Many bloggers believe in subjective reality. This means that your opinions influence your social interactions because they cause you to act unconsciously in ways that affect others, negatively or positively. If you want to be wealthy, be generous. If you want to be famous, harbor a positive attitude toward celebrities. If you want to be a writer, surround yourself with writers. If you want to be cured of cancer, think happy thoughts. You are not a subject of the world around you. The world around you is created by your mind. When you move from one room to another in your house, the other rooms cease to exist, because they are no longer being perceived by you.

Subjective reality means that you are responsible for whatever happens to you. If someone cuts you off in traffic, it’s your fault. You manifested it by thinking bad thoughts. If your wife leaves you, you could’ve stopped it by being more attractive. If you find $800 in the parking lot near K-Mart, congratulate yourself for attracting wealth. You must have opened your mind to receive that gift from the universe. Whenever you talk about someone else, you are talking about yourself, because there is only consciousness, and that is either your own or the shared consciousness of humanity. Your pick.

Most people blame other people or circumstances for everything bad that happens to them. When something good happens, they count it as luck. Subjective reality is very empowering in the beginning because it requires you to take responsibility for everything. Nothing is left to chance. All of the sensory input you receive is a manifestation of your inner self. Believe that aliens are visiting us? You will see UFOs and take them to be aliens. They might even beam you up and show you …

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In kindergarten, children are given writing assignments that are ten words minimum. Your high school final essay probably had a length requirement of 3000 words. A doctoral thesis is often required to be 30,000 words plus a bibliography.

Just like age for rights such as driving, smoking, and drinking alcohol, the word count has become the de facto standard for measuring content. Similarly, both age and word count are largely irrelevant. We use the most useless measurement of content not because it has merit, but because it is easy to use.

Novels are supposed to be 80,000 words. If you write a pulp fiction novel that is 200,000, good luck getting it published, even if it’s the next Harry Potter.

The attachment to the word count manifests itself most obviously in the padding of statements and sentences to increase the word count while adding no content. Notice the previous sentence… it is written in the word-count style. It is a sentence a student would write to stretch his essay from 990 words to 1000 words without writing anything. It could easily be rewritten: “People add fluff to increase their word count.” But no, that will not do, because we want to make it to 1000 words! It doesn’t matter that the shorter sentence is more powerful.

I have a case of word-count-itis on this blog. If I write a long article, I boast in the opening paragraph that it is “5000 words.” Every post has a word count below its title. I have a blog-wide word count displayed in my sidebar (currently 183,363), and I’ve set a goal of reaching 250,000 by the end of the year. As I type this, a word count is being updated, in real time, right below my text box. WordPress believes word counts are just that important. Unfortunately, …

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Looking back at a sunset on a busy road from a moving van. The road is Nova Road in Ormond Beach, Florida (could be county or Holly Hill, not sure). The colors really caught my eye. The setting is less than ideal, but it’s the best I could muster as the sunset faded quickly.

I added a lot of contrast and some vignetting. After using curves, I toned down the saturation with the sponge manually in the areas that were too bright to print.

Canon PowerShot SD790 IS, 1/60, F2.8, 6.2mm, ISO160, 2009-07-01T20:33:10-04, 20090702-003310rxt

Download the high-res JPEG or download the source image.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License. Credit me as Richard X. Thripp and link here.

One problem avid photographers have is they observe everything but experience nothing. Instead of being in the pool, they’re taking pictures of people in the pool. This becomes so natural to them that they never participate in everything. Photography becomes one big excuse to sit on the sidelines at every event.

You can learn plenty from observation, but you reach the limit quickly where you’d be better off ditching the camera, sketchpad, or notepad to get your hands dirty. You cannot become a good speaker from merely reading great speeches—you have to take the podium yourself someday, frightening as it may be.

One place where people are observers is in technology. I put off getting a decent computer for five years, all the way till 2006, because I was afraid that it would be quickly outdated. Of course this was foolish since even though I was right, the immediate gains are worth far more than the eventual losses. It’s the same thing in photography, where putting off getting a good camera for a while will cost you photographic opportunities in the present. While compact cameras aren’t getting much better anymore (just noisier), they and DSLRs are getting cheaper so people still find plenty of reason to not invest in good equipment, even if they consider themselves good photographers.

