Wait, you actually want me to TALK to people!? ACK!!!

Here's the thing:  I am horribly shy.  Which, you know, wouldn't be so much of a problem if I were a hermit living out in the heart of some endless forest, however in a world where I need to actually be social and network and *gasp* talk to people, this is something of a HUGE problem.  It also seems to be the presiding theme in my life lately:

     *in online articles about job searching
     *in wildly disparate blogs I follow
     *on Twitter
     *etc...

The job search and Twitter ones are the most prevalent, probably because I spend a fair amount of time on both.  The job search because, well, I'd like to find a "day job" for a while so I can dig myself out from under the ridiculous amount of debt and credit travesty I've accrued over the last couple of years.  I'd like to be better able to actually focus on becoming a successful (or at least functional) artist, and oddly enough I need to be working a stable job in order to do that, even though it will serious impact the flexibility I have right now.  The old adage "You need to spend money to make money" is sadly true, and while I have time a-plenty, money is on the Endangered Species list.  So, I need a decently paying day job for probably about 5 years.  (I could probably do it in 3 if I wanted to live on rice and lemon water, but that's VERY boring.)  However, an unfortunately large part of success in gaining lucrative employment is centered on who you know.  I've been out of work so long that I really don't have the contacts that I used to, and living in West Central Nowhere while being dirt poor doesn't exactly help me correct that.

Which brings me to Twitter and the Usage Of The Internet in Social Networking and Growing A Solid Contacts List.  I periodically get "followed" on Twitter by random strangers who found me through some arcane system that I haven't quite figured out yet.  Most of the time they are spammers only interested in promoting themselves in a fairly obnoxious manner.  Once in a while, though, they are someone genuinely interesting.  The problem?  I am so terrifyingly shy that I don't know what to do!  Should I follow them back? Should I talk to them?  I mean, they talk to me, which I suppose means that I should respond.  At which point, my little inferiority complex starts up.

"I'm not cool enough."
"Oh gods, they're a REAL artist/therapist/lion-tamer!  They'll figure out that I suck and laugh at me!
"What do I SAY to them?  We're in totally different leagues!"

The list goes on.  I'm working on getting better about that.  I finally made myself "follow" a photographer out in NY (who does beautiful work, btw...go see!) who randomly followed me one day, after I'd tweeted something about looking into the stock photo sites.  He suggested several stock sites that are good, and gave me a list of others to look into.

I need to get better at not letting that little voice in the back of my head that whispers poisonous little self-defeating thoughts get to me.  So what if someone's work is better than mine?  I'm still learning.  I'm NOT going to be that good, yet, but you know what?  That's okay.  I don't have to be.  I only have to be as good as I can be and keep on learning and experimenting and playing.  I have to trust that I'm worth talking to, which is really a major part of what being painfully shy is really about.  Most of us are terrified that we're going to say something, and we're going to be laughed at or sneered at or looked down on, or whatever our personal torment is.

Ya know what, though?  Most of the time, we're not going to be.  We're just going to find other people, who probably have the same fears that we do.  The difference being that they didn't allow their fears to control them, and extended the hand of potential friendship anyway.

How do other people overcome their fears and get themselves out there?

Do you know where the road leads?

There is a story somewhere in these trees.  I don't know what it is just yet, but they're definitely saying something...

"Excuse me, please.  Do you know where the road leads?"

Blue Morphos are the Great Danes of the butterfly world

Alright, who thought it was a good idea to let me play with the computer in the wee hours of the morning?  I got a little bored and wasn't quite tired yet, so I started playing with this picture a bit.  (The original was, while reasonably well aligned, a bit more washed out than I'd hoped.  Which was sad, 'cause finding one of the morphos sitting still long enough, OPEN, to be photographed was rather laughably hard.  I think they were drunk...I definitely had at least 3 bounce off my head, let alone the others I was dodging.)  Anyway, I was amused enough that I thought I'd share.

The Blue Morpho Series...  

The original

Ultra-contrast

Darkened and "curved".  It almost looks like twilight, or deep in shadow.

It really wanted to be purple, I guess

FLUTTERBIES!!!!

How I spent part of my Saturday...

Fishies!  (They have a lovely koi pond.)

And to my delight, they still have the tiny birds!  Eeee!!!  So CUTE!

