When I found out my friend Doug died, it didn’t fully hit me right away. I have lost far too many friends and when I first found out I though that maybe I was just permanently broken. The sadness I felt was more about the pain of life, how unfair it was for another one of my people to be gone, than it was the pain of his death. Later that day I found out another, less close, friend had died and the sadness I felt was compounded by the guilt for not feeling more.

That night I went to dinner with my girlfriend and this pressure of sorrow was weighing me down. She wanted to talk to me about Doug, who she never got to meet, but I didn’t want to talk about anything. I didn’t even want to eat. But I couldn’t not talk about Doug and I started telling her story after story about our friendship and how much he meant to my life and I broke down in the restaurant, crying into my food. I was just glad to be feeling something. 

I found out that Doug died a week ago, but I couldn’t write this post for so many reasons. I didn’t want to break down again of course, but I also had just so many things to tell you about Doug, so many stories, so many ways he impacted my life, I didn’t know how to do it. I wrote over 1200 words and deleted almost all of it because it just felt like a review of our friendship, just a list of things with links to old blog posts like footnotes in a research paper. It didn’t feel right, so here I am starting over again. Doug deserves that, and our mutual friends reading this deserve that. I have sadly become known for posts like these, and it helps me process, but I know how much these posts have meant to other people and I need to get this right. 

So let’s start at the beginning, skip to the end and then just write some more.

My friendship with Doug starts more than 20 years ago during the very early days of this website. I started it in 2001 and very quickly it became popular enough that I realized I could get free stuff if I blogged about it, so I would reach out to companies I loved and often would get sent products. One of those companies was Troma, a low budget, b-horror film studio that I am going to assume you are familiar with if you are reading a post about Doug. 

In 2002 Troma sent me a VHS screener copy of a documentary called All The Love You Cannes. The movie was about the Troma team trying to get the word out about their company at the Cannes Film Festival by any means necessary. They caused absolute chaos and the star of the film was a man named Doug Sakmann who managed to get kicked out of his hotel room and piss off (and on) his own coworkers with his insane behavior. It was so goddamn funny and 22 year old me was obsessed. After I wrote about the movie I emailed the link to Troma and I realized the guy I had been emailing with was the same Doug as the one in the movie. I told him he was my hero. 

From then on we stayed in touch, but it wasn’t until 2006 when I moved to NYC that we met at a Halloween party where he was hosting his “world’s most dangerous game show” Strip for Pain. By that point he had left Troma and moved to Philly to start his own company, Backseat Conceptions, but he would come up for events all the time and I made sure to see him pretty much every time he was in town. Never once did we live in the same city but we became very close and he impacted my life in so many huge ways despite the distance. 

Doug would come up at least twice a year to throw the NYC Zombie Crawl and as long as I was in town would photograph it, most of the time for free, despite hating it. The first few were a blast and I got crazy photos, but how many times can you photograph the same thing before you hate coming home sticky and smelling like pancake syrup from all the fake blood. Still, I would do anything for Doug and it was a chance to see him and we always talked about doing a zombie crawl book together.

After the pandemic Doug stopped doing zombie crawls. Events were canceled for a long time and by the time they came back he was dealing with his own losses in life. I injured my back, got wifed up and stopped going out so even if Doug was in town I am not sure I would have made it out. I still kept in touch with Doug via social media and the occasional text but I hadn’t heard his voice until a few weeks ago when he called me to tell me the Zombie Crawl was coming back and he wanted me to send him a bunch of photos for a gallery show around the event. He told me he was finally getting out of his depression after losing his brother and wanted to start doing things again. We talked about new Troma movies and a touring gallery show and finally doing that zombie crawl book. It was so great to hear from him and we talked for a really long time. 

It took me a while to go through all my zombie photos but I sent him an edit of a few hundred. It took him a while to get the selects back to me and it took me a while to edit them and send him the high res photos. I finally got them back to him almost exactly one week before he died. On June 23rd, three days before his death I landed in NYC at 9am. It was the day of the Mermaid Parade, an event I somehow never photographed in all the years I lived in NY. I was gonna go with my friend Mike but he had an emergency and couldn’t make it and I was exhausted so I just took a nap instead of going all the way out to Coney Island. The next day I saw Doug posted on Instagram that he was at the parade. If only I had seen it I would have been there in a second, spending one last day with my friend I hadn’t seen in way too long. But I didn’t see it and I cannot tell you how much I regret it. Tears are bouncing off my keyboard just thinking about it.

