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.

For Want of a Fob, the Explorer was Lost

It is remarkable how man loves to use technology to make life harder and more irritating.

I have a Ford. It has stupid electronic key fobs instead of brass keys. I wrote about it a few days back. One of my fobs was disintegrating, and I thought I had found a good solution to the problem. It turns out I was overly optimistic, so I am revisiting the issue.

What are the benefits of an electronic key fob?

1. You can operate your door locks with it. Brass keys do this as well, cars come with interior lock switches, and brass keys don’t fail due to battery problems.

2. You can start your car with it, if you have a fancy fob. Brass keys do this as well, and again, they do not fail. Yes, you can start your car remotely when it’s cold and get in when the heat has warmed it up, but then how sorry and useless do you have to be for that to matter to you? Is it really that hard to walk out to the car, start it, and go back inside?

3. You can make your horn honk when you’re in the parking lot at Walmart and you can’t find your car. Okay; score one for technology.

What are the problems with fobs?

1. They can cost up to $300 each. Each. And that’s not all. You may have to go sit in a dealer’s waiting room while they program your fobs.

2. They don’t last. Step on one or drop it just the right way, and you’re out a day’s pay. A brass key will work for a millennium.

3. As noted above, the batteries die.

4. Illiterate punks with gadgets from Ebay can clone your fob from across a parking lot, and then they can steal your car while you’re shopping. You, on the other hand, probably can’t program your own fob. Car makers work to make it impossible because, hey, $300 fob, which costs them $10.

5. When fobs that fit your car are no longer available anywhere, you will still be able to go to Lowe’s and get all the $1.50 keys you want for your 1975 Maverick.

My car is 10 years old. It has two of the fanciest 2016 Ford fobs. One of them slowly fell apart, and it finally refused to close. I decided to fix this. Being me, I thought there had to be a way to avoid the dealer.

I used AI. I watched videos. I did my homework. I was told I could buy a Chinese fob clone and program it myself, using some functions built into the car. I also read that I could buy a new shell for my busted fob so I could put the OEM guts in it.

I also read that in order to program a new fob, I needed two working fobs. Why? Because Ford is a jerk.

They don’t tell people this when they buy cars because they hope you’ll lose fobs and end up paying more.

I came up with a genius plan. Buy a Chinese fob. Clone my old broken fob to it. Make another clone for my wife. Put my old fob in a new shell. Put both OEM fobs in a safe place. Continue using Chinese fobs and replace as needed. Boom.

I ordered three items from Amazon for very low prices, and I felt pretty smug.

When the items arrived, reality hit me across the face like a cold, wet fish.

1. It was not possible to clone the fobs using my car. The year my car was made, they disabled the cloning feature for the particular type of fob I have. Other people with lesser fobs can still clone. Great.

2. The Chinese shell was impossible to assemble. The company that made it shipped it disassembled, and when I tried to put it together, I found out why. I think all the people who reviewed it positively were in China in review farms or they were the voices of the AI matrix.

3. Two of the fobs I ordered could not be made to work because they were not actually fobs. They were empty shells. Okay, technically I guess you could say that was my fault for ordering the wrong thing without paying attention.

I kept researching, and I learned some stuff.

It is (allegedly) possible to clone fobs like mine at home. You have to buy a cheap device that connects your ODB to a PC or phone via Bluetooth. You also have to buy an $11 program called Forscan. You hook up your car to your PC, crank up the program, and clone away. You can also change certain other functions of your car.

I bought the program. I ordered the gadget from Amazon. I’m sending the shells back and getting Chinese fobs complete with guts. I don’t know if I can do anything to fix the structural issues with my old fob, but I did put a thick rubber band around it to keep it together.

In a couple of days, unless I have been brutally deceived again, I will have two OEM fobs and two working Chinese fobs. Total cost about $105. Sounds expensive, and it is, but compare it to using a dealer or locksmith. And the ODB thing could come in handy later.

I would absolutely love to have a new car with brass keys and zero fobs. Keys are objectively superior, and I can say with equal certainty that the fob movement was a very bad idea that should be abolished. It’s like motorized mirrors and hatches. You just don’t need it, and the problems it causes when things go wrong, which they usually do, are horrifyingly expensive and bothersome.

Ford is an astonishing company. It is hard to understand how a company this stupid could continue to turn a profit. My car has design issues a monkey would have fixed prior to production, and cars with similar problems keep coming off the line, year after year, uncorrected. Ford is right up there with Nissan and the city of Los Angeles when it comes to incompetent management.

Somebody out there needs to start converting cars back to brass keys. He would make a fortune.

Would Yeshua Dance to Her Music?

So supposedly, Nicki Minaj is Christianity’s new ambassador to the world, and the Christian Broadcasting Network is her new ride or die b____.

Sorry for the choice of implied words, but it serves to illustrate how insane this story is.

Nicki Minaj is a very whorish woman. She performs sexually explicit “songs” about fornication.

Let’s take a look at some of her lyrics.

