This weatherbeaten house outside of Caherdaniel caught my eye a few days ago. This is the kind of photo where your mileage will vary about how much you like it, but it grew on me. In fact, I briefly thought about doing a series of photos of weatherbeaten Irish houses, but after shooting a half dozen or so I called it quits. They just weren’t that good. This one really was uniquely interesting.

This picture, by the way, has been Photoshopped to within an inch of its life. I straightened it. I fixed the perspective to get the square-on look I wanted. I brightened the house itself. I eliminated an alarm system above the doorway. I added some color saturation to the foliage in front. And I used haze removal to give the sky a little bit of definition. Then, after it was all done and reduced to 2000 pixels, I sharpened it. Were these the right decisions? There are a thousand different ways you could manipulate this image, all with their own virtues. This is just the one I chose.

I should also mention that this house is for sale! Like most of the properties around here, it’s represented by Brid Moran, auctioneer, and I’m sure she’d be happy to entertain your offer. Just click here.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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