In my early days of living in New York I called Doug while he was on his way home from the AVN Awards where he got kicked out of another hotel for chaotic behavior. He had drunkenly punch a slot machine and they kicked him out even though he paid for the machine. He decided to come back wearing a fake mustache and they arrested him. It seemed hilarious to me at the time. I was really jealous of someone who could just be so punk rock and not give a fuck. He didn’t have a care in the world about any of it. I turned that phone call with him into an interview I titled Doug Sakmann: American Hero.

Doug really was my hero. When we first met it was because he was an absolute maniac and I loved that. I have so many great Doug stories from those days but as crazy as Doug was, what made him my hero was his ability to get everything done in the midst of all that chaos. I remember the exact moment my whole view of Doug changed. It was 2008 and I came to Philly for the Basckseat Film Festival he was throwing. We spent all night partying with porn stars and doing god knows what. At some point Doug passed out and I was a little worried because he had a film festival to run. I was totally sober but he was the one who woke me up the next morning and he was a completely different person. I spent the morning with him and just watched him run the festival like a goddamn professional. He was so impressive to watch, commanding an army of volunteers despite being on three hours of drunken sleep. 

Late during zombie crawls one minute Doug would be swinging off a light post spraying fake blood out of a Super Soaker on to the crowd below and the next minute he would be inevitably be talking to the police, assuring them that all of this was absolutely normal. I have never met anyone so out of control and so in control at the exact same time. He invited me to be in a Troma movie in 2018 and I couldn’t make it on the dates they needed me, but I did spend a day as an (unpaid) extra just for the experience. Doug was running the show, making Lloyd Kaufman’s job as easy as possible, while also setting off insane special effects. It was this ability to create order out of chaos that made me hire him as a produce for every ad campaign I have ever done.

If you knew Doug, you don’t need me to tell you this but Doug wasn’t just fun, he wasn’t just a good producer, but he was also about the nicest friendliest dude you could imagine. He would literally give you the shirt off his back. Every post I have read memorializing him has talked about how wonderful of a fucking human he was. His last ever text to me was wishing me happy birthday and telling me that he loved me. I was on a midlife crisis, self loathing birthday shit and didn’t even bother to text him back. We are almost the exact same age and his birthday is coming up and I won’t even be able to repay the favor, but I hope he knows how much I loved him. Fuck, there are those tears again.

This post is almost 2000 words at this point and I still want to drop you guys a bunch of links so you can go back and look at all the fun times we had together. I documented almost all of it. I just want to tell you how much he impacted my life. He introduced me to one of my first friend groups in New York even though he wasn’t even living there. He’s the reason I went to the AVN Awards for the first time which completely changed my career. He introduced me to Lloyd Kaufman who is another hero of mine, and because of that connection I got to shoot my only Village Voice cover despite freelancing there for a decade. I partied with Jackasses, movie stars, porn stars and professional eaters with Doug. We got our logos tattooed to each other. He snuck me into Comic Con, he booked the best show of my short lived musical career, and he even convinced me to go to a fucking baseball game. I should also note, that my website is deeply broken so many of the galleries don’t work, but at least you get the stories and some of the pictures. 

It took me almost a week just to get started with this post and then four more days to finish it. I spent hours just looking for photos of Doug, trying to find a handful without zombie makeup on him. I have so few photos of him when he wasn’t “on”. I think part of that was the nature of our relationship, 90% of the time we hung out it was at some big event, or we were working. I guess I just wasn’t shooting photos during the downtime. I only found a couple of photos of him and I together. He was always in front of the camera, and I was always behind it. I fucking miss you so much man. I am so fucking sad your gone, and I am so sorry I didn’t text you back telling you how much I loved you too. 