Yeah, high heels on my tippies
Dolce and Gabbana, that’s on my t__ties
Cop me Vetements when I ride the d__kie
I still got the juice, b__ch, buy a sippie

More:

I got a call, told him, “Meet me in the backstreets”
Got out the Jeep just to f___ him in the backseat
I’m not impressed, I said, “Yo, the D mad weak”
Hit my niggas up, I got him robbed and that ass beat

More:

This dude named Michael used to ride motorcycles
It’s bigger than a tower, I ain’t talking about Eiffel’s
Real country Anaconda, let me play with his rifle
P-P-Put his butt to sleep, now he calling me NyQuil

“Yo, the D mad weak” means her companion’s work with his member is unsatisfactory.

Is fornication still wrong? A lot of Christians seem to think not. In the Bible, God equated it with abomination, and he hasn’t published a retraction, so who is right?

“But now she’s a Christian! She has changed, and you shouldn’t judge her!”

Oh, really? Find me a story that says she has repented of producing whorish entertainment. Show me where she has told girls and women to stop listening to her music and to quit fornicating and acting like whores. It must be out there, right?

No, it mustn’t. She still performs her filth, and she has not told anyone else to quit supporting her act.

What makes you a Christian? Calling yourself a Christian? People who called themselves Christians murdered American Indians and claimed the Pope had said they had to convert or face war, slavery, and the confiscation of their land.

Jim Jones was a preacher.

Try again.

Does raising your hand in church and answering an altar call make you a Christian? Does it bring you eternal salvation? Megan Fox went past these things, received the baptism with the Holy Spirit, and prayed in tongues. Now she is emasculating her three sons, who wear dresses and claim they’re girls. Is she a Christian? Do you think she will be saved if she dies before she repents?

Miley Cyrus used to be a church girl.

In 2 Peter 2, God makes it clear that you can lose your salvation and be worse off than if you had never had it.

Why are ignorant Christians suddenly praising a notorious slut?

Christians are persecuted, as we all know. Here in the US, Christians who don’t know the Holy Spirit persecute those who do, stifling their voices and driving them away from churches. In Muslim countries, even nominal Christians who don’t actually know God are persecuted. Churches are burned. People are murdered.

Nicki Minaj, though unchanged, has started calling herself “God’s anointed,” and she has been speaking up for persecuted Christians in Nigeria. She just spoke at the UN.

A millennial hipster with the obligatory beard and a hyphenated last name just put up a video for CBN, expressing approval. No mention of the horrible damage Minaj has done to women, millions of whom have surely gone to hell under her continuing influence.

In the comments, people who think they are Christians are saying things like, “I support Nicki Minaj!” They’re saying they’re fans now. FANS.

It’s the “don’t judge” cult, once again. The adherents of the two-word Bible. Never criticize anyone. Never name names. Hang out with sinners no matter what they do, because Yeshua hung out with sinners.

It’s idiocy. It comes from trying to make Yeshua popular by denying his essence and undoing his work.

Yeshua will never be popular during this age. He has never been popular. People need to get this through their heads. He said the world would hate people who belonged to him.

I’m so sicky of sleazy rappers claiming to be God’s chosen. It makes me want to throw up. Kids who don’t know Moses from Herod swallow it hook, line, and sinker, because it allows them to keep sinning up a storm while virtue-signaling and impressing each other.

People think Minaj should be supported because she is helping Christians. Is she really?

A whorish woman made a speech at the UN. Is that going to fix the problem? Really? You believe that?

It gained her public approval and built up her already-immense arrogance. It helped her make more money. It had no legal force, however, and it’s not going to fix anything in Nigeria.

If we want to help Nigerian Christians, we should be praying for them and exposing the filthy prosperity preachers who enslave them and keep them damned, poor, and weak. We should be praying for the destruction of Islam. What is more powerful and righteous? The prayers of tens of millions who actually know God, or the self-serving capering and prancing of a famous trollop?

There are millions of people who think everything they see on CBN is right. Now CBN is telling them to go ahead and be whores as long as they say they support Christians, and they are lapping it up.

She spoke as God’s representative at the UN, and now she’s back at work, selling songs about penises. Do you really think that works? Are you completely deranged?

If you think this woman is acceptable as a Christian leader, you are falling for a very old trick. Satan has a long history of promoting whorish women by tying them to good causes.

Consider Josephine Baker. A straight-out whore. Danced naked for Parisians. She was a spy for the Resistance, too. She risked her life to fight the Nazis.

Then there is Marlene Dietrich. She was a complete slut. One of the worst. Broke up marriages. Had sex with both men and women. Kept John Wayne busy while he was married and may have been the reason he was a draft-dodger. She was also famous for a long list of charitable works.

There are others you probably know of.

We’re supposed to look at people like this and say, “Well, Yeshua will ignore their sins because of all the good they did.” But salvation is conditioned on repentance, not good deeds. No body of good deeds can save someone who won’t repent.

When he wants to, Satan appears as an angel of light. He teaches his children the same trick.

Yes, Yeshua spent time with sinners. To get them to CHANGE. He didn’t dance for their approval and abandon all virtue and dignity. He didn’t go into bars so he could play beer pong and nail pelts. He went to pull people out, and when they wouldn’t listen, he left.

Try and picture him sitting in the front row of a Minaj concert, with a big smile on my face. I dare you to claim you think that is possible.

