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My desktop computer is on the verge of breaking down. In the process of cleaning it up to prepare for the move to a new box, though, I found something interesting going back to 2006. I had apparently mostly forgotten in the interim, but it turned out that I had taken more pictures of the China trip than I previously thought. Like, a lot more. A bunch of them were duplicates or boring (at the time) pictures of barely-lived-in hotel rooms, but some of them are novel, and just overall, it's kind of interesting to see what didn't get selected for publication back then -- and compare it to what did.
NEMHF 2006
These pictures are from the 2006 iteration of the New England Metal and Hardcore Festival, and cover the first two bands, after which I decided it was a fool's errand. Six and a half years on, I still fail at taking pictures indoors, but tend to keep doing it.
D01. Alarum, with neither flash nor focus.
D02. Alarum again, and the flash prematuring off a dude's back. Four years later, Mark (center) and I would recall this performance over beers at Wacken.
D03. The Absence and no detail at all.
They Missed The Cut For China 1
D04. Chronologically after pic 01 in that album, this shows the legs of the dinosaur and more of the concourse.
D05. First picture from HK, inside the hotel. I was apparently very impressed with Asian hotels after last being parked in a closet in Leuven. (There was a link-mark on that because I wrote this up offline, initially, and forgot that the Belgium trip referred to is also still unposted....though it's been not-really-classified for five years now. More tales untold.)
D06. This should precede the famous picture 09. Obviously, I was setting up for that one -- pushed in from across the street and a ways up Nathan -- and the bus drove into the shot, neatly blocking the sign.
D07 - D13. Between pictures 13 and 14. These are interiors from my brand-spanking-new/barely-finished room out in the BJEDD. D13 really captures the uncanny emptiness of the place.
D14. After picture 15. The effect of the giant, empty room and the high-line furnishings was pretty disorienting.
D15. Between pictures 16 and 17. This shot completes the 'pan' (shot around closed curtains) between those two. You see more of the replanted trees, and also a high-rise development that contrasts with the high-volume single-family development in 17.
D16 - D23. A tour of my room at the Beijing Marriott (following picture 19). Apparently the closet was super impressive. A lot of this is implied by pic 19, but the kitchen, as seen in the first two shots, kind of needs the extra view. And yes, there are two different beds pictured. This was an extremely large as well as well-furnished space to keep one engineer in.
Held Back From China 2
D24. This is an alternate, more poorly-centered take on pic 18, but there may be some extra information at the edges.
Walled Off From China 3
D25. Bootlegs and paraphrenalia, and the shiny black granite countertops. All those things on the left are DVD sleeves. This precedes the whole album.
D26. An alternate take of picture 09.
D27. The silk burner on the other side of the path from the one in picture 12, plus tour leader.
D28. Blurry original take of picture 23. Closer to the present, this would have just gotten deleted on-site.
D29. Mad as a wet....engineer, I guess. As the end of the album shows, I got majorly rained on at the Great Wall, and this small shirt (well, technically 4XL, but these are Chinese sizes) was what I had on hand, as a souvenir, to wear on the bus back to the hotel. Between pictures 55 and 56.
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Of the 29 rediscovered pictures, 3 aren't from the trip, and of the 26 that are, 19 of them are mostly dealing with the interiors of hotel rooms. Two others are obvious mistakes that got corrected in the next shot. However, there is enough of interest in the last five pics of legit B-roll to marginally justify dredging these up. I'm not sure why D15 especially and also D27 did not make it into the original release. The first really reinforces the other pictures from the BJEDD, and there are enough shots with other people in them that I can't see why the second was excluded. Those cut decisions may have made sense then, but they don't now -- hence this post rolling them back out.
