I got a bunch of random small things to mention to you guys so I figured we would do it all in one post. It’s not very exiting content wise but I gotta get the word out. Let’s do this.

The big thing I need to mention is that my site works again. This site does massive amounts of bandwidth. This site gets around 100k visitors a month but the average visitor tends to spend a lot of time on the site and looks at a lot of photos so we are talking of MILLIONS of page views every month and every one of those page views has at least one picture on it. I was on a shared server and when I would get a big link or something my site would just stop functioning or move really slowly. On Monday my awesome host Constant moved me over to my own server so the site is super fast now and hopefully we won’t have any crazy errors popping up any more. They really hooked it up on the price but it’s still nearly twice as much as I was paying so if you dig the site and want to support it you can help me out by signing up for my app, buying me some film or you can email me about advertising or buying prints. Any of that would be awesome.

Secondly I should be announcing the release info for my Route 66 book tomorrow. I am just waiting on a flyer. I can give you some of the info now though. The book is called “Get Your Kicks” and the book release will be in LA at the new Mishka art gallery above their LaBrea location. There will be a big solo show to go with it. There will be a smaller NYC release at the Brooklyn Mishka store with free booze and stuff but no art or anything. I am so excited for this I can’t even tell you.  A few books will be available online after the releases and if you donated to the fundraiser they will be in your hands by the end of the month!

Thirdly I threw a big party at Slattery’s Midtown Pub on Monday for this DolfansNYC thing I run. It was Monday Night Football so we went big on it.  I know people hate it when I post Miami Dolphins photos on Driven By Boredom so I am only going to mention it in this post in case anyone is interested. The Dolphins got killed but we raised over $1200 for charity through raffles and ticket sales. It was pretty amazing and my dude DJ Tropic killed it DJing during breaks in the game. You can check out all the pictures here! 

I also wanted to mention the B-Sides section of my site. I launched it a while ago but I haven’t really promoted it. I thought my site would be redone by now and the B-Sides are going to be a major feature of that, but we are way way way behind schedule on this thing and the B-Side blog has taken a back seat. I did update it the other day though with a really weird video from my friend Teddy Blanks that was directed by SXSW Film darling M Blash.  Check it out.

I gotta leave you guys with SOME content so rewatch this video about how awesome  and important I am. It’s the right thing to do.

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/30523163[/vimeo]

I came up with a terrible/great idea for a new Tumblr. Every time I shoot a naked girl I always take a photo of me and that girl for some reason. About a year ago I started publishing them at the end of the set and people seemed to get a kick out of them. I tend to make really awkward faces in all of them and I think they are kinda funny. Recently I was building a naked girl portfolio so I was going through all the old sets and pulling my favorite shots and while I was at it I started pulling photos of me with naked girls. At the end I had almost 200 images in that folder and this bad idea was born.

Starting today I am going to post several photos of me and a naked girl over at Me & Some Boobs. Yes, I realize that it’s a terrible name for a site, but when I asked my Twitter & Facebook friends the suggestions I got were awful so I decided to just name it the dumbest most obvious thing I could think of and Me & Some Boobs was born.

Anyway, the real point of this site is to promote my new app while at the same time providing links to older naked girl galleries that people haven’t looked at in a while. Also I get to be bragging and self loathing at the same time which is pretty much what I am all about. Yeah well, we all got problems.

Go follow this damn Tumblr and then have a lovely holiday weekend. See you guys soon.

When I went on my 30 day Route 66 road trip I launched the DBB Road Trip blog. It’s a perfect way to get up quick daily updates without having to deal with all the uploading and editing that comes with putting up a real post while I am on the road. The road trip blog is back this week as I return to the Gathering of the Juggalos. I will be out of town until Monday the 12th and I hope to update the road trip blog every day while I am gone.

I am shooting the Gathering for the Village Voice and Rolling Stone like I do every year, but this year I get to shoot it for Hustler as well. They are going to run a “Girls of the Gathering” article which should be pretty epic and very popular considering how popular my “Juggalo porn” updates are every year.  Expect the road trip blogs should be not safe for work. Just a warning.

Anyway I know people look forward and fear these updates ever year so get excited or horrified or hopefully a little of both. Should be a fun week.

Ps. While you are waiting for me to update, why don’t you check out the Girls of DBB mobile app!

Click Here To Launch The Gathering of The Juggalos Road Trip Blog!

From now until July 23rd I am going to be on an insane road trip. I am flying to Detroit and renting a car there. Then I am driving to Chicago and driving most of the old Route 66 before making my way to Vegas and then on to LA, San Francisco, Portland and hopefully Seattle. I then head across Montana and South Dakota before I head back to Chicago for a few days and finishing up where I started in Detroit before I fly home to NYC on the 23rd of July. It is going to be a wild, exhausting and hopefully very rewarding trip!