Yeshua criticized self-righteousness. We criticize actual righteousness and promote evil. People can’t tell the difference between self-righteousness and righteousness because they don’t speak in tongues and listen to the Holy Spirit. You could literally tell them to worship a chicken, and eventually, they would do it, and if you kept at it, you could get them to murder people who denied the chicken’s divinity.

Look at Revelation 2. Yeshua criticized the church at Ephesus, which was, like all the Revelation churches, a small group that met in houses and rented rooms. Not popular.

He told them they had forgotten the basics of Christianity, and he said that if they didn’t repent he would remove their lampstand from its place.

The lampstand is the Holy Spirit, who gives illumination; revelation. Nearly all churches have had their lampstands removed, and that’s why we grope in the dark and think Nicki Minaj is a virtuous Christian woman.

The church in Ephesus lost its lampstand. How do I know? The church became corrupt and vanished. Modern Ephesians are Muslims, and their country, the ancient epicenter of Christianity, is against Israel and the Jews. The sincere, unpopular church was replaced by a sick, enormous, state-sponsored church, and eventually, the Muslims took over.

If the ancient churches hadn’t lost their lampstands, Christianity would not have failed globally, which it indisputably has.

The church is a failure in America, and as a result, we see CBN promoting a tramp. The lampstand is gone. If you want your own lampstand, you can have it. You can get close to the Holy Spirit in your own right, but don’t expect to find a really sound church of any size.

Just to inform people: no, it is not okay to pal around with people who are not Christians and who sin constantly, and that includes people who claim to be Christians. It is not okay to continue in your Satanic lifestyle after you ask for salvation. It is not okay to hold onto the Satanic culture of this world. These things are harmful to you, and they can cost you salvation in addition to bringing many curses on you here in this world.

You are not acting as a missionary by continuing to stick with people who won’t listen. They are the missionaries, and they are missionaries for Satan. You are the potential proselyte. You are making excuses because you want to keep sinning, and you don’t want to be unpopular, and you’re claiming to serve God by doing wrong.

Nicki Minaj is not helping Christians. She is not a Christian herself. Christians need to wake up and renounce the insanity of embracing her.

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.

Inching Upward Toward Mediocrity

Some new gadgetry arrived today, so I made some effort to shoot some more macro shots.

I was interested in focus stacking and focus bracketing. I should cover these things first.

Macro teachers on the web bamboozled me into thinking all I needed were a camera, a diffuser, and some patience. Not really true. You can get plenty of good pictures without a ton of equipment, but there are things you just will not be able to do, and the smaller you go, the more obvious this is.

With the lens I’m using on my APS-C Sony, the depth of field is something like 1 mm. That is small. It means that if I’m shooting a flower that measures an inch in my sagittal plane, I’m only getting about 1/25 of it, in terms of depth, in focus. That is no good.

A lot of people take shots that focus on one part of a small subject and give up on the rest, or they settle for low magnification. That’s okay, but sometimes you want to see more.

The way to get more depth of field, assuming you can’t back up enough to get it naturally, is to combine images using a computer. This is focus stacking. You take multiple images, changing the in-focus plane in steps. Then the computer discards the fuzzy stuff and puts the rest together in one sharp image.

How do you get all those images?

First of all, you have to use a tripod. Forget doing it the old-fashioned way. You will move around and get shots that are not the same.

Second, you can forget changing the focus between shots manually. It’s just too hard.

I thought in-camera focus bracketing might be the way to go. It looked that way when I read about it. It doesn’t work.

When you make your camera do focus bracketing, you push the button, and your camera shoots more than one shot, changing the focus between shots. The problem with this is that if you’re doing macro, not just “taking pictures of small things,” the camera will not change focus in small enough increments.

It turns out you need to move the camera, using a device that has a micrometer screw. That device is called a focusing rail. You mount it on your tripod, you line up your shot, and then you take numerous shots, leaving the focus alone. This moves the focused plane along your subject, giving you the desired material for focus stacking.

I got a pretty good tripod, and it arrived today. I got a geared head for it because geared heads hold stuff more reliably and allow for easy tilt adjustments around several axes. I found out how to make my A7IV do focus bracketing, and then I took pictures. I merged them in software, and the results are about what you would expect if I just held the camera and hoped for the best. Bad.

It isn’t going to work. I’m not going to fool with it. I’m getting a rail.

The tripod is excellent. I’m not saying it’s a great tripod, because it seems like any piece of equipment that qualifies to be called “great” by real photographers had to be made of spun platinum and cost over $50,000. I believe it’s excellent for my plans, given what I am willing to spend.

It’s a Vanguard Pro 2+, or something like that. Carbon fiber for weight reduction.

It holds a lot of weight, and you can move the legs and the central column in ways that will put your camera just about anywhere, solidly.

Using the tripod for the shot above was heaven on Earth. So much less aggravation than an Amazon Basics.

If you want to photograph a mushroom on the ground from 8 inches away, this tripod will hold your camera right where it needs to be. That’s pretty neat.

I got a geared head for it, and that’s also fun, but I think I could have lived with a regular ball head, which has a ball-and-socket joint you tighten with a screw.

I think I blew around $350. It’s not a childish splurge. It’s me, being a grown-up about photography. You can’t nickel-and-dime everything. You can’t buy a nice camera and nice lenses and then cheap out on everything else.

