Journal of working with the photos.
This worked so well with my C3 photos, might as well use a journal again while
I work.
So I got the film developed in less than 24 hours after I stepped off the plane
in Toronto. Impressive, especially since all of the film had to be
push-processed. I wish I remember which rolls were 400 ASA and 800ASA, just
so I could compare graininess -- the colour C41 seems to get really
green-grainy when it's pushed too far.
Gave the negatives over to Black's Photo. Got the scans three days later (on
June 3rd). I couldn't download them because the firewall where I work blocks
attempts to download files ending in *.exe. Damnit. At home, the cablemodem
has been timing out when talking to Blacks. Doubledamnit.
June 5th, try again for the downloads, success! Now I really want to know
which rolls were 800 and which were 400, because the greengrain is bad in most
of these. Some photos were double-exposed and overexposed too (damnit, that's
what I get for eaking out every last exposure out of a roll). The JPEG
artifacts are also pretty bad in these pictures -- histogram stretch on these
pictures reveals the gridwork where it should be gradient or flat black. No
time to work with these.
June 10th, Saturday. Astrid's in Hamilton so I get the computer all to myself.
I noticed the initial order I had the rolls in was wrong (posing girl at the
end of roll 'c' and at the start of roll 'i' just can't be right). Working
on cleaning up rolls A (Thursday) and B (Friday afternoon)
a00001: hotel lobby. The graininess and artifacts really shows here in the
blacks of people's leather and hair. A median_cut noise filter seems
to do a good job without smearing detail like a smooth or blur filter
would. Resizing it down to 600x400 will do as much smoothing as I
should need. Trid identified the people, left to right, as Rafe,
Algernon, Donya, Kiria, Inar, Trid, and Madame Archel
"thursday, hotel, rafe, algernon, donya, kiria, inar, trid, archel"
a00002: hotel lobby again. Not much graininess, I wonder why this worked out.
The man who became dubbed 'avacado man' on the far left. Algernon
first sighted in the background here.
"thursday, hotel, avacado"
a00004: Outside the hotel. On a hunch, I cropped this photo to a 1:2 aspect
ratio... and it seems to work. It's the same trick that APS uses for
it's 'panoramic' mode: crop out the top and bottom thirds, then
stretch out to full width. I also replaced the right part with a
second photo I took of the same scene (see the jink in the white curb
which I smoothed, but couldn't quite fix). The left-side jink is in
the gold pillar, but you can't see it. I like the 1:2 aspect, I think
I'll use it elsewhere.
"thursday, hotel, crowds"
a00005: 1:1 aspect ratio. Works really well for these three. These three
cool humans I spotted all weekend and hung with. (damnit, I remember
Sable's name, but only because I had to use it ten times. Middle
lady is Sable's wife... whose name is... Natalie! (thank you Astrid)
from Salt Lake City, Utah.
The the circuitry corset (detailed later) is sported by masque.
"thursday, hotel, sable, natalie, couples, masque, donya"
a00007: The party bus. Bad photo, I'd toss it but it's the only picture I
have of the bus. Just consider this a token of what I've edited out.
Narrin's in the second row, left side. I aughta know who's in the
back row. Psyche's in the third row, right side. I never spoke to
the person in the front row, so I don't feel bad about not knowing a
name.
"thursday, bus, narrin, who"
a00008: In the Karaoke bar. Crab, the bearded man in the booth was very fun and
Fross looks on. Something about this picture looks... "right". Maybe
composition, or the colour. I don't know, but my instincts tell me
I should ask an expert what they think. Trid and Madame Archel face
away, Kristalle and Crab face forward
"thursday, karaoke, crab, trid, archel, kristalle"
a00008_hotwax: an attempt at getting the 'rightness' of the picture. Reminds
me of an impressionist painting.
"thursday, karaoke, artsy"
a00009: Low deail photo, but the colour is pretty cool.
"thursday, karaoke, artsy"
a00010: Some of us left the Karaoke bar for a bite to eat. We found a pub two
blocks south of the Karaoke place. This is Wendi/Artemis/Boadicea, seated for
a meal. Ask her the story about 'ah, but is Fross fuckable?' story
for something embarassing I did after taking this photo.
"thursday, artemis, boadicea"
a00012: Karoke. Picture's okay, I guess. Used a flash.
"thursday, karaoke, who"
a00013: Karoke. Reminds me of a magazine ad, somehow. Dr. Pain, with his tounge
sticking out on the far right came to C6 from Bavaria. Thick accent.
Trid identified Darth, Tweakin', and Jezibel.
"thursday, karaoke, darth, tweakin, jezibel, dr_pain"
a00014: Oh yeah, this is the karaoke photo I'd show off. I caught my flash in
the mirror (amateur mistake, d'oh), but it seems to add a bit of disco
to the mix. Very proud of catching the action and the crowd. She's
singing "Sweet Dreams (are made of this)"
"thursday, karaoke, who"
a00015: One of the reasons I'd rather not use a flash. Everthing human has
it's colour washed out. I kept it because it's a clear picture of the
bar. Bottom centre is Psyche, whose colour is washed out in every
photo I take of her, even without a flash. Reminds me of the Blade
Runner strangeness in my C3 photoshoot. A good sign.
"thursday, karaoke, psyche"
a00016: Washed out, but the promised detail of the circuitry corset, and a TV
as proof that Karaoke happened
"thursday, karaoke, masque"
a00017: Masque/Donya posed for me in the hotel. I did some photo fudgery
so the space between her left arm and waist wasn't lost in shadow.
I'm dead embarassed I don't remember her name. She was so nice.
"thursday, karaoke, corset, masque"
a00017_gamma: Masque with gamma adjusted. My art programs
auto-gamma-correct, but it occured to me this picture might still be
too dark, so I tweaked the gamma in the picture too.
"thursday, karaoke, corset, masque"
a00018: The drunk bavarian. Damnit, I read his nametag three times (Macross
and Artemis have reminded me it read "Dr. Pain"). This is
taken just before he deep-throated a beer and the foam backspilled out
of this throat and onto his jacket. Hotel parties are good.
"thursday, hotel_party, dr_pain"
a00019: Rafe, pretty pale Kiria in hand with one of the better t-shirts on the
weekend: 'Let the fucking begin'. Poor boy *finally* found that
special someone, but she couldn't come. C6 is an aphrodisiac and the
boy's sex toy was at home (and he was a good boy, never fear). The red
button affixed to his forehead reads "Panic."
"thursday, hotel_party, couples, rafe, kiria"
a00020: C6 is not just an aphrodisiac, it also a backrub-isiac. Inar giving,
Kiria gettting, Sable and Rafe reclining. I think Rafe's drinking some
rasberrry brandy.
"thursday, hotel_party, sable, rafe, kiria, inar"
a00021: TeeTok, masque now corsetless and breathing easy,
and the two in the back row of the party bus in A00007 I aught to know.
The 2:1 aspect ratio here again, but the effect is very different than
in A00004. Trid identified himself and Madame Archel.
"thursday, hotel_party, TeeTok, azathoth, masque, trid, archel"
a00022: Dr. Pain tries his luck.
"thursday, hotel_party, couples, dr_pain"
a00023: Ah, cute, but it was the end of the roll.
"thursday, hotel_party, who"
b00001: First official morning of drinking. Fross was nice enough to buy a
round (huzzah!). No, I don't remember the other two names. I'm awful.
2:1 ratio again for the picture. I'm really liking the composition
possibilities.
"friday, hotel, drinking, fross, who"
b00002: No, Artemis did not drink all of those. Her consort, TeeTok, is in
the photo, likely fantasizing about yoghurt (no, really).
"friday, hotel, drinking, artemis, boadicea, couples, teetok, azathoth"
b00003: D'oh. Natalie reading the comic 'Oh My Goth!',
written by New York's Voltaire.
"friday, hotel, drinking, natalie, who"
b00004: "Son, if you're going to get anywhere in this world, you need a good
suit. To be important, you gotta look important, and to look important
you need a good suit. You look important, people will think you're
important and put you in important positions where you will be
important." That's not the chorus of his joke, but before his shaggy
dog story was over we were all chanting it with him. Fun guy.
"friday, hotel, drinking, crab"
b00005: Maxi holding a little thing up, Tony and Alanja of SLC, Utah.
"friday, hotel, drinking, maxi, tony, alanja"
b00006: Astrid (looking very french model-like) and Sable
"friday, hotel, drinking, astrid, sable"
b00007: Astrid sees that Artemis is not amused.
"friday, hotel, drinking, astrid, artemis, boadicea"
b00008: Good picture of Fross
"friday, fross"
b00009: I forgot I took this picture. Carla Holley says "Flaming redhead
Leeny, baldheaded Ogre,
doorman at the Vogue. don't know who's got the purple hair...
then Dennis(DarkSabbat) with the long blonde hair, the fabulous
Jamie again in mesh, and dark-haired missy beside him is Sadee
(Dennis' wife) ... don't know the others."
