to malls so we can save a few dollars on junk for Christmas. I can’t believe people do that on Thanksgiving. I don’t think saving money is a good excuse, except for people in serious financial trouble. Even then, a day of prayer would do them more good than a day at a mall.

I have been so busy, I haven’t even showered. It is time to get up and do that. I hope I’ll be able to do it alone this time. My son loves visiting us in the shower and getting water all over his romper.

I wonder how long it will be till I have to start locking the bathroom door.

Tech Turns Faultless Two-Dollar Item into $250 Nightmare

I have good news for people who are justly upset with Ford for making keys ridiculously expensive, fragile, easy for hackers to copy, and hard for owners to copy.

Electronic keys are stupid. The electronic key boom is just one more example of engineers doing things they can, but should not, do. It demonstrates a total lack of common sense.

I have two fobs covered with buttons I don’t really need. They lock and unlock the doors. Don’t need. They open and shut the hatch. Don’t need. I think one of them will start the engine, but I don’t know, because…don’t need. There is also a button to set off the alarm, and that’s nice when I forget where I parked at Walmart, but truthfully…don’t need.

These keys are easy to duplicate. Easy for you and me? No. Easy for punk car thieves. They see you walking to your car. They watch you raise your fob. Then they use a machine to capture the signal. Later, they use it to get into your car. A 15-year-old moron who can’t read and write can do this, but you aren’t allowed to go to a hardware store and have your key copied electronically, like you could copy, oh, EVERY key made before engineers lost their minds.

Each fob has a real key inside it. Great. Problem solved. Throw out the fobs and use the metal key.

Oops…wait! Can’t do it. The metal key will not start or stop the engine. It just gets you into the car when your fob fails, so you can sit in the shade while you wait for a locksmith to come and charge you hundreds of dollars.

If the problem is a dead fob battery, you should be able to use the secret slot in your center console to start the car. You put the dead fob in there and start normally. If the fob got smashed or something, you may be stuck.

Here’s more great news. The fobs are made cheaply, so they fall apart. Eventually, long before your car gives out, your fob will start to come to pieces. Then Ford expects you to buy a new one.

If you buy a new Ford fob, you have to go to a dealership or a locksmith, prove ownership, and pay three digits to get it programmed. And you get to wait around while they get ready to call your name.

It’s a money-making scam for Ford, pure and simple. It’s also an insult. It doesn’t make the car harder to steal; it makes it easier. It doesn’t save the consumer money; it costs him money. It gives preferential treatment to thieves and dealers. Perhaps I repeat myself.

So what do you do?

If your fob breaks, it will almost always be the cheap plastic shell that fails. You can buy new Chinese shells on Amazon for as little as $10. You take the guts out of your old fob and put them in the new one. You’re welcome.

The new fob may or may not last, but for what you’re paying, you shouldn’t care.

What if you lose an OEM fob?

It turns out that all the problems that result from this are your own fault, assuming you know what I’m about to tell you.

You never use the OEM fobs. They are to be put away in a safe place. Both of them.

You can buy programmable Chinese fobs on Amazon for $27. If you have an Explorer, which is the only car I’ve checked out, you can program them yourself, easily. You have to do this before you lose one, because the car will do the programming, and it requires you to show it you still have both OEM fobs. Stupid. This is why you never take the OEM fobs out of your house.

I’m not going to show you the programming procedure. You can Google it, and I would probably get something wrong.

Before you lose or destroy a fob, buy at least two Chinese jobs and program them. Then put the OEM’s away. If you want, you can copy your metal key and put copies in the new fobs, but be sure you keep at least one key with your OEM fobs, because once you lose it, you are out of luck. You can program more fobs, but you will have to pay a locksmith to make the keys.

Are the keys useful? Well, I have driven this car since 2017, and I have never needed the real key.

You can also get electronic doodads to put on your keychain so you can find your keys with your phone. Samsung makes the Smarttag2, and Amazon makes Airtags. Ford sold you $250 fobs and did not include this cheap feature. Ford likes it when you lose your fobs. Ford wanted you to buy more fobs, because Ford is a jerk.

The rest of us will never stop paying for all the cafeteria wedgies the STEM kids got in junior high.

I guess I should not make unsupported allegations, but I lost my personal fob for a day and a half, and then I found it, broken, under a nightstand near which a certain small diaper-wearing person had been playing. Let’s say I have my suspicions. This is why I am learning all these new things.

Yeshua Never Said he Was the Way, the Opinion, and the Life

I was awake for hours last night. God showed me various things. For one, I have not been leading my family as I should.

I am not making my wife sit down in the living room every day, in the middle of the day instead of just before bed, to pray, study, and praise God. Sometimes we go all the way to bedtime before we pray together. We have a routine of praying after we get up, but I have not been enforcing it well.

I haven’t been speaking blessings over my wife and son every day. I should be doing that. Look how it worked out for Isaac.

I’m not decisive enough. I need to be in touch with God to get help with decisions. I shouldn’t consult my wife so much, when she is looking for leadership, not discussions.

God reminded me of some things.

Eve was the first rebel in the Bible. She was the first idolater and witch. She was the first drug pusher. She was the first feminist.

Adam failed to lead his wife. Perhaps she would have rebelled anyway, but we will never know, because he let her down.

It’s unfortunate, but most modern people have no idea drugs have historically been associated with witchcraft. By “witchcraft,” I mean all idolatrous practices that involve serving evil spirits and using them to satisfy our corrupt desires. Wicca. Voodoo. All the pagan religions that openly involve spirits.

Tobacco is a drug, and it was used by Indians in their religions, all of which were witchcraft. Marijuana came to us via Old World witches. Witches have used mushrooms in spirit worship.

The forbidden fruit was a drug. Like the worst popular drugs we have today, it came from a plant. It altered minds. A plant that alters minds is a drug. The forbidden fruit is one of many. Opiates, pot, coke, psilocybin, mescaline, and even LSD come from plants.

I am going to write in generalizations now. Generalizations are valid and useful. Citing counterexamples to debunk valid generalizations is sophistry. God himself speaks in generalizations. Read the Bible and see.

God also reminded me that women are the leaders in Satan’s army now. They have fought for feminism, homosexuality, fornication, drug abuse, idolatry, and socialism much harder than men. Go to a botanica, and what do you see? Men lining up to buy black candles? No. Women. Join a cult, and who do you see standing around you? Mostly women.

Men have abandoned their role as leaders because fornication is accepted and expected now. We are supposed to lead and accept the fact that we will not always be popular. Instead, we flatter and manipulate women to get them into bed. Naturally, they end up behaving like the fatherless. What were we to expect from them?

We can’t complain if we don’t accept the blame for our part in the catastrophe.

Women love homosexuals and homosexuality. Many women say they wish normal men could be like them. They wish we would be emotional and prone to crying. They wish we loved dancing the way they do. They wish we were excited about shoes and clothes. They wish we hated shooting, hunting, military service, and normal diets including meat.

Many women think it’s important to feminize men. To bring out a “feminine side” that doesn’t really exist. As though masculinity were an act, but prancing around like Liberace or Peter Allen reveals our true selves.

I have a baby son. He is as masculine as can be. He beats on things with his fists. He is fascinated by objects. He is rough and full of energy. I didn’t teach him any of that. It came with the package God designed. It’s going to continue.

It’s common for an American woman to have a husband and a homosexual friend to gossip with, and for her to wish the husband was more like him.

I had a girlfriend who teamed up with another woman and tried to get me and the woman’s boyfriend to go to a gay bar. I said they just wanted us to sit at a table and buy them drinks while they danced with homosexuals who loved dancing and wouldn’t try anything sexual. They admitted I was right. It was pretty insulting. It was extremely selfish and manipulative. It was contemptuous. Of course, I didn’t go. This is an example of the kind of thing I’m talking about.

My friend, who wasn’t really a friend, ended up marrying the other girl. I pity him.

Women vote for everything God hates. They vote for Democrats. They put Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Biden in office. They voted for the far-leftists in Congress. They vote for those who persecute the church and the Jews. They love socialism, because it makes the government the reliable husband they can’t find.

God told me this: if you and your husband don’t vote the same, how are you not a house divided?

BOOM.

What did Yeshua say about a house divided? It can’t stand. It’s built on sand, so it has no foundation.

If you vote to counter your husband, you make him and your entire house powerless. Is that supposed to be a good thing? A house that produces no net votes has no power.

Recently, Democrats put out an ad telling women to vote against their husband’s candidates. They were pitting women against their God-given leaders, with whom they were supposed to be one flesh. They were attacking their marriages.

If you can’t agree on the best candidates for political office, you are out of agreement, generally. You are outside God’s plan, and you are bringing curses on your family.

My wife and I visited Singapore. We were in a mall. An Israeli guy had a cosmetic business, selling ridiculous potions and fake medicines that were supposed to make women beautiful. He had a local girl working for him to hook customers, and she descended on my wife.

They convinced her she should try this expensive stuff, which I had to pay for. I was standing right there beside her, and they ignored me. They must have read Genesis 3.

Fortunately, the Holy Spirit spoke to me. I said they were trying to pit my wife against me, so why should I support them? I got very angry. God had given me a wonderful wife who was full of the Holy Spirit, and this mall huckster was trying to drive a wedge between us that would threaten my marriage. He was pushing us in the direction of divorce.