Click here to see over 100 photos I have taken of my brother and hero Doug Sakmann over the years.

Remember that time Moby wrote a letter about how he was leaving New York and everyone on the internet dunked on him for days? Well thankfully social media algorithms are so broken that no one will even read my version of that letter. But here we go…

In 2006 I was living in Richmond, VA after graduating college about a year earlier. I went to school for photography but I didn’t have any interest in doing photography as a career. I had wanted to work in the music industry since I was a kid and I decided to study photography because I thought it would be a good skill to have. I picked up a camera to photograph punk bands that were on the label I started when I was 15 and bands were 90% of what I photographed before moving to New York. I had always planned on moving there, but I was managing a band who were still in school so I decided to stick around a little while. I was working a temp job and they offered me a full time job. It was for $36k which seemed like a ton of money given that was paying $500 a month for a two bedroom to myself and I had this sudden realization that I might get stuck in Richmond forever if I took that job. Around the same time I ran into a friend of mine in NYC who was looking for a roommate. Two weeks later I had broken my lease and moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

As “cool” as Williamsburg was in those days, I still couldn’t afford to live on the Northside which was the hipster capital of the world those days. I had always wanted to live in the Lower East Side and I figured living two stops away on the J Train was my best bet, so I moved to the Southside which had somehow resisted gentrification outside of me and a handful of other white 20 somethings I would only see on the train platform after 11pm. Nearly 18 years later I am the one being forced out of the neighborhood by 20 year old white kids who can somehow afford to pay $5000 for a two bedroom. In 16 years my lease went up a total of $600 and then last year it went up $800 and now it’s about to go up $400 more. I could maybe afford it, but that is an untenable situation. I will continue to be broker and broker living in the same apartment I lived in in my twenties as a middle aged man. It’s unfortunately time for a change. 

I love this place, it’s my home. I’ve lived here significantly longer than anywhere else in my life and I am so fucking heartbroken leaving, but most of my work I don’t need to be in New York for and I am not hungry enough to deal with the rats and roaches and human shit on the streets and I used to wear like a badge of honor. My girlfriend does high end hair color and has made an amazing career here and she hates to leave herself, but we are just ready for an easier life even if it means giving up our home. 

It’s hard to admit that so much of your identity is tied up in being a New Yorker, but I think it’s impossible to live here for decades and not feel that way. I think it’s going to take a very, very long time for that feeling to go away. I really feel like I am giving up and that New York beat me. Everytime a friend leaves NYC I am a little judgmental about it, but when I talk to them after the fact they feel so much happier for it, that a weight has been lifted of them. I am hoping I feel the same weight lift off of me, a weight I might not even know exists because it’s so a part of me. When I moved here I loved the grind. I was working as a busboy in a hotel restaurant working a shift that started at 5:30am. I would go out and party and at four I would go home, shower and immediately head to work. I would sleep from like 5 to 10pm every day.

I would bring my camera out to parties, just because I loved taking photos but I was just there to have fun. At that time sites like Cobrasnake and Last Night’s Party were blowing up and everyone would ask me what my website was. I started Driven By Boredom in 2001, but by the time I moved to NYC it was mostly just an ad for the band I managed with updates coming whenever they would release a new record or go on tour or something, but since people kept asking I redesigned the site and started uploading my photos there. Just months after moving to NYC I was doing working as a photographer every night and working mornings four days a week. By the end of 2008 I was a full time photographer after grinding so fucking hard trying to live this new dream, as the band had broken up and my music industry goals slowly disappeared. 

From 2007-2011 I worked pretty much every day as a photographer. I was killing myself for a couple hundred dollars a night. But by 2011 party photos were becoming less of a thing and I was getting better paying jobs traveling, working event branding and shooting music festivals.  In 2012 I got into a serious relationship with a woman who lived in LA and when I wasn’t traveling for work I was traveling there, photographing models for adult magazines and the occasional event. By the time we had broken up a couple years later I had published my first book, had a ton of regular clients and was rarely working in New York, but my rent was so good I had no reason to leave. At times I felt like I was a prisoner of my own good housing situation. 

