In the above photograph of myself as a child, was my mother making me pose like a bridge-and-tunnel lout who just got cheek-punched, or was I really, at that young age, sitting under the roses, actually a bridge-and-tunnel lout who just got cheek-punched?

I'm conflicted about this space, in case you hadn't guessed. While I resolve these conflicts, I am posting trivial tidbits like these at tangentialism.vox.com. Of course, there's also flickr and, occasionally, periphery for less wit and more color.

• Crowded streets
• Sirens everywhere, silence besides
• Buildings descending
• The smell of smoke
• Phone calls from friends, apartments full of dust
• Buildings descending on TV, over and over and over
• Beautiful blue skies

Today:

• Crowded streets
• Sirens everywhere, silence besides
• The lavishly-airbrushed American Pride SUV, revving its engines on the West Side Highway
• Beautiful blue skies

A quiet dancefloor, with a single Japanese Breakdancer plying his wares. His movements are precise and robotic; he is a "popper". Among the seated observers in the club is a knowledgeable DANCE ENTHUSIAST, watching intently. The song ends, and the JAPANESE POPPER takes a seat. The Dance Enthusiast stands and walks over to meet him.

                          DANCE ENTHUSIAST
                  (shaking Japanese Popper's hand)
           Your name is really getting around, man.

                          JAPANESE POPPER
           Huh?

                          DANCE ENTHUSIAST
           All over the message boards.
           People are saying things.

                          JAPANESE POPPER
           What do they say?

                          DANCE ENTHUSIAST
           They say you're the next big popper.
           As big as Johnny Boom-Boom or Sven Locka.
           Bigger.

                          JAPANESE POPPER
           Is this good?

                          DANCE ENTHUSIAST
           It's very good for you, man. Are you going 
	   to Boston?

                          JAPANESE POPPER
           Yes.

                          DANCE ENTHUSIAST
                  (pointing at Japanese Popper)
           They'll know your name before you get there.

Dance Enthusiast backs away and returns to his seat. Japanese Popper nods, then turns away and, still seated, begins to practice his synchronized finger-pointing moves.

But nothing has so threatened the dominance of my music collection over my morning commute as the New York Times' new podcasts. I expect Count Bruni's daily restaurant updates, in particular, to bring the noise. I might have to take a longer route just to fit them all in.

Then, yesterday afternoon, my camera died.

Last night, I dreamt my hair was full of spiders.

When I heard the rumor last year, my first, sudden, only, thought was, "in the Palladium?"

Since it's tough to make a new year's project out of my cat not dying, here's a frenetic slideshow of those twelve hundred shots from the last year (smallish: tangentialism2005small.mov, 3'15", 13.2 MB / biggish: tangentialism2005.mov, 44.2 MB). One of my resolutions this year is to do everything I did in 2005 twice as well, so here's to twelve hundred even better shots (and closer friends, better projects, healthier cats) by this time next year.

Happy 2006. Don't break it.

"Hi, my name is David."

"Hi, David."

"I abuse saturation for seasonal gain."

—cop on 6th Avenue today, blanket-ticketing cyclists for lane and reflector violations. [via Gothamist]

A poignant and poetic excerpt here from a Google Japanese-to-English ("Beta"!!!) translation of a Sumo wrestler's blog (as mentioned on boingboing today):

When you mention some contents, * & *

It was in university age Martial romance And

By your Trick of liquor habit (@ @) Story,

As for the classmate doing what, the る?

While with laughing at the story which is said, you speak eternally.

Tell me about it, man.