I explained this to my wife later, and she understood. Now I am very sensitive about anyone who tries to persuade my wife to do anything while excluding me. After all, who did the same thing in Eden?

Satan didn’t come up to Adam and Eve and say, “I’m glad I caught you guys together, because I have a great limited-time offer I know you’ll be interested in. And there’s a coupon.”

Satan is a real bastard. There is no other way to put it. He is pure malice. His time in hell and his time in the flames will be the best times for humanity. He wants to destroy the best things in your life. He wants you in agony. The people who tempt your wife in his place are not looking out for you. The girlfriends who collect your secrets tell you your wife is too good for you. The gay hairdresser who tells you how to manipulate him. The salesmen who tell you your husband is cheap and selfish. The astrologers. The people who sell crystals. The palm readers. The lesbian preachers.

What I’m writing will not make me friends, and it will offend people. I don’t care. If you’re offended, it means you’re against God and against marriage. You’re trying to harm my wife and me. You’re trying to harm my baby son.

You should be offended. I hope you’re offended. I want you out of my life if you can’t listen. Get lost. I hope you never come back. I don’t need you. I’m sick of people like you. I need God and my wife, and my family needs me.

Your opinions are not valid or important. They are excrement. They’re like excrement from people who have fatal contagious diseases. Go and die from your disease far away from us, if you can’t listen.

God never worried about hurting people’s feelings. He never said, “I’d like to destroy Sodom for the good of mankind, but people will say I’m judgmental and homophobic. They won’t give me likes. I’ll be shadowbanned.” He poured out the fire and brimstone, killed hundreds of thousands of people, and the world was better for it.

I have repented, and I plan to do better, starting today. We will take over this house for God. We will get down on our faces in front of our son, and he will grow up to know this is normal. We are not going to live like nominal Christians who die and wake up in hell, surprised. We will show God love and appreciation instead of treating him like a washing machine and a VD clinic that gives free shots.

Spending More Money is Always the Answer

I plan to try to take more macro photos today. I am determined to figure it out. I have learned that if you want extremely beautiful, compelling, or interesting subjects, macro wins hands down. There are more small things than big things. You should be able to find excellent subjects in your own house, if you are satisfied with very small objects.

I have decided to upgrade my backup camera, and I don’t mean the camera on the rear of my car. I think I was stupid to try to make do with an old DSLR instead of getting a decent mirrorless during my last upgrade. Now I am correcting that mistake.

I don’t have to ask my wife if she thinks it’s a good idea. She always tells me not to worry about what I spend. I say I don’t want her to end up working at IHOP. She says God will take care of her.

Two years ago, when I decided to get a real camera for family photo purposes, I already had an ancient Canon 350D with 8 megapixels. It was not a bad camera, but I couldn’t get really sharp photos with it, and it was generally not as good as 2023 or even 2015 cameras. The screen was bad. It needed a lot more light. It was a 2005 camera.

I got a Sony A7IV, which, to me, is a Bentley of a camera. To a pro, it’s more like a Jetta, but I considered it a splurge. It’s full-frame. It has zillions of features. The lens selection is crazy. It’s easy to get great photos and videos with it.

My wife and I were still traveling a lot, and when I packed for trips, I learned that you have to be a very serious guy to take an A7IV with you on vacation. It is heavy. They lenses are big. If it’s stolen, it’s a big hit.

I had a Sony vlogging camera, but it’s not great. I don’t get fantastic stills with it. The lens can’t be changed. It overheats and turns off without warning while shooting video (that cost us dearly). I’m not sure I should ever use it again. It’s very convenient, but it doesn’t do much a phone will not do just as well.

My Canon had a lens I liked. I thought it would be smart to buy a newer but still old Canon that would take the lens. I bought a 200D, which was made in around 2017. It had lots of helpful features. It had zillions of megapixels.

Then I did something that blew my whole “bargain” theory out of the water. I got two new lenses for the 200D. One replaced the old Sigma lens that had made me think buying the 200D was smart. DOH!

We took the 200D on trips, and it was okay. It was lighter than the big Sony; so much lighter I actually used it. I got nice photos and videos. On the other hand, I now had two ecosystems, so I had to speak both Sony and Canon. I had to remember which camera could or could not do certain things, because the 200D was DSLR, not mirrorless. The 200D could not be zoomed during video shooting with a remote. Learning that was a real bummer.

I have been immersed in baby-related activities for over a year, and I have spent very little time with the A7IV and 200D. We are stabilizing now, so I got my gear out, arranged and sorted it, and started shooting macro. I found I had to use new features on both cameras. I had to use two flashes. There were useful features the 200D lacked.

I decided to do what Porsche should have done in the early Sixties instead of doubling down on stupid and continuing to make troublesome rear-heavy cars: I admitted fault. I gave up on the 200D and also on Canon. I’m getting a Sony a6400, which is a mirrorless camera which is lighter than the A7IV. Of course, I have to get a few lenses, and that adds to the pain. I can try to work with adaptors, but life is short, and I have already cheaped myself out of enough good photographic experiences.

I thought the a6400 was a good compromise between frugality and getting features that would be satisfactory for the next decade or so.

I looked at used cameras, but the discounts weren’t great, and the a6400 comes bundled with a lens I want, plus some other good stuff, at a nice price. I bought new.

While I was working on picking out a camera and two lenses, I read other people’s reviews. In particular, I looked at reviews of Laowa Venus lenses. Laowa is one of those Chinese optical companies that have been giving companies like Sigma and Tamron fits by making pretty darned good lenses for bad-lens prices. Not always the best, but often too good to turn down.

While I was checking out macro lenses, I had a realization: there a lot of very experienced, highly trained, bad photographers out there. It made me feel I had been selling myself short.

I have seen all sorts of shots on the web recently, and most were posted by people who thought they had gotten great results. Maybe 80% of the time, they were shots I would either delete or keep to myself. Bad composition was the biggest sin. After that, I noticed photos that were too bland and uniform; not enough color or brightness variation. I also noticed that most people were happy with photos that weren’t very sharp at all. Also, people took shots that either had boring subjects or seemed to have no subjects at all. Are we supposed to look at the island way off in the middle of the lake or the little crooked tree on the island?

Some people were posting sublime, eye-popping shots that made me feel I was destined to lead a life of utter inferiority, and I was glad to see those, because they showed me I should improve. The others were the kind of shots that make you try to think of polite things to say. “Everything in the shot is kind of orange, isn’t it? That’s certainly…interesting.”

So how much can you tell about a piece of equipment if people who use it post bad shots? A bad lens can make bad photos, but it’s not easy to create really good shots with an objectively bad lens. If a person’s photos are good, you know the lens must be okay, but if they’re awful, you don’t learn much about it at all.

Here is how I feel about photos: if a shot is good, you know it almost instantly. It grabs you. To me, this quality is more important than focus or obeying rules.

When I’m editing shots, I move selector buttons back and forth, and when a photo is right, I suddenly feel it and stop moving them. I don’t have any rules. When the photo looks right, it sort of yells at me and tells me to stop.

So…the people who take very bad photos with very good equipment and think they’re wonderful…are they just too proud to look for instruction, or is it an incurable lack of innate talent? I guess sometimes it’s both, and sometimes it’s just a talent void.

I know I can take very good photos. Can I create great photos? When I ask that, I mean great photos that aren’t lucky shots. Anyone can get lucky.

I know nearly nothing about photography, even after all these years. I haven’t worked at it. I make almost no use of filters because I don’t know how. I don’t know how to work with white balance. Someone told me about stacking software. Don’t know anything. I don’t know how to use fill flash. The list is almost endless. I can’t do a whole lot of the things a real photographer can do, but I can do good work within that limitation, and I should be able to improve somewhat.

I wish I understood editing software. Seems like every program has 5,000 functions, and I understand 4.

I wonder if I could find a useful course. Maybe there are online courses for people who are beyond being told what an f-stop is but not capable of anything advanced.

Now, of course, I’ll sell the Canon stuff and try to mitigate the pounding I took when buying the new Sony.

Yeah, right. I know me. I’ll find a reason to keep it.

I’ll post another macro from yesterday. The depth of field could be better, the subject matter is okay but not great, and I felt there was a limit to what I could do to improve the composition.

MORE

I got a few shots today.

I tried to keep the f-stop at 18, and I kept the speed at 1/160.

I believe my biggest issue today was focus. I used the A7IV’s focus peaking, and it really failed me.

First, a peach blossom I shot. I believe I need to jack up the ISO, because things come out a bit dark, and the color is bleached out. Nonetheless, I like this better than the results I got yesterday.

It looks a little better at full size, but it is not perfect.

Second, a fly on a magnolia leaf. These guys were all over the leaves. I am considering smearing the leaves with a piece of tuna or something to leave a smell that will draw more bugs.

This is a very small bug, like 3/16″ long.

As you can see, the focus is poor. This is true even though the focus peaking lit up all over this guy. I got a bunch of shots like this, and they’re all useless. I don’t know if I need to use the feature that blows things up for focusing, or what. The person I watched in order to learn macro says not to do that.

A tripod won’t work unless the bugs sit still, and that won’t happen.

I got a lot of bad shots of some blossoms, so I deleted them.

It’s difficult to press the camera’s button without ruining composition and moving the lens off to the side or up or down.

Anyway, I made some progress.

