Photography, Instagram, Blacklists, WIPs, and Music

The other night I realized I really love taking photos.  This is an unusual realization given that compared to the rest of you I am blind since birth.  I was born with a rare eye condition and so I see so poorly that with rather thick and powerful lenses I still can only barely read large street signs around Toronto, even the blue ones, with ease.  And yet photography truly turns me on.  I can get lost in taking a single subject into my camera for a thousand clicks and still not get bored.  The different angles, varieties of light, it all interests me.  And yet I do not care to even know what an F stop is, and I still do not.  My camera has these fancy things for ISO, F, white balance, focus, what have you, but to me they are just like knobs on a synthesizer.  I don't really know what cut off, resonance and so forth are, but I know what settings work in a song after decades of composing, too.

Why Privacy Violations Are About Manipulation

For the longest time I wondered why someone might violate anyone's privacy.  It is one of those things I had never done and could not comprehend the motivations for.  I do grasp why people steal for example.  If I was hungry and dying I might steal an apple or bread, and that is perfectly alright, especially if I was in a place where there was no help in that regard.  Greater thefts like stealing someone's car I still do not think valid - but in dire times one must do what is needed for survival and that we all can agree upon.  Murder is way beyond the scope of this article but even that is justifiable in times of self-defense, war, and so on, but not otherwise.  However, privacy violations are usually done during times of peace, and exceedingly so during times of long lasting peace, and that I could not grasp the origins of for the longest time.