Category: Digital Hoarding
2014’s 9/11 Spike Was Weird
This bar graph showing the spike in web traffic one of my sites got on September 11 and September 12, 2014 somewhat eerily evokes the profile of the old Twin Towers.
Read MoreHow did Photoshop Tame image018_001.jpg?
Before and after, all default drag-and-drop settings. Impressive AF but still needs human touch to...
Read MoreiSpy On Myself
I’ve tried countless webcam and surveillance softwares. This one was called iSpy, an open...
Read MoreCleanup Day? More Like Cleanup Month, Year, Lifetime?
I decided to go through this endless expanse of personal website content and clean things up a...
Read More“Games Women Play” (1970) (Sanitized)
A long time ago, an a Usenet far, far away, I downloaded a shit-ton of porn from the so-called “golden age” of the 1970s and 1980s. One of them turned out to be Games Women Play, a 1970 film which includes an...
Read MoreEmail. January, 2001.
it’s good to see new stuff from you, a.k.a. man-who-is-responsible-for-the-phrase-‘crazier-than-you’-being-stuck-in-vari ous- nooks-and-cranies-of-my-head-for-the-past-half-year-and-turning-up-when-i’d-...
Read MoreThe House on Reamer
After recently posting that I had virtually no memory of a house I lived in for one year of...
Read MoreThe Desk In My Bedroom on Main Street, Oberlin Ohio, USA, 1989-1990
I might have kept that upside-down “PERISHABLE FRESH FRUIT” box because of its sturdiness. And the cassettes. Might still have those, too. That’s a silver double-cassette boom box (Magnavox?) on the far bottom left. That thing rocked. I remember blasting Paganini, Alkan, Pabst, Busoni, and the gratuitous 19th/20th virtuosi, ghetto-style, across the firmament of Main […]
Read MoreAnything To Say? Incoherent Rambles.
Strange moment of kismet the other day. A friend emailed a link to a story about Frank Sinatra’s habit of carrying 10 dimes everywhere he went in case he needed to make payphone calls. Moments later I went downstairs and...
Read MoreChat With a Friend. I was the First Person She Ever Met in the Flesh From the Internet
kr-@-jh (7/26/2005 1:20:36 AM): how would you describe yourself in 3 words? sorabji (7/26/2005 1:25:57 AM): thir teen inches kr-@-jh (7/26/2005 1:26:35 AM): how many payphones have you answered? sorabji (7/26/2005 1:26:48 AM):...
Read MoreCan’t Stop Accumulating
This is the third day in a row I woke up thinking I’d buy a 7-day unlimited MetroCard and spend the week bolting all over town. I do this a few times a year. Today I planned to canvas parts of Throgs Neck and neighboring...
Read MoreShe Loves Me
She Loves Me
She Loved Me
Rummaging through old recordings for Payphone Radio when I found this call to my public phone...
Read MoreHave Scanner Will Scan. Stars & Stripes. May 29, 1975.
Just a random news clipping I found among my dad’s effects, some of which ended up in a foot...
Read MoreDriving to Coney Island. September, 2006.
Found this random, forgotten video of a friend and I driving to Coney Island in September, 2006. It was a spontaneous thing, as my friend driving the car was prone to indulge in and sometimes get me to go along. It’s rough...
Read MoreA Few Found Slides, Now That I Have a Slide Scanner Again
The return to service of the Canoscan 9000F scanner means I have a slide scanner again, so I can...
Read MoreConey Island Revisited. From August, 2002.
The previous post about the found photo from Coney Island and subsequent rambles inspired me to dust off a series of shots I got on the boardwalk there in August, 2002. I pared it down from over 200 to exactly 100, which is...
Read MoreA NEW YORKER’S GUIDE TO CIVIL DEFENSE. WHERE TO GO, WHAT TO DO & HOW FAST TO DO IT.
I don’t know when or where I procured this. It might have been in 1986, when I came to New...
Read MoreFarewell To My Mustek ScanExpress 2400 A3 Warhorse
After I don’t know how many years, and I don’t know how many thousands of pages scanned, my trusty...
Read MoreMountains Filling Oceans
This website has been around, in one form or other, at various URLs, since 1994. I rarely delete...