The World is Full of Tiny Models Who Never Need Rehab

I got all excited about photography yesterday, so today I went outside and tried to do some macro shots. Macro photography is photography involving little-bitty subjects like bugs and drops of water.

Back when I got my first DSLR, I gave macro a shot, and I got some photos I liked, but they were not amazing, and I did not keep up with it. I had an all-purpose 17-70mm Sigma zoom lens that happened to work okay for macro, but I didn’t know what I was doing, and I don’t recall working hard to educate myself.

When I got married and had to think about family photos, I bought a nice full-frame Sony camera, and I kept my Sigma lens and replaced the camera instead. Probably a bad idea, since I was going to replace the lens anyway, and I suppose a new mirrorless Sony would have been smarter.

I liked the idea of having a lighter, smaller, much cheaper backup camera.

I upgraded to a 2017 Canon 200D, which, oddly, was much more advanced than the 350D I bought 20 years ago. Shouldn’t the numbers get higher, not lower? I also picked up a wide-angle lens for the Canon as well as a better macro lens.

I have a very good macro lens for the Sony, but I like the Canon because it’s way lighter.

I also got on-camera flashes, which you need for macro shots, and I also got a diffuser, which is a big fabric pancake thing that, aptly, diffuses flash light.

I did a little macro work, and if memory serves, it was all bad. I did some studying so I could improve, but I did not follow up.

Today I tried to refresh my meager macro education, and I got out there and took some photos. It went poorly.

The guy I looked to to get me up to speed is a Youtuber whose bag is macro. He said to shoot at ISO 200, use a shutter speed of 1/200, and use f8 for an aperture. He also gave some other tips.

I tried doing what he said. I put my diffuser on. I set my flash up the way he said to. I adjusted my camera to his liking, to the degree that its firmware would let me, and I looked for little things to shoot.

The first thing I went after was a peach blossom. It is probably under an inch from one end to the other. I will show you one of the better shots.

The focus is heinous. Some bits are almost sharp. The rest looks the way everything has looked to Keith Richards since 1962.

I didn’t do anything to that shot except cropping, resizing, and exporting to JPG.

I kept trying. There were some things I could not photograph at all. I’ll post the best shots I got. I cropped them and edited them with Affinity, which is a great program you don’t need a Ph.D. to operate. Forget Photoshop. Maybe it’s great for pros. I don’t know. Affinity is working better for me than Photoshop ever thought of working, and it’s free.

If you know anything at all about cameras, you can see that my depth of field was inadequate. There was no way to make it work. Focus on the bug’s head, and you lose the tail. Focus on the flower, and you miss the bug.

I kept fiddling with the lens, and then I came inside to see if I had anything I could save. You are looking at the best of it.

Here’s something interesting: the first guy has posted his work on the web. I just looked at it. The focus is awful. Half a bug in focus. The other end hazy. Apparently, he is not a very good photographer.

I found another Youtuber, and she made a video about people’s macro mistakes. High on the list: using a low f-stop.

Wow.

She says to go to f22 or f28 or whatever it takes to get the shot. She’s right. Her photos are very, very good.

So why does the other guy keep giving bad advice? I wonder if he needs to be fitted for glasses.

The lens I was using is a Sigma 70mm 1:2.8 DG Macro DG EX, and it’s supposed to be very good for macro, and not just because it has “Macro” in the name. The camera has 24 megapixels. It’s not the problem. The instruction is the problem.

I was going to take the Sony out next to see if I could do better, but I don’t think I will. I plan to use the Canon again and start out at F22, the highest setting. I think I’ll do much better.

I like macro for a lot of reasons.

1. There are probably millions of times as many macro subjects around us as ordinary subjects.

2. Macro subjects don’t cost anything. You don’t have to create backdrops or whatever. You definitely won’t have to pay bugs.

3. Macro subjects aren’t whiny and uncooperative, and they won’t call the police on you or beat you up, which could happen if you do street photos of other people.

4. Macro is perfect for introverts. You never have to accost anyone or ask permission. Or have any of that nasty old human interaction.

5. You can do a lot more macro shots in the time it takes to do ordinary shots. You can walk around your yard and take dozens in an hour.

I expect things to go well once I start doing what actually works.

Let Your Walls be Your Testimony to God’s Goodness

I thought I would post some good advice for anyone who wants to decorate the walls of a house.

You can spend big money for good art. You can spend less but too much on bad art your kids will throw out. You can make your own art, which is great if you have the ability. Another possibility: have your own photos blown up, and put them in nice frames.

Today I received a frame from Amazon, and now this photo is on our wall, 20″ wide.

We have other big photos on our wall. I have 4 photo posters that are 24″ high. Travel shots of the wife and me.

Ordinarily, I would not put a shot of my son on the web, but you can’t really make out his features from this photo of a photo.

I didn’t spend a ton on the frame. I got it from Amazon for $50. I could have spent maybe $150 at a frame place. This frame looks very good. The front is plastic, not glass, but I can always go buy a pane of glass if I want to. You would have to touch it to tell the difference.

I took the shot with my phone, and it’s a very good photo. It shows you can’t use limited equipment as an excuse not to try.

In 2023, before upgrading my cameras, I took a shot of a weed in my yard. I used my ancient (!) Canon 350D Rebel, which is about 20 years old. It would be easy for a photographer to convince himself it wasn’t possible to do anything worthwhile with that old 8-megapixel camera, but it’s not true. There are some things you can do with a given setup, and there are some things you can’t do, and many of the things you can do are well worth doing.

Below, you will see the photo I took. It’s an elephantopus carolinianus blossom (Carolina elephant’s foot). It’s a useless weed, and it’s ugly from a distance, but the flowers are really something. The flower is around 3/8″ across.

I blew the shot up so it’s 24″ high, and I ordered a frame to fit. I think it will look neat on an upstairs wall; a guest (or child’s) bedroom. Not the greatest photo on Earth, but very pleasant to look at, and it’s mine. I took it on my own land. If I croak, my family will feel bad about throwing it in a dumpster.

I need to spend more time using my better cameras. The baby interrupted just about every process in my life.

Not Every Tramp is a Tramp for the Lord

A friend of mine is mad at me.

I sent him and another friend a link to a Fox News story celebrating slutty Halloween costumes celebrities were wearing. I listed some types of familiar costumes. Slutty nurse. Slutty bride. Slutty vampire. You can finish the list.

He got mad and said I was using crass language, and he said I was using “slut” to “define women.” That’s a false accusation. On his part, I mean. If he meant I was trying to give women a label for the purpose of condemning them, he was wrong. If he meant I was defining actual sluts, meaning individuals who were bona fide sluts, well, okay, he was right. He mentioned the one true judge, meaning I was not entitled to call anyone a whore.

This is an important subject, because whorish women now have unprecedented power in America. We literally make them billionaires, and we make them co-parents by encouraging our kids to watch them and listen to them.

Back when I was an armorbearer at Trinity Church, or maybe it was right after I left, Kim Kardashian visited. I was not present. The other armorbearers had to put her in a front-row seat and treat her like Yeshua himself. She was honored during the service, and afterward, “pastor” Rich Wilkerson went to the Internet to post a photo showing everyone that the goddess had visited HIS church, and he wrote, “What a great friend.”

Kim Kardashian is a slut. She is the most famous and powerful slut in America. Bigger than Madonna ever was. A slut is a woman with loose sexual morals and/or a woman who has many sexual partners.

She made a porn video and sold it on the web. Her co-star says her mother was in the room, directing the video. She has posed for Playboy. She has posed naked in other places. She has never repented.

This is what comes of misapplying “judge not” and bowing and scraping in order to put butts in church seats regardless of what kind of people the butts belong to.

Rich Wilkerson teaches tithing and giving extravagant offerings. If he can get a billionaire to join his trashy church, he can cash in like never before. I believe this is why he sucks up to rich people. He puts them in the green room behind the stage and fawns on them. I never saw a person in need treated like that at Trinity, but I did see him ask us to shoo them away.

As to my friend, I pointed out a few things, but I didn’t convince him. I’m not angry, but he pretty clearly is. I’m a little frustrated, but I’m not angry.

First of all, every word in the Bible can be attributed to every part of the Trinity. They are unified. If Yeshua or the Holy Spirit or Yahweh said it, or an anointed person said it while God spoke through him, it can be attributed to all three of them. Yeshua wrote the Ten Commandments, for example. It’s not like Yahweh wrote them and Yeshua said, “Wow, that seems pretty harsh to me.”

Also, I’m entitled to use any word an anointed person used, because as a Holy-Spirit-baptized Christian who listens to the the Holy Spirit, I am anointed. Anointing refers to authority. As long as I’m not out of line, and I have heard from the Holy Spirit, I have authority. It’s not like Paul is a general and I’m a private. We both answer directly to God.

With that in mind…

The word “whore” and synonyms and related words are all over the Bible, in both testaments, spoken and written by God himself as well as prophets and apostles. “Whorish woman.” “Whoring.” “Whoredom.” “Harlot.” “Whoremonger.”

It gets worse. God called Israel an ass in heat.

If you want to see something shocking, read Ezekiel 23:20. “Flesh” is a reference to private parts.

There is no point in referring to the Old Testament any further to prove “whore” is an acceptable and valuable term. Anyone who disputes the fact that “whore” and related terms are all over it is either lying or unfamiliar with the Bible. It’s like saying there are no mice in Disney cartoons.

