Goth Pride fundraiser

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Last night I made a rare mid-week visit to the Vogue, as they were having a fundraiser for the local goth community’s entry into this Sunday’s Pride parade. It gave me a chance to play a little bit with low-light photography, experimenting with various shutter speeds to see if I could get anything decent at the club.

Bad JuJu Lounge and The Vogue, Seattle, WASome shots worked better than others, of course (trial and error will do that). I brought along a monopod, which allowed me to me to go for two- to four-second exposures without too much camera shake. A tripod would have been better, but it would have been a lot bulkier and a lot more difficult to adjust quickly. The resulting shots aren’t my greatest, but I’m not unhappy with them at all — it was fun to try, and I’ve got a better idea of what settings to use the next time I get a chance for something like this.

Burlesque, Goth Pride Fundraiser, The Vogue, Seattle, WAThe one bummer was that as the actual fundraiser part of the show started late (scheduled for 10:30pm, they didn’t get going until about 11:15pm), I only got a chance to shoot three of the burlesque dancers before I had to leave. By the time I had found settings that were working pretty well (half-second exposure, front-curtain flash, focus fixed at just over two meters), the three of them were done and I needed to be getting home.

Still, it was fun to experiment with, and I got some time to bounce around on the dance floor for a bit. I’d been missing that, as the past two weekends have been too busy for me to make it out on Saturday night, and I don’t think I’ll be making it out this Saturday, either. Sunday’s the Pride parade, and Prairie and I will be heading up to watch that along with Rick and Kirsten and her husband; and on Saturday we’re planning on heading out to the Utilikilt Anniversary picnic.

The Vogue, Seattle, WA

Looks to be another busy weekend lined up. Yay for summer!

iTunes “Believer” by BT from the album Go (1999, 5:11).

Another bad headline

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Best headline of the day award:

No More Bear Meat in Glory Hole

It probably says more about my own sick, twisted little mind immediately going for the worst possible interpretation, but my first parsing of this was that it was no longer permissible for large, hirsuite gay men to receive anonymous blowjobs.

It’s actually about a Juneau, Alaska homeless shelter — named, for some unfortunate reason, the Glory Hole — which just realized that it’s illegal for them to serve donated game meat, including bear.

Gave me a good laugh, though.

iTunes “Walking In My Shoes (Random Carpet)” by Depeche Mode from the album Walking In My Shoes (1993, 6:10).

Podcast 02: Difficult Listening Hour 02v2

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And here we have the second of my old collection of mix sessions that I’m putting up for download and podcast. A little longer than the last one, and a little more pop-y. There actually was a ‘v1’ of this mix (which may go up eventually), but it had a few slight flaws that I wanted to fix, and I ended up choosing a slightly different set of tracks to use (though, I may have simply introduced new flaws…so it goes). Hence, ‘v2’.

Standard disclaimer: All the mixes I’m posting were mixed ‘live’ — running a Pioneer dual CD mixer directly into my computer and recording straight to .mp3 — and have had no post-mix editing done in the computer. As such, they’re not flawless, but they’re not bad, either, if I do say so myself.

Here’s the link: Difficult Listening Hour 02v2 (1h 04m 41s, 59.5Mb). Tracks included are:

  1. Faithless ‘Salva Mea’
  2. Transister ‘Head (Hot Tracks)’
  3. Dee-Lite ‘Groove is in the Heart (Van Helden ’99)’
  4. Madonna ‘Music (Deep Dish Dot Com)’
  5. Sarah McLachlan ‘Possession (Rabbit in the Moon)’
  6. DJ Icey ‘This is How My Drummer Drums’
  7. The Crystal Method ‘Busy Child’
  8. Wink ‘Higher State of Consciousness (Itty Bitty Boozy Woozy/vs. Public Enemy)’
  9. Underworld ‘Rez’

Advantages of a Real Server

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A quick look at my traffic over the last month does a good job of illustrating the benefits to moving to a server that can actually respond at a decent speed:

Eclecticisim Traffic May-June

The day I moved is pretty obvious — the 7th of June. Prior to that, I was averaging 921 page loads a day, and it was trending downwards. Once I switched to the new server, things suddenly improved, and until the past few days, I was averaging 1,490 page loads a day. Nowhere near any of the big sites on the net, but still not too shabby.

So, once again, many thanks to Rain City Story for hosting me!

That spike over the last few days (up to 2,820 page loads yesterday) is almost entirely due to people looking for pictures of the Fremont Solstice Parade, arriving either from Google searches or links to my picture pages from other sites. Lots of pervs out there looking for pictures of naked bikers, would be my guess…and good for them!