A few years ago my landlord sold the building. They fired our amazing superintendent and replaced him with someone who didn’t live in the building and was never around. My old neighbors were bought out or kicked out and the place got worse and worse. The giant corporation who bought it then sold it to a second corporation who according to their website are a”data–driven Multifamily real estate investment and services firm”, whatever the fuck that is. Apparently their analytics decided I should be paying 50% more rent and boom, I am no longer able to afford to live in my home.

Okay, so 1000 words into this post, where am I moving? Well, I could move to Ridgewood or something and live in a smaller apartment for what I am paying now, or, I could get the fuck out, move to some small city and live in a nice ass building and then actually be able to afford to buy a house in the future. My girlfriend is from North Carolina and lived in Wilmington for years. We visited her friend’s down there last summer and had a great time. The beaches are incredible and it’s a fairly progressive city for southern town and I always wanted to retire at the beach so why not start now? 

I can still travel for photography, and we are keeping my office her as a crash pad so we can visit regularly. My girlfriend will be back every month to take her old clients and I am sure I will be back a ton for work and to run my non-profit Dolfans NYC. Meanwhile we just signed a lease for a huge, nice apartment, that even with keeping the office is still $500 less than our current rent. We have a god damn balcony that overlooks a park and closets the size of New York bedrooms. Maybe I will get a boat and learn to scuba dive or something. Maybe I will start making my own hot sauce or like start wearing shorts. I have no idea, but I am ready for my weird retirement life, even if I have to get some shitty part time job to make up for the work I do get in NYC. Maybe I can take family portraits or something. Who knows? It’s gonna be interesting. 

I cannot tell you how mad I am at New York for allowing landlords to run this place and not protecting tenants. I cannot tell you how sad I am to be leaving my home for nearly twenty years and the city that completely changed my life. I feel like I am in mourning. Everytime I do something I think about how I might be doing it for the last time. But, even with all that I am so excited for my future. I am so ready to have hobbies and to relax a little and just be able to finally breathe. I am excited for my future with my girlfriend and seeing what is next for us. It’s such a weird experience to feel so sad and excited at the same time.

Anyway, this post is so much longer than I thought it was going to be and I am not even sure I said half of what I wanted to say, but I just started writing as soon as I signed my lease and here we are. I am moving at the end of February so if you want to see me or shoot with me before then let me know. I will miss you all, come visit me at the beach. 

New York I love you, but you’re bringing me down.

I haven’t updated this site in a minute and I figured it was time to do that. I don’t know how much I have talked about my girlfriend moving in and me moving to a new studio but it’s consumed my whole life and when you add into that my back injury and physical therapy and a few trips to visit my family, I don’t have a lot of content to give you guys. Good news is that once this office is up and running I hope to get a lot more done and be way more productive. 

That’s not to say I haven’t been shooting and planning. I am working on a project that is going to span 15 years of my career and include a ton of new work as well. I have shot about 10 rolls of film for it and I have a lot more planned. The project will be released as a web3/NFT situation, but it isn’t about using that to make money, it’s about using the technology to organize and preserve work in an interesting way. I don’t want to say too much about it, but you won’t have to care anything about web3 to enjoy it. The blockchain is just the medium. But yeah, not really important because it’s a long way away but I just wanted you to know that I am working on something significant.  I am also have a new zine in the works, but it’s been in the works since like 2019 and still isn’t out so it’s probably not worth mentioning. 

If you do want to get a sneak peak at the new project you can sponsor a roll of film and see one of the rolls I have shot recently before anyone else and get a print of your favorite shot on the roll. 

Lastly I gotta mention the thing that’s taking up a ton of my time right now and that’s the Miami Dolphins. I know, I know. But seriously they are actually maybe good this year?  As you may know, I co-run Dolfans NYC the NYC Dolphins fan club and we throw this massive event every year when the Jets play the Dolphins in New Jersey and we raise thousands for charity in the process. It’s pretty amazing. This year we have sold nearly 1300 tickets to the game, all sitting together, surpassing our record for most people ever. 