Yay Spring!

Poplar Catkins, Tewksbury MA

I can't decide if I need to stop paying attention to politics altogether, or if I need to find a way to control my homicidal urges and get more involved.  Either one, I'm sure, will end up involving an ulcer...  (I keep making the mistake of looking at the US news reports on the idiocies that a number of states are pulling and it makes me want to scream.  But I'll try and avoid talking about politics here.)

In other news...

IT'S FINALLY STARTING TO LOOK LIKE SPRING AROUND HERE!!!!  There are crocuses blooming, most of the snow is gone, and the poplars are about to start tormenting me with allergies.  In a few more weeks the trees will be covered in leaves, and it'll be warm enough that I can finally ditch the fourteen layers of clothing and start opening windows.  We actually had a fabulously gorgeous day last Friday that was so warm I was out in a t-shirt, though I did manage to get myself a slight sunburn.  Silly Irish heritage.

Speaking of Irish...the St. Patty's Parade in Southie was good.  Huge difference from the year before, where we had a nor'easter and it was howling wind and rain.  Most of the pictures came out tolerable.  Nothing particular spectacular (I apparently suck at Things What Involve Humans), though I did get an amusing shot of  one of our friends in the 501st NEG.

Commander Fil (aka, Phil)

Several of our other friends were also there, but I wasn't able to get photos of them, sadly.

Apparently I wasn't done with the Foxentrees yet, as I've started another one.  I wonder what this one has to tell?  I've taken to calling the series the Foxenwood, as I believe there are a number of them, and at some point I'm going to end up drawing an entire forest.  (Also, I believe that I will probably end up getting one of them tattooed someday, but that is a little ways off.  Very likely the original one.  'Cause I need more tattoos. What? I only have the two!  Not nearly enough!)

Sorry about the lighting...the new set-up is atrocious in the evening.  Assume the paper is white. ;)

Tomorrow we take a trip the Butterfly Place.  Yay for warm, green, butterflies, and pocket-sized birds!  (At least, I hope they still have the pocket-sized birds.  They used to have Chinese quail, but they also had a massive disaster in the form of a roof collapse, and had to more or less start over.  The website doesn't say anything about the quail anymore.  This would make me sad.  They are deadly cute.  (Yes, I refrain from sticking one in my pocket and carrying it off, though the temptation is great.  Something tells me a bird in a house with 3 cats would end up on the dinner menu real fast.)  Can't wait!

It's That Time Again!

It's been a little while since I've done a Tarot reading, and my bank account's running a little bit on the dry side, so I figured it's about time I do another one. As the full readings are generally harder to do (each one takes about an hour, all told) in mass quantity, I'm going to take a cue from other readers before me and do the One-Card Draw idea.

So, here it is. The door is open from now (Noon) to 7 tonight. One question, one card, please donate to a good cause (namely, keeping me, the boy, and the cat fed). In exchange, I promise to get you your answer as quickly as I can manage (depending on volume of response, I usually manage to get everyone taken care of within 24 hours). Comment below, or email me at corvusrising@gmail.com. Ready? Set? Go!

(cross-posted elsewhere, as well.)

Wandering Around Town...

A Life in Pictures

Nashua River, Pepperell MA

I really need to get out with my camera more often.

The Boston Globe ran an article this morning about a Parisian photographer who moved to the city recently. What caught my attention about her was that in her quest to send photos back to her family in France, she hasn't been using her big, fancy cameras. She's been using only her iPhone and a photo editing app, and taking some simply gorgeous shots with it.

This is kinda along the lines of what I've been wanting to do.

See, one of my goals/philosophies in this whole studying photography thing is that I want to learn how to show people the world as I see it, and I want to do it with minimal technology. Not only because I don't HAVE fancy equipment, but because I honestly don't think it's needed. What is important is the photographer's eye and their knowledge of light, shadow, and color. This woman proves it can be done.  Amusingly, what she's doing is sort of what I've had in mind for a while. I've just been busy trying to learn how to take the pictures that I see...how to get the angles, colors, light, etc. to show what I want them to show.

Eventually, I would like to put together a photo journal of sorts.  It’s something I’ve wanted to do for years, actually.  I’ve just never gotten around to it, despite having nearly an entire box worth of photographs in storage, cataloguing years of my life.  (Many of these are just horrendous, really.  I was doing point-and-shoot, and without having the view screen technology this just compounded the problems, as I couldn’t get the true idea of what I was looking at on the old cameras.)