As for the New Testament, which is where flesh-led Christians find a Yeshua who never judges and is basically a gay version of Buddha, well, hold onto your socks.

First Corinthians 6:15-16:

Know ye not that your bodies are the members of Christ? shall I then take

the members of Christ, and make them the members of an harlot? God forbid.

What? know ye not that he which is joined to an harlot is one body? for two, saith he, shall be one flesh.

Ephesians 5:5:

For this ye know, that no whoremonger, nor unclean person, nor covetous man, who is an idolater, hath any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.

First Timothy 1:9-11:

Knowing this, that the law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and for sinners, for unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for manslayers,

For whoremongers, for them that defile themselves with mankind, for menstealers, for liars, for perjured persons, and if there be any other thing that is contrary to sound doctrine;

According to the glorious gospel of the blessed God, which was committed to my trust.

Hebrews 11:31:

By faith the harlot Rahab perished not with them that believed not, when she had received the spies with peace.

Rahab was an ancestor of Yeshua, and the Bible still calls her a whore, which she was at the time she helped the spies.

Hebrews 13:4:

Marriage is honourable in all, and the bed undefiled: but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge.

Revelation 17:1:

And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither; I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters:

Revelation 17:15:

And he saith unto me, The waters which thou sawest, where the whore sitteth, are peoples, and multitudes, and nations, and tongues.

Revelation 17:16:

And the ten horns which thou sawest upon the beast, these shall hate the whore, and shall make her desolate and naked, and shall eat her flesh, and burn her with fire.

Revelation 19:2:

For true and righteous are his judgments: for he hath judged the great whore, which did corrupt the earth with her fornication, and hath avenged the blood of his servants at her hand.

Revelation 21:8:

But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.

Revelation 22:15:

For without are dogs, and sorcerers, and whoremongers, and murderers, and idolaters, and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie.

It is interesting that we are still “allowed” by the church to call murderers, thieves, liars, and other habitual sinners exactly what they are, and we can even say “adultery,” but we are not supposed to say “whore” or “pervert.”

Why is that? Satan shapes the language of the Spirit-denying church. He is using whores and perverts to destroy our connection to God, so he has banned terms that describe them accurately.

People claim words like “slut” and “whore” are derogatory in some special way, but that’s only because they describe people others find contemptible due to their behavior. The behavior made the terms distasteful. Call whores “sex workers” long enough, and “sex worker” will come to be considered offensive.

When I think about the way words fall into disapproval, I always think about “moron” and “imbecile,” which came to us from medicine. They were legitimate terms used to describe people with terrible problems. Naturally, they came to be used as insults. Then we were told to use another medical term: “retarded.” That became an insult. Then we were told to say “mentally challenged.” Soon after, I heard a kid ask another kid, “Are you challenged?”

When Yeshua called people fools, which he did several times in the Bible, he used a Greek word. The noun form is “more,” and it means an unintelligent person. It’s where “moron” comes from.

There is only so much you can do to make language pleasant to hear.

It’s not self-righteous to say “whore.” It’s self-righteous to say you are too good to say “whore.” John and Paul said it. Am I better than them?

Why do I not mention Yeshua, who used terms like “whore” in both testaments? Because my friend claimed only God had the right to say it. If John and Paul said it, and they were not out of line, then what he said isn’t true.

I don’t think my friend realized it, but unintentionally, he was implying he was better than I am because he doesn’t “judge.”

We are commanded to judge, by the way. Look at everything Yeshua said in the verse many Christians think constitutes the entire Bible:

Matthew 7:1-5:

Judge not, that ye be not judged.

For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.

And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?

Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.

No one quotes the whole passage. Just the part Satan likes. He liked it when the ancient Jews were too hard on sinners, and now he likes it when we refuse to correct them. He’s like a good lawyer. He can work with any parameters and make an argument.

Look at this passage from Ezekiel 3:

Son of man, a watchman I have given thee to the house of Israel, and thou hast heard from My mouth a word, and hast warned them from Me.

In My saying to the wicked: Thou dost surely die; and thou hast not warned him, nor hast spoken to warn the wicked from his wicked way, so that he doth live; he — the wicked — in his iniquity dieth, and his blood from thy hand I require.

Has the Old Testament been set aside by God? Astonishingly, many Christians think so. In reality, it can’t be set aside. We are not required to abide by certain rules the Jews had to follow, but the word is eternal. After all, it is the word itself that tells us we don’t have to follow those rules. Only the word has the authority to do that.

The Holy Spirit will generally tell us to do what God told the Jews to do before us, and he definitely wants us to warn people about sin and iniquity. How else are they supposed to know?

I showed my wife the conversation with my friend, and she expressed the same wonderment I do.

She has a niece. The niece hangs around drunk in bars. She has three small children by three men. At least one of the men is married. She makes her mother raise the kids. She leaves them for days at a time. She shows no signs of stopping. What are we supposed to call her? A great friend?

You’re not supposed to go outside with a megaphone and tell prostitutes, “YOU’RE ALL WHORES, AND YOU’RE GOING TO HELL, UNLIKE ME.” But you are supposed to call people what they are. It wakes them up, if they are willing, and it can turn them from destruction and help them live in God’s love every day.

I think my friend is a wonderful guy. He used to smuggle Bibles for Brother Andrew. He is kind and warm-hearted. He wants to please God. But I think he needs to get closer to the Holy Spirit.

It seems like he never has a testimony, and I have never heard him share revelation.

If you’re spending a lot of time with God every day, praying in tongues and bathing in the Spirit, you will have revelation every single day of your life. It won’t be something you saw Ray Comfort or the pope saying on TV. It will be something God told you directly. It may conflict with your church’s doctrine, and it may even seem to conflict with the Bible at first, but when you open the Bible and look, especially at the Greek, Aramaic, or Hebrew, you will see that there is no conflict.

If you spend time with God, you will also have all sorts of testimony.

The other day, I opened a dish in the microwave, and hot steam shot out onto my thumb. It kept hurting after it cooled off. I commanded the burn to go, and I commanded my flesh to be healed, and I asked God to back me up. The burn left, and within the hour, I was as though I had not been burned. That’s an example of testimony. I have lots of testimony. So does my wife. Hers is more amazing than mine. It’s not because we’re super-righteous. We are definitely not. It’s because we have spent time in the Spirit.

If you’re not spending time with God, how can you call him your father?

We are taught to be church-worshipers, which means man-worshipers. We know we’re not all that holy, so we go to church to listen to the really holy guys and give them money. We have the really holy guys pray for us instead of praying for each other, because we have no faith in our own prayers. We accept the doctrine the really holy guys teach us, as though they were God. After all, they have the big hats, the fancy cathedrals, the TV cameras, and the jets.

Then we find out they’re homosexuals and even homosexual predators. We find out they sleep with women they are supposed to lead. We learn that they made things up in order to get power and money. We find out we wasted our lives, displeasing God by following their false doctrine.

A church-worshipers are predictable. They get very angry when you question their denomination and their favorite preachers, as though doing so were blasphemy. They repeat certain bits of false doctrine predictably. Things like “judge not.” They may tell you it’s a sin to have a single drink; a lot of them do that, but it’s a lie, as Yeshua might tell you with a cup in his hand.

Often, they try to be holier than God himself. This usually manifests in niceness. God isn’t always nice, though. He killed nearly the entire human race once, and he is coming around for another pass soon. He is extremely blunt and open about sexual matters and toilet functions. He’s not a Victorian prude, running around putting skirts on table legs so they don’t give men impure thoughts.

God gave me a wonderful word once, and it suprised me. He said it in my own voice, directed to himself. He said, “I am not better than you.” To be clear, he was telling me I am not better than he is.

It sounds strange and obvious at first, but it’s very powerful.

Satan and his children are always claiming to be better than Christians and better than Yahweh. They’re nicer, they tell us. Of course, they are really angry and dangerous, but let’s not go down that rabbit hole. They tell us they love everyone. They tell us they’re superior because they don’t eat animals. They tell us sexual sin is virtuous and beneficial. They call whores “sex workers” because it sounds like a job, not like whoring and being enslaved by pimps.

When we refuse to judge, we are telling God we are better than he is. We are doing what Satan’s children do. What the “judge not” passage really means is that we have to judge ourselves first, fairly and honestly, before we judge other people and try to help them change.

Yeshua judged. All the writers of the New Testament judged. All the prophets judged. David judged in the Psalms. We are not better than God.

My friend is a church Christian. That’s why he doesn’t have revelation or testimony. He is doing his best to do what he has been taught by men. This is probably why his family has been destroyed and he has been separated from his wife and kids, although they might have abandoned him if he had done everything right. They have free will. It’s definitely why things aren’t getting better for him and why people are still abusing him and getting away with it.

I judge myself constantly. I keep asking God what I’m doing wrong to cause chronic problems, and I ask him to help me to stop, show me what to do to fix it, and help me to do the things that will turn the situation around. He told me to ask these things…because I spend time in the Spirit and receive revelation.

The ancient Jews also asked for correction when they were in trouble. They never said, “Well, we’re having a famine, so it must be because we’re the special, chosen, righteous people, and we’re doing everything right.” They fasted. They tore their clothes. They put ashes on their heads. They went to prophets and priests and asked them the same questions I asked, and what did God do? He answered them, and when they heeded his words, God fixed their problems.

When I didn’t spend time in the Spirit, I was ignorant, and I lived in defeat and depression. That’s not a mysterious aberration. That’s how life is supposed to work. You’re not supposed to be blessed if you shun the Holy Spirit. It’s not proof God doesn’t exist or doesn’t care about you. It’s evidence that his word is true.

I wasn’t a “good person” to whom “bad things” happened. God wasn’t testing me. He wasn’t showing me his greatness through my habitual, degrading defeats. He wasn’t teaching me to be strong. I get sick of hearing Christians claim failure is really victory. I wasn’t a martyr. I was just a loser, because I wasn’t connected to the person who gives us victory.

We need to quit asking God why bad things happen to good people. We need to quit promoting a dangerous lie. We need to ask what we’re doing wrong.

Just this morning, God gave me a relevant word: “Thank you for humbling correction.”

As for Halloween, I am glad it’s behind me and all the witches have gone home from their meetings where they cursed you and me and Israel and Donald Trump and Yeshua himself. I’m very glad I live behind a gate so no one gets to knock on my door and ask me why I don’t have candy for little children dressed like demons and vampires.

And sluts.

Can’t Get to the Parking Lot Fast Enough

For a long time, I’ve been telling people competitive sports are incompatible with Christianity. In America, this is like saying God himself is evil, because American men almost literally worship athletes, and the sports industry is their church. It makes people very angry. It really upsets the guys who have the mistaken impression that football is a great tool for building good Christians.

It is true, however. Our sick, deranged obsession with sports comes to us from the Greeks. They also exalted athletes and even treated them as gods after their victories. The Greeks were not Christians. This should be obvious. They worshiped childish false gods and decorated their front yards with statues featuring permanent erections, and they considered these statues sacred, not unlike the bizarre nudes found in many Catholic churches.

Today I got some wonderful confirmation.

I dreamed I was back in prep school. I was in history class. My teacher was Mr. Thomas. He taught me in ninth grade. Now that I think about it, he was the football coach.

Mr. Thomas was not a very nice guy. He wasn’t extremely abusive, but he was an angry leftist, and he was a little bit of a bully. Example: students complained that he kneed football players because he didn’t believe they were wearing protection.

I just realized how odd it was that he was a sports coach. He was about 5’7″ and maybe 260.

In the dream, I had already graduated from high school and college. For some reason, I was repeating high school.

You can imagine how much interest I had in my second tour. I didn’t need another high school diploma, so I had no reason to do any work or show up at school.

Mr. Thomas had given us a novel to read. It was about a Revolutionary War hero. Fiction. He had told us to write term papers about it. Odd, but this was a dream.

The paper was due the next day. I had done nothing whatsoever. I felt I had to do something by the next day in order to avoid failing. That was all I cared about. I was not interested in writing a good paper. I just didn’t want to be yelled at.

I was in the classroom with the other students, but Mr. Thomas was not there. He was late. I decided to take the time to use my laptop to see if I could learn anything about the guy in the book.

I searched the web very quickly. I made the mouse fly. I went to site after site. I made a lot of typing errors, so I went to sites that were not helpful. One site had something to do with sex. It showed a realistic cartoon lady who was wearing a short transparent nightgown with nothing underneath, and she was evidently familiar with a practice attributed to people from Brazil.

Somehow, my classmates were able to see what I was doing on a huge display. I told them I had gone to the dirty website by accident. In case they were wondering.

At my school, we had an unwritten rule, and the rule was that if a teacher was late, we could leave after a certain amount of time. I think it was 20 minutes. We got tired of waiting for Mr. Thomas.

A security guard came in. He was dressed more or less like a cop. He was a nice guy. A little nerdy. Glasses and a short beard. He wore an old-fashioned police hat.

We told him what was going on, and he told us to go home.

I was thrilled. Best news I could have asked for. I got up to leave.

My desk was like an elementary school desk in that it had a lid on hinges. It was bigger, of course. I opened it and saw that it was full of my belongings. I couldn’t take them home in one load.

By now, the guard had turned into a custodian. He wore a grey shirt with his name on the left breast pocket. Somehow I knew his name was Zeke. Ezekiel.

I asked Zeke if he or someone else would be around to let me into the room later to get my stuff. He said someone would be there.

I didn’t expect to return. I wondered if Mr. Thomas was dead. I guess he is, now.

When I woke up, I didn’t know whether the dream meant anything or not, so I prayed for revelation.

What is high school for? It prepares you for employment, and if you’re ambitious, it prepares you for self-exaltation in a prestigious, lucrative occupation. My school always sent a big percentage of students to Ivy League and Ivy-League-adjacent schools, and a lot of them went on to make big money.

In the dream, I had no ambition at all. Why would I? I didn’t need money, and the thought of getting a job and having to work was horrifying to me, as returning to prison would horrify an ex-con. This is my attitude in real life, as it should be. God has, with extraordinary generosity and patience, given me an easy life. Also, I know from past experience that no matter where I work, I will be blackballed, cheated, robbed, and undermined. Satan runs that world. It even happened to me at church. It’s part of Satan’s world.

The purpose of the dream was to get me thinking about ambition and to confirm that my attitude toward it was a gift from God.

I went to the Bible and the web to look around.

God expressly condemns ambition in many verses. I was relieved to see that.

Let’s start with Galatians 5. Look it up, and you will see that selfish ambition is a work of the flesh. The Greek word for it is eritheia.

Before you hit the keyboard and tell me that wanting to be a preacher or something similar is not a selfish ambition, let me point out that it very often is. Preaching is a great job. It can make you a millionaire, and you never have to do anything right. You can keep teaching things that don’t work, and when your victims complain that their lives aren’t getting better, you just tell them they’re not doing it right, or you say it’s an attack of the devil, and they will keep giving you money. This even works if you are caught in a motel room with a prostitute after getting another preacher removed from the pulpit for adultery.

Priests are often ambitious. Same for cardinals. Popes are often glory hounds; look at Francis. It’s not just a Protestant problem.

At Trinity Church in Miami, there was a young man called Chino. After I left Trinity and moved on to a church called New Dawn, Chino visited. He had decided to become a preacher.

He delivered a sermon which got people very stirred up. I thought it was pretty bad. Other people were cheering and clapping.

After the service, a friend of mine told me he had heard a preacher named Jabin Chavez recite the same sermon, nearly word-for-word.

Chino had been indoctrinated by a prosperity church run by a con artist with a family made up largely of con artists. He saw that the preacher lived in a mansion on Golden Beach with a yacht tied up out back. He saw a chance to get his own mansion, so he stole a sermon.

I only single Chino out because I don’t want to type dozens of similar stories, which I could easily do.

What does this have to do with sports? It should be obvious.

Sports are driven by ambition. They’re also driven by gambling, but on a personal level, they are driven by personal ambition.

In sick America, athletes get crazy favor. They get sex with all sorts of very attractive girls and women who won’t have anything to do with non-athletes. They get a grotesque amount of admiration. They get scholarships. They get good grades without doing their own work. They get all sorts of wealth. When they’re young, they get cars and paychecks for no-show jobs. They get bribes from colleges. They end up with free college degrees. Some become professionals and make tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. The police turn a blind eye to their violent crimes. It’s a cushy existence.

Don’t tell me there is no personal ambition in team sports. If you want your team to do well, great, but you wouldn’t be playing if it didn’t benefit you.

The word eritheia can be used to describe a lot of things. Selfish ambition. Strife. Rivalry. Factionalism. It has been used to describe people who campaign for political office. It describes doing a job purely for mercenary reasons.

Competitive sports promote all of these things. It’s about exalting yourself and abasing others. It’s about division. You or your team against the other guy or guys.

What happens at an athletic event? One person or team leaves in celebration, with memories that will bring them joy all the days of their lives. The other leaves in painful disgrace. Don’t let anyone tell you different. No one goes home thinking, “I played the game ethically. That makes me a winner.” That never happens.

Losers regret their losses all their lives. They fear losing. Many athletes throw up before competitions. Many beat their wives and girlfriends when they lose. They suffer depression. They are often condemned by teammates, relatives, coaches, and fans. These days, “goat” is used to mean “Greatest Of All Time,” but it originally meant an athlete who caused a loss.

If you win an Olympic gold medal, you may go on to extremely lucrative endorsements and appearances. If you win a silver, you end up teaching gym to high school students. Then you spend the rest of your life watching the gold medal people, wishing you weren’t a loser. Blaming yourself. Wondering what you could have done differently. Reliving moments when you made bad choices.

These principles apply to all types of competition. Shooting for a promotion your coworkers also want. Winning an election. Competing with another business. Ambition is divisive.

Don’t tell me we should apply these principles to Christianity, too, because Yeshua said he came to divide. Not true. Yeshua came to divide wrong-thinking people from the righteous. He didn’t come to pit the righteous against the righteous.

Romans 2 says God will render to every man according to his deeds:

To them who by patient continuance in well doing seek for glory and honour and immortality, eternal life:

But unto them that are contentious [eritheias], and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, indignation and wrath,

Tribulation and anguish, upon every soul of man that doeth evil, of the Jew first, and also of the Gentile

Second Corinthians 12:20:

For I fear, lest, when I come, I shall not find you such as I would, and that I shall be found unto you such as ye would not: lest there be debates, envyings, wraths, strifes [eritheiai], backbitings, whisperings, swellings, tumults

From the list of works of the flesh in Galatians 5:20:

Idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife [eritheia], seditions, heresies. . .