We finally put together a recap video from last year, and I always share them with you guys, so I figured I would do the same for this one, but I just wanted to update you guys a little on everything that was going on since most of you don’t care about the Dolphins. Still, I think the video is worth a watch. Enjoy!

I feel like every year I do some sort of Christmas post but this is not like every year. I haven’t left my apartment today and I haven’t seen anyone and I spent an hour today zooming with my parents and brother and then another with my less immediate family. I haven’t exactly felt festive. As miserable, pessimistic and Godless as I am I actually like Christmas. I like seeing my family and my parent’s dog and eating food and I like getting stuff I would never buy myself and I like buying people stuff they would never buy for themselves and the whole thing. This year all my family’s gifts got lost in the mail and haven’t even left Brooklyn despite the fact that I mailed them 11 days ago. Merry Christmas. 

Honestly I am not sure what the point of this post is. I don’t have anything new for you and who wants to read about someone else bitching about the pandemic again? No one needs that. I did post some outtakes from my 2016 Christmas card on my OnlyFans but most of that stuff I posted on Twitter back then. Nothing new. 

I guess I got one thing but it’s just sentimental and not at all content you would come here for. My brother edited together a bunch of old home movies for the family for Christmas and I put a 20 second clip (of a 45 min video) of my brother as a cute baby and me playing with a toy gun in a cowboy outfit on my Instagram so I guess you could look at that if you wanted to and hadn’t seen it already. 

Yeah honestly I just feel some sort of compulsive need to put this post up just because I said I was going to in my last post. There is honestly no point of this and I am just gonna watch football and go to sleep now. I got nothing. I’m out. See you guys in 2021. Merry Christmas. 

10 years ago today I was laid off from my job at Archive.org. I was digitizing books that were in the public domain so that anyone could read them without having a physical copy. Archive.org is a non-profit and a huge part of their budget came from Microsoft donations. The housing market collapse in 2008 caused a lot of companies to reevaluate their corporate giving and Microsoft massively cut their donation for 2009. 

Two days before we left for the holiday we were told that the late shift was being cut completely and that everyone from both shifts could reapply for their jobs the next day. They would pick the best from both groups for the shift. Unfortunately for me I was working part time as a nightlife photographer and there was no way I could get to a day job at 7am every day when I was getting home at 5am. I took 6 weeks severance, filed for unemployment and took a few weeks to figure out what I was going to do next.

I also ended up benefiting from the market crash because that January I was hired to photograph Sundance for the main liquor sponsor even though I didn’t even have a legit professional camera at the time. I did the job for way less than I should have charged, but it was a ton of money for me and everyone was happy. Right around that same time someone randomly found a photo I took of all my cameras and paid me a few thousand dollars to retake that photo for a poster for a Swiss photo competition.

So suddenly I went from going paycheck to paycheck to having a little money in the bank and enough to buy a better camera and by the time my unemployment ran out I still hadn’t run out of money. 10 years later I have had a lot of ups and downs but I still haven’t had to get a job. Given the state of the industry, I might not make it 11 years, but I made it 10 years as a professional photographer and I am pretty proud of that.

I don’t really have any other new content for you today, but here’s a bunch of links to the best photos I have taken over the last 10 years. I am also uploading a new set exclusive to Girls of Driven By Boredom today so if you want to see some new NSFW photos of Kasey Warner and her friend Damia, go sign up there.

Now here are links to my “Best of” posts from 2009-2017. I will start working on the “Best of 2018” post in January.

– Best Of 2009 – Best Of 2010 – Best Of 2011 – Best Of 2012 –

– Best Of 2013 – Best Of 2014 – Best Of 2015 – Best Of 2016 – Best Of 2017 –

Cyber Monday is complete bullshit but maybe I just think that because I am terrible at capitalism. I feel the same way about consumerism as I do Photoshop, I hate it, but like maybe if I was good at it I would be more on board. I honestly have no idea, but I am here to try to sell you some shit anyway. Not at a discount mind you, because I am so bad at making money that my margins suck anyway so I can’t really give you a discount and I am not making enough money for me to care if you buy more shit. I just want you to buy it because I made it and I want people to have the stuff I made and I want to have less boxes in my living room.