My $20-$25 tripods are amazing for what they cost, but you can’t put a real camera and a real lens on one and expect things to go smoothly. The weight is just too much. They’re wonderful for things like smartphones and Gopros.

I am getting a mid-range focusing rail, and with that done, I should be in good shape to do some photography. I am eager to see the results. The rail goes on top of the geared head, under the camera.

Pushing the button to take a shot is nerve-wracking, because it takes a lot of force and moves the camera. I’m going to be using remotes instead. I would stay away from Canon and Sony remotes. For one thing, they are back in the Stone Age when it comes to batteries. They use coin batteries that are a pain to replace, and my OEM Canon remote actually has a tiny Phillips screw you have to remove. Insane. I got rechargeable remotes from a company called Aodelan. I also have a tiny Smallrig tripod that has a rechargeable Sony-compatible remote in the handle.

I’m not using a phone app to pop the shutter because NOT EVERYTHING IN LIFE SHOULD BE DONE THROUGH A SMARTPHONE. Man, I wish millennials would understand this. I’ll bet I have over 100 apps, and in a sane world, maybe 35 of them would not exist. The 21st-century obsession with forcing people to do everything on phones is incredibly stupid. A 50-year-old who can use a desktop is almost godlike compared to a millennial who can’t.

I’ll bet there are kids out there writing term papers with their thumbs.

Well. That’s not true. They tell ChatGPT to do it, and they go on their illiterate, merry ways. Oh well; 6-7, right?

I guess I’ll want a real diffuser eventually. The fabric job I have is not very good. The diffusing part is white fabric, and the flash shines through it. This would be fine if there was any distance between the flash and the fabric, but it’s very close to it, so I think I’m probably getting a very localized light source. I think it’s a lot like wrapping your underwear around the flash. The light isn’t direct, but I don’t think it is spread out effectively. Could be wrong.

Diffusers are cheap, so no worries there.

Looking back, it’s a wonder I ever got any nice shots of small things.

My conclusions are always subject to change, because I am learning as I do, and I knew almost nothing to start with. I think I’m right about focus bracketing, but who knows what knowledge tomorrow may bring?

Suddenly Semi-competent

I am getting better at macro photography.

I should say that I have learned that the term “macro” is used very loosely. In the most rigid sense, a macro photograph is one in which the subject’s projection on the sensor is at least actual size, but people use the word “macro” to describe photographing just about any small object up close, so I will use it that way, too.

I was not happy with my focus or depth of field with the new camera and lens. I have a real tripod on the way, and that will help. My TEMU-grade tripods are not up to the challenge.

Another thing that helps: backing up. The farther you get from your subject, the greater the depth of field is. Unfortunately, it’s an exponential change, so I don’t expect to be able to predict it while moving the camera. Today I tried to double my distance from the subjects, and I guessed at the distance by looking at the size of the subjects on the monitor.

I also changed the focus peaking settings. Focus peaking is the camera feature that makes things light up on a monitor screen when they are in focus. I have been using the high setting, because, hey, high has to be better than low. But it doesn’t. Google AI told me accuracy increases as you turn it down. I couldn’t really see the focus peaking on the low setting, so I tried the middle setting, and my focus improved.

A lot of people say not to use high f-stops because of diffraction, which will make things look fuzzy. On the other hand, it increases depth of field, or “DOF,” as we pro photogs call it. A French lady who teaches macro says to go high and not worry about it, so I did that today, shooting at f16. The results were not exactly crisp, but they were better than previous efforts. Maybe going down one or two stops is the answer.

Anyway, I’ll post a photo.

It is not going to win any sharpness contests, but on the other hand, photography isn’t all about sharpness. This isn’t science. I’m not a satellite shooting tiny features on the surface of Pluto so the human race can get the most information possible. It’s just supposed to be pleasant to look at.

To me, this is good enough to be considered a successful photo. The bigger version is sharper. I can’t post giant images here. I’ll post a piece of this photo for comparison.

That ought to be good enough for government work. I wouldn’t be embarrassed to have that hanging on my wall.

I have learned that some cameras do something called “focus bracketing.” You focus and shoot, and your camera takes several shots while changing the focus slightly. This is very useful for macro photography with a low depth of field. It gives you a number of images suitable for combining with software so more of the subject is in focus.

Guess which Sony camera doesn’t have this feature? The one I just bought. DOH!

My bigger Sony does have it, however.

I don’t think it’s that important. I’m using a manual-focus lens, so I couldn’t do it with this lens anyway. A lot of people get great results with this lens.

Things keep improving. I’m learning more about real photography where the dial is not set to “AUTO” all the time. I’m really enjoying the editing. I don’t know why it’s so relaxing.

I think I should be able to produce some pretty good stuff before the month is out.

A Lot of Money, That Is

The macro photography journey continues.

I got me a Laowa lens that was supposed to be fantastic for macro, and I also got real and bought a Sony a6400. I need to quit dividing my time between the Sonyverse and the Canonverse, and it seems pretty clear the Sonyverse is better. I don’t want to have to speak the languages of two manufacturers, because I don’t shoot often enough to keep my memory refreshed. I also got an a6400 because it was time to admit I needed a Sony APS-C camera for travel. I am probably never going to lug the A7IV around the world with its heavy lenses.

