Nostalgia - 1270 boston

On YouTube I have the completed longer version of my documentary about one of Boston's greatest bars from the days when Boston actually had 30 or so gay bars at one time. I made a shorter more concise version for a festival but this one has stuff many of the people interviewed liked in it. It was the third of 3 films I made about gay history (maybe 3 and 1/2 if you count "46 Years" to "50 Years" as separate films). It took 3 years to get the research done and the interviews set up and 8 months to edit and get the graphics done.

I tried to get the History project in Boston interested but they were pretty cold and unresponsive (as they have always been when I've tried to contact them to tell the truth). In fact, while many people showed up to see it and were happy it was made, in general not many people, particularly younger gay people, seem to not care at all where their roots are. I am glad at someone, even if it was only me, managed to get something done before no one remembers Boston's quite interesting gay past.

More photos

I find children's play parks really creepy. The play"animals" always look like something (to me) that should give kids nightmares and complexes. So of course I feel the need to photograph them whenever possible.

Chog est mort / Chog has died

The inspirations for "Nomi et Chog" are both gone now. Chog was a little joy his whole life. His owner, Tobias Allen was with him.

Les inspirations pour "Nomi et Chog" sont morts maintenant. Tobias Allen, son maître était à côté le petit Chog à la fin.

Le Murales de Montréal

Lentement, je vais faire une grande collection des photos de murales de Montréal. Quand je trouve le temps, je sors avec mon appareil de photos numérique et pris quelques photos et après, j’enlève les lampadaires et les arbres qui bloquent l’art pour une vue claire et sans obstruction.

This post stems from a nice conversation I had with a poster in the commentary section. This is a conversation I’ve had in various forms with clients as well so I thought it might be good to bring up.

Many people are under the impression that a site is more “advanced” if it has more stuff on it, moving stuff.... stuff that links you to other places... sound effects... animated buttons.. CSS, PHP ASP any number of letter combinations will do. Fact is unless you have a reason, and it better be a good one, to load a site down with anything but basic html,you are just making a crappy site. “Advanced” is not technology, or not just technology I should say. “Advanced” means fast functional and easy to use and find things.

EVERYONE wants animation on their sites again, after a decade of shying away after the flash heavy sites of the mid-90’s. The reason is simple... most people don’t know what FLASH is anymore, even though they see examples of it all the time, modems are so much faster, you don’t wait for 10 minutes to see a 700K animation that only tells you, in the most round-about way possible, you’ve reached the site you were looking for. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.

I am all for animations where they work well, and I’m all for programming solutions where they do the best job getting the info to the browser faster. But too many people start their list of needs now with I want “a flash intro” or an “animated gallery” before they even know what the content of the site will be.

It’s the content that decides what the site needs, not the tech. Otherwise you are just making a version of Homer Simspon’s web page, which was so bogged down with animated gifs and no content, that it crashed the internet. (Old episode.. if you’ve seen it you know what I mean!)

As in science, the simplest solution is almost always the correct one.