My super-cool birthday!

For those few readers who give a damn, my birthday was great. I had a surprise party, which was made more interesting by the fact that I was already AT my house. So everyone actually had to contrive a reason to show up, and then arrive simultaneously. Miss Information had taken her recent Sweeney Todd obsession into the realm of vegetarian-friendly “meat pies” and some yummy hazelnut cookies as well.

She also found me some REAL COKE. For the uninitiated, real Coke is made with actual sugar, and comes in a tall glass bottle. None of that high-fructose corn syrup nonsense to spoil things!

A well-timed bit of spending money (a rarity around these parts) enabled me to pick up a new memory card for my camera, so I upgraded from 64 megabytes to 1 gig! Now I can take high-quality video for nearly 30 minutes… my brain is enjoying tossing this possibility around for future projects. I also got some punch balloons, and three tiny basil plants.

On a somewhat surreal note, the girl checking out our purchases was very excited to tell us about a hotel “somewhere in the midwest” that does not have beds, but is “all murder rooms.” Not sure what that meant exactly, but I think she may have been describing some sort of home-grown history museum. Or just getting too much of the home-grown herself…

Taking our leave from Homicide Ho-Jo, Mister and I had our photostrip made, with props! For the record, bubbles are finicky partners in a photo setting.

Upon returning home, DJ Mo presented me with the keys to Dave City, a sim of which I am not only the man-about-town and concurrent five-time homeowner, but also the mayor. My approval rating is pretty high, but apparently, I need to get a fire station built before this highly-desirable real estate goes up in flames.

New Nashville homeowner Tony capped off my birthday with a much-appreciated gift card for Amazon. Winging their way to my door are John Cage’s “Silence,” David Toop’s “Haunted Weather,” “The Soundscape” by R. Murray Schaeffer, and a Dover Thrift Edition of the “Tao Te Ching.”

All in all, a great birthday. Thank you, everyone!

357 scanned photos of photobooth owner!

Aside from the first strip– which I’ll be returning– I have added all these photostrips to my personal collection. There are a total of 357 individual frames of the photobooth owner here, so enjoy! As always, I’ve also included the “abstracts,” and damaged photostrips…

And don’t miss yesterday’s giant update, with found photostrips of random Southern Illinoisians…

HUGE photobooth strip update!

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m a big fan of photobooths and the photostrips made within them. I don’t mean those new digital things, just the old “dip and dunk” type. Earlier this year, I scanned a large portion of my personal photostrip collection, including the ubiquitous shots of the photobooth owner taken during maintenance.

Since that time, I’ve been trying to catch him somewhere to let him know that there are dozens of scans of him online, as it seems the polite thing to do. I urge you to put this policy in effect as well– if you have dozens of photos of me somewhere online, please let me know, haha.

Anyhow, I saw him a few days back, and told him about the scans. He took it much better than I might have, and promised to hook me up with a large amount of photostrips he’d amassed over the last few years. I agreed that I would only keep the damaged and owner photos, but will return the others– so if you see your photo here, there’s a good chance you can still rescue it! I hope to get the owner photos scanned within the next 12 hours, so be sure to come back and check them out as well!

Alrighty, let’s start on the photos– lots of kissing going on. The best of this set of four is the little girl in the 4th strip. Check that grin! Also, the mom barely moves, even as the baby become increasingly more crazed.

I like photobooths!

Ever since I was little, I have enjoyed taking my picture at photobooths, as well as seeing the photos that others have taken. Every so often, I’d find a lost photo, and add it to my informal collection of random odd photographs. After seeing the film “Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain,” which featured a character who collects photobooth pictures, I started looking at these photos in a new way. I was surprised to see how frequently I could find discarded photos, given the tiniest of efforts at checking my local booths.

I’d been wanting to put these online for a while now, but was not looking forward to the repetitive scanning and re-sizing this would entail. Regardless, here they are! The first seven sets are obviously my photobooth owner, who takes these pictures while maintaining the machine. He is aware that I collect his photos, and will occasionally provide me with a particularly interesting one he has found by slipping it into the side of the machine for me to grab later on. He also has a terrific collection of photos, mainly of girls flirting with the camera– the best of these often end up under the plexiglass cover of the photobooth itself– a sort of shrine to college girls willing to fondle each other, or “kiss” the camera.

As you can see, my own collection is much less focused: