Housing hunt (on behalf of a friend)

EDIT: Sadly, it turns out the timeline was even shorter than I thought. Thanks to everyone who offered help.

Some of you have seen this already, but I’m trying to cast my net as widely as possible, and that means canvassing all my available outlets.

A friend of mine is looking for a place to live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and if this is going to happen, it needs to happen fast. Her main requirements are that rent be less than $1200 a month, and that the place allows cats. It doesn’t have to be close to public transit (she has a car), and it doesn’t have to be centrally located — she’s even looked as far afield as Santa Cruz. She’s willing to share with a roommate, though an individual living situation would be preferable. Craigslist etc have already been tried; this is a hunt for options that aren’t on the usual radar. So if you happen to know of any leads, please do let me know ASAP: like I said, this has to happen fast if it’s going to happen at all. (I don’t have an actual deadline, but I’d guess that if there isn’t at least a strong lead by Friday, it’ll be a moot point.)

Thanks in advance for any help you can give.

two Kickstarters

These both came to my attention recently, and deserve a signal boost:

Daughters of Mercury — this is an art project, creating portraits of trans women “how they want to be represented, either complicating the conventional portraitist’s art of flattery with the dynamics of gender dysphoria, or celebrating features stigmatized as masculine as a woman’s features.” I know the woman behind the project, and I also know an increasing number of trans women (one of whom brought the campaign to my attention), so there’s a personal weight to this one: I’ve been thinking a lot lately about gender identity, passing or choosing not to pass, etc, and there aren’t any simple answers. But we can accept trans women for who and what they are, and I think projects like this one are part of how we can do that.

Not Our Kind — this is an anthology built around the theme of “outsiders.” Not only does a friend of mine (Marissa Lingen) have a story in it, along with several acquaintances of mine, but the topic sounds pretty dang appealing. I’m pretty sure I’m going to love the heck out of it . . . but first it needs to be funded, so.

Go forth! Support!

A Year in Pictures – Highgate Trio

Highgate Trio
Creative Commons License
This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

This gives you a notion of how closely packed the monuments are in Highgate West. (Although there was a recent burial there — as in, within the past few years — the place is almost completely closed to new additions.) I very much liked the three-tiered effect these had, all in a row; the only thing that would have improved it was if all three used the draped-urn motif. The Victorians may have had a bunch of different funerary motifs, but pile up enough of them in close proximity and you start to realize how repetitive they got . . . .

A Year in Pictures – Highgate East in Ivy

Highgate East in Ivy
Creative Commons License
This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

This is from the eastern portion of Highgate Cemetery . . . which is ostensibly the less overgrown part of the site. And indeed, there are large portions of East that are perfectly well maintained — but get off the main paths, and you soon find yourself in a wonderland of headstones and ivy.

A Year in Pictures – Zakopane Jesus

Zakopane Jesus
Creative Commons License
This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

I had to resist the urge to title this one “Bored Jesus Is Bored.” Apparently this sculptural motif is actually called “Contemplative Christ,” but man, he just looks tired and disappointed to me. 😛 Anyway, this is one of the graves in Peksow Brzyzek in Zakopane, and as you can see, it isn’t your standard Western headstone. (Also, I am exceedingly fond of the moss.)

We All Fall Down

After the Napa quake a little while ago, I found myself curious. I’ve known for a while that the Hayward Fault in the East Bay stands a decent chance of tearing loose in a big way. If I’m still here when that happens, how bad will it be? What will it feel like for me, on the other side of the Bay? How will that compare to what I felt during the Napa quake? (How frightened am I likely to be?)

If reading about destruction from earthquakes is likely to upset you, don’t go behind the cut.

(more…)

A Year in Pictures – Circle of Lebanon

Circle of Lebanon
Creative Commons License
This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

This is one of the more famous bits of Highgate: the “Circle of Lebanon,” so named for the Cedar of Lebanon that stands atop the central part. It’s at the upper end of the “Egyptian Avenue,” and together those two areas form a rather spectacular display of Victorian funerary extravagance.

A Year in Pictures – Zakopane Cross

Zakopane Cross
Creative Commons License
This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

This is the third of the spectacular cemeteries I’ve been to. It’s the Peksow Brzyzek in Zakopane, Poland, a place which introduced me to a wild array of funerary monuments of a very different sort from the codified Victorian catalogue of motifs. (Among other things, many of the Peksow Brzyzek markers are vastly more recent.) It was actually difficult to photograph the place well, since everything is crammed together cheek-by-jowl, but you’ll see more of it as the month wears on. This height of this cross is not an artifact of the angle; it towered over everything around it except the trees, and gave those a run for their money. Those beads are a rosary necklace, if you need a comparison for scale.

