Sede vacante

Pope Francis | Jorge Mario Bergoglio 1936-2025

The Pope has died.

I’m not a very observant Catholic, although over Lent and Easter I have found myself returning to Mass with more regularity. I don’t really like to talk about religion that much because I consider myself a secular pluralist – as I’ve discussed before.

But this is my blog, that’s my name in the URL and while I’m not going to beat you over the head with religion at a dinner party, I might as well gently prod you with it here.

Pope Francis was my kind of pope. His emphasis on mercy, understanding and reconciliation was very much needed after the more doctrinaire Pope Benedict XVI and Pope John Paul II. In the wake of the abuse scandals and especially the cover-ups, a lot of Catholics like me were very angry at the Church and I suffered a spiritual loss when I lost the compulsion to observe my faith.

Pope Francis’s approach to his ministry demonstrated that Catholic spiritual life and engaging in the world as it is are not incompatible. Without that approach I don’t think I would have been open to returning to church.

I hope when a new pope is elected by the College of Cardinals, that he builds on Pope Francis’s work. This world, as always, could do with more mercy, love and understanding.

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord,
and let Your perpetual light shine upon him.
May his soul and the souls of all the faithful departed
rest in peace.

Walking the walk

This weekend I confirmed the cancellation of my Adobe subscription. I’m just a hobbyist and I’m happy to use Darktable instead of Lightroom and GIMP instead of Photoshop. I’ve been trying them out for a couple of weeks and they are more than satisfactory. They are more than enough for a hobbyist like me.

I also took the opportunity to look at my Amazon spending. I’ve been blocking them since November, but it was only last month that I gave up on Prime Video. I have to admit this gives me a smug sense of satisfaction. I hope you’ll forgive me.

Liberation Day

When Trump was elected last year I promised myself that I wouldn’t concentrate on international politics that much this time around. While yes, I am no longer on Twitter or TikTok any more and barely on Facebook, it’s hard to ignore the collapse of a superpower into authoritarianism. It’s the kind of thing that invites comment.

My boycott is going well. I don’t miss Amazon, Adobe is slated to end next month and I don’t subscribe to Amazon Prime any more.

For New Zealand I think the rubber is going to meet the road on 2 April (3 April our time). Trump is calling it “Liberation Day”. That’s when the Trump administration is announcing global tariffs on a country-by-country basis. Even in the absence of a free trade agreement, the United States is our second largest export partner. A smidge ahead of Australia and a fair way behind China.

The risk is severe enough that in February Minter Ellison Rudd Watts outlined steps NZ exporters should take and Winston Peters returns from a diplomatic mission to the United States today.

Tariffs there will hurt us. And I don’t know whether Luxon and the rest of the government have the mettle to retaliate in a reciprocal manner should they be applied. Trump considers value added taxes like GST as a form of tariff and I fear his administration will act to that effect.

I guess we’ll find out in two weeks. But I think we need to brace ourselves for our exports to take a hit. At least we won’t be alone in it.

A four year term?

Almost every day it’s like “idiot government does idiot thing”, but this really takes the cake. The proposal for a four year term in New Zealand is a retrograde step that is not healthy for our democracy.

I was against this when Labour floated it and I’m against it now that National is advancing legislation for a referendum.

Efficiency shouldn’t be the primary motivator. After all, the most efficient government would be a dictatorship.

I don’t want my opportunities for democratic participation to be reduced. This proposal would do that. It is at its core anti-democratic.

We don’t have a system of checks and balances in place in New Zealand. There is no veto option for a head of state, there is no upper chamber, there is no supreme law the courts can apply to strike down unjust laws.

Parliament’s rule is absolute and it can already bypass normal processes under urgency to enact its programmes.

Elections every three years serve as a good safeguard against complacency and bad law in an otherwise fairly lax constitutional environment.

If there were other safeguards in place, I’d reconsider. But given how powerful Parliament is in New Zealand’s system I am strongly against this measure.

Fundie-mentality

I’d like to take a moment to declare that I am a secular pluralist. Secularism – at least in my understanding of it – is the practice that excludes religious influence from civil administration. This is because there are so many diverging positions when it comes to religion that when a civil government imposes the precepts of one religion on the population as a whole it is oppressive to many within that society.