I did this for years also, working with a junky point-and-shoot till I got my Canon Rebel XTi in 2007 August. Now I’m using a Canon 10MP point-and-shoot and I love it, only reserving the SLR for occasional use. Hmm… If I’d spent my time observing I’d still have a Fuji A360. Although I mostly observe as a photographer.

One problem I have is I spend far too much time reading other blogs and not enough writing on my own. Reading other peoples work doesn’t …

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A comedy skit I wrote:

Did I tell you that I’m going to be staying in North Virginia this summer? Every time I go there, my mother KILLS me! She says I don’t visit enough.

Oh, you mean North Virginia as in *North* Virginia?

SOUTHERN North Virginia.

Do you really mean to tell me, that, that you’ll be staying in SOUTHERN North Virginia?

Well yeah, of course. Why is that such a surprise to you?

And, and your mother will be staying there too?

I hope so.

Why would you wish such a thing on her?

It’s where she lives! What are you stupid? All the great Smiths retire to Southern North Virginia. A few of them even like it better in South Virginia.

South Virginia? No way! I hear it’s too hot there.

It ain’t that bad, try Florida if you want hot.

I had no idea that, that you and your family were such bad people.

Now why would you say a thing like that about my family?

Most of the good people I know… well, they go to North Virginia.

Some of the really good ones go to NORTH North Virginia.

I knew a bank robber once, and he went to South Virginia.

Another guy was a rapist, and he went to SOUTH South Virginia.

Well what does that have to do with anything?

I just thought, you see, that you were a good family man… and you went to church every Sunday… and you were on the mission for four years… yet now I find out it all means nothing. What kind of game are you playing with me? Is your life all a lie?

Listen, I’m only going to South North Virginia because my mother couldn’t afford to move further North. She wanted to be near the rest of the family.

NEAR the rest of the family? Why would she want to suffer through that?

Now your …

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Especially in the last decade colleges have become biased toward giving higher grades for poorer results. For a trigonometry test several semesters back, I ended up with 30 bonus points for acing the advance quizzes. While I got a modest 84 on the test, this turned into a mighty 114 with the extras. Mind you, my grade was not capped at 100, but the 14 overage would apply to other sub-par test scores. The net effect was an easy A in the class. The standard for a good grade is steadily creeping downward.

The standard maximum GPA was a 4.0, but now with honors classes, which are supposedly harder than their traditional counterparts, GPAs can soar to 4.5 and beyond. These classes do not compare to the college-level English and arithmetic taught to the students of Lincoln’s day. No–it was in those days that the condescending moniker, “higher education,” truly lived up to its name. It was not uncommon for half of a pre-graduate class to miserably fail.

Nevertheless, test scores are plummeting–it seems the more bonuses and concessions we pile on, the WORSE students do. All of the sudden mediocrity is excellence and is awarded A’s. A new standard for success emerges, one far more base than that of yesterday’s scholars.

Some teachers find students skipping vital tests or even finals. This is due to a new practice where the lowest score for any test in the class is dropped, as if the failure never took place. Often, if the test score on the final exam is higher than the lowest score on the junior tests, the final counts for both, erasing the lowest test grade. All of the sudden, a final that counted for 20% of the class grade gets a boost to 30%. This allows for amazing comebacks gradewise, at …

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Hello folks. I haven’t been doing much of anything recently. I’ve been working on a summer course in computer programming and doing photography on and off.

My spring project was an open-source integrated library system (ILS) in PHP called Bookley. It allows you to manage patrons, items, check-ins and check-outs, renewals, fines, records, cover scans, and more. Try it out if you want to set up your own public or private library. It’s over 4000 lines of code and took 120 hours to program.

Th8.us has been going down a lot lately, but I fixed this today by removing lists of URLs and hit counters (resource hogs). This site and Th8.us will be rock-solid now.

I will be blogging, Twittering, commenting, and posting photos regularly again. In fact, I think I have more than ever to blog about.

If you haven’t heard, there is a lot of evidence that the Great Pyramid of Giza was built by aliens. Mainly, it consists of two million stones weighing 5000 pounds each quarried five miles away. The theory is they rolled them on logs to transport them, but the logs would be worn after each stone and would likely get bogged down in the sand. This means new logs would be needed for each of the two million stones, which is unlikely because Egypt is a desert with few trees. If it was built in 13 years, this means one stone was added every three minutes and thirty-five seconds, which I find implausible. If they stopped working at nights, that means an even faster pace. Aliens built it before they were here. Egyptians kept no records of the construction of the Pyramids.