So let’s get to it. Recently I mentioned my new zine Fuck LA and this mysterious project that I had created. Well, that project has officially been released and I have honestly sold most of them already (I only made 35) but it’s a callendar of people brushing their teeth because I have no idea why. 

At the end of 2017 someone emailed me about doing a calendar. Calendars seem silly because people have telephones now and because if you don’t sell them all my January first they are trash, but I had been working on my zine NOT SAFE and I realized I had a bunch of photos of girls brushing their teeth and I thought it would be hilarious to do a teeth brushing calendar and use a bunch of absurd anthropomorphic teeth clip art. So I found a place that does print on demand calendars, pulled and edit and found clip art. The problem was I only had 9 photos and I needed 12.

I immediately hit up all my favorite models that live near me and in two days I had shot Sabby, Lucy Everleigh and Sammy for the calendar. I was ready to go so I reached out to my friend Teddy to design the cover and throw some of the teeth clip art on there but he didn’t quite have time and we really ran out of time before Christmas so I put the project on hold for a year.

Last month I started up again. I had 12 photos ready to go, but one I didn’t really love and I happened to be shooting my friend Ashley and I asked her to let me take some of her brushing her teeth just in case and I ended up getting a really pretty black and white photo of her and the calendar was locked. I printed up 35 copies and bought a bunch of toothbrushes in bulk because I am a crazy person and here we are ready for you guys. 

The calendar features the four models I mentioned above plus musician/model Marz Lovejoy, pornstars Riley Reid, Stoya and Alexis Fawx, plus Anya Amsel, Kirra Hughes, Whit, and this girl Taylor who I don’t think I have seen since I took the photo and couldn’t find out how to contact her so she’s the only model who doesn’t have her birthday listed on the calendar. Half of the photos involve some nudity and 5 out of 12 photos are in black and white. They are all 35mm photos. The clip art is adorable. 

If you order a calendar it comes with a free toothbrush and a appointment reminder card because I am an idiot or brilliant I am not quite sure. Whatever the case it’s better than anything you can get from your dentist aside from healthy teeth and a more attractive face. Whatever. I am 100% sending my dentist one of these calendars too and if you have a calendar you can find out when my next dentist appointment is and then ask me how it goes when I show up for the appointment. 

Oh and I shot some digital test shots of Sabby, Lucy, Sammy and Ashley whilst I was shooting the calendar. I was both trying to figure out the best composition and making sure I had something in case the film didn’t come out, but fortunately it didn’t come to that because the digital shots are pretty bad. But if you do want to see the digital outtakes I uploaded them to Girls of Driven By Boredom so if you sign up for that you can see a bunch more of these photos. Also, you should still buy Fuck LA cause Cyber Monday or something. 

Click here to buy the 2019 Driven By Boredom Dental calendar!

If you are reading this I am in Los Angeles. I am in town for a few reasons but the important one is that on the 18th, that’s this Sunday, I am going to be at the Cultural Traffic Art Fair at That That Gallery. I will be selling my new zine Fuck LA (you should buy it!!) as well as Instaxxx, a bunch of other zines and prints and stuff. I am pretty psyched for it. 

That That Gallery is located at 4405 W Jefferson Blvd in Los Angeles and goes from 11am until 8pm. It’s completely free and there should be a ton of amazing stuff for sale there. I am splitting the table with my friends at Wood Rocket and they will have a bunch of weird things for sale like enamel pins, adult coloring books and new posters from vintage porn classics like Debbie Does Dallas and The Devil In Miss Jones. There are a bunch of great exhibitors as well including my friends at Paperwork NYC and rad publishers like Kill Your Idols and Richardson.

I don’t really have much more to mention in this post, but since I might not update again until after Thanksgiving (Gonna try and get some new pictures up this week but no promises) I figured I would give you guys something to hold you off. I took some photos of one of my friends dressed like a topless pigeon for some reason. I am not sure what I just said makes complete sense so let me explain. My friend asked me if I would take photos of her topless wearing a pigeon mask walking around NYC. We went to Times Square but it was raining so we went to Applebee’s like midwestern tourists and then finally took some photos of her topless hanging out with weird people who dress like the Statue of Liberty for money. The photos are real silly but she was happy with them and now you can look at them if you subscribe to Girls of Driven By Boredom. If you don’t then you are out of luck. It’s like $25 a year so I don’t know what you are doing not signing up.