"friday, townhall, crowd, leeny, ogre, dennis, darksabbat, jamie, sadee, who"
b00010: ?, Monica's sister, Steve with kewl hair (Astrid met him and said the
person is also kewl), and ?.
"friday, hotel, steve, couples, who"
b00011: Steph and silentq in the foreground, outside TownHall. I can't tell
if it's out of focus or slightly overexposed.
"friday, greet, silentq, townhall, stephanie"
b00011_silentq: Detail of B00010, and cleaned up some. She hates cameras, so
it's not easy for me to take a picture of her without tensing up. I
like this one, even with the greengray grainy. If someone can tell me
how to clean it up, I'll get to work with the 1586x1024 original to
improve this shot.
"friday, silentq, artsy"
b00012a: C-Ko, protestgoth. That's a Sushi chef on her shirt telling you to
mobilize for global justice. She's also a volunteer working the
weekend, thus the red 'I give blood' button.
"friday, greet, cko, c-ko"
b00012b: a couple I thought looked cool sitting on the pew. Michael Barrick
id'd them as Dwight and Melanie, friends of his girlfriend.
"friday, greet, couples, dwight, melanie"
b00013: two exotics I saw, and a miscreant arm in the way. I used the flash
for this one since I needed it in that hallway. The taller one reminds
me of someone (aside from atypical corporategoth). I'll mention it
later.
"friday, greet, who"
b00016: Sable with a Sisters lunchbox, and someone corseted and in velvet.
They're watching some gypsy dancers (I didn't bother taking photos of
them, since I couldn't get a good spot and everyone else was taking
photos anyways).
"friday, greet, who"
b00017: Goths? Getting organized? Get outta here. First sighting of Macross
(turned away, centre), Siobhan (small head to his right), and scottish
Louise from Toronto (recognizable with the top hat).
Macross says "the fellow next to me is TSM, the blonde guy with the
beard next to Louise is Albatross."
uroboros says "The one at the far right edge of the picture in the
thigh-high boots is me."
"friday, greet, macross, siobhan. louise, tsm, albatross, uroboros, crowd"
b00018: cute couple, eh? It's Absinthe and her fiancee, Dave.
"friday, greet, couples, absinthe, who"
b00019: Also cute couple. Astrid in the corset I got her for her birthday
(made by Nicole Cooper, Toronto, nocturnaliacloth@hotmail.com,
totally unpaid for plug), and first sighting of Jett Black. I didn't
see much of Jett in New Orleans, but we spent some time in Seattle...
even though he probably remembers little of it (lack of sleep and hard
work, not booze). I've got a *great* picture of Jett in Toronto for
C4: http://netdesign.net/~moses/c4/mozai/ThirdCD/IMG0045.jpg
"friday, hotel, astrid, jett_black, couples"
b00020: Astrid posing for me. Her skin tone is a bit washed out, but there's
no denying she looks sexy. The gloves, satin. The clothes, plastic.
The choker, leather.
"friday, hotel, astrid, fetish, artsy"
b00021: Krista and the avacado man. After this shot he tried to enlighten me
on the virtues of avacodos. I learned if you put the avacodo seed
into your guachamole, it won't spoil overnight like it usually does.
He tried other times to enlighten me on avacados and other topics
during the weekend, even telling me to 'shut up' so I would pay
attention. (shrug) whatever.
"friday, hotel, krista, avacado, couples"
b00022: Good couple shot of Keith and Kendra from Milwaulkie. I did some
photo fudgery to make for an even
background (right and left sides used to be the elevator and a luggage
carrier. You'll notice I didn't put back the reflected light you see
in B00021). Wish I could print this.
"friday, hotel, keith, kendra, artsy, couples"
June 12 Monday. Wrote this journal, and rearranged the photo rolls.
Accidentally deleted whole bunches of them. Black's photos webserver screwed
up. Gonna sleep now. It's 1:47am Monday, and I still have to photo-fix my C
and E rolls, redownload rolls D, F,G,H,I, and my MP3 playlist of Battery songs
just ran out. Also surf other photo sites so I attach more names to faces,
and come up with website design (C4ish without frames, maybe).
Awright, just a little Unreal Tournament before I sleep. Algernon got me
hooked on Unreal Tournament at Hallowmas)
http://netdesign.net/~moses/hallowmas/index_02.html
June 13 2000 Tuesday. Soundtrack: Starcraft by Blizzard Entertainment.
Got the other rolls, and they're in the right order now, A thru I. Somehow I
don't make the time to do these things, argh, it's 12:18am and Lisa is
sleeping on the couch five feet behind me, Astrid's trying to get to sleep in
bed (yes, naked again... must... resist), and I've only been tweeking with this
for half an hour. Astrid was giving me suggestions about the pictures, and I
got all grumpy and sensitive, so she got upset and stomped off. Damnit. At
least she and Lisa were impressed by the start of the C roll, shots taken in
the Catwalk. (C00002 thru C00006) Tried to use the clone brush to get rid of
a waterbottle in C00004, and Astrid started dissing the clone brush. Then I
showed her B00022 versus the original photo and she was impressed.
c00002: Oh yeah. This is why I like not using a flash.
"friday, catwalk, band, unto_ashes"
c00003: I should get a bloody award for this one, IMNSHO
"friday, catwalk, band, unto_ashes, melody, natalia"
c00004: Argued with Astrid about how to crop this. I wanted the two to be
balanced, like a mirror. Tried it, Astrid said it was "static."
M: "Um, that's bad, right?"
S: "Putting something dead centre makes it static"
M: "But there's nothing in the centre... oh." and then I remembered
her telling me about negative space, and also Scott Mcloud's
"Understanding Comics". It's slightly off-centre now.
"friday, catwalk, band, unto_ashes, melody, natalia"
c00005: Another lesson from Astrid, about cropping is cutting away extraneous
information. This is actually less than a third of the original
photo, but it has all of the information/subjects in this third... the
stage clutter removed.
"friday, catwalk, band, unto_ashes"
c00006: Crowd scene. I think people don't notice that a well-lit stage means
well-lit people. Hell, take a look at the photos I did at C3 of the
audience (http://netdesign.net/~moses/c3/photos/b26.jpg)... actually,
maybe not. Some of these photos aren't the greatest, but hey, I'm
three years older and wiser now.
"friday, catwalk"
c00007_bw: This is actually the best I could do for restoring a pretty bad
picture. See C00007_orig for a sample of part of the original and
you'll see I didn't do a bad job of tweaking it. Thank ghod for
digital image editing, else this lady's posing for me in the Catwalk
would've been wasted.
"friday, catwalk, who, artsy"
c00009: angel wings. I used a flash, which had the unfortunate effect of
shining off her right shoulder, washing out the tattoo there. I saw
at least three women (likely more, I was drinking) with winged tatoos,
much like the advertisements I've seen in HMV. A fad, I guess, but
I can't see wings going out of style... the dark suit with tails never
did.
"friday, catwalk, who, artsy"
c00011: Psyche in the Catwalk. Used a flash again, mostly because my fave
good lighting spot (which wasn't good, as C00007,8,10,11 proved) was
occupied. Again she's all washed out. I can't tell if there's
something right or something wrong about this photo, but certainly
a je ne c'est quoi. Psyche mailed me later (2000-08-29) to say it's
her favourite photo, so I guess there's something right.
"friday, catwalk, psyche"
c00012: Siobhan, silentq and Steph. I like, no, I love this one. Same
green-gray graininess as C00007, so more smoothing and noise filters
and greyscale picture, but this time I added a uniform amount of
noise to balance how noisy it was in lighter areas but not shadow --
the eye seems to smooth out the uniform noise, making it vanish in my
mind's eye.... or maybe I'm being to artsy-fartsy. I'm glad I got a
good picture of Siobhan. I think this photo has her looking handsome.
"friday, catwalk, siobhan, silentq, stephanie, artsy"
c00013: something about sitting people. I dunno. C5 has a terrific shot of
^batty^ kneeling that reminds me of this picture, only the C5 shot
was done better. http://netdesign.net/~moses/c5/B/b0006.JPG
"friday, catwalk, batty, who"
c00014: Metamorph, Hardrock and Omar.
"friday, catwalk, metamorph, hardrock, omar"
c00015: ?, but snappy dresser. This photo and C00014 were really grainy and
completely red, but I managed to pull something out. Maybe the pix
weren't worth it. You be the judge.
"friday, catwalk, who"
It's raining outside. Furiously, or maybe benevolently, depending on your
opinion of how dusty a city can get. Gave thanks to the Divine for the rain.
Gotta switch music -- the Starcraft music
is actually pretty short, I've already listened to it twice. I can't believe
I've only got one Funker Vogt single. I'll pad it out with the Run Lola Run
soundtrack.
c00016: Yeah, okay, the dress is straight outta SkinTwo and I was distracted.
