I’ve been killing a bit of time this morning, organizing and tagging a bunch of photos on my flickr site. I take a lot of photos of concerts (some good, most of questionable quality; I’m not a photographer, you know) and organize them into their own individual sets. I go to a lot of different shit, but the overall trend is Metal, be it Doom, Black, Drone, Death…you name it. So, for the Hell of it, I’ve organized a set of only Metal shots for anyone’s enjoyment. Destroy! \m/[(>.<)]\m/

It’s been a at least a few months since I’ve posted some of the photosets of concerts I’ve been to recently. If you know me (really, you don’t), I go to a fair amount of shows here in New York City, mostly metal of the Doom, Black, Stoner, Drone and occasionally, Death varieties. I like Metal; I like getting pasted and snapping a shitload of photos and uploading them to Flickr with minimal editorial discretion.

So, here’s a mess of them for you:

• Mouth Of The Architect / Wetnurse / Total Failure / Psyopus
• Fu Manchu
• Tombs / Plows
• Estuary
• BloodHorse / Disfear
• Howl
• Earth / Kayo Dot / Zaïmph
  

The cool thing is that today, the band Wetnurse emailed me to ask if they could use one or more of the photos I shot of them for the liner of their new CD. Of course, I’m more than happy and honored to oblige.

It took a hell of a long time, but I’ve finally finished uploading the photos I took while in Hawaii to a set on my Flickr account—all 748 of them. I still have some tagging and naming to do, but feel free to check them out. A lot of them are overkill, but I think I did manage to get a few really cool shots here and there. Hawaii is an incredibly beautiful place. It’s hard not to go apeshit with a camera.

There’s this huge-ass dry-erase board in my newly-built office that I share with four other people. Together, with a cubicle buddy from back in the day, who is similarly graced with a fat-ass whiteboard, I have created a Flickr group dedicated to all things taking place on a dry-erase board.

“Dry Erase Yer’ Face” has only one rule. All images must consist of dry-erase markings on a whiteboard. It can be art, a cartoon, scribbles, notes, graphs, flowcharts or semi-realistic radioactive-orange vulvas—I don’t give a shit, as long as it’s dry-erase.

If you have access to a dry-erase board and a camera, join and post to the group today!

A friend of mine recently pointed out that of all the public photos on Flickr that are tagged “bastard”, 5% of them are of my cat, George. This morning, I checked it myself with a calculator. As of right now, there are currently 2403 public photos tagged “bastard“. 392 of these images are of George. That’s 6%! All hail the fuzzy, fat bastard!
While I am very pleased, George has mixed feelings. He does enjoy being looked at and admired by many strange people, but he really doesn’t like my camera, especially the flash. Personally, I could care less. I feed him and give him shelter, hence I will pimp his fuzzy belly on Flickr all I want.

Tonight was the dreaded bath night for my two cats, George and Gracie. As expected, it was more than sufficiently scarring for them and I’ve no doubt that some form of revenge is undoubtedly around the corner.

Naturally, photos were taken and I’ve posted them to a set on my Flickr account. All the carnage is there. However, when bathing Gracie, she really did not enjoy the water and completely flipped the fuck out, so there’s not too many photos of her ordeal and what there is to see is pretty blurry since she was freaking. She was flopping and flailing all over the place so after a point I took pity on her, made sure the soap was off and just let her be lest she get hurt with her flinging about.

All in all, it was so traumatic for them, that I doubt they’ll be getting another bath for at least six months. It makes for funny photos, but they’re going to kill me in my sleep if I do that again to them too soon.

This morning I felt like I wanted to try something new, so I installed Flock, the plugged-in, oh-so-social spin-off of the Firefox browser. Flock is basically the same as Firefox, but with integrated support for Flickr, Photobucket, del.icio.us, Shadows and most popular blogging software. Lotsa whiz-bang fancy shit going on.

After installing, I went through the setup and hooked Flock into my Flickr and del.icio.us accounts as well as this blog (typing that word makes me feel dirty… go figure). Currently, I’m typing this post using Flock’s built-in editor. I write the post, click publish and the post should go live, I guess, we’ll see.

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I’ve been bed-ridden, sick as fuck all day long. After sleeping for far too much, I started going through some old archive discs from years ago as I sweated out a fever. Most of them were damaged or corrupted, but I did find some shit I’d pretty much forgotten about.

One of the discs I found was an archive of photographs I’d taken of the World Trade Center area on September 27th, 2001. Some of the photos had been corrupted, but I was able to recover the majority of them and post them to my flickr account.

It was still a complete and total fuck-zone went I first went down there and I remember walking around with my camera, everything around me covered with a thick layer of ash and feeling like I was walking through a ghost town in winter only in reality it was September and the “snow” was actually pulverized concrete and God knows what fucking else. It’s disturbing to think I inhaled some of that stuff.

All kinds of items, hats, shoes, umbrellas, briefcases and other sorts of things were lying around, neatly stacked and out of the way, in case someone might return to reclaim them. Messages were written in the dust on the walls and everywhere possible were notes scribbled on paper, photos and desperate pleas for information on missing people. It was an extremely surreal experience.