Yesterday, I tried shooting a tiny fly on a leaf, and it was frustrating. A Youtube guy said to use focus peaking, which is a weird feature through which cameras guess which parts of an image are in focus and paint them with bright colors in your display. The bug and the leaf lit up, and I thought everything was in focus, but in truth, very little was.

I have been told to use a tripod and try focus stacking. A tripod makes focusing easier. Focus stacking means taking several photos focused at different distances and using computer trickery to merge them into one image that has more stuff in focus than any single source image.

My best tripods cost about $20 and $25, and I got them in about 2004 and 2020
It is not ready for this kind of work. The camera, lens, and flash are light, but the tripod can’t handle the weight. It allows the camera to droop gradually toward the ground. I managed to get some shots, but this tripod has to go.

The tripod was inadequate, but it made focusing a lot easier. I got all sorts of color from the focus peaking. Then I looked at the images, and the depth of field was still no good. I got some gorgeous shots, but the focus was subpar.

I have to get a real tripod. K&F Concepts makes a cheap one that seems to work for some reviewers, and Vanguard makes a more expensive one that appears to be a more solid choice.

I have free Affinity editing software, and I checked to see if it does focus stacking. It does. So now I have to take some appropriate photos and try it out. It is conceivable I could do it with the $25 tripod, but I don’t know yet.

I don’t know if Affinity is good at focus stacking, but if it isn’t, finding something else won’t be hard.

The tripod I used today sometimes held steady long enough for me to fool with camera and flash settings, so I was able to get some okay exposures. That was a big step forward. I have watched tutorials about the flash, but I forget things, so I will have to watch again. It seems to have a mind of its own.

I am getting truly beautiful photos, even if they are seriously flawed, and I’m very gung-ho about macro. I think I’m less than a week away from a few photos that will make me very, very happy.

I’m also going to shoot other stuff. I am used to using a phone or shooting in aperture mode, so my understanding of what really works when I go manual is not what it should be. I have been trying to get good shots of my son before he is so old he gets mad at me and drives home.

Doing all this makes me appreciate phones more. I don’t know who designed my phone so it does such a good job making me look like a great photographer, but he must be a genius.

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.

I Never Did Mind About the Little Things

I am fooling with macro photography today.

I am starting to think the Canon 200D is not all that great for macro. It lacks focus peaking, and you can’t set the temperature manually without a lot of grief. Even then, you’re guessing. Maybe I’m wrong, though.

Today I decided to use the Sony A7IV I rarely take out of the closet. Maybe I was stupid to spend so much. I really thought I would be using it all the time for baby photos, but the phone has turned out to be more than adequate, and it’s always handy. I don’t have to take it out of a bag and re-read a manual.

I used a Sigma 105mm F2.8 DG DN Macro Art lens. This is a pretty decent lens, so I had high hopes.

Setting up the camera turned out to be a royal pain. At first, the monitor was dark all the time. I found out there was a setting that forced the monitor to show me what it thought the photos would be like, and because I was using flash, it showed me darkness. The camera didn’t know I had a flash attached, which is weird, considering all the other things it knows.

It also has a maddening feature that magnifies things drastically when you try to focus manually. One second, you’re looking at a flower you want to shoot, and the next, the flower is IN YOUR FACE SO FAR YOU CAN SEE THE INSIDE OF THE ROOTS. You lose the shot every time. I had to fix that.

The exposure was too low. The ISO was too low. I finally got the camera to work well enough to produce images, however. They are not spectacular. I think they are underexposed. But the focus is much better than yesterday, with greater depth of field. I kept the f-stop pretty high.

I’ll post a couple of shots. The flower is under an inch across, and the bolt head is around 5/8″ in diameter.

The detail is not great. I don’t know if that’s because the ambient light was low. I would have assumed using a flash from a few inches away would make ambient light irrelevant, but maybe it doesn’t. The sun was fading when I shot these photos.

I left the flower photo somewhat dark. I don’t think every photo has to be bright. Given the exposure, I don’t think it would have been possible to brighten it up much without making it look weird.

I think I’ll get on top of this soon. It should be a very rewarding experience.

Mankind Fails Again

What a week. An antisemitic Muslim socialist who awaits the 12th Imam, who he thinks will turn the world Muslim and make the rest of us dhimmis, is now the mayor of New York, a city so heavily identified with Jews that Jesse Jackson calls it “Hymietown.” A nut who said he wanted to put two bullets in the head of his GOP opponent and said his small children should also be killed is now the Attorney General of Virginia.

Here’s something I haven’t seen anyone talking about: if Republicans and Jews had voted for Andrew Cuomo, Zohran Mamdani would have lost. Hmm.

About 100,000 Jews voted for a man who is on the side of those who want to put an end to the Jewish state; their only lifeboat. The worst enemies of the Jewish people have always been Jewish, just as Christians have always been the most effective enemies of Yeshua.

As for conservatives, I think it’s fair to say we are seeing a powerful wave of antisemitism on the right. As a Babylon Bee sketch character said concerning the left, hating Jews is cool now. That is literally true in the mainstream left, and it is becoming true on the right.

It’s a shame Americans are so young. If the average age were 60, more of us would remember a more-normal, less-insane America, so we have the background to understand how deranged the populace has become.