Since I will be on the road and I am going to have very little free time and limited access to reliable internet, I set up a special Road Trip site. I will be posting photo updates, stories from the road, and maybe the occasional video clip. It seems like a perfect solution while I am gone.

At the end of my road trip will be making a zine which you can pre-order by PayPaling $20 to my road trip gas fund. You will also gain access to a top secret road trip Tumblr with even more road trip updates!

UPDATE! The Girls of DBB Mobile APP has launched! Check it out!

Now Click Here To Access The Special DBB Road Trip Site!

In about two weeks I am going to go on an adventure. Ideally I am going to travel to Chicago, and then drive most of the old Route 66 and then drive to Vegas and then to LA and then go up the west coast to San Francisco, Portland, Seattle and Vancouver. Along the way I will be taking photos of naked girls and road side attractions and hopefully both at the same time. I am gonna hit some parties along the way and just take a million photos. I make enough money of this site to eat, but I certainly don’t have enough money to spend a month on the road driving to towns in the middle of nowhere.

Fortunately I am going to be shooting a video series for WoodRocket.TV  so I have some money coming in right off the bat. On top of that I am talking to a couple of sponsors that will help the trip along. I also have some money saved but I am pretty sure that will be gone VERY quickly.

So in order to fund the rest of this massive undertaking I am going to be making a black and white photo copied signed and numbered zine from the trip. I think it’s going to be pretty awesome and I have some cool ideas for it assuming I still have some money left over when I get back. So I set up an Indiegogo crowd funded thing for it. You can preorder the zine for $20 or you can donate more money to get a bunch of other stuff like prints and exciting things like that!

If you donate $5 or more you can get access to a secret Tumblr I am going to set up with daily photos and video from the road. If you donate $10 I will send you a post card from some campy road side attraction. From $25 upwards you can get prints and other stuff and I will send you a bunch of DBB swag like stickers and buttons with those orders. If you ever wanted me to come to a photo shoot with me you could donate some stupid amount of money and do that. People hit me up all the time about it which I find mildly creepy but for $1000, you are instantly less creepy.

Anyway, please help me fund this project!! I give you guys tons of free content and I ask very little from you. Plus I will totally be your best friend or something.

Click here to donate to my “The Great American Road Trip Zine”!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiBZ8p5kZWI[/youtube]

I met Xochitl at this insane Whores N Gold party a few months ago and I ended up photographing her topless in a refrigerator.  There was something about her I really liked so a few weeks later we decided to do a photo shoot. I showed up at her place and called several times to no answer. I started walking home, since my cab had already left, but a few blocks away she called me back. She told me to just walk in. It turns out she didn’t hear my phone because their was a party at her place and everyone there was pretty fucked up. I was sort of taken back by the whole thing since I don’t normally do photo shoots during house parties, but I pressed on.

Her room was totally insane and there was a party going on in the living room so I just started taking photos. She rolled a cigarette, poured another glass of wine  and started showing me her clothes and her stuff and we just took photos and they started turning out. What started out as me just wanting to get the shoot over with and get out of there turned into one of my favorite shoots in a while. I feel like it’s very personal and real and weird and amazing. Xochitl is strangely beautiful and sort of nuts and really awesome and I had a blast taking  her photo and I hope I get to do it again soon. I think you guys are really going to dig these shots.

In other news, two days ago I decided to shoot the Indy 500 so I am driving to Indianapolis today. Turns out it’s only 12 hours away so fuck it. Let’s get weird. Gonna stop in Pittsburgh tonight and probably stay in Indy til Monday or Tuesday so don’t expect any more updates until I get back. Check my Tumblr for updates while I’m gone!

Now click here to see some fantastic photos of the amazing Xochitl.

12 years ago today I launched Driven By Boredom into the world wide internets. I was in my second and last year at the Penn State University. I hated it. I had a girlfriend who lived 6 hours away, I was a punk rock kid in a town with no punk scene and I was a straight edge kid at a frat filled party school. The year before I had started a party photo website that ended up being so successful that I had become a minor celebrity on campus which I hated. Being stopped by frat dudes at 8am on the way to class was a nightmare. I quit the blog and spent most of my time in my dorm room playing on the internet.

I was so bored at school. I barely did any school work and as I mentioned I didn’t have much of a social life. In high school I ran a record label, a magazine, played sports and got in trouble with my insane friends. I was constantly busy so being bored was something I wasn’t that used to. I hated it so I started coming up with projects to kill time. I was making stupid videos and I was selling weird fake shit on eBay and I was making horrible music on my computer.  I was always taking photos but emailing them to my friends was getting to be a pain. I needed a place for all these projects and a site to host my photography. My brother had a website and he had found a little community of webmasters who ran what they called “E/N” sites. E/N stood for Everything/Nothing. They were the first blog sites and I decided to create my own.