Pluralism is the practice that society accommodates a diversity of religious beliefs. In order for it to do so, religious adherents should not seek to force their beliefs and practices on others. While they can campaign, lobby and protest just as much as anyone else they must accept that their religion is only practiced through their personal conduct. Not through the intervention of the state or other civil powers on their behalf.

This brings us to Brian Tamaki and the Destiny Church, elements of which over the weekend invaded a library, disrupted a drag-king event and are alleged to have carried out acts of assault.

Leave aside for the moment that it is an error to conflate drag performers with transsexuals. The Venn diagram does overlap, but it is not a perfect circle (see for example Dame Edna, Monty Python and The Rocky Horror Picture Show). But that’s beside the point. Tamaki and his followers have taken to performing a number of provocative and escalating acts against the LGBTQ+ community in New Zealand. Mountain Tui has a good rundown here.

Certain evangelical types like to revel in the false idea that they are persecuted. They point to the Sermon on the Mount:

(Matthew 5:11) Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you (falsely) because of me.

But my source of condemnation is not due to their faith in Jesus. It is due to the betrayal of his teachings. If they have faith in Christ, they have an odd way of demonstrating it.

It’s time for the justice system to take off its kid gloves and protect the rainbow community from the brutal and cruel thuggery of Tamaki and his gang. They’re welcome to believe what they want to believe and protest what they want to protest, but intimidation and violence is where we as a civil society must draw the line.

Discovering the XPan Crop

I think I’ve found a format that I really like: XPan ratio panoramas in black and white.

It started with trying out a secondhand lens: the Pentax 15mm f/4. Which on an APSC camera like my Pentax K3 mark iii Monochrome is pleasingly wide. So I made my way down to the Dunedin Botanic Gardens and took this shot of the Winter Gardens there. I often take photos around there. I could never get the whole thing in frame before, but with such a wide lens I got a great shot dead on.

The pitfall was that there was a lot of stuff in the shot I thought didn’t really help and Lightroom’s widest preset crop, 16:9, didn’t really crop out enough. I wanted a standard panoramic crop ratio and I discovered the XPan ratio. XPan was a panoramic film camera developed in a joint venture between Hasselblad and Fujifilm and

I was very pleased with the result.

This made me want to start composing more of my shots using that ratio, but the trouble is my camera only shoots in 3:2. I know some Lumix cameras offer the ratio as a native option, but I’ve got no plans to buy any more gear for a long time yet.

It turns out one of the viewfinder grids in the K3iii, while not being bang-on the ratio, is close enough for composing an image with the crop in mind. By composing in the middle two rows, I can get some great panoramas.

The images themselves end up being 14 megapixels after cropping, so are still very usable.

This last one was taken with a more conventional 35mm lens.

I have a feeling I’m going to be using this crop a lot.

Boycott

After a stern show of resistance from Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, Donald Trump has caved – for a month – and won’t institute his proposed 25% tariff against Canadian and Mexican goods.

He is of course claiming victory, seizing on previously announced Canadian and Mexican border programmes as concessions. But I think we can expect some kind of volatility from month to month. And he also wants to target the EU, Ukraine and the United Kingdom. Sooner or later he’ll want to target New Zealand.

It remains my intention to carry out a personal boycott of US goods and services over at least the rest of Trump’s term in office.

The Trump Administration has shut down USAID. It has withdrawn from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees. It is engaging in mass-deportations. It has granted Elon Musk unfettered access to the US government’s payment system and personal data held by the US Treasury. It has taken down public information from the CDC and other scientific bureaux. And it has withdrawn support for gender-affirming care for trans youth.  I believe the US has strayed too far from democratic norms and has become an oligarchic state with fascist tendencies.

I’m not Canadian or Mexican, but I am at least one of those people who Trump holds in contempt – a non-American. Trump cannot be seen as a success. And I can’t support economic growth under his regime. The best thing I can do for Americans and anyone else suffering under him is accelerate his failure.

Of course there are limitations and I can’t promise perfection, but there are a number of easy wins I can happily achieve.