The average age of a US citizen is 39. That is pretty young, in a world where a person who isn’t a total health idiot can expect to live to be over 80. A person who is 39 now was only 21 when the first Iphone was released and people started seeing the world through their phones and engaging with it with their thumbs.

About a third of us are 25 or under. They are generally like loaves of bread that haven’t been baked long enough. They have no idea how to look for the truth. Their morals are appalling. They get their news from random nuts on social media sites and also from the withering MSM, which is very dishonest and hostile concerning Christians, Jews, Israel, conservatives, men, and America itself.

The kids have no idea what a normal country looks like. They don’t see how America has changed, and they don’t realize how much healthier it used to be.

What is happening in the US parallels what is happening around the world, and it’s happening for the same reason. Israel’s allies are vanishing, we are moving toward a world that is almost universally antisemitic, and it’s because mankind rejected the Holy Spirit. The Jews claimed to accept Yahweh but rejected Yeshua and the Holy Spirit. Christians claimed to accept Yahweh and Yeshua but rejected the Holy Spirit.

To reject any part of the Trinity is to reject every part, and there will be a price to pay.

Only the Holy Spirit keeps people sane. If you’re not spending time with him every day, you can be made to believe anything. If you think Caitlyn Jenner is a woman and Donald Trump is a serial pedophile rapist, you’re listening to demons, and you are probably lost forever. If you think the pandemic was planned, you’re in the same boat.

We are seeing things that were not possible in 2000 America. Millions of us now admire a sick, disgusting boy named Nick Fuentes, who says he loves Hitler. If figures can be trusted, Candace Owens has over 7 million X followers. She repeats classic libels as though they were true, and self-described Christians tell her she is doing God’s work.

Not long ago, these two bigots would have been considered radioactive. No one would have given them platforms. Owens would be working in a cubicle somewhere, or she would be a liberal pundit who was careful not to step on Jewish toes. Fuentes would be working at Walmart. The guy the other employees didn’t want to sit with at lunch.

Someone who pays for ads is supporting these two. I guess antisemitism is now good business. Doesn’t that mean that someone somewhere was paid to do a survey asking people questions to find out whether it would bother them to see products associated with people like Owens? Advertisers don’t roll over in bed without a survey. Surveys are what got conservatives and gun enthusiasts demonetized on Youtube.

Americans must have have given responses that encouraged advertising companies to associate their clients’ products with hating Jews.

I’ll say what I always say: if it’s this bad now, what will it be like in 6 months?

The prophecies are coming true. I know people say Christians have been making apocalyptic pronouncements since the day after the crucifixion, but we live in a time like no other. For the first time, nations all over the globe are turning against the Jews, as the prophets said they would. It’s a new thing. The UN persecutes Israel. In 1948, the UN established Israel. The prophets say all the nations of the world will come against Jerusalem. That was never on the table until now.

The church is collapsing in the US. It collapsed a long time ago in Europe. There is no place on Earth that hasn’t been evangelized. Not China. Not India. Not Japan. Not the Muslim world. There is no nation that is a candidate for a future revival that will give Christians and Jews a refuge. America is going to abandon Christians and Jews, and then there will be nothing to prevent the prophecies from playing out.

Look for conservatives, including “evangelicals,” to adopt antisemitism as the dominant policy soon. I think three years will get it done.

I don’t think it would be hard to get J.D. Vance onto the wrong side, if he isn’t there already. He’s a Catholic who married a Hindu. Here is Christianity 101: don’t marry a pagan. Vance has zero revelation, he doesn’t know the Holy Spirit, and that means he is open to anything.

Maintream Americans weren’t like this in the past. Candace Owens isn’t the first nut to grab a microphone and squirm with rage while ranting against innocent Jews, but her support is unprecedented. So is Fuentes’. So is Tucker Carlson’s. Megyn Kelly is also turning a blind or at least severely astigmatic eye toward antisemitism.

No one should be surprised to see blatantly hateful and dishonest people win elections. It’s normal now. No one should be surprised to see uncloseted antisemites receive wealth and acclaim. No one should be surprised to see Jews help them and vote for them. Jews have been empowering their enemies since Genesis. For Christians, it has only been since Acts.

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.

You’re Inadequate

Yesterday I wrote about a revelation God gave me: the 7 churches of the Revelation, though very important to Yeshua, did not have their own buildings. They were not big organizations like the Southern Baptists or the Catholic Church. There were no popes. They met in houses. The many people who now claim everyone has to belong to an organization and go to a building once a week are mistaken, unless Yeshua was mistaken.

He considered house churches important enough to feature them in an appearance that was to be recorded in the final book of the Bible. He didn’t say they were doing poorly because they didn’t have enough members. His criticisms never mentioned buildings or the sizes of their congregations. He didn’t tell them that if they pleased him, he would get them nice buildings.

Today, I’m thinking about this: John and the Apostles had no New Testament.

At some point, people started writing the gospels down, and the authors of the rest of the New Testament gradually produced the rest of the books. Before the New Testment was compiled and approved, the post-Yeshua scripture Christians had access to was very limited, if they had anything at all.

I should also add that Adam, Seth, Enoch, Methuselah, Noah, Job, Abraham, and Moses didn’t have the Old Testament. Neither did Melchizedek.