Also, here again we have a splendid example of what Lightroom can do for you. The cross was rather backlit, but fiddling with the settings allowed me to bring out the carving on the front, which was otherwise lost in shadow.

A Year in Pictures – Brompton Cross in Ferns

Brompton Cross in Ferns
Creative Commons License
This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Parts of Brompton Cemetery are nearly as overgrown as Highgate, but in a different way: fewer trees, more ferns. (And a wall that bids fair to win the award for Most Ivy Per Square Inch, which you will see later.) There were seas of underbrush to the sides of the main path, with headstones and crosses poking up, and some of the ferns orange with the season. I do not know if there are plans to try and clear the cemetery grounds and restore them to a more manicured state.

A Tale of Two Leicas

It turns out that the reason I could only get the Leica V-Lux 4 from Austria was because they’ve discontinued it. And the reason they’ve discontinued it is because . . . there’s a new one out as of about, oh, yesterday.

On the left, my Leica V-Lux 2: not sure how old it is, but given that I’ve had it since 2011 and it was a hand-me-down from my mother who used it for some amount of time before that, let’s go with “elderly (in camera years)” and leave it at that. On the right, the V-Lux Typ 114, which is O_O shall we say a little bit larger.

I’m okay with this. I just didn’t realize how much larger it would be. Still nothing compared to my father’s setup, but his rig — body and lens — weighs about four pounds, which is way more than I ever want to carry around myself. This should be fine. I’m going to sit down with the instruction manual and learn how it works, including both the stuff the V-Lux 2 couldn’t do and the stuff the V-Lux 2 could do but I never actually learned it, and then I’m going to find an excuse to go photograph something dark just so I can cackle at what it’s like to have an up-to-date sensor that isn’t borderline at ISO 400 and useless above that.

Best thing? I called the Leica store in San Francisco yesterday to ask when the Typ 114 was going to be released, and the guy told me they’d arrived that morning. I thought about going to the city to pick it up, but it turned out that shipping would cost less than parking, would require zero effort on my part, and would have the camera to me today — way sooner than I could have gotten up there to claim it in person. Laziness for the win!

Stories, stories, everywhere

A number of these things have been piling up:

  • “Daughter of Necessity” is live at Tor.com today! Some of you heard me read this at FOGcon this past spring; well, now it’s out in the world. With fabulous art by Ashley MacKenzie — seriously, it is gorgeous and amazingly appropriate to the story and not a spoiler. Which is a remarkable balance to strike.
  • I just got my contributor copies for Zombies: More Recent Dead, which includes a reprint of “What Still Abides.” (Shhhh, don’t tell Paula Guran that I used to refer to that as my Anglo-Saxon vampire story. It’s as much a zombie story as it is a vampire story, which is to say it isn’t really either, but you can read it both ways depending on the angle you tilt your head at.)
  • The anthology made from the first four issues of Mythic Delirium‘s online reboot won’t be out until November, but it’s gotten a starred review from Publishers Weekly, with a specific shout-out to my story “The Wives of Paris.”

(Now I feel like there ought to be five things. But at the rate I do (or don’t do) short fiction-related stuff these days, that would mean delaying even longer, which is silly.)

A Year in Pictures – Moss-Covered Urn

Moss-Covered Urn
Creative Commons License
This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

October will be a themed month, sort of — the theme is “October-ish stuff,” which is to say autumn color, cemeteries, and bones. (Only two photos of bones, if you’re put off by that sort of thing.)

To start us off, I have one of my favorite photos from my 2013 trip to England and France. This is a funerary urn in Highgate Cemetery, covered in a velvet layer of moss. I know all the growth on and around the monuments in Highgate is not good for them, and people are working to restore the ones that have been badly damaged . . . but of course the partially ruined state of the place constitutes a large part of its aesthetic appeal.

A Year in Pictures – Bright Blue Beetles

Bright Blue Beetles
Creative Commons License
This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Today we are kicking it old-school, not just with another print scan, but with a photo from my oldest album. I thought I wasn’t interested in photography until I went to Costa Rica; then I realized I just needed to be in a place worth taking pictures of.

Or at least presented with beetles worth taking pictures of. 🙂

A Year in Pictures – Etched Window

Etched Window
Creative Commons License
This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

If I needed evidence that proper cameras still have the edge over cameraphones, this provides it. I tried to take a photo of this window (in the Okinawan Prefectural Budokan) with my phone, and it came out useless, with the etching totally washed out. When I came back the next day with my actual camera, though, I could control the settings enough that it came out beautifully.

A Year in Pictures – Zakopane Church

Zakopane Church
Creative Commons License
This work by https://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

It took some fiddling in Lightroom to get this photo to reflect what I saw; the initial result left the leaves above so thoroughly silhouetted that their color didn’t come through at all. The framing pleased me, though, with the evergreens on the sides and the changing leaves fringing the top.