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This entry was probably made two or three years into my foray into photography in 2004, so I was using camera metaphors. 20 years later, I can still resonate with this idea, but there's something to be said about things being automatic, where we might get ourselves too entangled in our own ideas about what “manual focus” or “manual operation” really means. you can sometimes take the best pictures with no manual involvement, and the metaphor translates over to life as well. But I've always liked doing things manually in music, and still do to this day. Even though I'm using AI to generate some of my music, I would never want to do anything that's completely automatic, because I think you can lose a sense of who you really are if everything's done automatically according to rules. You might even lose sight of what those rules are, and they might not be serving you at all. The prime example of this is a lack of free will, where your black box is regulating everything that you do, even if you're not aware of it.