I actually painted out a lot of superfluous detail that the flash
included by accident.
"friday, catwalk, fetish, who"
c00017: I dunno. I took the shot just before a woman noticed her nipples were
trying to escape and adjusted herself. I think I'll delete this one
out of courtesy.
c00018: grayscaled because of green noise.
"friday, catwalk, band, who"
c00019: Not much noise, works out kinda nice. Composition may be spread out
too much.
"friday, catwalk, band, who"
c00021: Decided to keep the red colour. Played with the noise by filtering
most of it out, adding some uniform noise and then smoothing the whole
thing. Worked out okay. I like the foreground-background contrast,
maybe I could reuse this idea in a studio photo shot.
"friday, catwalk, band, who"
c00022: She's not amused. Is it because she's being manhandled, or because she
doesn't want evidence that this man is the one doing the handling?
"friday, catwalk, couples, who"
c00023: Detail of the original. The motion-blur on the hand can't be avoided,
but pretty small considering it was shot at 1/30s shutter speed (yup,
even drunk I have a steady hand). No idea who she is.
"friday, catwalk, who"
c00025: Ah, this is Jo, from Germany. Met him the first afternoon, amidst the
beermageddon that was happy hour in the hotel bar. We compared the
poor quality of american beer and he suggested I should stick to
Guiness. Good man. He kept popping up around me all weekend.
"friday, catwalk, jo"
c00026: thank you for posing!
"friday, catwalk, who"
c00027: the rubber nun that was talked about around the bar at the Catwalk,
identified by Carla Holley as Stacy/Glitrgoth, who is a model for
fetish fashions in Seattle.
"friday, catwalk, fetish, stacy, glitrgoth"
c00028: thank you for posing!
"friday, catwalk, fetish, who"
c00029: ambient light is so much better on the street than in a bar. Nice
shiny dress
"friday, catwalk, who"
c00030: cool makeup (sorry about the short descs. I'm keeping Lisa up because
she's sleeping on the couch behind me, and it's 2:10am) Lady Elizabeth
Busbee identified him as Brian.
"friday, catwalk, brian"
c00031: first sighting of Cusraque, indomitable in the party bus
"friday, catwalk, cusraque"
c00032: first traditional picture of Mistress Prynne and Edward. Ever since
C4 in Toronto I hunt them down and make sure I get a photo of what
they're wearing.
"friday, hotel, couples, prynne, Edward"
c00033: GREEN! LeeNy thanked me later for taking this photo. I didn't get her
name or email at the time, but she found me later and identified
herself! The Internet brining people together.
"friday, hotel, leeny"
c00034: cute couple. (I got to be an assitant to Kore/Monica at C5 for the
goth prom photos, and now it's rubbed off on me) Narrin identified
them as brian and kelly (or is it celly? He's not sure).
"friday, hotel, couples, brian, celly, kelly"
c00035: Yes, that's a kiss on his cheek. Just where is his right hand?
AMy Lyn helpfully identified the couple as "Tart and ]["
"friday, hotel_party, couples, tart, ]["
c00036: John VerBerg, the Evil Chemist. "What? I didn't drink that, I was
drinking somebody else's!"
"friday, hotel_party, verberg"
c00037: good looking man in chair, in hotel party. Lady Elizabeth Busbee
identified him as Frank N. Furter (which puts me in an odd spot
because he and I met at the Catwalk earlier that night).
"friday, hotel_party, frank_n_furter"
c00038: Lady Elizabeth getting ready to pose for me.
"friday, hotel_party, elizabeth"
Right. 2:15am, and I gotta get some sleep. I promised to show the interns
early in the morning how to maintain the sinking wreck that is the company I
work for, but more importantly, my MP3 playlist ran out. ZzzzZzzzz...
perl -e "while (<*.jpg>) { $n = $_; s/^Img/h/; rename($n,$_); }"
June 14, 2000. soundtrack: PAL, Photek, BigPig, Moby, Rigor Mortis
Added keywords to the pictures. Showed off some pictures to Astrid. She said
I am so lucky to only ever know digital photography -- fixing up pictures
(like the light lamp in g00035). I also did some aux artwork for the website,
and surfed around for fonts. My ghod, but http://www.fontpool.com/ rocks my
world.
Second night of rain. Fucking gorgeous, it is, moreso this time because of
the thunder and lightning.
perl -e 'foreach (2..30) { printf("D%05d: \n",$_); }
d00002: Posed shot. She was uncontiously posing sassy like this, but she had
to get all comfortable and snuggle up to some guy, so I asked her to
pose for me and I positioned her. Still looks stiff, though, not as
good as she looked while I was still pulling my camera out. No, I
neglected to ask her name. (but Lady Elizabeth sent me a letter July
27th identifying herself and two others. Thank you)
"friday, hotel_party, elizabeth, artsy"
d00003: with beer, everybody is your friend.
"friday, hotel_party, couples, drinking, who"
d00004: DJ Arcanus, in what is probably the longest running gag in Convergence,
my fascination with his hands. No joke, I think his hands are
beautiful, but I think this photo shows that saying it every year for
six years gets kinda old.
"friday, hotel_party, arcanus"
d00005: Jett Black, starting the partying night already slumped against a door
in Spyder's room. That's not water he's drinking.
"friday, hotel_party, spyder's_room, jett_black, drinking, who"
d00006: ? and Steve and Brandon, listening intently
"friday, hotel_party, spyder's_room, who, steve, brandon"
d00007: Mike, a little worse for wear (the makeup looked good in the nightclub,
but this is part of why I don't like flashes). Aw, it makes him look
really bad, and I like the way he looks. This one's getting deleted.
d00008: Spyder, lone turbotramp in Seattle, and host to the only free-smoke
hotel party.
"friday, hotel_party, spyder's_room, spyder"
d00009: Louise, scottish lass whom I can finally recognize without her top hat.
(http://netdesign.net/~moses/hallowmas/f0015.jpg and f0016.jpg)
"friday, hotel_party, spyder's_room, louise, drinking"
d00010: The non-spyder hotel party on Friday night... no, wait, there she is
shouting from the hallway. Hardrock holds the door open and our
hostess, the lil bl00 munchkin, looks on.
"friday, hotel_party, spyder, hardrock, lil_bl00_munchkin, kris"
d00011: Spyder tries to get us out of her room by threatening to play the
shameful music that _she_ likes, like [band name withdrawn by request].
This has the opposite
intended effect on Metamorph, as she cries "kindred spirit!"
"friday, hotel_party, spyder's_room, spyder, metamorph"
d00012: "No Turn On Red" A cute couple photo of Brian and [CK]elly again.
"saturday, couples, brian, celly, kelly"
d00013: in the merchant's bazzar. I recognize Jo holding the flyer, and
Jessie holding her hand up (see my photos of Chelsea Sunday night, in
line for the ShowBox).
"saturday, merchants, jo, chelsea"
d00014: "how much am I bid this chickenwire corset?"
"saturday, merchants, who"
d00015: lady attending at the Skin Two table. Okay, the photo is of her
clothes and not her, but isn't Skin Two all about how clothes make the
person?
"saturday, merchants, skin_two, fetish"
d00016: shoppers. I don't remember what the point of this photo was.
"saturday, merchants, couples, who"
d00017: Can you find Cossack in this picture? Taken by setting the focus and
sticking my arms above my head before taking the shot.
"saturday, merchants, cossack, cusraque, hardrock"
d00019: Algernon said I needed the obligatory 'photographer taking a photo of
someone taking a photo of someone taking a photo'. I can't deny this
man anything.
"saturday, merchants, algernon"
d00020: Must take a rest from shopping, especially since Fross contracted some
deviant trans-Atlantic flu bug.
"saturday, merchants, artemis, boadicea, teetok, fross, micol"
d00021: smoke break. Voltaire is hiding in the shadows (how goth).
"saturday, merchants, who, voltaire"
d00022: Detgoths and TOgoths. Art is gonna show me how the Great Lakes homies
do things downtown. Um, left to right it's Art, Martin of Innis
College, Stephanie (smooching), the reliable Jay, ? (see B00022),
Macross (wearing a Transformers t-shirt), ? (but see B00022), Astrid.
"saturday, seattle, art, who, steph, macross, astrid, couples"
d00023: What the hell is it with Cossack climbing things and taking photos? I
didn't bother giving him my camera -- he already had eight to deal
with.
"saturday, seattle, cossack"
d00024: He looked good. Kinda reminds me of a guy I met in New Orleans.
"saturday, seattle, who"
d00026: Sara and Macross.
"saturday, hotel, macross, couples, sara"
d00027: Goths usually go against the grain, in a different direction. This
was part of a bizarre walkabout saturday afternoon -- Astrid and I
were wandering with a horde from Detroit and Toronto, but twice our
horde collided with another horde of goths (or, if gulls are a 'flock',
and rooks are a 'parliment', then technically another 'mope' of goths)
and we were enticed to abandon the first horde to join the others.