Read More181 Everywhere
One photo accumulation I started but lost track of involved sightings of my magic number, 181. PO...
Read MoreUnrecognizable
I got hung up on taking pictures of myself in mirrors and reflective surfaces around this city...
Read MoreMissing Masklessness
I don’t get nostalgic, at least I don’t think I do. But for some reason this video, from 9 years ago, makes me realize how much I miss masklessness. I never would have thought I’d get sentimental for seeing people yawning, or...
Read MoreFiltered Faces
Rummaging, again, through my oceans of scans, photos, and other digital detritus, when I found...
Read MoreA Waltz I Think I Wrote, But Not Sure
These two takes of the same short piece are from December, 2004. I find nothing else on them, but feel reasonably confident this is something I could have written. If you the composer to be someone else please let me know....
Read MorePet Cemetery, Unknown Location
This is from my absurdly huge collection of found photos and slides, mostly purchased from eBay...
Read MoreI’m a friend of Jesus: I will not suck my own penis.
I have no idea what this refers to. I found it in a mass of text files from the early 1990s....
Read MoreOld House In Astoria
I never got a backstory, if there even was one, on this old house in Astoria, 24th Avenue ~45th...
Read MoreForce of Nature
Here’s audio I made describing a woman I spotted while talking on a payphone yesterday. She paced back and forth outside a doughnut shop, drinking from a bottle of beer she carried in a black bag. She had a steely,...
Read MoreFamily Tree
The family was having a good old time when dad decided to bring things down to earth by reading the family tree. He had a late-life interest in genealogy, suddenly becoming best friends with distant cousins he had never...
Read MoreA Found Piano Playlist
I know I posted one of these before, the “Incantation”, but I’m not sure about the rest. Some of this is pedantic yet has its moments, while the “Song Without Words” is ace. Prelude, August 25,...
Read MoreFrames Madness
Some said that frames, an innovation from the labs at NCSA Mosaic, were and abomination, akin to...
Read MoreMy Pictures, 2005.
This blast of photos represent most of what sits in the “My Pictures” folder in a PC...
Read MoreRecord Everything
I am letting myself be recorded 24/7, or at least attempting continuous documentation. In this pursuit I finally did what I’d been curious about for years: I watched myself sleeping. I’ve have long wanted to explore...
Read MoreFrom the Treo 700p Video Vault: Car Fire in Astoria, February 2007
Crap quality video from Feb 22 2007 of a car that burst into flames, with firefighter response, outside a bar in Astoria, Queens. It’s crap quality because it was recorded in the dark of night with a Treo 700p. All of us...
Read MoreSexual Frustration In The Suburbs, 1960s | Found Photos, Sorabji.com
Source: Sexual Frustration In The Suburbs, 1960s | Found Photos, Sorabji.com
Read MoreThe Things We Keep
Since last year around this time I’ve been surrounded by my past, present, and possibly future. The past returned to my space in the form of handwritten and typewritten papers from as far back as grade school that had been lurking in a storage locker for as many as 15 years. I once again have […]
Read MoreHyenas and Elephants, Oh My
Strange discovery. I spotted a 4gb .WAV file on my phone, and figured I had left the voice recorder running by mistake. That’s happened a few times, and when it did I just deleted the file. Not this time. What happened was I was trying to record Joe Frank off the radio in the kitchen. […]
Read MoreShower Talk: I’ll Never Know What Happened
I’m not proud of what I am discussing here, but I’ll move on. Going to try and dump some of the shower talk tracks into a Shoutcast stream. Such a daunting seeming task with so many hours recorded, and so much to edit out. This sounds OK to me, how’s it sound to you? These […]
Read MoreFun With the Muze Machine
I would never have remembered this without finding the scrap of paper shown below. At Tower Records it was kind of a thing for the employees (and customers as well, for all I know) to look up 4-letter words in the Muze database machine. We must have laughed and laughed at this one, which I […]
Read MoreTimeOut NY First Ever Issue
Holding on to the first-ever Time Out New York issue like it is going to make me rich some day. But also because Mira Sorvino looks hotter than a midnight cup of coffee.