What steps have I been taking to move myself toward this?  I’ve been studying the works of professional photographers, reading their blogs, reading online photography courses, taking pictures of EVERYTHING.  I’ve been practicing.  I’ve been learning to take as long as necessary to get the angles I want.  I’ve been playing with Gimp.  I’ve been killing a lot of batteries.  I’ve been deleting a LOT of seriously bad photographs.  I like to think I’ve been getting a little better, at least.  Someday I hope to be actually good.

In the meantime, I keep practicing and learning and practicing some more.  Right now, that means I should probably stop fiddling around here and go out for a nice walk.  It’s a gorgeous day and I’m wasting it hanging around indoors!

Tomorrow, though, I’m going to be in South Boston for the St. Patrick’s Parade.  :)

Really, Etsy? Customer Service is THAT Hard For You To Understand?

From an Etsy PSA, Re: the ArsTechnica debacle:

"There was an article published on ArsTechnica that made clear how direct the connection was between using your real name on Etsy, buying an item and receiving public feedback for that item. The reaction to this article has made us realize that we need to change the way our Feedback system works, and this is what we’ve already done today."

'Cause, ya know, the USERS screaming "NO!NO!NO! DO NOT WANT!" to the myriad privacy changes they've made in recent months wasn't getting through, it took it going far elsewhere into the Internets and a couple of FTC reports for them to figure out "Hey, maybe this is a problem?"

My favorite part? "To further discuss this, please see this Forum thread." BTW, the forum thread, as posted at the end of the original blog entry that was just posted 3 hours ago is closed to commenting. There is no further discussion. As usual, Etsy has shut it down when they weren't being told "YAY YOU'RE TEH AWESOMEST!"

Glad I stopped listing there. The amazing lack of customer service is special, and seriously? I am a rather firm believer in 'Net privacy. No one gets to decide for anyone else what they should have be public information. Now it would be nice if Etsy would actually, ya know, close my damned account like I asked them to.

These Are the Days of Mist and Shadows

I love near-Spring in New England.  The last few days have really epitomized the old adage "If you don't like the weather, wait a minute".  Forty and fifty degree temperatures, snowstorms, and sunny...sometimes all at the same time.  Warm days and cold nights making the sugar maples sprout their annual spring crop of buckets.  (For those not familiar with this, welcome to maple syrup season.  Every year they tap the maple trees and hang buckets to collect the sap for boiling down.  The wider the temperature fluctuations between day and night, the faster the sap runs, and the more syrup they can make.  Bring on the 50 degree days and the 25 degree nights, I've got pancakes crying out for real syrup!  Ahem....)

One of the things I love most about this time of year is the snow fog.  When we've got a lot of snow on the ground and it warms up fast during the day, the snowbanks melt so fast that it turns to fog.  It's an odd fog that doesn't blow away in the breeze and the sun only makes it thicker.  It hangs low and gives everything a lovely soft look.  I especially love it at sunset, when the very air is tinged a glorious rose-gold.  (That is when the sun obliges and shows itself in time.)

The other day was one of the foggy days I adore, and though my camera batteries were dying, the boy and I went for a walk around town.  I got one or two decent shots before the batteries died altogether...

(Main Street dam, bridge view)

(View of the Mill stacks from the Covered Bridge walkway)

(window of abandoned house)

I did also finally get around to watermarking and resizing the photos that I have up for sale.  As much as I like to think that people will be honest and not try and claim other people's things as their own, I sadly need to be a little less trusting, and so that is my concession to it.  Tomorrow I'll get around to putting up some sort of disclaimer on the actual website here, but right now it's late (stupid Daylight Savings) and I need to at least attempt to go to sleep.  

G'night, all!

Schrodinger's Room

Basements and I have an odd relationship.  Or rather, I have an odd relationship with their existence in dimensional space.  Plainly speaking, I simply do not believe that they exist in the dimensions they appear to.  I blame the house I grew up in.