Philippians 1:16-17:

The one preach Christ of contention [eritheia], not sincerely, supposing to add affliction to my bonds:

But the other of love, knowing that I am set for the defence of the gospel.

Philippians 2:3-5:

Let nothing be done through strife [eritheia] or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves.

Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others.

Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus

If you want to see more references, click on this link to a reference site.

It all makes sense. What was the iniquity that got Lucifer expelled from heaven? Ambition. He wanted to compete with God, not because he thought God was wrong and wanted to save others from God, but because he wanted power and admiration.

Ambition is self-exaltation, and God hates self-exaltation. There are endless verses that show this. Here is one: “And whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted.”

To be ambitious is to keep yourself under a curse and make God himself fight you. If you’re a parent, it can destroy your descendants. My dad’s ambition helped destroy my sister, and it harmed me greatly.

Proper Christians don’t compete. They build each other up.

God has shown me how important it is to know your place and love it. I should be glad I get to submit to God. My wife should be glad wives have to submit to husbands. My son should be glad he has to submit to God and his parents.

There are people who have more than I do. Well, God bless them. They generally work hard, which I do not, and they provide all sorts of benefits. Inventions. Products. Helpful services. I wouldn’t trade places with Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos.

Much of the current strife in the world is based on ambition; the desire to elevate oneself above one’s proper place and take that which belongs rightly to others. The vicious people who set cities on fire and topple statues are motivated by ambition. They want what better people have, but they want to remain children and, at heart, murderers and criminals.

Ambition does great harm in the church. Ambitious Christians attack and take down Christians who want to do the right things and spread the truth. They amplify their own voices and smother the voices of better people.

The ambitious do the work of their father. They can wear robes and miters, and they can start big TV ministries and claim they brought millions of people to salvation, but they belong to Satan, and they do what he would do if he were in their shoes.

I’m very happy I had this dream. It means I’m doing better than I thought, and it will help me to avoid catastrophic decisions in the future. It will also help me protect my son from catastrophe when he is old enough to listen to me.

I hope this dream is about the rapture. I concern myself all the time with practical matters. How should I deal with wealth in order to make sure my wife and son always have more than enough? What should I do about various business affairs I loathe working on? What will I do about health insurance next year? Where can I find a good contractor to fix minor issues with the house? I hate this stuff. I would be great to be take out of this world with my brothers and sisters so I can let it all go, like the junk in the drawer in my dream.

I Better not See a Bro Stache on Him This Year

I expected my son to grow up gradually, but it seems like he changes in sudden jumps.

Maybe 6 weeks ago, we got him a push walker because he was standing and holding onto furniture. We thought a walker would help him learn to walk. A push walker is sort of like a lawnmower. Babies stand behind them. They don’t sit in them.

He started standing and grabbing it right away, but he could not figure out how to move it around. He kept pulling it backward onto himself. He banged his head on it. I put padding on it to keep him from getting bruised.

He wasn’t able to push it around, but it has a panel with a bunch of toys on it, and he loved using those.

Last night, I was lying in bed looking at my phone, and I heard a noise. I looked down, and I saw his funny little head smiling up at me from beside the bed. He had pushed the walker across the room and into the bed.

I was amazed. It happened very suddenly.

He pushed it all over the bedroom last night. He loves it. It’s very easy for him. He holds the top bar with one hand and takes off. He acts like he has been doing it for months.

He will be walking in a week or so. I am sure of it. He has tons of strength, and he can stand up and squat without support. I’ve only seen him stand unsupported once, and it was only for a few seconds, but he is changing fast. What he’s doing with the walker is very close to walking.

We had to buy him a bunch of toys because we realized he was bored. He was chewing on charging cables and playing with anything we left within his reach. We got him a little plastic table with toys in it, and we also got him a plastic fire truck and a little toy TV remote that plays songs and so on.

He loves all of this stuff. He has learned how to use the table toys, and he spends a lot of time playing with them. There may be one toy he’s not using; I’m not sure. He sucks on the remote and pushes the buttons. He takes the parts out of fire truck and throws them around.

Now he has moved to a new stage, so we have to figure out what else to get him. I don’t even know what babies play with, so I am researching.

I don’t believe giving kids things spoils them. I believe teaching them not to appreciate things spoils them. It’s important to give kids anything they can make good use of. Where would we be if the great pianists hadn’t had good pianos when they were little more than toddlers?

My dad made good money, but my parents deprived me in comparison to the kids who lived around us. My sister and I had toys, but not many. I actually received hand-me-down toys from my best friend. I should have been given music lessons and good instruments as soon as I could benefit from them. My dad should have bought me equipment and taken me hunting and fishing. He and my mother should have shown me how to use science and engineering toys. I should have been taught to use tools. We should have traveled to Europe and Israel instead of taking cheap trips to Kentucky over and over.

It’s sad that I was encouraged to write. My parents and my teachers let me down with that advice. As a hobby and a way to communicate with people you care about, writing is fine, but anyone who encourages his child to do it for a living is extremely foolish. I should have been helped along with STEM pursuits. I would have had a bunch of patents by the time I was 30.

Toys aren’t luxuries. For kids, play is work. It’s their job. It builds capable adults.

We should also get something better than a stroller to use for walks. I don’t know anything about babies, so strollers were the only things that occurred to me when we had to move him around. There must be other things, like wagons. I’m looking into it.

We like taking mile-long walks on our private road, so we need something that will work well for that.

This boy is in such a hurry. We need to enjoy him the way he is while we can.

Bad Ideas go to the Burn Pile

Oh, boy. I feel like a runaway slave.

I managed to bust out and get some things done. Jobs that have been weighing on me and making me feel trapped.

I have lost a bunch of oil seals lately. Utility cart rear axle. Excavator slew motor. Tractor front axle. Even my car is leaking around the oil sensor.

I finally took my tractor’s axle apart and replaced a seal and two bearings. I have been thirsting for the day when I could use the tractor again, and it has come.

I am moving more rocks out of my yard. I have some buried rocks and boulders that get in the way of the mower, and I also have–had–a big flowerbed surrounded by irregular native rocks placed there by the guy who built the house. In addition to all this, he and his wife dumped more native rocks in random places as decorations. He put a bunch of them in places where there should have been grass. I couldn’t mow over them, and they sheltered weeds.

Some people think there is nothing nicer than a bunch of crude rocks surrounding a flowerbed or a walk. I disagree. Pavers and curbs always, always look better. They do a better job of containing things. They make regular borders between things. It’s easy to get close to them while mowing without hitting them. It’s easy to clean them up with a weedeater.

An oval of irregular rocks in your yard says, “I am cheap and lacking in good taste and common sense.”

A natural rock formation can look nice, but decorating your yard with obvious landscaping debris is tacky and doesn’t fool anyone.

Putting these rocks around the flowerbed was extremely unwise. It looked bad, and it caused lots of problems. We have a neighbor who has flowerbeds with pavers, and his yard looks spectacular.

Today I put the bucket on the tractor and rammed it into the rocks surrounding the big flowerbed, dislodging them so I could move them. Some went right into the bucket. Most, I had to put there myself. There were a few big ones weighing up to, perhaps, 150 pounds. There were dozens of smaller ones ranging from maybe 100 pounds to the size of a golf ball.

The big ones, I rolled into the bucket. The smaller ones, I picked up and threw. In maybe 90 minutes, I must have moved over a ton. I wanted to do more, but it was getting dark.

I’m so grateful to God for my energy. I am too lazy to do serious exercise, but I had no problem yanking rocks out of the ground and getting them into the bucket. I worked fast. My heart rate was elevated. I was sweating. I didn’t die or anything. I felt great.

I have prayed for God to keep me going so I can be here on Earth for my wife and son. I got so used to envying Christians who died and left this place, I think I started to welcome death. I apologized to God and repented. I don’t like Earth, but I am eager to sacrifice in order to be with my loved ones and help them.

I won’t pretend my motivation is completely altruistic. I want to be with them. I would hate to find myself leaving them prematurely. I want to see him grow up, and I want him to know me.

I think God has graciously agreed to help me, in spite of my wickedness and selfishness.

I told my wife to keep my son away from me for a couple of minutes so I could drink something and get it together, but he just ran in, stood up beside my chair, and started clawing at my shirt while screaming with joy. Then he speed-crawled away. Now he’s back.

He seems to have the same kind of energy I have. God’s joy, I believe.

She came and got him. I have to get up and join him in playing with his toys in a minute.

I’m sure there are still rocks out there. I’ll have to take a pitchfork and sift through the dirt to get rid of the ones I missed. After that, I’ll be able to mow over the flowerbed every week to kill weeds and puree the dead leaves.

I have hit rocks by the flowerbed with mowers several times. The rock border was formed so irregularly, I could not guess where it ended.

My theory is that the original owner and his wife told their kids, “Take the rocks we’ve found in the yard and pile them up around those two oaks by the driveway! It will be a fun project!” Then the kids moved a couple of huge rocks there, realized they wanted to be doing something else, and started using smaller and smaller rocks and arranging them with a sloppiness that increased with time.

Then the wife planted a magnolia between the oaks, which were about 7 feet apart, leaving me no choice but to rip it out after I moved here.