I wholeheartedly approve of pervs in most situations — moreso when it drives a traffic spike to my site. ;)

iTunes “We Care A Lot” by Faith No More from the album Never Mind the Mainstream (1987, 4:05).

Rules and Regs, Section 8: Noise

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My apartment building just transferred to a new management company, and along with the letter alerting all the tenants to the transfer, they also gave us a copy of the new rules and regulations for the building (which, as far as I can tell, is the same as the old rules and regulations). For those of us that weren’t home when they distributed these, they left them taped to our doors.

So, since my next door neighbor hadn’t emerged from his apartment to grab his copy yet, I grabbed a big red permanent marker and circled section eight on his copy:

NOISE: All Residents and their guests shall have due regard for the peace, comfort and quiet enjoyment of other Residents at all times. Musical instruments, radios, television sets, laundry facilities, etc. must be kept quiet from 10:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m. All noise shall be confined within the walls of Resident’s own apartment.

I doubt it’ll make much of a difference — he hasn’t shown any indication of caring one whit about those of us on either side of him — but it made me feel a little bit better.

iTunes “Misery Machine” by Marilyn Manson from the album Portrait of an American Family (1994, 13:09).

Pledge of Allegiance

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A young kid was suspended from school for one day when, while everyone else in the classroom was reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, he recited his own pledge of allegiance.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United Federation of Planets, and to the galaxy for which it stands, one universe, under everybody, with liberty and justice for all species.

Good for him, I say — and good for his mom for laughing in the principal’s face when she was told what her boy had done.

(via Boing Boing)

Fame

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Last night when I went down to check my snail mail, another of the residents in my apartment building was checking his. I was heading back to the elevator when he spoke up. “Hey — aren’t you Eclecticism?”

Turns out he’d stumbled across my site a while ago looking for pictures of the Jensonia Hotel fire, and has stopped by from time to time (recently enough to have seen some of the Fremont Parade pictures), and recognized me from my photos and my kilt.

Pretty fun, actually. So far, that makes the second time someone in the “real world” has recognized me from my site (the first being one of the regulars at the Vogue). I’m famous! ;)

More old Gig’s photos

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I’ve updated my photoset of old photos from Gig’s Music Theatre with shots of a lot of my friends from that time period. I’d held off on uploading those, as I don’t have a way to contact most of those people to be sure they won’t mind, but tonight I figured that as most of the shots have been on my archived Gig’s Music Theatre site for years now — and had been donated to me for public use — that it would be okay.

Of course, if anyone finds them and says “Hey! Get me offa there!” I’ll oblige. Hopefully that won’t be the case, though.

www.flickr.com

iTunes “I Showed A Caveman How to Rock” by US3 feat. Def Jef from the album Flintstones, The (1994, 5:19).

Downtown Excitement

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I wondered why there was a helicopter hovering over downtown as I came back to work after picking up a job outside of the building. Now I know why…

  • Seattle Times: Man shot at federal courthouse in Seattle

    A man who walked into the federal courthouse in downtown Seattle today carrying what appeared to be a hand grenade was shot, police said.

    Seattle Police Chief Gil Kerlikowske said the man walked into the building armed with a hand grenade that appeared to be real. After a 20-minute standoff, Seattle police officers fired several rounds. The man, still clutching the grenade, collapsed.

    Kerlikowske said the man appear to be dead, but was being attended to by medics.

  • Seattle PI: Shooting at federal courthouse

    It was not known whether the man had made any threats or said anything to the officers or courthouse personnel. Kerlikowske said the man may have been known in the neighborhood but offered no suspects.

  • King5: BREAKING NEWS: Police shoot grenade carrying man in Federal Courthouse

    The suspect was seen entering the courthouse shortly before noon, carrying a yellow backpack strapped to his chest, raising suspicions by police and courthouse guards.

    Around 11:30 a.m. a woman cleaning windows in the lobby saw a middle-aged man enter the building. He was acting oddly, she said. “Usually you don’t wear a backpack in front of you.” He drew the attention of security officials when he tried to sneak around the security gate.

    She described what happened next when they told him to stop. He responded, “don’t come near me don’t come near me, I’ll blow it up!”

Wow.

More Solstice Parade pictures

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Other sets of parade pictures I’ve run across…I’ll add more as I find them:

There’s now a list of galleries on the Fremont Arts Council blog (who very kindly have linked to both my photoset and this very post) — I’ll let them take over from here.

(Sorry to hit your RSS feeds one more time, but as this is currently my most popular post, I figured it’d be a good idea to add in a link to my photos as well. Regular readers will be bored of this by now, but it should be good for the visitors.)

www.flickr.com