Holy ego boost and comfort. The mope of goths pictured includes
Yosa in the red hair, the only person I can identify right away (sorry
to the others).
"saturday, seattle, yosa, who"
d00028: Individually shrink-wrapped shoes. What will you crazy americans
think of next?!
"saturday, seattle"
d00029: Seattle's Pike Market. Take the farmer's market in your local huge
metropolis, and squeeze it until it oozes into a half-kilometer long
and only 20 meters wide.
"saturday, seattle, pike market"
d00032: Astrid had to work at Starbuck's in Toronto to make ends meet. Here
she is, standing at the first Starbuck's ever, showing her contempt
for the company that forced her to service morons and jerks with aa
smile.
"saturday, seattle, pike market, starbucks, astrid"
d00033: Do I need to spell this one out for you? "Open, Come In"
"saturday, seattle, astrid"
d00034: The tourist-plus-commericial centre of Seattle, it seems. If you're
from Toronto, this place is like the corner of Younge & Dundas, only
much cleaner and nicer looking with a fountain. Underneath where I
stood were some people trying to teach the word of Christ to
passers-by (I didn't stop to listen if they were legit or just
prothelizing twits), but I did see a man walking in a circle about
them, holding a sign aloft that read "JESUS! Please SAVE US from your
followers!" I gave him the thumbs up, and he smiled in return.
"saturday, seattle"
d00036: *sigh* It would've been a nice picture, but sometimes at the end of
a roll this will happen if you misload film. I left it in just cause
double-exposures are rare, even intentional ones.
"saturday, seattle, astrid"
Okay, 1 am. Goldfinger's cover of "99 Lufte Balloons" is playing in my mp3'd
earphones (I don't know how). No point in going to work, really, because
earlier today I got word that a placement agency that represents most of the
population where I work has told it's contractors to resign _immediately_
because my employeer owes them $400,000 in back pay and missed one payment too
many, finally. So, no management, no sysadmins, no DBA, no clerks, no
receptionists, just me and two student interns left. Good thing I already
gave my two-weeks notice two days ago. [now playing: Front 242, "Happiness",
remixed by Underworld]. I'm gonna add two more keywords, 'couples' and
'fetish'. Maybe 'drinking' too.
Sunday Jun 18, 2000:
Actually it's 10 after midnight, but I haven't slept yet so it's still Sunday.
Today I had a very nice suprise: cleaning up the apartment I went through the
film I got back from Black's. I expected to find thirteen rolls of film in
thirteen paper envelopes with thirteen orange "DO NOT CUT" stickers. I also
found thirteen CD-ROMs, that each had the large-format scans of the negatives
the CD was packaged with. To think Black's used to charge at least a $1 for
the privaledge to download the 1024x1536 images... now they're free _and_ they
come as JPEG files on CD. 'Course, the price per roll is now up to $10
instead of the $5 it used to be, but this would have cost me ($5 + $1 per
exposure for the large format + $10 for a Kodak CD + $1.50 per Kodak .pcd
image) $75 dollars if I asked for the same material after Convergence IV.
Suweeet.
As per usual, I'm here at the computer, Sarah's in bed, still awake. The
stuffed animals are keeping my part of the bed warm while I'm working here.
Tonight's soundtrack is a band sbenesko "Chinard" recommended called
'Hallucinogen.' Pretty trippy, very 909 and some sort of flange-digeridoo
sound. The night he [censored] for the first time, he asked me to shoot
him if he should ever stray away from industrial into raver hell, because
he's seen and heard of good goths go yellow (and lime, and pink and azure...)
after [censored]. Music like this gets close, but I'll wait until he wears
fun-fur phat pants before putting him down like a dog.
e00001: We're waiting at pier 56, and Rafe's showing off.
"saturday, ferry, pier, rafe, who"
e00002: John "The Evil Chemist" VerBerg and a lady who I really aught to know
the name of, and I have a horrible feeling she may be hurt that I
don't know it right now. Amy Lyn helpfully suggested her name might
be "Diana"
"saturday, ferry, pier, verberg, diana, who"
e00002_trans: An experiment. Maybe John will use it.
"verberg, artsy"
e00003: Lollypop couple at the pier. Looks like Gwyrah and Lisa, but Gwyrah
said it isn't. Jodi Mikesell says "This couple is Asia and Joey.
They live in Tacoma, WA. Asia was one of my models for the fashion
show."
"saturday, ferry, pier, couples, asia, joey"
e00004: Crowd scene at pier 56. Another shot taken by holding my camera above
my head and pointing it in hopefully the right direction.
"saturday, ferry, pier, crowds"
e00005: Someone in denim stepped in front of me, making for a horrible photo
of batty's bucaneer outfit.
e00006: I really aught to know the names of these people, or maybe not. I
kept seeing the man on the right around all weekend, and I remember
him from New Orleans, but maybe we weren't introduced. Not a cross-
dresser, just looks good in women's clothes. (Carla Holley said
the boy looking good on the right is Jamie... among the other things
she said about him.)
"saturday, ferry, pier, who, jamie"
e00007: Astrid and Hardrock, and Hardrock's whips. Narrin and Jo can be seen
in the background.
"saturday, ferry, pier, astrid, hardrock, narrin, jo"
e00008: What the *hell* is with Cossack and climbing things?
"saturday, ferry, pier, cossack, monica"
e00009: The ferry. I didn't get much chance to take photos of the inside.
Shortly after boarding Astrid started to get nervous. "I'm gonna
puke, I know I'm gonna puke, why the hell don't they sell gravol on
the pier?" Apparently it's illegal for the crew to give drammamine
(aka gravol, or motion-sickness pills) to the passengers. I walked
her around, she was getting her sea legs, but she was only comfortable
on the top deck and it was too damned cold. Then the water got
choppy and she insisted she get off the boat... she felt awful about
it, and kept apologizing all the way back to the hotel.
Turns out, she was the smart one; crew said the water was only rough
in the pier, but passengers later said it got much worse in the bay,
and people did get quite quite ill.
We went to the consolation-prize venue, the Mercury.
"saturday, ferry, pier"
e00010: But before we go, let's get the Goth Fratboy to pose for us. Nice
gold and black here, I extended the right side to improve the
composition (I botched the pattern, you can probably see the repeats
with your naked eye). I tried tweaking the colour, but nothing I
could do would improve the oilslick-and-gold tones.
"saturday, hotel, fratboy, fetish, artsy"
e00011: Actually looks pretty cool, but how the hell do I get that green-grain
out without loosing the green girl in the centre of the picture? I've
tried a few things, posterizing, midtone-tweaking, gamma adjustment
(which works, but only to a point), anything short of painting by
hand. Oh, and I'm unhappy about that damn thread that was on the film
when it was scanned. I'm onto something here, though.
"saturday, mercury, artsy"
e00012: Inside the Mercury. Getting closer to what I'm looking for. The shot
is of the DJ booth, from across the dance floor.
"saturday, mercury, artsy"
e00013: Inside the Mercury. Actually this is only a 15% sliver of the
original, but the original is a piece of crap. I saved this part
because it's a reflection of me in a mirror.
"saturday, mercury, mozai, artsy"
e00014: Either: No, there is no escaping Rafe.
Or: Let's see how this turbotramp can do 0-60 with a luggage rack.
"saturday, hotel, spyder, rafe"
e00015: You're in a 10x10' hotel lobby. The wandering monsters table
produces (rolls dice) Becky, Jelousy and Metamorph.
"sunday, hotel, becky, jelousy, metamorph"
e00016: Let me get out of your way; now let the fucking begin.
"sunday, rafe, couples, who"
e00017: Sable takes a lunch break -- Shade (from the Starman comic book series
published by Vertigo) approves.
"sunday, townhall, sable, john"
e00018: British invasion.
"sunday, townhall, micol, jenni4, fross, artemis, boadicea, teetok, azathoth"
e00019: 'We are not amused,' she said, to which they replied 'Oh, but we are
immensely amused!'
"sunday, townhall, who"
e00021_trans: The only salvagable part of a shaky-handed photo of Cliff:
a detail of the sacred heart he wears.
"sunday, clifford, artsy"
e00022: Much better picture of Cliff. Yes, Rafe tends to get in front of
my camera pretty often this weekend. Cliff and I didn't really
connect this weekend... not really the fault of either of us. I was
running around a lot, there are plenty of people I didn't see much of.
"sunday, hotel, rafe, who, clifford"
e00023: It's 2am now. I dunno what to say. Took the photo, the greengrain
kinda ruins it (tried tweaking it by toning down the green 26% and the
blue 48%). The natural position of the four elements make it
interesting, but I'll have to find an art student to tell me why.
Best viewed at half the size.
"sunday, hotel, rafe, who"
e00023_small: see what I mean about it looking better at half the size?