I grew up in what had begun its existence as a boarding house for a brickyard (which was fantastically fun, let me tell you, with the annual brick harvest every spring before my mom could get started planting the garden).  It was one of the older houses in town, and as tends to happen to old houses, it had undergone a few face lifts in its day.  At least inside.  The outside looks very different today than it did when it was built a couple hundred years ago.  The basement, however, hadn't really changed over-much.  Which made it even more odd.  Old fieldstone, dirt floors, low ceilings, that sort of thing.  It was only accessible through the bulkhead doors in the back yard.  You'd descend a few steps in and promptly bend in half to get inside.  It had a very low ceiling.  To the left was the sump pump that kept the underground stream from flooding the house, next to the water heaters and nothing else.

 As you'd peer into the shadows straight back from the bulkhead, just outside the range of the single, dim light bulb, you'd realize first that the ground sloped up slightly toward a stone wall too close to be the far wall of the foundation, and second that in that wall was an opening.  Too wide to be a doorframe, but too even to be a hole.  You'd approach it, crouching a bit more as the floor sloped upwards, glancing cautiously at the cave spiders who perched on the wall, watching* you curiously as you'd pass them by.  Beyond the wall, it opened into a larger cavern, dark as night since there were no windows, with little more than a crawlspace worth of height.  To the left, though, was a small staircase.  At the top of the stairs was a door, behind which was a tiny secret room.  In the upstairs, you have no idea this room is there, as it's actually underneath the staircase between the first and second floors, the other side of which is the front hall stairs of the whole house.  It's perfectly hidden.

Needless to say, this little oddity has warped my ability to accept other basements might be normal.

Earlier today, I wandered into the basement of the house I currently live in.  (It's also an odd house, as it was originally two separate houses that were joined together around 1900.)  I was prowling around with my camera, looking for interesting things to experiment with light and shadow, and basements are always treasure troves of oddities, especially old fieldstone ones with workshops in them**.    This one proved no exception. I took some neat shots of the walls, eyed a few odds and ends but discarded them for another day with better light (it was overcast, so the light coming in was awful), and then I saw it, hidden in the shadows in the corner.

The Door.

I do not know where the door leads.  There are theories.  Some of them are terribly logical and employ the use of Occam's Razor.  (The boy says there should be a small space accompanied by a short staircase leading up to the bulkhead doors and to the outside.)  My brain tells me that there is another half of a house worth of unexplored basement and quite possibly secret rooms (after all, that wall to the right is unfinished and there is a clear gap between it and the far wall).  The boy's answer is likely the correct one (damned left-brained people with trained spatial reasoning skills), but until I open the door I do not know for sure.   Therefore it is Schrodinger's Room.

I think I'll leave it closed.  At least for now.  There is that gap, after all...

*I use the word loosely...these spiders had spent so many years in the damp, dark cave of a basement that I'm not kidding when I say they were pure white and HAD NO EYES.  They also had weirdly elongated legs with odd knobs at the joints.  These were some seriously creepy-ass spiders.


**I would like to take a moment to mention that engineers keep oddly pristine basement workshops.  Or at least this one does.  I didn't think it was humanly possible to get a fieldstone basement that clean, even with concrete floors. I'm suitably impressed and very grateful for the lack of mutant arachnids.

Sometimes My Horoscope Amuses Me.

SCORPIO (Oct. 23-Nov. 21): Despite the wealth and renown he has accumulated during his influential career, musician Brian Eno is a big fan of raw simplicity. Speaking about R&B, soul music, and psychedelia, he said, "These earlier eras of pop music were characterized not by the search for perfection but by bizarre enthusiasms, small budgets, erratic technique, crummy equipment, and wild abandon." Would you consider playing with that approach in the coming weeks, Scorpio? It's not necessarily something you should do all the time, but right now I suspect it's a formula for the most interesting kind of success.


*laughing*  Isn't that sort of what I'm doing here?  


It was suggested to me, that I might want to look into putting some of my photos up on the stock photo sites as a possible source of some revenue.  It's a neat idea, and I'm poking through the legalese on some of them to see what it entails.  We'll see, I guess.  

The Lurking Darkness

Just off the center of town, set neatly just below the bend in the river, is the bridge.  At first glance, it appears to be a simple affair, if a quaint conceit, being a covered bridge modeled after the old fashion of the early days of this, our great nation.  It's newly rebuilt walls, still the pale gold of freshly hewn wood.  It's paved road still dark from new tar.  On either side, walkways beckon passers-by to cross and admire the view of the river sparkling in the afternoon sun.