I am gonna go hang out with my girlfriend now because we are celebrating our 1 year anniversary today. That’s pretty adorable right? Maybe you guys could look at the photos we ever took. I posted them right before we started dating officially so that’s extra cute. Sorry.

Okay, that’s enough. Here’s a flyer. See you guys sooner or later. 

So one year ago I went to the Galápagos Islands with my family to celebrate my parents’ retirement and their mutual 70th birthday. It was the first family vacation we had been on in 20 years. The islands were absolutely incredible. It was like something out of Jurassic Park. Unfortunately, had to leave early. After spending two days getting to the islands, my dad tripped on a rock cut his head open less than 24 hours after we boarded the boat that we were to be living on for the next week. It was a really magical and horrifying trip that I detailed in this 2000 Words post. Just a heads up, there is a lot of blood…

The good news is that my dad was okay. After spending a day in the only “hospital” in the Galápagos he was was allowed to fly and when he got back to the States his doctor told him they did a fantastic job stitching him up on the boat and he would barley have a scar if it weren’t for the fact that he ripped one of his stitches out and didn’t bother to get it fixed because of course he didn’t. The other good news was that my parents bought travel insurance and we got all our money back for the trip including the last minute tickets that we had to buy to get us home.

So one year later we are returning to the Galápagos and I am really excited about it. The place is so fucking insane and I can’t wait to show you guys the photos I take there. Assuming we all survive the trip in relative health it should be amazing. 

All that being said, I am going to have very little internet access so I won’t be updating the site again until after the 14th. I will be posting stuff to Instagram though, so make sure you are following me there and on Twitter if you want to hear about the trip in real time. 

Lastly here’s a link to some of my photos from last year that you can check out while you wait and see you guys in about 10 days!

I had something planned for today but it didn’t work out. Such is life. But the site turns 17 today and I told you guys I was going to do a post so here it is. I figured I could tell you a story about the history of Driven By Boredom.

Before Driven By Boredom was a website it was a motto. I hated being bored and have always needed to be doing something with my spare time. When I was 14 I started a music magazine and when I was 15 I started a record label and then I started taking photos of punk bands for the label and the magazine and punk rock was my entire life. Around my senior year in high school my partner in the magazine and label quit and I didn’t have something to consume my life with anymore. But around that time I also started fucking around with web design.

It was the late 90’s and I had been on the internet since 1992 or something like that. I was a kiddie hacker and for that era I was fairly knowledgeable when it came to tech but it wasn’t until my sophomore or junior when I started my first Geocities site. By the time I was a senior I knew basic HTML and had made a couple little websites and would check the hit counters every day and was blown away when a handful of people would check out my site in a given week.

I went to Penn State University in 1999 and realized immediately I had made a huge mistake. I wanted to run a record label for a living so I was a business major but before I even took my first class I said fuck it and became a photography major. Punk rock was all about DIY and I figured if I was a photo major I could take it easy and figure out the music shit in my free time. The problem was Penn State had no punk scene.

I quickly became good friends with my Penn State roommate but outside of him and a couple other people I didn’t really have any friends. I was a punk kid and I didn’t drunk and I didn’t exactly fit in at a giant party school in the middle of nowhere Pennsylvania. I spent a lot of time talking to my friends online and meeting new people on the internet, but one day I decided to ride the Loop Bus around campus on a Friday night and it changed my life forever.

The Loop Bus was a free bus that drove around campus from about the time classes started until bars closed at night. During the day it was a way for people to get to class or to get downtown but on Friday and Saturday night it became a way for people to get to bars and parties without having to drive a car.  It was affectionately called “The Drunk Bus” and it was always a complete fucking shit show.