Read MoreJACKHAMMER
The dude in the pictures is not the person or persons running the jackhammer in this audio. He is from March, 2000, or at least that’s when I first posted the pictures of him. The audio is from February, 2011. This jackhammer racket was right outside my bathroom window, which is close to my bedroom, […]
Read MoreHappy Mousepad!
I don’t remember from whence I procured this ludicrous mousepad but it is no longer in da house. As is my wont I find that I cannot throw something away without photographing it, adding to my ever-increasing accumulation. I am a digital hoarder, and it has come to a point where my mind is drowning […]
Read MoreCaught Up
Soooo, caught up on some payphone calls from the last few weeks. That’s maximum entertainment value, I say. I find the payphone calls eerie at times, and I suspect others would as well. Who do I think I’m talking to? Who do I think is listening? Why am I saying these things, and in this […]
Read MoreOctober 19, 2000. First Day of the Truest Form of Wealth.
Rummaging through old papers I found this bit of scrawl on the back of a money.com business card, from when I was Director of Technology. I remember this day, on which I once and for all paid off the student loans that had hung over my head for about a decade. I know now relatively […]
Read MorePLaza-8-2272, and a Woody Allen Autograph
It’s been a scanning day here. I am feeling somewhat reflective since the brief hospital stay, reflective enough to scan away some ephemera and detritus, discarding the paper but scanning it away into the mountainous digital remains of my eternity. Here is a photo that has been in front of me for months. I only […]
Read MoreMy First Webpage
Just found my first-ever website, or webpage rather, moldering away on an old drive. It was last updated 9/9/1994 but had been online from early 1993 (I think), sometime after Mosaic came out. The original version of this magnificent webpage was at Panix, and had a picture of Yoko Ono’s butt and just a few […]
Read MoreI Wanted To Have A Moving Sale
This might be my favorite payphone call ever. Well, from the last year or so. Spoken from the mind of a digital hoarder.
Read MoreNew Years 1994
I remember this. I don’t consider myself a sloppy, stupid drunk in public, at least not anymore. But when I hung out with a certain friend from college (unnamed but present in this little story) I think the behavior was contagious. Yeah, I remember cartwheeling straight out onto 6th Avenue and then pissing out of […]
Read MoreMEMOS, and Apology Remarks From 1993
I just found a document called MEMOS.doc, 83 pages and 39,989 words I wrote while not working at my first real job in New York. I was some kind of coordinator at Avon Products, the cosmetics company, and from the looks of this I had all kinds of time to burn while soaking up what […]
Read MoreQueens Map 1922, Rand McNally
Found an enormously huge JPG of a 1922 map of Queens on the RAID tonight. I’ve looked for this a few times and was never able to find it because I could not remember the year or the publisher or anything except that somewhere in my downloads I had an old map of Queens. A […]
Read MoreBroadcasting, and I Remember Me
My piano music was playing on as many as 10 kiosks earlier, now it is down to 4. This is what I guess is called getting back to my roots. I cannot hear the kiosks from here, of course, but I could earlier when I turned them on outside. This has every possibility to be […]
Read MoreReceipts in Retrospect (RiR)
I guess it’s been 3 or 4 years now since I started taking pictures of my receipts and using an app to send them to a company in Florida doing market research into what people buy. I haven’t cared much about my data being accumulated and monetized, though it has started to bother me just […]
Read MoreMother and Daughter
Well, I thought this was a beautiful picture, and I am glad that 59 others on Tumblr seem to agree. This photo is love. https://sorabji.tumblr.com/post/170126882235/mother-and-daughter-1950s-kodachrome-slide
Read MoreRamble Hoarding/Hoarding Ramble
Digital hoarding. The documentary team that came calling a couple of years ago, or its director at least, wanted to focus on that aspect of my online existence. It’s not out of a sense of missed opportunity that I find myself reflecting on that possibility. It’s just that I think the director was after something […]
Read MoreReading, Writing.