"sunday, hotel, rafe, who, artsy"
e00024: Monica's on a mission. Krista backs her up with a frappucino.
"sunday, monica, krista, seattle, mcfee's"
e00025: The sign reads: 'Our Beloved Satan Is Back! Sold on the Black Market
he has been returned to his rightful home!"
"sunday, mcphee's"
e00026: Archie McFee's, and what we found there:
- ? found a china umbrella and pirate's handbag
- ? found a rubber chicken and crown of the gourd queen
- Astrid found the Jesus action figure (from TrainUpAChild.com)
- Monica found the Syphilis lunchbox and wobbly-headed devil
- Krista found heart deedlyboppers and rabbit ears
- Rafe found something very small, so he's holding my fallout shelter
Luckily I didn't get hit by traffic taking this photo
"sunday, mcphee's, who, astrid, monica, krista, rafe, crowd"
e00027: Should you be in Seattle, get a taxicab ride at least once from this
man. He gave us a lift from Archie McFee's, telling us stories about
the building we passed and the city itself... if we weren't leaving
on a late night plane, I would've called him to give us a lift to
the airport. Do I remember his name or number? NO, damnit. I asked
for his card and got it, too. Well, call Red Top taxi and hope he's
the one that gets the call.
"sunday, mcphee's, taxi, seattle, who"
e00028: Fashion show. The deadly sins display.
"sunday, fashion_show, townhall"
e00029: Fashion show. This is gluttony, I think.
"sunday, fashion_show, townhall"
e00030: Fashion show. This is rage, no mistake.
"sunday, fashion_show, townhall"
e00031: Fashion show. I thought the runway was poorly lit anyways (I was
wrong, but no great loss because) and so many people were already
taking pictures that I could afford to be the one camera that doesn't.
So I took pictures of the audience. A bit of a failed experiment, but
it's something I still experiment with (like C00006).
"sunday, fashion_show, crowds, townhall"
e00033: Same technique as E00004, but not nearly as effective when the camera
is pointed at right angles to how everyone is looking.
"sunday, townhall, fashion_show, crowds"
e00035: Little did I realize that the best fashion show photos would not be
on the runway, but behind the audience as the models get some fresh
air but don't bother getting out of the outfits. I cursed and cursed
when I hit the end of this roll at a bad time. masque tells me this
is gothbitch/Amanda.
"sunday, townhall, fashion_show, gothbitch"
e00036: I don't think Sunny walked the runway at the fashion show (masque says
she was, right after gothbitch), she might've been at the ticket
stand all afternoon. That would've been a waste.
"sunday, townhall, fashion_show, sunny"
Gah. 2:36am, and I have a funny taste in my mouth, and I think I can still
hear sounds from the bedroom that are like book being read by a Sarah that is
staying up way too late waiting for me. That, and my contact lenses were
already dried out when I started two and a half hours ago. Argh. Bitch bitch
moan, but I love this work. I've just got higher standards so I tweak the
pictures more than I used to... although I'm too tired to tweak E00027-33.
That, and I'll never use film that I purchase in the USA with Russian writing
on it, I swear that must be why I've got green-grain even in the hotel lobby
photos. The questionable film I bought in the hotel gift shop, and it came
with English/Russian labels and a cute logo of the towers in Red Square, I
shit you not.
Dazed surfing, found a page that is going to help plenty in finding people's
names, http://www.gothic.net/~squee/net_goth_pix/. Heck, they've got a
picture of me there, and I'm pretty sure I didn't give it to them, so
it should be a complete-ish list. Just have to surf hundreds of (probably
tweaked) photos. Found Montieth, and he never ever told me his handle, so I
might succeed. I've used the keyword "who" for photos I'm missing names for.
... hey, found Gwyrah for one of my couples pictures on the pier, and Absinthe
for the cute couple in B00018. Sent off letters, to see if I got it right.
Gah, I'm tired, almost too tired to sleep. I haven't been able to sleep
lately. Anxiety, morbid fear of death ("Sleep, those litle slices of death,
how I loathe them." -Edgar Allen Poe), just so much to do and I have a short
span of eighty to a hundred (or, for that matter, any finite number).
Mortality sucks such ass. I wouldn't mind so much this body passing away if
my self continued. I wish I could take comfort in the faith in an immortal
soul... I'd make a lousy Bhuddist because I'm too attached to this world,
attached to other people (no any person, just all people), attached to ideas,
I'd always be sure to come up offbalance in the kharmic wheel just so I could
go for another spin.
June 20 2000:
Today's soundtrack is the television, because for once I'm doing this before
midnight and Sarah's awake. She's actually making some pasta shell things
that smell yummy, and she always works (homework, cooking) with a television
turned on. Got the cablemodem for my net connection and for Sarah's homework.
f00001: Half this picture was over-exposed, so I just cropped the part
with Scary Lady Sarah, but she was pretty dark, so I greyscaled it,
tweaked gamma and contrast, and tried a wax coating filter (like I
did with a00008). It's not bad.
"sunday, townhall, scary_lady_sarah, artsy"
f00002: Another strangely exposed photo, but the colour is good.
"sunday, hotel, couples, who"
f00003: Spent some time in the hotel hottub. I jumped in, then Thomas (of
Cleavland?) jumped in, then a woman in a distracting bathing suit
jumped in. We spoke for a while about where the goth culture came
from and where it's going. On a whim, I took a photo of her in the
bathing suit... Thomas said it could be mistaken for a come-on, and
afterwards I think he's right. Luckily this frame was also
overexposed, so I don't have to think about whether it's appropriate
or not.
f00004: A shot from the restaurant area above the hotel lobby. The lady heard
the camera shutter, looked up and snarled at me.
"sunday, hotel, who"
f00005: Yay! Natalie posed for me. Did I ask for a name? No, and the
contrast on her dress blends into the background. I'm so very critical
of myself. Really, she looks good in a 19th century french kinda way.
"sunday, hotel, natalie"
f00006: Why don't people wear more red in the goth scene? I mean, it fits
the colour scheme... hell, each primary colour does well with black.
Lord Angel identified Rose, and said he can find out the man's name.
"sunday, townhall, fashion_show, couples, rose, who"
f00007: Nothing quite like smoking to give you that sunken-cheeks look.
"sunday, townhall, fashion_show, cureboi, who"
f00008: Casual poses are always the best.
"sunday, townhall, fashion_show, who"
f00008_tilt: Here you get to see the original picture, and what I cropped out.
I don't always crop out that much, but I figured I'd focus on one
person. The original was tilted because I took the photo without
looking thru the eyepiece. I played around with this, and Sarah
said "hey, that looks cool." I agree.
"sunday, townhall, fashion_show, crowd, who, artsy"
f00009: Cusraque gets direction from Kyle/DGMage.
"sunday, townhall, fashion_show, cusraque, gray, kyle, dgmage"
Stopped to eat dinner. A fine pinot noir for spinich and ricotta baked pasta,
while watching teevee with a biography of Mary Magaline. Sarah's watching a
show about morticians while I'm editing photos. Good lord, an ordinary night
at home is boast-worthy. Soundtrack now is two covers of "Guilty" by Gravity
Kills (Flood and Juno Reactor remixes), more Juno Reactor, Leaether Strip and
some KMFDM.
f00010: More colour, pink tights! (Carla Holley says "The purple skirt is
lovingly inhabited by Trishy.")
"sunday, townhall, fashion_show, who, trishy"
f00011: Grrr, someone walked in front of me. I've noticed that if you close
one eye to look thru the viewfinder/eyepiece of a camera, you lose
your prehipheral vision, and your awareness of the world around you.
The worst case of this is when the flash goes off, but the photographer
doesn't notice because the SLR camera 'blinks' during the flash as the
mirror swings out of the way for the film to be exposed.
People sometimes back off, or otherwise try to stay out of my way
when I point my camera. I always tell those people to stop being
silly, because I never want to impose (unless I do, in which case I'll
*shove* you out of the way).
His leather jacket looked cool; maybe it's the Front242 reference that
seduced me.
"sunday, townhall, fashion_show, couples, who"
f00012: Once again, the best photos are caught outside the r instead
of on the runway. Cute little leather number, cute little Sanrio
kittycat. Oh, that reminds me, I saw a gothed up Jigglypuff pokemon
in this room. So cool! Whose idea was that?
"sunday, townhall, fashion_show, who"
f00013: More fashion just outside the show. Lord Angel identfied Duane
in the ringmail skirt.
"sunday, townhall, fashion_show, crowd, duane, who"
f00014: 'Passenger Load Only, Tow Away Zone' Something about boys in
leather and skirts that just get's your niccotine running. That's
Lord Angel looking cenobite-like in the armour.