Bibles are very important, but you’re not supposed to be dependent on the Bible. You’re supposed to get to know God and have him live inside you so you learn from the Holy Spirit. If all the Bibles on Earth suddenly disappeared, would you be unable to continue in the faith? Would you be unable to evangelize and baptize? If so, you have a problem.

Sooner or later, you should start living more by revelation than by what you read, and the Bible should serve more as confirmation than teaching. You should reach the point where you know certain things because God told them to you, and then you see them confirmed when you remember or read the Bible.

If you can’t do what Christians are supposed to do without belonging to a church, going to church weekly, swallowing all the doctrine your church teaches without question, and reading the Bible all the time, you’re in a bad situation.

I always think about John, who told us we don’t need men to teach us. This is a passage preachers ignore. It’s a threat to their power, prestige, and wealth, and I think most of them don’t understand it and don’t believe it. Most preachers don’t actually believe what the Bible says. These days, Christianity is more like a philosophy than a religion.

Actually, it’s more of a business, and treating it like a philosophy is a way of offending fewer potential customers. Denominations are like the ad agencies that refuse to monetize Youtube videos they think might upset consumers.

If you want to see a preacher squirm, ask him about dinosaurs. Ask him about the flood. Most of them think Genesis is a fairy tale, so why are they Christians? Are they Christians at all? Can you say you believe in Yeshua, who called himself the word of God, when you dismiss the written word?

In 1 John 2, John, who was closer to Yeshua than the so-called pope, Peter, explained where heresy and apostasy come from. He wrote about “antichrists.” “Anti” means “instead of.” Antichrists teach doctrine they want you to accept instead of the truth. On the other hand, Yeshua is the truth.

John said that the difference between antichrists and God’s children was that God’s children hear from the Holy Spirit. Paul said the same thing when he said, “For as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God.”

The Spirit is not a book, by the way. He’s not a set or rules, either, and he’s not a feeling. He’s a being.

In 1 John 2, John said:

Little children, it is the last time: and as ye have heard that antichrist shall come, even now are there many antichrists; whereby we know that it is the last time.

They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have continued with us: but they went out, that they might be made manifest that they were not all of us.

But ye have an unction from the Holy One, and ye know all things.

“Unction” means “anointing.” Look it up.

As God has told me, all authority comes from spending time in the presence of God. Anointing is authority. Speaking in tongues, allowing the Holy Spirit to speak through you to Yahweh, is spending time in God’s presence. The Holy Spirit is God.

Did John literally mean we were omniscient? No. He meant we had the Holy Spirit to tell us everything we needed to know in order to succeed as children of God.

He uses the word “antichrists” to refer to nominal Christians who taught bad doctrine, including preachers. “They went out from us.”

The preachers who became antichrists became so because they didn’t spend time with the Holy Spirit, who would have kept them on course.

Later on, he said:

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.

Who is going to be ashamed at his coming? Yeshua told us.

Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.

Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works?

And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.

The people who will be ashamed will be Christians and Jews who denied the Holy Spirit and trusted men, denominations, and their own crooked minds and hearts over him.

By “iniquity,” he means lawlessness. Christians are under the law. We’re under the law of the Holy Spirit. You can build a cathedral, feed the poor, house orphans, and do 15 pilgrimages to Assisi and still be disobedient and unsaved. You’re supposed to do what the Holy Spirit tells you to do. In person. Not just through a book. You’re not supposed to guess and say, “I think God would like it if I did this because it sounds virtuous.”

The other day, I got a fresh confirmation of this while studying the prophets with my wife. We were reading Jeremiah, and somehow we ended up looking at Ezekiel. Ezekiel described what was supposed to happen after the crucifixion. He agreed with John.

Of course he agreed. The Holy Spirit tells everyone the same things. There is never any disagreement. There is no such thing as “healthy debate.” It comes from separation from God. This is why God is a king who hates democracy, not a president.

God mixes things up in the Bible. For example, he addresses David when he is really talking about Yeshua. and he addresses the King of Tyre when he is really talking about Satan. He said the King of Tyre had been in the Garden of Eden, which is not true. In Acts 2, Peter referred to Psalm 16, which said David had ascended to heaven from hell, which was true of Yeshua, not David, who was still with Abraham.

In Ezekiel 36, God speaks to Israel, saying he will gather them and fill them with his spirit, but that never happened. He was talking to future believers, including Christians:

For I will take you from among the heathen, and gather you out of all countries, and will bring you into your own land.

Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean: from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse you.

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.

And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them.

And ye shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers; and ye shall be my people, and I will be your God.

He will put his Spirit in us and cause us to walk according to his laws, and we will be obedient. That is a reference to the baptism with the Holy Spirit, which was not available to Jews in the time of Ezekiel or any time prior to the events of Acts 2. It’s about all believers who are Spirit-led.

It’s a confirmation of what John said and what God told me.

He said the same thing in the 11th chapter:

Therefore say, Thus saith the Lord God; I will even gather you from the people, and assemble you out of the countries where ye have been scattered, and I will give you the land of Israel.

And they shall come thither, and they shall take away all the detestable things thereof and all the abominations thereof from thence.