It's a rare and wonderful thing to be able to name-check two of my own posts in one day. Thank god for the arrival of the UPS Store to the Williamsburg Franchise Watch. For those of you too engrossed in this paragraph to click away, the neighborhood of northside Williamsburg, former quiet hamlet of Polish and Italian families turned ruggedly-hip artist district, turned red-hot post-grad bobo wonderland, turned mezzanine-condominium Shangri-La, has begun cautiously to offer its storefront real estate to national franchise interests. This summer's entry, at the corner of North 5th and Bedford, a Subway sandwich shop, barely escaped the focused attention of the Williamsburg Warriors and now serves as the daytime post of local curmudgeon Leo Kowalski. A casual visual survey of the traffic at Subway (namely, whenever I walk by) indicates a relatively light customer base, though it is next door to a funeral parlor.

And then today, the UPS Store made its franchised intentions known on North 7th, just across from the notorious Finger Building. So far, there are a couple boxes and some papers strewn around inside. And this big banner. No hilariously ironic signage yet, but I'll keep my eyes peeled.

Oh, on that note, there's a Sparky's hot dog place opening up on Lafayette, between Houston and Bleecker. Just north of the aforementioned ironically-signed UPS Store. Coincidence or strange chain consipiracy? You make the call.

Before I continue, let me point out periphery.tangentialism.com, which I finished this weekend. It's a Photoblog-with-a-capital-P that I'll be directing my daily photos at for a while, supplemented by Flickr for random shots and sharables.

I wrote Periphery because I've spent too long telling other photobloggers that "I really want to have my own photoblog". I love Flickr, and I've been posting regularly there for over a year, but while I use it to photoblog, it didn't feel like "my own photoblog". It's been very good for me, both as a photographer and as a photoblogger, and the community of sharing there is so rich that I don't see any reason to leave, but as even Eric Costello points out, in this interview with Adaptive Path, Flickr wasn't originally put together for Photobloggers-with-a-capital-P:

Flickr was really envisioned initially as an organizational tool for an individual who has this huge collection of photos. The social network was built in just so that you could restrict access to your photos. But what has really taken off with Flickr is that it’s turned out to be a great platform for sharing with the masses, and not just with your small collection of friends...

But we found that it took off when we got some excellent photographers who were interested in using Flickr as a new kind of photo blog, so that the world could see their pictures. And that, I think, is really the primary usage of Flickr now.

In fact, I've changed with Flickr. When I signed up, I only imagined I'd post photos to share for kicks--and you can see that in my early posts, of signs and vacations and cameraphone shots. In the last year, mostly because of the vibrant local community of photobloggers, I've fallen back in love with photography, and with looking at nice, big images, which isn't Flickr's strong point.

In fact, the biggest problem with using Flickr to photoblog is that everyone's first glimpse of your photo is a wallet-sized snapshot, and I'd like people to be have a larger image to gaze upon when they load the page. On Periphery, that's about 900 pixels wide versus 240 pixels wide, which amounts to a lot when I'm posting a photo I'm proud of (ideally, every shot I post). Conversely, 900 pixels make it difficult to hide shoddy work, which raises the bar--a good thing.

Though I briefly considered using Eliot's Admiral package to get around the image size issue, while still keeping my roots in Flickr, I decided against it. Frankly, I think Flickr and I need some space. I've been asking too much of Flickr lately, expecting Flickr to be all things to me at all times. I'll still call Flickr up for daily shots of friends and odd visual couplings (just like old times), but I think the new space at Periphery will make for an interesting change in how I work and edit, and I need that change.

Working on Periphery was incredibly fun, and it came together very quickly (about three weeks in my free time). It's written in Ruby on Rails (geek out!) with a couple judicious visual effect-y, AJAX-y things. I'm holding a couple features back until I have enough photos to make them interesting, but I'm already happy with the way it works. Hopefully you will be, too.

Thanks are in order to a few people: Eliot and Raul's sites both served as inspirations for the layout and features of the site. In particular, the navigation effects are the sincerest form of flattery of Eliot's (and Kottke's) work. Actually, if they're listed in the "Links" section of the photoblog, they're probably an inspiration in one form or another. Thanks to Raul, Keith, and Nick for looking it over and offering advice. And thank you, so much, to Flickr. I'm here because of you, Flickr.