Driven By Boredom Turns 13!
In February 2001 I was a sophomore at Penn State University. I had recently been destroyed by the first love of my life and I was a straight edge punk kid in a city full of nothing but drunken frat boys. I had a few friends (all of whom I somehow still stay in touch with) but I didn’t have much to do. I had no interest in partying with bros and hitting on these preppy college girls and I was so fucking bored all the time. I spent a lot of time on the internet.
Penn State had broadband internet and my time on it wasn’t restricted by how many hours I had left on my dial up AOL account. Napster was invented and I was downloading massive amounts of music and hanging out in my dorm room coming up with shit to entertain me. I started selling funny shit on eBay, I was re-captioning Family Circus cartoons, I was making terrible music with early versions of programs similar to Garageband, I was making weird videos and I was of course taking photos.
The problem was that YouTube didn’t exist yet. Flickr didn’t exist yet. Blogs didn’t exist yet. I had all this content but I didn’t know what to do with it. I was mostly emailing stuff to friends one by one if I wanted to show them what I had made. Fortunately my brother introduced me to a community of websites called E/N sites which stood for Everything/Nothing meaning they would post about anything they wanted or just ramblings about their everyday lives. They were the first blog sites as we think of blogs now.
On March 1st 2001 I launched Driven By Boredom into the world. By mid 2002 it was an incredibly popular blog and I got emails from fans every day. It was really amazing. Unfortunately my site was hosted by a guy who hosted a bunch of E/N sites. One day all of the sites went down and my site was down for months before I gave up and started over almost completely from scratch. It wasn’t the same after that and when I started managing a band in 2003 DBB took a back seat. By the time I moved back to NYC in 2006 DBB was pretty much dead.
By the end of 2006 I had been shooting parties with a point and shoot digital camera just for fun and people kept asking me what website I was putting them on. Last Night’s Party and Cobrasnake had just come out and everyone thought I was a party photographer. So I said fuck it and brought DBB back from the dead. On April 25th 2007 I bought a flash and started taking nightlife photography seriously and on December 23rd 2008 I got laid off from my last job became a photographer and blogger full time.
It’s been a long and exciting 13 years for this blog and it’s amazing that it still exists and is somehow my actual job.
To celebrate DBB’s 13th anniversary I am having a party tonight at The Flat! There will be free DBB tattoos, cheap booze and naked babes. If you live in NYC you should come out! But if you don’t live in NYC I have something for you to look at anyway.
As a present for my blog I created a new Tumblr site called Fuck Yeah Driven By Boredom! It’s a Tumblr compiling fan signs and Driven By Boredom tattoos and sightings of my stickers and anything fun I can think about that has to do with this blog! It’s probably of marginal interest to anyone who is not obsessed with me or this blog, but I think it’s going to be a lot of fun to catalogue all this stuff. I hope you dig it!