And I will give them one heart, and I will put a new spirit within you; and I will take the stony heart out of their flesh, and will give them an heart of flesh:

That they may walk in my statutes, and keep mine ordinances, and do them: and they shall be my people, and I will be their God.

Again, this never happened to the Jews. They continue in rebellion unto this day. They have lived in occupation, servitude, or exile. They are not united by the Holy Spirit, and they admit they have no prophets. Not one.

There are a lot of similar references in the Old Testament.

Look what Yeshua himself said in the book of John:

But the Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, whom the Father will send in my name, he shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you.

The Spirit teaches us, and he also reminds us of what Yeshua said, including things that are now scripture, showing how the Holy Spirit is confirmed by the word.

I saw something funny the other day. A Christian named David Wood likes to debate Muslims. He is not Spirit-led, or he wouldn’t spend his life debating. He is a psychopath who tried to murder his father when he was young. Although he has accepted Yeshua and defends Christianity, he says he is still a psychopath.

He was criticizing a Muslim, and he used the Koran to do it. Apparently, there is a passage in there that says that a Christian or Jew who doesn’t accept the whole “book” (Bible), and who agrees instead with man who teaches against the word, that person worships a man.

That amused me, because it’s true. Satan wrote the Koran, but he had to put some truth in it in order to fool people. He included a truth most Christians would hate. It’s a truth that caused a lot of righteous people to be imprisoned, tortured, and burned alive by Catholics.

John told cautioned us against believing men, and he told us the Spirit would teach us, but preachers tell us to join a church, go every week, give us their money, and believe them instead of John. They tell us the Bible, all by itself, contains all the knowledge we will ever need, which is indisputably not true. If the Bible contains everything we need to know, why did James tell us to pray for wisdom? He could have said, “Look it up.”

Have you ever prayed for God to help you make a decision? If so, you were admitting the Bible doesn’t tell us everything we need to know. “Tell me whether I should move to this city.” “Help me choose a job offer.” “Is this woman the one for me?” The Bible doesn’t contain information like that, but the Holy Spirit knows. He’ll tell you anything you need to know. He’ll tell you what to have for lunch.

History is littered with Bible scholars who knew the Bible inside and out and were completely, catastrophically wrong about God, and who led millions to hell. Mormons read the Bible. Knowing the Bible will not get you everything you need.

The Bible is not enough, and it was never intended to be sufficient.

It’s wonderful to see Ezekiel and other Biblical authors confirm what John and the Holy Spirit told me. We search long and hard, trying to find the right path, and many of us find out late in life that we have wasted our existence on wrong beliefs. Knowing I’m on the right course is priceless.

It’s good to have the Holy Spirit on my side, because as the word says, who can be against me? He’s going to keep teaching me and looking after me. I should continue becoming less and less wretched from here on out.

You’re Building on the Wrong Rock

I just got the most interesting revelation, and like all revelation, it seemed obvious after I got it.

Christians love dragging “backslidden” Christians to church. By “backslidden,” I mean any Christian who doesn’t belong to a church or hand a lot of money over to a pastor or priest. They think anyone who is not a church member is “out of fellowship,” they see us as “lost sheep,” and they think we are deluded by pride and demons.

Here is a great question: why was there no big church building in Ephesus?

Don’t bother Googling. I did it for you. There was no big church building there until long after the apostles were dead.

I’ve been to Ephesus. It is decorated with symbols resembling 8-slice pizzas. Circles with several lines across them.

This type of symbol is called an ichthys, which is a word English stole from Greek. It means “fish.” Most of us are more familiar with the icthys we see on car trunks, but the pizza symbol is also an ichthys.

The symbol is supposed to stand for “Yeshua Moshiach, Son of God, Savior.” The lines represent letters.

When you walk through Ephesus, you see pizzas here and there, scratched into public structures. Why?

Ephesian Christians were afraid; that’s why.

The Ephesians of First Century Asia Minor were unpopular, like all true Christians. Christianity was new. Pagans hated Christians. Jews who rejected Yeshua hated Christians. It was dangerous to get together to celebrate Yeshua. As a result, Christians used pizza symbols to announce their presence, and they met in each other’s houses.

BOOM. God drops the mic again. Thank you, Lord.

Scroll forward to 2025, and somehow a Christian who worships Yeshua in his house is illegitimate! The people who are more like the Christians Yeshua decided to call a church in the Revelation are scallywags and truants.

Yes, Yeshua chose to mention cities with house churches, but he didn’t say anything about…Rome. Or Jerusalem, for that matter.

None of the seven cities had big church buildings. Look it up if you want to waste your time.

When God told me the age of the big church was over, he wasn’t talking about a church in decline. Not exactly. He was telling me about a new, better church that would meet in houses and locations of opportunity. It won’t take over the world, because Satan always gets the popular vote, but it is less corrupt by an order of magnitude.

If you meet in a house, you can exclude the people who need to be excluded. The glory hounds. The control freaks. The hypocrites. The denomination-worshipers. The pastor-worshipers. They ruin churches.

People think it’s about building a big tent. It’s not. Exclusion is important. Mindless inclusion is what destroyed the big churches. Go read about Gideon.

I love this. I love getting confirmation that I heard from God when people are trying to correct what he told me. It happens over and over and over.