I decided on Driven By Boredom because it was quickly becoming my motto. I always needed something to fill my free time so I wouldn’t be bored. Everything from starting a record label to selling trash on eBay was all driven by a fear of being bored. For a while I had an idea of getting a tattoo that read Driven By Boredom and it eventually became not only a tattoo but an early logo for my website.

The site got very popular very quickly. It was a mix of a few projects that went viral and convincing fans of my site to send me photos of their boobs with BORED written on them. Tits = hits was an early motto of the internet and even back then my site was known for the nudity, even if I wasn’t even taking the photos. By 2002 I was getting thousands of visitors a day which in those days would have been like hundreds of thousands. The site now gets more that twice the traffic that the old site ever got, but I don’t get a 10th of the fan/hate mail that I did back then. It was a really amazing experience.

Unfortunately I made a huge mistake of letting a friend of a friend host my website. He disappeared from the internet one day and my site was down for almost two months while I had to rebuild the site almost from scratch. I had to get a new design and although I managed to recover most of my content that was backed up on my hard drive I lost a lot of stuff and a LOT of traffic. My site never really recovered. I kept blogging but it wasn’t as much fun and I was just constantly angry about it. I started blogging less and less and in 2004 I started managing a band called The Gaskets. I put so much effort into the Gaskets that by 2005 the site was pretty much just an advertisement for them and I only updated like once every three months.

I tried to revive Driven By Boredom once using Blogspot, but I gave up on that quickly. In September of 2006 I moved to New York and started going to a lot of dance parties. I bring a camera with me everywhere I go and so I started taking photos at these parties. Last Nights Party and the Cobrasnake had just blown up and everyone was asking me what website I posted my party photos on. I had met Cobrasnake years earlier back when he was doing Polaroid Scene and I didn’t really get it, despite running a successful party photo site in 2000, but by the time I moved to NYC it was pretty oblivious how popular party photography was.

I decided to bring Driven By Boredom back from the dead and started posting terrible photos on it because I was just fucking around. I think that was probably a mistake because by the time I started making a little bit of money and taking party photography seriously I think I had a reputation as a shitty photographer. I remember people being shocked when they would see my (good) photos after not seing my site for a while. I was a pretty good photographer back in 2006/07 but I just didn’t care about party photos.  Even though I take it seriously now, as it pays my rent, I still think party photos are bullshit and it slowly eats at me, but that’s a story for another time.

So yeah, I started bringing my real camera into clubs and then I started bringing my flash into clubs and I started hustling. My internet skills plus my old fan base plus naked girls plus me covering all of NYC south of 14th St with stickers added up to Driven By Boredom getting very well known, very quickly. A year after I moved to NYC I quit my job and started running the site full time. After 8 months I ran out of money and had to get a job again, but in December of 2008 I was laid off from that job after the economy tanked. I happened to book two big gigs in January of 2009 and I never looked back. It’s been more than 4 years of doing this site for a living and DBB has come a long way since 2001.

DBB 4.0 is on it’s way and when the new site drops there are going to be a lot of changes. Personally I can’t wait but I don’t have much of a choice since the two people building my site have full time jobs and I am paying them about a 1/100th of their normal rate. But by the DBB 13th anniversary things should be a lot different around here. I just hope the next 12 years are as fun as the last 12 years. See you guys in 2025.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2YAyVhJos8[/youtube]

Tis the season for giving, and I give you guys a lot. Yeah, I make money doing the nightlife and I make some money in advertizing but most of the naked girls and the crazy adventuring I do for the love of it. In the last year I have been working less and trying to focus on a few projects. I am redoing the site, working on my first photo book, working on a series of food related zines, adding a video component to DBB and shooting as many naked girls as possible. All of this stuff is going to be awesome, but none of it is making any money. I am of course working enough to pay my rent and get by and everything is good as far as that stuff goes, BUT I want to be shooting more film and doing more stuff to make this site, and my Tumblr, more awesome.

So I came up with an idea. I always see these cam girls and porn stars with wish lists and I figured if dudes will buy them stuff maybe I can get dudes to buy me stuff. But I don’t want underwear or books or DVDs, I want supplies so I can keep making rad stuff for this site. I also figured that you should get something back for your rad donation.

So here’s the deal: I set up an Amazon wishlist and  if you buy something on it, you get something back.  If you buy me some Polaroid film, you get a naked girl Polaroid signed by both me and the naked girl. If you buy me some 35mm film you get a signed 8×10 35mm print. You can pick if you want a naked girl or not. You don’t get to pick the actual photo but you can at least sugest what kind of image you want.  If you buy me a box of 5 Hour Energy I will give you a digital print I guess. That seems to make sense somehow.

So yeah, buy this website a present, I will keep working on great content and you guys will get some “art”. Seems like a good idea right? Oh, and don’t forget… Driven By Boredom has a store now!  More on that later…

Ps. No DBB Christmas cards this year unfortunately but if you buy something I will send you an old one!