Create Awesome

After roughly a year’s hiatus, I have an official blog again. I’ve tried this before—twice, actually—but those Tumblrs just didn’t really work out.

You see, the thing with Tumblr is…it kinda sucks. I’ll admit, it has seductive elements—the themes invariably look great, post formatting is easy, the cool kids use(d) it, there’s a whole social network underneath it, providing you a stream of ain’t-it-cool images and popular posts from all over the Internet.

But the cracks in the armor appear quickly. read more>>

Causeway Street, c. 1988 (source):

Causeway Street, 2009:

And the mashup:

I’ll admit it: I cheated on this one. The new shot is an intersection too far east. The construction in the modern shot’s upper left is located where the elevated Green Line tracks are in the historical photo.

But the chance to overlay the trolley at the old C branch terminus with the new North Station headhouse, and to place the ghostly el tracks over Boston’s newest landmark was too way good to pass up.

See also: “Boston’s Chinatown, then and now.”

Washington and Essex, 1985:

Washington and Essex, 2009:

And, of course, the mashup:

Last year, Beantown Bloggery ran the 1985 shot. I’ve been meaning to give it a modern companion for a while, but I don’t find myself at the particular intersection too often. I didn’t quite nail the alignment (I was shooting from memory, and using a different aspect ratio) but I’m still fairly pleased with the result.

Probably my most productive three hours of 2009 went into this. Those with a short attention span might want to start at 1:03.

City Spokesman and local hero Tom Champion occasionally autodials all the numbers in the City of Somerville database to let citizens know that a snow emergency is going to be declared at some ungodly hour, and they need to move their motor vehicles.

Turns out, there’s also a .wav file of his message on the Somerville municipal webpage. Since he’s a government official, it’s (hopefully) public domain. Feel free to use my mix under the terms of CC-SA-NC. Commercial interests (snicker) can contact me directly.

UPDATE 1/29

Here’s a link a torrent file of the track (mp3, 192kbps, 4.7MB). You’ll need a BitTorrent client to download the actual mp3.

There’s also a direct link to the mp3 version, but this costs me 17 cents a gigabyte, so obviously, I prefer the torrent.

If anyone wants to do further remixing, I can provide pretty much any file format you want (.aif, FLAC, etc). Just send me an email (bottom of the page) and I’ll set something up.