We Are Back!

Just a quick post to let you guys know that Driven By Boredom is finally unfucked. The site has been dealing with hackers and malware for months. The person who designed the new site retired from doing websites and hasn’t been able to help me fix it. Between trying to figure it out myself, trying to get my host to restore from old backups and frankly just me ignoring the problem, it’s taken forever to do something that apparently I could have solved in an afternoon.

A couple days ago I hired someone off Upwork who specializes in WordPress malware and he was able to fix my site, and the Dolfans NYC site in under 8 hours. My brother’s website, that I also host, was completely deleted, but fortunately we had an old backup. There was one other site that is completely deleted, and has been unrecoverable, but I think my old webmaster has a backup so I am hopeful. That site isn’t public facing anyway.

So yeah, what now? Hopefully I get a bunch of the photos I took in fucking January up. I have been promising these photos of Emma Starseed and Olivia Wildin’ for months so they are up next. I want to get some Vintage DBB posts up soon as well and maybe I will drop some fucking wildlife photos on you guys soon as I bought a long lens a few months ago just to photograph the critters in my backyard. Not quite as exciting as parties and porn stars but I still have a bunch of that shit coming soon too.

In 25 years of running this website I have had to deal with so much bullshit like this and yet I just keep doing it, post after post after post. At some point in the very early days of the site, my host just disappeared. He was just some guy who hosted a bunch of early blogs and he just decided to stop and didn’t tell anyone. As far as I know, no one ever found out what happened to him, but it was months before I got the site up and running again. In the mid 2000’s the site just became so hard to update that I just scrapped the whole thing and went to a Blogger account, but I only did like three posts and gave up. I took about a year off before moving to NYC and started DBB backup as a party photo blog, but that site became less and less functional until this version of the site was launched in March 2025. It’s always something, but we keep going and I am so glad to have my site back. 

See you guys soon!

New Shop, New Product!

The new Driven By Boredom shop launched today and I launched a super limited new product and I wanted to hit you with a quick B-Side post about it.

I had been using Etsy for years but for a bunch of reason I switched over. Big Cartel looks better, I have a custom domain and my fees are way lower. I do have to pay a monthly fee, which is not ideal if I am not selling stuff, but hopefully it makes sense for everyone. At least now you don’t have to sign up for an account or anything. If you buy anything, let me know how it goes. I haven’t tested anything so here’s hoping nothing goes wrong… 

The new product is a print series celebrating the 20th anniversary of my first solo show, which was my senior show in college. I don’t love the work now, but when I found all the prints I got developed at the time, I knew I had to do something with them. It was really interesting to see how I shot at the time and how the project was really the beginning of my current portrait style. I talk much more about the project (and the product) here, but I wanted to give you a little TL;DR with the shop announcement.

Richmond Outtakes is a collection of 50 unique 4″x6″ prints, that were printed at the time, collected in a clamshell box, signed and numbered out of an edition of just 20. For just $50 it’s a pretty good deal for that many essentially 1/1 prints. Each collection features two photos from 25 different photoshoots and no two boxes feature the same 25 shoots (I did more than 50 shoots for the project). 

Even if you aren’t interested in the book make sure you check out the new shop and, if you feel like it, let me know what you think. It’s a big change and took slightly more work than I expected getting to this point. 

Site Update, Life Update

Since I last left you guys, I found out that I had a tumor and as of April 1st it is no longer inside my head and just a couple of days ago I found it it was non-cancerous. They found a little bit of bone degradation when they were in there but they apparently did a little bone graft and otherwise the surgery was successful. My surgeon thinks they got all of it, but I am gonna have to have a ton of check ups over the next two years to make sure it doesn’t come back, and then once a year for the rest of my life. I guess I now forever have a pre-existing condition. Good times. 

The night of my surgery I was in so much goddamn pain and they gave me some painkillers which instantly made me sick but I woke up the next morning nearly pain free but with my nose completely stopped up and a bunch of random soreness and cuts. God knows what happened to be when I was under. The day after the surgery I actually attended a hockey game because my surgery was 2.5 hours away from my apartment but only 25 minutes away from the Carolina Hurricanes arena and my Washington Caps were playing there. I had the tickets long before I ever knew about the tumor so the timing worked out. Then again we got killed and I was miserable the whole time so maybe it wasn’t such a good idea. At least Alex Ovechkin scored, but more on that later…

After I returned home I spent the next few days half dizzy and just randomly bleeding out my nose. I would get so tired but couldn’t sleep because I couldn’t breathe. It was a real blast, but at least I wasn’t in pain… Until after my follow up visit. One week after my surgery I drove five hours round trip to have three doctors take turns sucking things out of the inside of my head like I was about to be mummified. Even with the local anesthesia it was insanely painful and the last couple days I have been in more pain than I ever was from the surgery. So perhaps that explains why I haven’t updated the site in a while.

Here’s hoping the pain resides a bit because my girlfriend is in NYC for five days and I have a lot planned. This post right here is #1 on my agenda, and I have plenty of chores around the house on my list, but I also have two more posts coming very soon, with two more planned right behind them. The first is an article for B-Sides about the aforementioned Alexander Ovechkin who just broke Wayne Gretzky’s “unbreakable” goal scoring record. Writing about stuff like that is exactly why I wanted a separate blog section to my new site and I am more than halfway done with the article, I just wanted to get this up first.

I also have a new limited art piece that I have been teasing for way too long. I honestly don’t really have an excuse for not releasing it, since it’s been ready to go for months, I just wanted to finish the site first, and then I wanted to launch my new store and then my girlfriend’s knee surgery got in the way, and then my surgery, but I am out of excuse and my plan is to drop the new project, the new store and a new sticker design all at once. This project is super limited so if you are a long time supporter of my work and interested reach out and I will save you one.

Lastly, I have a couple Vintage DBB posts ready to go, but the new project is sort of a Vintage DBB related thing so I have been holding off on that too. Procrastination is a bitch. 

Okay, this has gone on way too long, but just wanted to check in and give the handful of you who read this stuff an update on what’s been going on, and what’s next… See you soon.

Reintroducing B-Sides

One of the things  I am most excited about with the new site design is the “B-Sides” section. I came up with this idea probably more than a decade ago and then idea was to have a section of my site where I could just blog without having to do a full proper post. For YEARS this site a blog where I wrote about whatever I wanted to, but somewhere around 2009 when photography became my full time job this site became a photoblog only and the random blog posts disappeared. I wanted you to see images when you went to this site and my take on the movie I just watched or the YouTube video my friends made didn’t really have a place anymore.

At some point I came up with the idea of doing a B-Sides blog that was off the main page where I could keep writing about whatever i wanted without it messing up the content on the site. But I never actually finished designing that site until more than ten years later. But it’s finally here. Welcome to B-Sides.

A few months ago my friend Teddy recommended a book called The Artist’s Way, a self help book for artists. I was stuck creatively after moving away from NYC and he thought it might help. The book is all about spirituality and has so much dumb stuff in it and I bought 20 year old edition, not realizing how out of date some of it might be. Ultimately I am not sure how much I got out of it, but one thing I have kept up is the process of journaling which I do nearly every day now and it’s really inspired me to write more, tell old stories and maybe just share my thoughts somewhere other than Twitter. I have no idea who is going to read these B-Sides, but I am excited to write them for myself.

I’ve always enjoyed writing, and I am excited to do more of it and I hope you guys enjoy it. And yes, that is a photo of 13 year old grunge me doing homework back in the early 90s. You’re welcome.