When the planes had hit the towers, I was working on 28th Street. After watching from the roof of my building, I’d headed straight down there, mainly because I had nothing to do and didn’t know how to get home, having lived in New York for only a couple of months, but I was turned back at Canal Street by the police. I was living in Williamsburg at the time, but aside from the fact that it was located in Brooklyn, that was about as much as I knew. It took me six hours to walk home. I crossed the Manhattan bridge on foot with thousands of other people. I was hot, tired and hungry. I had no money and could find no working ATM. My cell phone didn’t work. Nothing fucking worked except my feet.

I’ve been back there several times since but I’d almost forgotten that first visit, alone and pretty fucking bewildered. There was this one jewelry store, completely abandoned and trashed. The doors must have been open when all the shit went down, because inside the place everything was covered with almost two inches of ash. Peering through the store window made me feel like I was looking into a crypt.

Anyway, here’s the link to the images:

World Trade Center photo set

Have a peek.

I use Linux at home and I’m also a big fan of Flickr and use the service to store and share all my photos online, including my gratuitous cat photos, embarrassing and revealing though they may be.

The problem I face using this service with Linux is that while Flickr supplies uploading applications for most operating systems, they kind of leave Linux out to dry. Luckily, several people have written programs to fill this void. If you only have a few photos to upload, you can get by using uploading via web page, but if you just got back from vacation or shameless cat worship and you’ve got 40-100 images to put up, you need a batch uploader or you’re going to go insane.

I had some success using Flickr Uploadr. It worked well enough until I chose to merge my Flickr account with my Yahoo account (Flickr users know what I’m talking about). After that, I couldn’t get it to work. Faced with the headache of finding, installing and setting up a usable replacement, I started getting pretty frustrated with the missing dependencies, incorrect Java packages and shit I didn’t have the time or patience for. I just wanted to upload a few photos, not perform an appendectomy.

Fortunately, I spotted uploadr.py. It’s a simple Python script that lets you specify a folder on your computer to serve as the “live” folder. Put your photos there, run the script and they are uploaded to your account. It’s no frills. You can’t rename, set tags, resize or add to sets, but honestly, I’m happy to be able to upload by only running a simple script. I can do all the rest later, once they’re up and I’m logged into Flickr’s batch edit.

Lately, as far as I’m concerned, everything’s been all about the mad subway masturbater. A man, dedicated to what I envision as a insane, frantic and unstoppable pud-thwacking frenzy that was caught on a cell phone camera, spanking his monkey like there was no tomorrow. Not a man to be upstaged, nor crossed. It’s all over the news. It’s the topic of conversation. It’s the image that’s burned into the back of my retinas when I awake, sweaty and screaming for mother in the wee hours of dawn.

Few of us, here on this earth can reach such levels of social inappropriateness as a guy who likes whipping his junk out in public. It’s raw, it’s primal, it’s really bizarre. Most of all, after consuming a lot of alcohol, it’s really fucking hilarious to me.

Now I know, this guy is a serious pervert. He’s victimized a lot of people and he’s really bad and should be castrated with extreme dull-bladed prejudice, but fuck, I have brain damage, I come from a broken home and at this current mental state, the whole thing is looking kind of humorous to me.

I mean seriously, a mad, demonic subway masturbater. Just when you think it’s safe to take that 6 train… THWACK, THWAPPA-THWAPPA-THWAPPA-the demon wanker of the underground has struck! You look up from your newspaper to a grinning fiesta of greasy, meat-spanking weirdness and you ask yourself, “Who am I, really?” As a passenger here on Spaceship Earth, do I really know where I’m going in this life?” Some deep moments can be had when facing the leering mask of the Monkey-Spank God.

By whipping his johnson out and painting the ceiling, he has single-handedly (literally) shown the world that as civilized as it may look, underneath the surface, lurking around the corner is a crazy dude that likes beating it in public. You probably work with him and don’t delude yourself by pretending he washes his hands on a regular basis.

There’s something almost primal about a dude who sees something he likes and just starts punching that clown till there’s no tomorrow with total disregard for social norm and restraint. It’s totally fucking caveman and in that sense, is awesome. Unfortunately, there’s victims. But let’s pretend for a minute that there aren’t. Remove the victim and in my mind, the Mad Subway Masturbator is a hero of the times. A man that refuses to bow to society’s rules, who indulges in his animal roots and yanks it left and right, preferrably on public transportation. His rigid, grinning visage of onastic pumping joy serves as a beacon to shock us and remind us that we are human and not that far away from the caveman, whipping one off by the campfire.

If he hadn’t terrorized those girls, I would’ve felt a lot more support for him. I envision him pulling an OJ Simpson, riding the train into the sunset, cops on his tail, whacking that shit till it bleeds because he’s not jerking it for himself, he’s jerking it for the world. He’s whacking it for God, man. I’d be right there on the platform as the train would whip by at breakneck speed, with my cardboard sign that said, “Go Mad Subway Masturbater, Go!”

But reality is something I’m far removed from. This guy’s an asshole. He’s a pervert that needs to be someone’s ass-toy at Riker’s for a few months.