"sunday, townhall, fashion_show, fetish, lord_angel, who"
f00015: This picture is larger than the others (four times as large as my
usual square pictures!) because at 400x400 there isn't enough
detail to see Hardrock and Algernon in the background. They're the
only two I know the names of in this photo. Ooog. (Carla Holley
identified the couple on the right: Ben/Empty and Andrea/Princess,
who married during the year following and moved to Seattle) I like the
perspective of the road, and the vanishing point that is visible
off-centre (pixel (455,280)) with all the lines pointing to it in the
picture.
"sunday, couples, who, hardrock, algernon, ben, empty, andrea, princess"
f00016: The image of a goth freak in a suit, sitting in a desk in what looks
so very much to be a practical business interaction... well, it was
too good to pass up. The concierge(s) at the hotel, by the way, were
always polite and helpful and were never at a loss whatever questions
we asked or assistance we required. They kicked ass and didn't even
blink at our unusual attire. _Very_ professional.
"sunday, hotel, carrie, who"
f00017: Algernon. 'Nuff said.
"sunday, hotel, algernon"
f00017_large: Algernon, larger for him, suitable for framing. The original
is actually 1024x1536, three times the size of this (six time the size
of the usual pictures on this site). I can get prints of these
pictures if anyone likes, but you're probably better off asking for
the originals and printing them on photo-quality paper at your local
expensive copy shop.
"sunday, hotel, algernon, artsy"
Would you beleve only half an hour has passed since I last had to stop?
f00018: TJ posed for me in the hotel lobby. Wonderful jewelery and hair, which
didn't show up beacuse I was slightly out of focus. *sigh* I
shouldn't beat myself up over these things.
"sunday, hotel, TJ"
f00019: Kirsta is a tired kitty, and Art is such a niiiiiice pillow. Monica
is not grossed out by the cuteness.
"sunday, hotel, krista, art, monica"
f00020: From the New York band Unto Ashes, we have Melody (armed with a squirt
gun of virgin's blood?) and Natalia (in leather, mrreow)
"sunday, hotel, melody, natalia, unto_ashes"
'K, gotta go. I'll get back to this later. I finished 'F' roll at least.
June 20 11pm: okay, back to the grind. Sarah's freshly molested and watching
The Simpsons, I've got lipstick smeared on me.
Spoke to a woman in Seattle:
W: "So, you're heterosexual."
M: "Sorta; these days it doesn't really matter since I'm monogamous. Why do
you say that?"
W: "Because on your website you keep gushing about someone named Sarah, and I
assume that's a girl's name."
Now on to the 'G' roll, shot outside the ShowBox Sunday night. *Perfect*
conditions: overcast sky (actually it started raining), place nearby I could
run to to get more film, everyone's dressed up as their favourite dead thing
and standing still because they're lined up for a nightclub and the 'seance'.
I forgot about the seance, but I managed anyways with one of my favourite
dead things -- I was wearing a black 'Atari' tee shirt with the Fuji logo.
Some of the last shots on roll 'F' were of the lineup, but I opened the camera
and exposed the film by accident. Grr. G00024 is a retake of what is probably
F00024.
g00002: Red! Red red red! And what is probably a better photo of C-Ko than
when I was trying to take a photo of her on purpose.
"sunday, showbox line, couples, cko, c-ko"
g00003: Chelsea's the PVC angel,
"sunday, showbox_line, chelsea, who"
g00003_eye_detail : just in case you didn't see the eyes in the resized-to-fit
version of g00003.
"sunday, chelsea, artsy"
g00004: Krista in... um, Elizabethan or Edwardian? dress. Going to have to
ask her.
"sunday, showbox_line, krista"
g00005: Big boots, running on the streets of Seattle.
"sunday, showbox_line, who"
g00006: The gothic frat boy is in the foreground, and the lineup goes beyond
him. This part of the lineup is actually a block away from the
ShowBox, around the first corner.
"sunday, showbox_line, fratboy, crowd, who"
g00007: Meow.
"sunday, showbox line, cusraque, christelle"
g00008: Sorry dear, but I _have_ to take this call. (Carla says "The pretty
asian woman is Noel.")
"sunday, showbox_line, noel, who"
g00009: Spotted friends in the lineup. TeeTok, Artemis, Pained,
and one person who probably doesn't like cameras.
"sunday, showbox_line, artemis, boadicea, teetok, azathoth, pained, who"
Thank goodness for http://www.gothik.org/gallery.html and for
http://www.gothic.net/~squee/netgoths.html
1:31am: Got sucked into ICQ conversations with Macross, Algernon, trist and
Kevin McSprocket (the latter of which is either insane or touched by God,
it's so hard to tell). Lost an hour to conversing, but showed some pictures
to Macross and sent f00017_large to Algernon -- he was tickled. I messaged
trist just as she was surfing photos and found a shot I took of Lady Bathory
at Convergence IV -- synchronicity?
g00010: Hoorah. A suit, Cypher the dandy, and Lady Myria. Trid identified
Caleb and Tiffany on the left.
"sunday, showbox_line, couples, cypher, myria, dandy, caleb"
g00011: Hardrock all wyrded up. Deadrose adores.
"sunday, showbox_line, hardrock, deadrose"
g00012: Forgive me father for I have sinned. I mean really cut loose and
sinned like there's no tomorrow. I mean, you got an hour or so?
(Kait Moon says his name is Monsignor from Seattle)
"sunday, showbox_line, monsignor, who"
g00014: What's with the suits? This time, black with violet, attended by
a smiling dandy.
"sunday, showbox_line, who"
g00015: Ah, someone suitless. A victorian lady and gentleman, Sarahmonster and
Crispy, waited upon
by ~twilight~ (her favourite dead thing: Optimus Prime).
"sunday, showbox_line, optimus_prime, twilight, sarahmonster, crispy"
g00016: Huzzah for alternate women. Trid says 'I believe the blue
haired yummy one's name is Jayne, FYI
here are some great pictures of her in front of the bazaar.'
"sunday, showbox_line, couples, jayne, who"
g00016_eye_detail: In case you missed it, she's wearing catseye lenses.
"sunday, showbox_line, artsy, jayne"
g00017: lady holding an umbrella. Sorry about the black & white, but I had
to do some tweaking and the colour was a casualty. That, and I don't
have enough black and white pictures. They set a different mood.
"sunday, showbox_line, artsy, who"
g00019: I adore digital editing. The woman's face (in white makeup) under the
umbrella had turned very very blue with the sunlight through her
umbrella. Experimenting, I split the picture into it's red, blue and
green components, and cut-and-pasted the green component for her face
into red and blue, and recombined. The effect was a tintless (and
colourless) face. I cut-and-pasted her lips from the original so her
striking red lipstick would survive.
The lengths I go to to preserve the proper use of whiteface.
"sunday, showbox_line, who"
g00019_bluface: the original, in case I might need it.
g00020: Excellent! Didn't have to mess with this at all, and it had the
desired effect. You can see the line-up we were forced to endure.
I can identify Greg and Absinthe at the left of the
picture. Rafe's colourful skirt is in there somewhere too.
"sunday, showbox_line, absinthe, crowd, rafe, who"
g00021: Two hauntings, and a Katherine Hepburn. The event involved being your
favourite dead thing, remember.
"sunday, showbox_line, katherine_hepburn, maxi, donya"
g00022: Marilyn and... oh my goodness! I've got to go to my C3 photos and
I'm sure I'll identify this person. Is it Ratty/Tamera ?
(Amy Lyn says it isn't.) (Carla says "Marilyn
is Jennifer/Jen/Satan's_Sister/Stillbourne.
Her friend is Christina 'Christi' Milton, arteest extraodinaire. These two
are inseparable friends, Christi loves to play dress-up dolly
with Jen [as her doll?]. By the way, Jen just got married to
the lovely Jamie ( e00006 and b00009 )."
"sunday, showbox_line, marilyn, stillbourne, christi"
g00023: Lovely photo. I've got the original around somewhere here
if anyone wants to make a print. Chelsea is still a PVC angel,
and the couple I've seen before in the hotel... still looking
good here. Trid spoke up and identified himself and Madame Archel
(and corrected me with "oh yeah, and the name of the luscious
vinyl vixen is Chelsea... not Jessie."
"sunday, showbox_line, chelsea, couples, trid, archel"
g00023_large: Trid asked for the original of this picture, so here it is, a
copy of the JPEG the photo labs gave me to work with. It's 1.5
Megabytes, 1024x1536x24.
"sunday, showbox_line, chelseaaa, couples, trid, archel"
g00024: I keep thinking this is a french legionaire, but I'm very likely wrong.
Authentic looking uniform, though. I was impressed enough to seek her
out after I overexposed her photo on the last roll.
"sunday, showbox_line, legionarie, who"
g00025: An off-hand shot, I don't think much of it, but Sarah says it's good,
so maybe she sees something I don't. Good makeup on him, but pity
you can't see the rest.
