I’m pretty much done publishing The Big Aha now, although there still keep being little tasks. It’s easy to put a paperback on Amazon via their CreateSpace. But it’s been slow getting the final version of the paperback edition on Lightning/Ingram so that retailers other than Amazon can distribute it. I have a feeling that Lightning is a little overwhelmed these days, with the still-cresting wave of self-pubbers.

[I took some photos near Bernal Hill and 24th St. in the Mission recently. I always wonder about shoes on the phone wires. Love this shot. Did the Witch of Oz crash here on Halloween?]

Indeed Ingram now has an alternate interface to Lightning which is called Ingram Spark (Spark as in baby Lightning, I think.) See this page for some comparisons of possible earnings via Lightning, Spark, and CreateSpace.. The main financial difference between Ingram Lightning and Ingram Spark has to do with the discounts that you can offer to retailers. (As if there was any real money in these quixotic ventures.) Self-pub maven Aaron Shepard doesn’t like Spark, see this post and scroll down to see his earlier ones as well. All very chaotic, as usual.

Anyway, let’s look at some random snaps.

Our son Rudy Jr. and his wife Penny had a Halloween pre-trick-or-treating get-together. This young hipster woman Annalise, she was wearing a dress with a lift-up flap labeled “Hello Titty,” and the flap covered a plastic window revealing part of her breasts. She told me she’d made a satirical superhero video called Hello Titty, and you can see it online. San Francisco art.

Another time, in mid-November, my wife and I walked from Bernal Heights down to Precita Park with our granddaughters. I saw a nice California chestnut tree, laden with fruit. Always an easy move to silhouette things against the ubiquitous wires.

It was a sunny day. I’m always into shadows.

Later we were in a playground on 24th Street, which is in some ways like Mission Street, very Mexican and Latino, but it’s a narrower street, and homier. One of the swings was like a flat UFO, I dug how it looked against the buildings in the background. The cube and the triangular prism.

That particular playground has a huge Aztec-type serpent sculpture that snakes all around. A little girl running next to it here.

There’s a very cool alley with murals off 24th Street near Harrison, it’s called Balmy Alley. Some the murals are kind of disconcerting, as they express the locals’ growing discontent at the potential gentrification of their neighborhood. The cops busting Mexicans and having coffee with white tech workers. The developers tearing down low-rent Victorians to put in glossy condos. You can see an evil invader monkey with a dollar sign in this amazing mural. I forgot to note down the muralist’s name, but maybe somebody can tell me.

You can see a ton of Balmy Alley images via Google Image search. And you can get higher level info from the muralist organization Precita Eyes, which has an center on 24th St, and even gives tours.

Other venues…here’s a cell-phone shot of the sun glaring on a Target Sign near Union Square in SF. Merry frikkin’ Xmas.

A lady with her T-Bird in Los Gatos. Old California.

The Precita Café. I like those festive colors and lights against the night sky. Kind of European, somehow. SF is a bunch of other countries.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 26th, 2013 at 10:10 am and is filed under Rudy's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.