So one night I am with my roommate and a few people and we are trying to figure out what we should do. We didn’t know of any parties and it was way too fucking cold to do much anyway, so I had this idea that we should just ride the drunk bus around. For some inexplicable reason I grabbed this stuffed animal monkey that a girlfriend had given me and we rode around the bus. Before one loop around campus was over I had been approached by a half dozen girls wanting to talk about my monkey and suddenly I had an idea.

The next weekend I went back on the bus. I was by myself this time but I had the monkey and a camera. If anyone talked to me about the monkey I would take their photo with it. I spent a few hours Friday and Saturday taking photos and on Sunday I dropped the film off to get developed. On Monday I picked up the film and started working on a website. A few days later “The Loop Monkey” was born.

Almost instantly the site became a hit. Hundreds of people were visiting the site every day to look for their photos and the photos of their friends. The school newspaper even did a front page story on me. I was getting stopped five times a day by people wanting to talk to me. The problem was that I hated that. I quickly realized I was not cut out for being famous, even on that micro level. I would have someone try and talk to me at 8am and I would kinda blow them off and by the time I got home from class they would have written some post about how awful I was on my message board. The head of the bus company found out about me and had the bus drivers kick me off after one lap around campus. It became a whole thing. I decided to quit and a few months after it started the Loop Monkey was no more.

I wanted to drop out of school but my parents convinced me to give it one more year. The problem was that by the time they convinced me to go back all the dorms were filled up. I got stuck in temporary housing in a study hall with seven other roommates. I had just broken up with my first serious girlfriend (she cheated on me with my first girlfriend and a random dude the day before I left for college!) and I was depressed as hell. My old roommate and his friends moved off campus together so I spent a lot of time in my room.

I started all these dumb projects to keep myself entertained. I was doing photography still and I was making really terrible electronic music with early EDM programs like ACID and Fruity Loops. I didn’t even like electronic music but it was fun to do. I had some terrible site on Mp3.com. I started making these really absurd videos with my roomates where we would lip sync to 80’s pop songs and record these mini music videos using the super early webcam I owned. I started making prank listings on eBay just to entertain myself and my friends.

When I say friends I am of course talking about my friends back home, but I was also talking about my new online friends. There was a scene of people popping up making these websites about their lives. Blog wasn’t a word back then and LiveJournal wasn’t really popular yet. It was mostly just nerds in their parents basement making these sites that were a collection of everything they thought was cool on the internet and nonsense about their lives. The sites were called Everything/Nothing because they were about everything and nothing at all. E/N was also used to talk shit about the sites saying they meant everything to the author but nothing to everyone else.

At some point I got sick of having to email my photos and videos to people and decided I needed to start my own E/N site. YouTube didn’t exist back then and there weren’t many options for sharing photos with people. I wanted to put all my dumb projects in one place so that everyone could see them. I didn’t want to use Geocities or Tripod or any of the other hosting sites back then because I wanted to host all my own content. Fortunately I had friends in the E/N scene running their own servers and I got some space on a friend’s server and bought my first domain name. I bought drivenbyboredom.com because this was going to be central home for all the projects that I created when I was trying not to lose my mind from boredom.

Building the site took months. I did a lot of the HTML by hand but I also used a program called Microsoft Front page. Everyone at Penn State got a bunch of the Microsoft Office type products and Front Page was the web design program. I wasn’t great at it, but I built a separate page for all of my projects. I built a webcam portal into the main page that would refresh every 30 seconds with a new photo if I was online. I built a journal into the site so I could tell people when there would be new updates to the different sections. And most importantly I built a links page.

These days there’s way too much shit on the internet, but back then finding quality content was hard and the way you would do it was by going to a site like mine to find out about other cool sites. I went on mIRC and asked all the webmasters I knew if they would link me and I got a couple girls I knew to pose topless with popular websites written on their skin. I knew how to get people naked and topless fan signs were a prized internet currency back then. By the time Driven By Boredom was ready to launch I had a dozen sites ready to tell everyone about me.

On March 1st, 2001, Driven By Boredom launched…..

If you want to read the rest of the story check out The History Of Driven By Boredom over on Medium. 

Here’s now some random old DBB related shit to make this post look prettier.