Last night I randomly found myself looking at words I wrote about 4 years ago, when times were bad but also conflicted. I don’t know how the cursor landed at that particular block of text, which is somewhere in the middle of 60,000+ words that comprise Part VI of The Road To Elvis. It’s interesting […]
Read MoreRachel
Here’s an IRC log I mentioned in the previous posting. It’s from 23 years ago. [LOCAL] CHANNEL LOG ON [rachel] i had a nap. i think maybe i feel a little better [rachel] but i’m not sure. [rachel] and i still wanna get laid. <sorabji> i hope you are. <sorabji> i hope you do. <sorabji> […]
Read MoreOld Chat Logs
I have known these files were lurking, but I never thought I’d actually look at them again. Oceans of text, mostly inane prattle and sallow gossip. It is the IRC chat logs I automatically kept from 1994 onward. I am looking at a lengthy conversation with Keri, reminding just how much she and I used […]
Read MoreA magicJack Playlist
Here is something I’ve intended to assemble for a long time. It’s a selection of some of the random wrong numbers and misdirected calls that have arrived at my old landline phone number, which I transferred to magicJack a number of years ago. There are a number of calls from what sounds like the same […]
Read MoreThat Cheap Hotel Around Union Square, and Other Random Stuff
Most of these are from a hotel around Union Square. A friend from college stays there when he passes through town. Other photos are from my glamorous apartment and around Astoria. These are from a bunch of Kodak Picture Disks, which were floppies that I think were included when I got film photos developed. The […]
Read MoreTypewriter
It is the Smith-Corona I believe but cannot prove my father used to type his suicide note. This contraption, its memory erased, was safely (?) dismissed to a thrift shop.
Read MoreStrange To See, At First: A Swastika
Here are both sides of a deposit for the Citizens National Bank, in Lebanon, Kentucky. Stamped May 12, 1910 I found that the date took away my brief astonishment at the symbol seen in the top left corner of the check. It is a swastika. Until the Nazis made the image of the swastika synonymous with […]
Read MoreStudio Building, Boston, 1865
I just found these cool bits of ephemera from the Studio Building in Boston. These are room rental receipts for one Mr. Thayer, who paid $30 for one month in Room 7 and $1.47 for what looks like 4 days in Room 44. I find the dates on the second scrap of papyrus a little […]
Read MoreWhen Hoarding Fails
I am looking at a book of poetry. When it was published the author said that certain of the poems were about me, my websites, and some of the people who used to inhabit them. Dated from 1972 to 2015 I can only guess which pieces from 1994 onward might have made reference to sorabji.com […]
Read MoreBusted Telephone, Big Allis, 1999 or 2000
Looking through old things, looking for old things, was not looking for this but it’s a couple of cool shots from the obsolete Canon APS film camera that sits in my closet, useless or, at best, a collectors item. These photos should be on 38th Avenue and Vernon, near the Big Allis power plant, unless […]
Read MoreArtless 80s.NYC
These are my favorite kind of shots, save for those with payphones, of course. 80s.NYC is like an artless continuum, something that would inspire a lengthy dream sequence in Ben Katchor’s Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer.
Read MoreMore Ugly Tampa
Never let it be said that all of Tampa is like this. That’s not the case at all. But the area surrounding the subdivision where I grew up has plenty of eyesores for the ugly hunter. I’m not saying Tampa is ugly in general, but this particular area is.
Read MoreTampa: The Things I Thought I Knew
Last night I started looking through the pictures I took in Tampa back in May. All I can think when seeing some of these pictures is wow, that was a butt ugly part of Tampa. I mean, I hope that doesn’t offend anybody, but so much of the structures around there look like architectural roadkill. […]
Read MoreSounds From Lenox Square Mall in Atlanta. September 20, 1997.
I uncovered this interesting specimen from the bag of cassettes I digitized a few months ago. Sounds like me ordering a tall coffee at about 2:00, though at first I thought I had said “telecopy” and I was trying to remember if that word meant anything back then. It’s not magnificent but it’s mildly mildly […]
Read MoreSundays in Atlanta
Listening to tapes I made in Atlanta in 1997. These might have been my first ever “walking around” recordings, and from the sound of the first few minutes they are not very good. It’s the same problems I try to deal with today, in isolating or preventing altogether the sounds of my physical movement from […]
Read MoreListening to Myself
So today I commit to a full day at the desk, at the wheel, at the helm of this great enterprise that is no enterprise at all. Listening back to audio from 6 years ago, the Kosciuszko Bridge captures. They seem inferior to me now but I don’t think I have yet reached the ones […]
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