"sunday, showbox_line, who, artsy"
g00026: More good-looking humans in the lineup crowd. I like the faces I
caught in the background of this shot. The monocole'd man on the
right is SmartPatrol, another photographer, who used to live in
Waterloo just after
I did, and now he's in Vancouver (www.gothic.bc.ca). We exchanged
cards, and I think I lost his for a while. Thank
goodness he saw this text and mailed me later.
Michael Barrick also had more to say: "The faces in the background
behind Morgan are Miss Nicole (red bob), Michael (me!) beside her,
and the bald person half obscured by Morgan is Myriam. Dwight and
Melanie from [b00012b] are hidden behind Christian and his girlfriend
(sorry, I forget her name)".
"sunday, showbox_line, smartpatrol, crowd, artsy, barrick, miss_nicole, myriam"
g00030: On the left is Sally, who isn't technically dead, but the quality and
coolness of the costume makes up for it. I didn't speak to the other
two ladies.
"sunday, showbox_line, micol, jenni4, sally"
g00031: Take a bow. Thank you.
"sunday, showbox_line, who, artsy"
g00032: Hrm, the picture looks better in black and white (because of the
greengrain), but then I loose the hotpink hair and krinalin. ...what?
What to you mean 'HSV brush' and 'feathered selection fading'?
...really? Well, what's stopping me?
[what's stopping me is losing any respect from the the two people who
I left in black and white. It's been pointed out to me some things
are just wanking. DELETED.]
""
g00033: Excellent period dress. I was thinking of just cropping to her, but
the face poking out into the rain to get a glimpse is just cute.
"sunday, showbox_line, who"
g00034: Inside, the lighting was either red...
"sunday, showbox, who"
g00035: ... or yellow. Hey! The guy in the top hat is The Shade, again.
You know you've 'arrived' when supervillians come to your parties.
I've been informed the Shade's common name is John.
"sunday, showbox, john, artsy, who, crowd"
Gah. 3:30am, and another roll done. Two rolls, 72 pictures left to go. Well,
I shot a whole roll of Peter Murphy, so I'll likely only keep six pictures off
that roll. I showed off some of the pix to friends. Oh ghod, I forgot I need
something to make thumbnail images with. I must have something around here
that will do it.
I think I'll upload this journal.txt file to the website, just so people can
see what kind of progress I'm making. The soundtrack eventually mutated into
Dead Kennedys, and devolved into Q3Arena soundtrack, Information Society and
the abattoir music New Order did for the movie Blade.
Hmmm, better reverse the order on the website so the newest is at the top.
6:50am. Can't sleep.
h00002: Peter Murphy.
"sunday, showbox, peter_murphy"
h00003: Peter Murphy.
"sunday, showbox, peter_murphy"
h00008: Peter Murphy.
"sunday, showbox, peter_murphy"
h00012: Aaron's brother, black and white
"sunday, showbox, aaron"
h00012_rgb_attempt1: Aaron's brother, an attempt at restoring colour
"sunday, showbox, aaron"
h00012_rgb_attempt2: Aaron's brother, another attempt at restoring colour.
The original photo is pretty horrible with grain, but I _have_
to rescue this. Aaron needed a photo of his brother and told a
crowd of people "Hey, Mozai's a photographer!". If I was thinking
straight, I would have taken him into better light, like that time
I had to shoot a woman's corset so I dragged her into the men's
bathroom.
"sunday, showbox, aaron"
h00014_orig: h00014 before...
"sunday, showbox, artsy"
h00014_rgb_attempt1: h00014 after...
"sunday, showbox, couples, who, artsy"
June 22, 11:10pm.
Ghod, I was up for 36 hours that night. Monica/Kore is going to stay over
this weekend for Toronto's Pride Day. Well, actually hoping she and her boy
hook up. I love having company but I also love knowing my friends are getting
some action.
h00019: Peter Murphy
"sunday, showbox, peter_murphy"
h00020: Peter Murphy
"sunday, showbox, peter_murphy"
h00021: Peter Murphy
"sunday, showbox, peter_murphy"
h00022: Peter Murphy
"sunday, showbox, peter_murphy"
h00023: Peter Murphy
"sunday, showbox, peter_murphy"
h00024: *not* Peter Murphy, but his friend Bill Rieflin
"sunday, showbox, peter_murphy, bill_rieflin"
h00030: Peter Murphy
"sunday, showbox, peter_murphy"
h00031: *not* Peter Murphy, but his friend Bill Rieflin"
"sunday, showbox, peter_murphy, bill_rieflin"
h00032: Peter Murphy
"sunday, showbox, peter_murphy"
h00034: Peter Murphy
"sunday, showbox, peter_murphy"
Yes, I blew a whole roll on Peter Murphy. Mark (nee Narin) and I were at
the front shooting film with the occassional turn, grip onto each other and
squeal like little schoolgirls.
12:43 took a break to kiss Sarah goodnight, and to wrestle with Gnutella a bit.
2:00am. Just got started again. My friend Kevin has been talking to me via
ICQ, trying to share his visions with me. As you can see by the later hour
of this journal entry, his attempts are time-consuming. By the way, the
soundtrack now is Front 242 (Headhunter 2000, Remixes, Up Evil, Tragedy >For
You<).
i00003: This was supposed to be an artsy-fartsy picture of the fratboy, but
it's rather underexposed. The idea was to have him underlit by the
pinball machine, with orange glittering chains over his chest.
"sunday, showbox, fratboy, artsy"
I think as I go thru this roll I'm going to find more of these problems, but
I've been learning new techniques that might rescue these pictures. Part of
the problem is also the (poor) quality of the film I was using (unless
someone can explain to me why there's more blue snow in underexposed film than
green, and almost no red snow/static. See h00014_orig and h00014_rgb_attempt1.
They're all going to look red because the snow/static/graininess is always
three parts blue and two parts green.
i00004: Cossack and Tatiana. Would you believe C6 was their honeymoon?
It's black and white because it was the only way I could restore the original.
See i00004_orig for what I had to work with.
"sunday, showbox, cossack, who"
i00006: Two ladies, in red light. I did have to tweak it further red to get
rid of the greengrain, but the lighting was naturally this red and
appealing. Josie pointed outh the blonde lady is Roxanne
"sunday, showbox, roxanne"
i00008: On the right is Artemis, whose magical corset bestowed upon her the
largest tracks of land I've seen with my own eyes. (and I told her so
when I took the photo). On the left is Opium, like laughing at me (and
why not?)
"sunday, showbox, artemis, opium"
i00009: ,,, see i00010_bw
i00010_colour: ...
"sunday, showbox, who"
i00010_bw: see i00009.
"sunday, showbox, who"
i00011: Krista
"sunday, showbox, costume, krista"
i00013: Yosa. Damn auto-shutter speed. [DELETED, it's crap]
""
i00015: Autobot in motion.
"sunday, showbox, costume, optimus_prime, twilight"
i00016: A dandy. Not much of a costume, but oh well.
"sunday, showbox, costume, who"
i00017: Not a lady.
"sunday, showbox, costume, who"
i00018: Rafe, in costume as... um, Rafe
"sunday, showbox, costume, rafe"
i00020: Aaron, costumed as 'the Death of the American Farm'. Hey, my
favourite dead thing costume was my Atari t-shirt and nobody minded.
He also said it was an experiment to see how people, who complain about
prejudice because they look different, would react to someone who
looked different. Aaron was pretty disappointed by the condescending
looks he got.
"sunday, showbox, costume, aaron"
i00021: TRyan gets credit for identfying Deadrose, "at least that's what she
was wearing and how her hair was when [TRyan] met her." I overlooked
it because I was tired, honest.
"sunday, showbox, costume, deadrose"
i00022: Marilyn Munroe, her favourite dead thing.
"sunday, showbox, costume, marilyn, who"
i00023: Sally from Nightmare Before Christmas. See also g00030.
"sunday, showbox, costume, sally, micol"
i00024: A flapper? I don't quite remember, I'd had a few beers in me by the
time the costume event finally happened.
"sunday, showbox, costume, flapper, who"
i00025: ancient french (saxon?) dress by Maxi
"sunday, showbox, costume, maxi"
i00026: The Shade. I don't know what he was supposed to be dressed as, but
I've been calling him the Shade all thru my notes. Damnably, I took
the shot just as he doffed his hat. I really must stop drinking if
I'm going to be on camera duty.
"sunday, showbox, costume, shade, john"
i00027: Beeeig dress. Bad timing for taking the shot. Kait Moon says this "is
Alda AKA Madame X dressed as Lady Bathary, She's from NJ"
"sunday, showbox, costume, madame_x"
i00028: Bellydancer. I'm certain this is the lady I shared a hotel room with
afterwards. Deadrose would know her name.
"sunday, showbox, costume, who"
i00029: The Monsignor again, this time onstage for the costume thing.
"sunday, showbox, costume, monsignor"
i00030: Macross accepts his 'nice guy' award -- a toy motorcycle.
"sunday, showbox, macross"
i00031: Back at the hotel from the Showbox.