My wife and I have decided to make this place our own and abandon all reverence for the original owners’ ideas. I used to give them deference, thinking they had to know things I didn’t know, but over time, I have realized they made lots of dumb decisions I need to undo.

I plan to leave the flowerbed alone so grass covers it. It’s in the shade, in a place where oak leaves fall and kill things. It would take a ton of work to keep it up and make anything grow.

They also left a huge, sick oak in the middle of the driveway island. I had to cut that and get rid of it after it snapped 30 feet up. Next to it, there was a dense shrub about three feet high, encircling a scraggly dwarf magnolia that looked like it had tuberculosis. You don’t plant a tree inside a shrub. Is this not obvious?

A few weeks back, I tore out the shrub and the magnolia. Of course, there were also two ugly rocks, which I removed. I am thinking of making a proper flowerbed there with pavers around it. I’ll fill it with mulch and put some kind of attractive low-maintenance tree in the middle. Maybe a peach tree or a crape myrtle. Around here, the crape myrtle is the go-to answer to poor soil and hostile bugs and weeds. It’s not the greatest tree, but it thrives, and it doesn’t need much care.

No one should ever buy a dwarf magnolia. They always look like the tree Charlie Brown brought to school for the Christmas play.

I also had a magnolia about 15 inches from my expensive brick front walk. That was not a smart choice. You never put a tree close to a house unless you like buying new roofs, siding, pavement, and ceilings.

I murdered that magnolia, too, and I’m also going to murder the two rows of boxwoods that line the walk. Boxwoods always look like they’re dying, and you shouldn’t use shrubs to wall a walk in and get in the way.

I have other boxwoods, and they will die soon. I also killed some kind of scraggly tree beside the workshop. It got in the way when I mowed, and it looked awful.

I bought a flail mower, and I finally assembled it. I have a couple of things left to do to make it work better. Then the boxwoods will meet its spinning blades and become sawdust.

This property will never make Architectural Digest, but I should be able to make it presentable and arrange things so taking care of it doesn’t break my back.

I killed the original owner’s wife’s roses a long time ago. Roses always look terrible unless they receive perfect care and pruning, and they were in a bad location. I’ve killed many of her plants.

She put hideous, enormous bromeliads near the front door. I paid a friends’ kids to do some weeding, and they tore them out because they didn’t know what they were doing. That’s fine by me, because I think bromeliads look sort of evil.

I had a very satisfying time with the tractor. I can’t wait to see this place looking better.

Cut Out the Middleman While You Still Can

I feel like I was put on this earth to tell people to pray in tongues.

The benefits are so great they are beyond understanding, and the price of refusing can include things like loss of salvation and eternal damnation.

One of the things I love about praying in tongues is that it brings revelation. When I find myself praying in tongues for a very long period, I get excited, because I know God is about to teach me things.

If God isn’t teaching you things, you are likely to slide into beliefs and practices that will cost you salvation and put you at the mercy of evil people and spirits.

Hosea said:

My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children.

Hosea lived in a time when most people had to rely on scripture and special people who heard from God in order to receive knowledge, but that isn’t true today. By allowing the crucifixion, Yeshua made it possible for every believer to be filled with the Holy Spirit and hear directly from God. See what he said in John 16:

Nevertheless I tell you the truth; It is expedient for you that I go away: for if I go not away, the Comforter will not come unto you; but if I depart, I will send him unto you.

John later informed us that the Holy Spirit, not men, was to be our teacher. Obviously, we have to hear from men to some degree, or most of us would never know anything about God. John was a man, and I am going to quote him. But men can’t be your primary source of knowledge, because they make mistakes and they also lie.

But the anointing which ye have received of him abideth in you, and ye need not that any man teach you: but as the same anointing teacheth you of all things, and is truth, and is no lie, and even as it hath taught you, ye shall abide in him.

And now, little children, abide in him; that, when he shall appear, we may have confidence, and not be ashamed before him at his coming.

This is interesting to me, because God told me that all authority comes from time spent with God, and all peace comes from authority.

Men who don’t hear the Holy Spirit hear every other spirit that shows up, and they repeat made-up doctrine that comes from those spirits. What can you say about these spirits? That they have no authority. If they contradict God, they contradict the highest authority.

To abide in God, as John tells us to do, we have to spend time with him. When you pray in tongues, you are spending time with God. As Paul says, when you speak in an unknown tongue, you speak to God, and he builds you up.

If you pray in tongues, you spend time with God. If you spend time with God, he teaches you from the position of complete authority. When you repeat what he tells you, you have authority and you are correct.

When you listen to men who don’t know God, you end up repeating unauthorized garbage that comes from demons. “Pray to dead people.” “The pope is infallible.” “Give money to me, and God will make you rich.” “You have to obey the dietary laws.” “God commands Christians to tithe.”

I have believed wrong doctrine propagated by preachers who listened to demons, but God has always shown me that they were wrong and helped me to escape the snares. I kept praying in tongues, and revelation came to me over time. As the word says, though I stumbled, I was not utterly cast down, because God upheld me with his hand.

The Holy Spirit was my compass. I was able to deviate from the course due to misinformation, but when I consulted the compass, I returned to the proper heading. When I got back on track, it wasn’t because I was smart. I was completely fooled before God corrected me. I thought Kenneth Copeland was a great preacher. I gave money to Robert Tilton.

I exchanged some emails with Robert Morris, because his teaching impressed me. How’s that for a confession? He has turned out to be a gigantic disappointment, not because he was sexually involved with a 12-year-old, although that’s not exactly inspiring, but because of the way he handled the consequences. He threatened the victim. He was even too greedy to pay her a modest amount of money, which is remarkable, considering his income.

He wrote, “My attorney advises that if I pay you any money under a threat of exposure, you could be criminally prosecuted and Debbie and I do not want that.”

Those are shameless lies. You can’t be prosecuted for extortion if the victim doesn’t press charges.

He is currently suing his church for millions. He wants over one million up front. Then he expects $800,000 per year until he hits 70, and after that, $600,000 per year as long as he or his wife lives. If he is suing for that kind of money, he was making similar money, or better, before the scandal broke.

That’s $4.8 million for the first 6 years, and assuming one spouse makes it to 84, $9 million more. Add the initial payout, and you get something like $15 million. He expects this from the church he built but also crippled.

The victim asked for $50,000, so what was that to the Morrises? Two weeks’ pay?

Was he ever the real thing, or did he steal his material from other people and make money from it? Does absolutely every charismatic preacher have to turn out to be a heartless, avaricious crook?

Ambition is the enemy of the Holy Spirit. It seems like every famous preacher is ambitious.

I don’t see him winning his case. The church claims there is a morality clause in his contract, and a jury is not likely to want to help him.

If I had sat around listening to men and never questioning them, I would be in big trouble today. I might be a Catholic. I might still be a prosperity Christian. I might be an atheist.

One of the sad things about my experience is that some of the worst preachers who taught me lies were baptized with the Holy Spirit and had the ability to pray in tongues. They just didn’t exercise it. They were trying to impress God. They were too busy for God! Can’t talk now, God! I have to build a bigger church! I have to go look at a jet!

They had time to network and copy sermons, but they didn’t have time to pray in tongues, be with the person who loves them more than anyone else ever will, and listen.

I have no doubt that you can be baptized with the Spirit, be given the ability to pray in tongues, and then go to hell. You can always go to hell if you want to, regardless of whether you accepted salvation in the past.

If God leads you to water, you better drink if you want to live. God has called the world “a dry and thirsty land where no water is.”

This morning I was praying in tongues, and I started thinking about the filthiness of my life and things I still needed to clean up. As long as you’re not like Yeshua, there is cleaning to be done.

I thought about all the sleazy, disgusting things I had done and said in the past. I think I would rather be flogged every day for a month than have the whole world watch my life on a screen.

Things are much, much better than they used to be. I used to be fatherless, so I acted like a fatherless kid, disgracing myself daily. Now I am improving. I disgrace myself less frequently.

I keep asking God to raise my wife and me all over again, and he is doing it. I’m not good, but at least I’m not what I was, and I will keep getting better.

I was given a great revelation yesterday. A long time ago, God told me all my problems were caused by lack of prayer. Yesterday, he showed me the other way of looking at it: all my problems can be solved by prayer. That’s a big motivator.

I had a revelation this morning, and here it is: if God won’t let me have something in heaven, why would I want to have it on Earth?

Example: if God won’t let me watch a movie in heaven, why would I show it in my living room?

An awful lot of things fit that description. I still have some movie DVD’s somewhere. I am going to dig them up and throw them away. I’m not sure I should dump The Ten Commandments, but I probably will. I will dump Casablanca, which is my favorite movie.

The entertainment industry was created to destroy me and my children, so why cooperate with it?

I should throw out some books. I’m not sure what I have left that could cause problems.

When I was young, I read books by fools like Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Ernest Hemingway, and Fritz Perls. Real excrement. Did me a lot of harm. Those people are all in hell. I loved Hunter Thompson. He’s in hell, too, and he has dragged a lot of intelligent people down with his wake. He was a monumental buffoon.

People think only children need to be protected from bad influences. If that’s true, why are adults joining Antifa and trying to hurt the police? Why are there conservative Christian adults who don’t support Israel and who think Jews cause all the world’s problems?

It’s not true at all. If adults weren’t impressionable, there would be no advertising industry and no campaign consultants.

