Sepia!

I found a box of old photography paraphernalia in my family's house; apparently my mom got it at a garage sale some time back. Included are some developing chemicals and flash-pistol cartridges, baffles for creating ornamental borders, etc. (All of this will be documented later.) The information on the flash-pistol cartridge box matches an ad placed in several photography journals from 1909 (go go Gadget websearch!). Included is a half-pound can of "Rumford Baking Powder", emptied out and used to store photo negatives. Some of them are really gorgeous and well-composed. This morning, I got up early and walked through the mist-grey air to scan them... for you!

Below are the negatives; mouse over for positive-adjusted versions! (See what I do for you.)




























Alas, this one didn't come out well, but the negative looks clearer than that; I know I can get a better image. Try, try again...





Clicking -> Picasa album. These are all the negatives - but there is plenty of photo'ing yet to be done! At some point, I'll share pictures of the rest of the stash (containers, etc.). I'm sharing all of these under Creative Commons (I doubt that the mystery photographer is still alive). You can use and alter them however you want, but please give credit.

Percolating.

I haven't finished anything recently, but that certainly doesn't mean I haven't advanced. I have a sort of book-exploration thing I'm working on, involving such delightful things as mirror poems and inter-language homographs. I've stolen most of the plot and characters from my dreams, which is how I'm getting around my general failure at writing fiction. :)

This is also an excuse to work up a bunch of interesting material. Here are some practice pages from almost a year ago now, when I was being all inspired by old manuscripts (I was taking a Medieval Spanish/Arabic literature course at the time):

(Text is Mazlaani, my constructed language.)

(Text is English, written in... well, I don't think we need to give that away. It's a bunch of quotations I like, from a variety of sources.)

(Basically the same thing.)

Here's a chord wheel for transposition and whatnot; there's some kind of book out there, but the author's wheel makes no sense to me. This is what does. It's a bit janky, visually, but it flows in a logical fashion: you start in the center, and go out to see what chords line up harmonically. If your song uses the first and fourth boxes in a radius, they'll be the same interval apart but in a different key for each other radius. It progresses like cello/viola/violin strings: 7 semitones apart, ascending clockwise. I use this because I'm lazy and find complex chords intimidating.