"sunday, hotel, who"
i00032: Random shot at the hotel. I'm tired and I wanna go to bed.
"sunday, hotel, who"
i00033: Name the movie: "You were nothing before you met me. You were playing
Barbies with Betty Finn. You were a bluebird. You were a Brownie. You
were a Girl-Scout cookie. I got you into a Remington party. What's my
thanks? It's on the hallway carpet. I got paid in puke."
"sunday, hotel, puke"
i00034: Hotel party. First of a few.
"sunday, hotel_party"
i00035: A pic of Scary Lady Sarah and John VerBerg. They're very close friends
in real life.
"sunday, hotel_party, scary_lady_sarah, verberg"
i00036: moses and her husband/consort, Stuart.
"sunday, hotel_party, moses, couples, stuart"
*sigh* 3:45am (I shut down ICQ so I could get work done). The last roll gets
progressively bad, and the grainy film, which is likely to be the fault of the
lab as well, I had to airbrush out a half-dozen hairs that was on the film
when it was scanned in at the lab. Quite a few I just deleted because the
graininess is too much and I really mean that: compare i00009 with i00009_orig
and you'll see a face that's invisible in the original. I deleted photos
that were _worse_. I look at them, though, and just the composition, what I
must have seen when I took the shot, what I must have been thinking when I
took the shot, the only excuse I can think of is that I must have been
too drunk.
Anyways, I wrote code yesterday and thismorning for the searchable part of
this website (the code actually reads this journal file for the keywords and
descriptions). I have to finish debugging it... maybe I should rewrite it in
Python, for the practice and so I can debug it inside fifteen minutes. I also
need some HTML for decoration and to make thumbnails. I was thinking about
raiding my artsy-fartsy playing cards (I mean, it's the rare person who
remembers the games Heresy or Dark Age). I dunno, I just have to keep the
green and black theme to it to separate it from San Fran (dusty red), Toronto
(violet), and New Orleans (purple).
For once, I get to say "screw you readers of journals, I'm gunna go jump in
bed with Sarah now." I'll stick a reference to this year's easter egg
somewheres... althought observant and early visitors would notice that I
put the passcodes to the original scans in black-on-black text on the
front page. There was an Easter Egg for C3, and an Easter Egg for C4, but
none for C5 (if you saw the site, you'd understand why I didn't). No Easter
Egg for Hallowmas, but then I was torqed off from having my Jhonen-signed JTHM
and Squee books stolen, along with three rolls of film that I shot.
Easter Egg, hrm. Well, when I come up with it, I can't put it at the end
here where it can be easily found. I'll stick it in the middle of this
journal text. [actually, I got tired when I finished this, so I did end up
putting the easter eggs at the end of this journal.txt file. If you read
this far looking for 'em, just skip ahead.]
Jun 23, 9:15pm:
Monica's staying the weekend, and she helped me out with a few names. No
soundtrack. We'll be seeing Etian/Casper later tonight DJing at the Savage
Garden. There's no photos of Etian for the same reason there's no photos
of Petro.
Jun 25, 2:46am:
Playing way too much Crash Bandicoot 3. Sarah and I were at a party earlier,
although we had to leave early because Sarah took ill. I thought I'd stay up
late waiting for Monica, but it's late already. On a whim, I checked email
and ICQ, and people have already _found_ the search.cgi and have started
submitting corrections to me already! Artemis was first, and likely most
helpful. I haven't been thru all of the letters and ICQs yet.
Artemis, Rafe, Macross, Metamorph, thank you.
Jun 27, 4:40pm:
Used cd2html for the thumbnails... I used it for the thumbnail pages for
Hallowmas (http://netdesign.net/~moses/hallowmas/), but I'm still sticking
to making this searchable, if nothing else than for the exercise. I've been
very distracted lately, but I'm going to finish this, goddamnit.
Soundtrack: nothing. Damn. I should fix that. Gah, techno CD. I've gotta
fix the audio output on my CD-ROM and throw in some Arcane Device/David Meyers.
"Extremis" by HAL ( that band that recorded Gillian Anderson reading a physics
textbook). Damnit, I wanna get a hold of Brian Eno's software, the Koan
player.
June 28, 12:28am:
Looking for artwork to spice search.cgi's output, and for some sort of vision
of what the front page will look like. Damnit. No soundtrack either...
better fix that. There, Fight Club soundtrack by the Dust Brothers. I've no
idea if it's any good, Brian Kennedy left it here when he dropped in tonight.
Obligatory mention: http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Fuji/8963/melancholia.htm
I've been buzzing thru here for artwork I could steal, but really she's put
in so much work I'd feel kinda bad. That, and the only stuff I see that I
could use is from the Darkstalkers page, and frankly it's all cheesecake.
Damn shame there's nothing quite what I'm looking for in the page about the
vampiric homosexual romance anime.
I'm finally regretting that I don't slurp alt.binaries.gothic anymore for
pictures. Damnit. At least this Fight Club soundtrack is pretty good.
Okay, 2:51am and I think I've got it for the design. I threw out the imagemap,
mostly because that's against my idea of dynamic keywords, and because making
the thingy is a pain in the ass. I decided to keep with the simple
style, added some eye candy, and it turned out really really good. Sarah
would be giving me thumbs up if she wasn't asleep (and, yes, naked. No long
before I can enjoy that). The eye candy is the random image in the left
column. 'image.cgi' is eight lines of perl code, randomly picks an image
file out of a directory and serves it. I adore the random number generator.
Now it's 5am, morning of June 28th, and I'm FUCKING FINISHED! I even
remembered to put in easter eggs. Yeah yeah, I mentioned them in the C3
journal, so might as well mention them here. Searching on certain keywords
will never return pictures (they're not in keywords.txt, for instance), but
they do return curious text files. 'winnie' gives Winnie The Goth, 'magick'
is the digest version of Bonewitz's doctorial thesis, 'hypnosis' is a text
file from 1985 I still have on me, and 'milk' or 'story' is one of my earlier
attempts at a horror short story. 'videos' gives a message (I wish I could
have put in reboot_hexintro.avi as an easter egg) and searching for 'easter egg'
gives a snarky message and a link to one of the easter eggs in my Convergence
IV site.
Gah. I posted to alt.gothic. Let's see what the reviews say.
I'm going to sleep. No more late nights (early mornings?) for a long time.
desktop_jun20: A screenshot I sent to some people keeping me company while
I was working the night of June 20th. Responses I got were "whoa"
and "how can you work with that messy desktop?" and "That isn't
Windows, is it?". Sadly, it is.
"mozai, artsy"
2000-07-12T19:55:05
Got a letter from LeeNy identifying herself and giving Peter Murphy's
friend's name as Bill Reiflin, not "David".
Sarah spoke to Narrin via ICQ, where he identified tonnes of people.
Sarah's not here right now... She's out with Lisa. I've been feeling shitty
about myself lately, harping on about my mistakes and kinda taking it out on
Sarah by shoving her into the "you're the one who always says I'm wrong" role.
Huh, just like my Dad said about playing emotional scripts. I'll get Narrin's
info later so I'm not snooping into Sarah's ICQ logs.
2000-07-19T13:10:00
Got a letter from Morgyn/SmartPatrol, complimenting me on getting a
photo of him. Got another letter from Kiria@bc1.com identifying her
in the photos with Rafe.
2000-07-23T16:29:05
Got a letter from Trid/Triddlywinks, identifying more people. He also asked
for the original of g00023, since it's him and a ladyfriend, and he was all
sayin' 'Sorry to occupy your valuable time' and humbling crap. C'mon, it's
clear I've spent hours and hours on this, I love this kinda stuff. He also
motivated me to label the CDs of scans I got from Black's lab.
2000-07-28T09:20:49
Got a letter from Elizabeth Busbee, identifying people in c00030, c00037,
c00038 and d00002. Oh, so she's the sassy model. Man, I got some nasty looks
from Sarah when she saw d00002 -- not because she thought I was
interested in Lady Elizabeth (quite happy with my girlfriend, shan't apologize)
as much as I was at a hotel party where I found people who posed, and she
wasn't there with her own camera.
2000-08-04T14:50:02
Gah, sick with maybe strepthroat. Finally got Narrin/PlasmaTouch's comments
for fixing up the 'who's, and I got a letter from Michael Barrick identifying
more.
2000-09-01T10:56:26
Wow, it's been a long time, and I just got some more mail. Psyche said that
c00011 is her favourite photo of herself. Silverware said that g00010 is
herself ("Lady Myria") and the dandy is Cypher. Lord Angel sent me a
letter to identify himself and some more people.
2000-09-22T02:31:40
Got a message from Trid/triddlywinks/Paul, pairing down more of the 'who'
list.
2000-11-10T10:14:30
Got a message from Josie@josienutter.com, naming Roxanne in i00006 and telling
me she's changed the C6 Memories webring from Yahoo to ringsurf.com