If I had started praying in tongues at 5, I would not have been damaged by filthy books and entertainment or by bad preachers. There was no one to teach me, however. They were too busy telling us to worship the pope or whatever.

My own mother, who was not Catholic, taught me to pray to Saint Anthony when I needed help finding things, and I did it. I hope Saint Anthony was saved, but I know he can’t hear anyone’s prayers.

If people had paid any attention to the Holy Spirit throughout history, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel wouldn’t be covered with paintings of naked people. If you think about it, it’s insane that anyone ever thought that was a good idea.

Imagine going to Yeshua today and saying, “We’re building a new sanctuary for you, and we’re planning on covering the ceiling with paintings of naked people.”

How do you think that would go over with him?

I wonder how many Catholics enjoyed that ceiling for the wrong reasons back in the days before pornography. I wonder how many sodomites enjoyed the paintings of men. People who remained in perversion because their church didn’t know how to deliver them. Like a huge percentage of current priests and cardinals.

If you like naked art in churches, enjoy it now, because God will eventually destroy it.

I believe God would now tell you this: “As you turn away from earthly culture, turn to me.” Don’t just give things up. Pick up better things.

I hope this is helpful and that you use it successfully to avoid my mistakes.

Local Smith Prices Herself Out of Business

I am wiped out from installing a new dishwasher. It should have been pretty fast, but like most quick, easy jobs, it had complications.

I bought a Bosch dishwasher to replace a Bosch dishwasher in the same series, and of course, Bosch changed the inlet fitting and did not include a threaded elbow to connect to it. I went to the local Ace, and unfortunately, the person who helped me was a friendly and earnest young man who hasn’t learned everything about the hardware business yet.

We could not find the elbow, which was confusing to me because I knew it had to be a common part. Bosch equals Thermador equals Whirlpool and so on these days. He sent me home with a couple of parts to screw together as a substitute, and I had to locate the correct part on the web, go back to Ace, and show them the SKU.

I did an excellent job of installing it because a) I am capable of doing simple things well, and b) I actually care about the quality of my work, which may not have been the case with the guys Lowe’s wanted to send for $217.

I may want to adjust the dishwasher’s position in the sagittal plane by 3/32″ or so, but that can wait.

If you need a dishwasher right now, jump on one of these Bosches while they’re on sale.

I’m still waiting for something else I ordered. You will never guess. Yes, it’s a rifle.

Four or 5 years back, I bought a Thompson Center Venture bolt action rifle in .204 Ruger. I thought I was going to shoot a lot of varmints. So far, that has not been the case. I also hoped to use it for target shooting to improve my shooting without spending money on pricier ammo.

Until just now, I thought it was a Venture Predator, but it turns out it’s just a Venture. I believe “Predator” means “with a green plastic stock.”

We live in amazing times. Fifty years ago, which was the 1970’s, believe it or not old people, a rifle that shot maybe 5 minutes of angle (about 5.25″ at 100 yards) was considered very accurate. Now, any bolt rifle that doesn’t shoot 1.5 MOA is considered lame, and you can walk into any sporting goods store and choose from a selection of 1-MOA rifles.

I chose the Thompson Center partly because it came with a 1-MOA guarantee. Three shots at 100 yards. Based on photos of targets I shot back then with cheap Fiocchi ammo, it looks like the gun came through, although I also shot some bad groups. That guarantee was pretty clever, because any gun will eventually shoot one three-shot 1-MOA group if you keep trying.

I wasn’t ecstatic about the trigger, so I looked for options, and there were none. Sadly, TC was not doing well, and its guns were not all that popular. In fact, it was going out of business, even though it belonged to Smith & Wesson. I don’t recall how that worked.

TC has been bought by the guy who sold it to S&W, but I don’t think they’ve actually made any new guns. Will they ever start? Who knows?

If you buy a popular gun like a Remington or Tikka, you will be able to find a lot of aftermarket triggers for it. I suppose no trigger maker thought it was a good idea to spend time and money on a trigger for an unpopular gun, however.

I put a lighter spring on it, and that was about all I could do.

Flash forward to a year or two ago. Suddenly I had a silencer. I wanted to get back to shooting. But two bolt guns I wanted to shoot did not have threaded barrels: the TC and a Tikka T3x.

By the way, the Tikka IS a 1-MOA gun, with factory ammo and no excuses. I managed to shoot a few rounds to zero it. It seems like it always rained when I started shooting for accuracy, so I have had a lot of sessions cut short. Anyway, even the zeroing shots, made while I was turning scope screws, looked very good.

I’ll post photo of a target I shot with “garbage” Sellier & Bellot ammo. This is a modestly-priced deer rifle on a modestly-priced bipod, shooting cheap ammunition. I shot these rounds while still adjusting the scope. There is one flyer which was probably caused by me shooting one round and then cranking the screws, and then there are at least 6 rounds that are 1 MOA or extremely close to it.

Checking my blog history, I see that I went indoors because I wanted to see if the scope was loose, not because of rain. When I shot another target with different ammo, the point of impact changed in a way that didn’t make sense to me. And target above was shot at both 50 and 100 yards. I shot one round at 50. It was very low. I adjusted the scope and shot two rounds into the same hole. Then I backed up to 100 and shot pretty much into the same POI. I was confused, because the 50-yard POI was essentially the same as the 100-yard POI. I didn’t understand how flat the gun shot at these distances.

That S&B FMJ 6.5 Creedmoor is nothing to sneeze at, at least at 100 yards. I bought a ton of it. It shoots great in the Tikka and also in my RPR.

If the domestic enemies of Christ finally started their war and I somehow found myself in a situation where I had no choice but to go out with the militia nuts and fend off guerrilla murder squads in floral print dresses, I would be able to do what was necessary over and over while they were too far away to see me without binoculars.

I think I paid $16.00 per box when I bought them one at a time, and I didn’t buy most of mine one at a time.

Of course, I have zero interest in participating in a civil war. If it weren’t for my family, I think I would prefer being among the early casualties than staying here and treating demonized jerks like paper targets. The word says David was a bloody man. I have no desire to follow suit. I would rather be a man of love.

So anyway, I had the Tikka and the TC, and they were not threaded.

I looked into having them threaded. In spite of living in a huge 2A area, I could not find anyone close to me who would do it, and I really did not want to do it myself. Most machining is easy, but barrels are not made to fit in the usual lathe tooling, and they are hard to remove from actions. Also, it’s easy to mar them up, and aligning them in lathes so the bullets won’t hit the silencers later is more complex than you would think.

I found someone in the next county, and she wanted $195-$275, which is insane. I paid $450 for the TC.

I let it go, but recently I learned something that changed the picture. Silencer Central now offers mail-in threading for $165, including muzzle protectors. The price is lower if you ship two barrels at once. The shipping is about $40 whether you send one or two.

Great. I am sold. It’s fantastic news. I’m sending the Tikka in, because even though it is not a high-priced rifle, it is 100% worth it. But the Thompson Center?

I can’t get a trigger for it. I don’t know if I’ll ever get fun-level accuracy out of it. Thompson Center has been bought and reanimated, but there is no guarantee they will provide warranty service or that they’ll exist next year.

It looks like a quagmire to me.

I figure I can sell it for $350, so that’s $350 I can put toward something else. That something else is a Ruger American Predator in the same caliber. I want the same caliber because I have a boatload of ammunition, and I still think the .204 Ruger has potential.

It has a light, fluted barrel. The metal bits are Cerakoted. It’s threaded. It has a pretty good trigger out of the box. There are lots of aftermarket parts for it, including Timney triggers. It will probably shoot 1 MOA the day I bring it home. Lots of guys are getting that kind of performance in other calibers.

I’m sold. I don’t need any more hassle.

I’m getting the rifle plus a Timney. I’ll take the scope off my TC and put it on the Ruger. Done deal.

Now I have to ask: is it really necessary for two different companies to put “Predator” in the names of their guns? It sounds kind of silly. AMERICAN HE-MAN HAIRY-CHESTED CARNIVORE PREDATOR!

Yes, I am a predator. I have killed more fish than red tide, and I have managed to make a tiny dent in the hunting realm by murdering squirrels. And I eat hamburgers. But come on. You can call the gun something a little less steroidy-sounding, and I will still buy it. I mean, I did.

It bugs me that people call the Tikka, the Ruger, and the TC budget guns. Why do they do that? I guess you get more refinement in guns costing two or three times as much, and you get walnut instead of plastic, but I feel like any quality gun should be respected. If a gun can hit rats repeatedly at 100 yards, it is durable, and it is pleasant to shoot, calling it a budget gun sounds a little snobby.

I think the Tikka ran me $950 or so. Budget? Really?

The TC may not be long for my armory, but it seems very well made to me. All the machining is neat and tidy. It’s actually pretty tight because of the tolerances.

I don’t know if I’ll stick with .204 Ruger. It’s kind of a novelty round. I like it because it’s modern, with modern ballistics something like .223 can’t match, but on the other hand, .223 is more powerful, and it can hit anything I am likely to shoot at. It’s just as accurate, even if it doesn’t shoot as flat. I could blow through my .204 ammo and then rebarrel.

I have another .204 rifle besides the TC, so putting a .223 barrel on the TC would not deprive me of the ability to shoot .204 well even if I sold the TC.

Maybe I shouldn’t have bought the new rifle. It just bugged me that the TC had so many issues.

It should be here soon. I hope I actually use it.