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The Beach Boys - Surfs Up ex. full

On the Summer Solstice, the people of Larkspur did gather (in what seemed to be a wind tunnel) And Funk Nugget brought The Funk And the people did Boogie-oogie-oogie. And it was good.

I really hated the whole bums rush to go to war after the tower attacks. Too many good men died or were injured. My younger son did a tour of duty in Iraq. My older son had a complete meltdown over it. He didn't want him to die in that "shithole". We all breathed a sigh of relief when he came home. I firmly believe in holding government accountable. If war can be avoided, it should be. Old guys in suits aren't the ones out there fighting. When it was me wearing the uniform, it was different than when your kids are the ones on the line. I guess I now know how my dad felt when I enlisted. Let's hope cooler heads prevail.

Which is a 2-hr follow-up to the amazing 3-hr piece on tariffs in the computer hardware industry below: This piece was big and eye-opening enough that Bloomberg picked it up and brought Steve from GN (aka Tech Jesus) onto their podcast: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-05-07/the-tariff-buzzsaw-is-coming-for-hardcore-gamers

Tried some new techniques for the dough and for cooking the pizza and happily gobbled up the results. Red sauce, mozzarella and parmesan, guanciale, corn and leeks.

Proper cooking this time, fried chicken breasts to make sandwiches for dinner.

In 1996, a then 19 year old woman founded "Haven" a goth night hosted at Club Metro in Northampton MA. I was there in the first year. I still have a flyer from a 1997 event ...somewhere. Club Metro became Diva's at some point, and was the biggest gay nightclub in the area. Space-wise it was the biggest nightclub period. In 2006, Haven celebrated their 10th anniversary and it was insane. I have alluded to the fact that I have taken a fair amount of shit for the nightclub photos I took in the mid 00s. This got stuck in my craw and I (as I am wont to due) overrated a bit. There's a lot to unpack here and most of it is, to be frank, fucking irrelevant. The bottom line is that a lot of freaky shit happened at goth night, I gleefully took photos of it and posted them online. I got rather puritanical reactions from a number of people in the local nightclub scene, earning me a reputation as some kind of leering pervert. In the fall of 2007, I made ~1500 photos private because I was tired of hearing about it. As I have said before my edits to many of the photos I took were crap, primarily because I thought it was a good idea to crop in super close, with zero regard to aspect ratio and framing. Bad editing definitely made the situation worse. Now with nearly two decades of reflection, I've concluded that yes many of the photos were without merit, the reaction against them was primarily from assholes, and I am remarkably bad at not taking things personally. With that said, here's Haven's 10th anniversary. There will be some titty. When I get to a later photo set from Haven, there will be a lot of titty. You have been warned. Diva's had remarkably crap lighting. They had a bunch of flat mirror scanners set to "synchronized spaz" and two 1000W strobes that went off irregularly. The combination made for the worst imaginable source for available light photography. This shot is 1 second with the camera placed on a railing. I should add that all of these photos are ISO50, because at this point I didn't know how to adjust the ISO setting on my PowerShot(!) See the woman in the far left? In '06 I cropped the image to just be here ...resulting in something that would barely be a thumbnail today. She's still the subject of the image, now she just has some context. This is The Enigma. He's a heavily body modified performer. He's actually quite a showman. The goths ate up his schtick. He hammered a nail up one of his nostrils. He ran a drill up the other one. He blasted himself in the face with an angle grinder. He pumped a bottle of what he said was Windex up his nose. People went back to dancing. This guy is not the founder of Haven, but he was the main DJ for many years. He's like 6'5 and rail thin. I used to call him "The Alpha Goth." I know him a bit. He's dedicated to his craft, but we have some ...philosophical and creative differences. The two main people behind Haven. They had a falling out as some point. This photo is absolutely terrible from a technical perspective, but documents the moment in time. I did say there would be titty. 1/8 second handheld. 2 second exposure of discarded Champagne glasses. I really like these two shots. My friend Felicia has been a belly dancer for decades. She did a performance. None of these shots are very good, but they do capture he abilities. Back to dancing. 1.6 seconds with the camera on a railing again. I think someone bumped it. Neat effect. There was one guy with a pair of glowsticks. I took a number of long exposures of him with the camera on a railing. To the credit of Diva's, they had all sorts of places to place a camera. The Enigma is back. Now he's got Peaches with him. Things are about to get interesting. She's got a bed of nails. They also smashed the watermelon Gallagher style, and I utterly failed to capture it. Part of the act was "force feeding" Peaches some of the watermelon. I missed that as well. Thank you for attending Haven's 10th!