For a year and a half, I have lived across the street from this great beast.  I have watched as the townsfolk, in manner more closely resembling worship, have rebuilt the aged thing from the ground up.  Day after day, week after terrible week, it grew.  I watched with unnamed dread as they held ceremonies the day they completed it.  It looked so innocent and cheerful by day, safe in light, but some dark foreboding bloomed within my breast.  

By day, it is bright and pastoral, cheery and almost whimsical in it's very existence; a memory of a forgotten time.

And then the sun sets, and dark night descends.  Oh, then.  Then, does it's true nature show.  Then do the sinister shadows writhe and dance in the mist, bathed in the sickly orange glow of the single street-lamp, while the river gibbers and cackles madly to itself.  The river whispers and giggles and tells tales of the unwholesome and eldritch things that lurk in the darkness below the bridge's shadowed peak, and cling, wetly, to the beams that lie so close beneath the road...

(Really, I just couldn't decide which I liked better...the pure, unaltered shot, or the tin-type styled one...  Yes, that's the bridge across the street.  It's enough to send Lovecraft screaming into hysterical fits.  I love it, though I do more than half-expect to see tentacles appear one of these nights...)

Remember that Paper Mill?

While I haven't managed to get myself over to Town Hall to ask about getting inside that chain link fence, I did take a walk in today's delicious 55 degree weather, and I may have remembered to bring my camera...

Some of the shots I took didn't come out the way I'd hoped, or the angles were just a little off (for example, the slightly cut-off nature of the sign below).  I thought about being upset about it, but then again it's been a bad knee day and I was trying to climb around on snowbanks while hobbling around with a cane... not the most conducive to neat shots.  (Though I realized that my cane may actually increase my chances of convincing folks when I get in to ask about getting inside the fence that no, really, while I'm sure there are some truly fantastic photos to be had inside the badly crumbling brick buildings, I'm not really keen on further injury and my knees preclude doing excessively stupid shite these days.  ;)  I just want to get some good photos closer in than I can currently!)

So, without further ado, have a glimpse of what lies across the river from where I sleep...

 (Did this one with a bit of a monochrome wash.)

And because I was feeling a bit whimsical, I played with this one a bit... I don't know about anyone else, but I'm rather pleased with it!

March blows in like a lion...

...and in true fashion, my week has been very much like the weather in March; a rapidly changing flurry of ups and downs...

The ups:  I made it through the application process, phone interview, and face-to-face interview for an office position at Wellesley College.  I ogled some truly delicious architecture and stonework while at the campus and drank in the visual feast.  I made a vat of bread dough, and have been having tasty pan-cooked bread whenever I want.  I stood up for what I believe in and attended a pro-Union rally in Portsmouth, NH.

The downs:  The steering column on my car more or less let go, making it no longer safe to drive and leaving me dependent on the boy for transportation.  (Thanks to a generous soul, I at least have the money to get it looked at and see if it's something easily fixed or if my car is well and truly hosed.)  I was turned down for the aforementioned position at Wellesley.  I've gotten more or less no artwork of any kind done this week (including not yet looking into getting into the paper mill), and have been fighting not to give in to the "What's the use" voice.

Where does this leave me?  I haven't quite figured that out yet.  The lack of car makes wandering around looking for things to photograph even harder, as the boy doesn't particularly care for driving aimlessly.  Not getting the position makes other things harder, as well, I really am in bad financial shape and need some sort of stable work while I work on this and my other side projects.  (I have an additional project I've been toying with, but I'm not ready to discuss it until it gets a little more coherency to it.)  On the other hand, I'm more determined then ever that I really do, firmly, adore photography above all other art forms (and itch when I don't have my camera with me).  The aforementioned side project has been occupying even my sleep for a good couple of weeks now, which bodes well for my ability to bring it to fruition.

So, yeah...ups, downs, sideways trips...  Changeable and mercurial, just like March in New England.  Should be interesting to see how things settle out, at least!

An interesting read

There are a few thoughts percolating in the back of my brain right now, and at some point there will probably be a real post, but in the meantime I thought I'd share an interesting article on risk, and a few other things I read a little bit ago.  

Take it away, Mr. Coppola.