  • Unsubscribe from the New York Times – I was only subscribed for Wordle and Connections on a $12 per annum deal, but I can live without a couple of puzzles.
  • Unsubscribe from Prime Video – Bezos is going to take a big hit from me. He’s already aligned himself with Trump, so he has it coming. This is the only US streamer I currently pay for. I still have my DVD collection – it’s about 1,000 titles – and TVNZ+ is actually very good. I’ll do my best to avoid sailing the salty seas. I want to do this ethically.
  • Block Amazon. Make greater use of the public library.
  • Do not renew my Adobe subscription. Use RawTherapee instead.
  • Don’t buy games through Steam, use GOG instead. I already cancelled Microsoft Gamepass some months ago.
  • I don’t use Microsoft 365. My desktop PC has Office 21 and I’ve got Libre Office on my laptop (along with Office 2003 I installed for a lark a month ago). If I really need a modern iteration of Office, I’d buy Office 24 (a one-off payment), rather than subscribe to 365.
  • Continue using an adblocker on YouTube.
  • Social media: I already closed my Twitter account back in November. Facebook and Instagram are shuttered – I switched to a minimalist launcher on my phone so I don’t get any alerts from those services. I quit TikTok way back in February last year. I do enjoy using Bluesky, though and I’ll make an exception for it. But at any hint of enshittification and I’ll be back on Mastodon.

There’s probably more I can do, but these are the easy wins. In the offline world I need to educate myself on food brands and who owns what. But as I said, I can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good and I have managed at least to outline hundreds of dollars worth of cuts that in my own small way will contribute to Trump’s failure. I’m just one person, though. I hope many others the world over are watching him and taking him into account when they make their decisions as consumers.

I read The Old Patagonian Express: By Train through the Americas by Paul Theroux

Paul Theroux’s The Old Patagonian Express is a manifestation of the idea that travel is about the journey, not the destination. It details his journey – primarily by rail – from Boston, Massachusetts to Esquel, Argentina. This was a trip undertaken in the late 1970s, during the Carter administration. And so this book offers a glimpse into another time as well as – to me – entirely different geography.

Theroux outlines the contrast between the rich and the deeply impoverished he encounters in this book and one meeting with three homeless boys sleeping in a doorway in Colombia is particularly moving. They’d be in their sixties today if they still live and I have my doubts that they do.

The book also strangely echoes the contemporary world, highlighting the debate in Panama over the Torrijos–Carter Treaties of 1977, which placed sovereignty over the Canal Zone in 1999. With Donald Trump now threatening to annex the Panama Canal, this period becomes ever more relevant.

Theroux is fairly acerbic when it comes to tourists and backpackers in South America, especially the budget travellers who count every penny.

Finally, the book has a general literary tone. Theroux reads Lovecraft, Poe, Boswell and Kipling through his journey. And insofar as the book has a climax, it’s his experience with Jorge Luis Borges in Buenos Aires.

This was an enjoyable read and leaves me wondering if I should try learning some Spanish.

The power of the blog

The internet has fallen. Over the past decade and a half, online life grew more and more concentrated into a handful of platforms. Twitter. Facebook. Reddit. Youtube. And lately, Tiktok. Three of those services: Twitter/X, Meta (Facebook/Instagram/Threads/Whatsapp) and Tiktok have demonstrated their fealty towards Donald Trump. Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter/X, performing a Nazi salute at the inauguration. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta has abandoned third-party fact checking. And Tiktok performed a stunt of an 8 hour shutdown, crediting Trump with saving the app in the US.

Reddit and Youtube are not quite so nakedly biased in the way they deliver their content, but the nature of AI slop and the fact their business models rely on retaining user attention means the quality is variable.

What I’m driving at is the users have lost control of these platforms. And the best way to counter that is to revert back to blogging. With a blog, you are in control. You can say whatever you wish and post whatever you want (within the law). And while it may for a while be yelling into the void, at least for me it is the change I want to see online.

I’m sick of enshittification. I’m shit of losing years of posts. I’m sick of missing out on seeing how my thoughts evolve on a topic and where I draw a line on various issues.

Most of all I’m sick of supporting companies whose interests are totally out of line with my own. This is a simple, concrete action to take if you don’t want to support what’s going on in the US and you don’t want to be in the hands of the corporates.

A blog is fairly simple to set up and if you want to self host on a Raspberry Pi – as I do – or a secondhand PC or a cheap mini one, it’s cheaper than a year’s worth of hosting on a commercial web host. And at least then you can claim your independence online.