Category: Stevens Brosnihan

Over the weekend a yearly cool hipsterish Gloucester occurance took place: the season opening of Present.

If you get your news from dumpster graffiti or the back of a Keno card and haven’t heard, Present is a pop-up holiday season retail shop featuring a ton of local artists and great stuff to buy. It embodies the whole “shop local” movement but with the added bonus of buying handcrafted items from your friends and neighbors. Last year I pretty much gave everyone in my family stuff from Present. This year it’s at 269 Main, between Alexandra’s Bread and Leonardo’s.

This place has fish with tiny santa hats. WITH TINY SANTA HATS!

As a matter of fact, as far as friends and neighbors go, several of our own Clamtributors are involved with Present on a yearly basis. The hipster creative artist community and people who read and contribute to this blog had somewhat of an overlap, who knew? Both Staff Photographer Stevens Brosnihan and Poet Laureate Amanda Cook have stuff they’ve made here for sale. I’m sure someone in the comment section will accuse us of being shills or whatever, but bite my ass, this place rules.

Stevens Brosnihan’s RTFM patch. Jeez, google it, if you’re not a nerd.

Sunday was their opening reception, which Marty DelV took a time-lapse video of. You can watch me eat artichoke dip and rice krispie treats in time-lapse! If you’re into that kinda thing. It was an awesome time, and it was great to see the place packed like it was.

One of the most awesomely hipster things I found in there that I hope someone buys for me (not like this is a hint for my mom or anything) were these awesome fabric record-shaped placemats.

The handmade Christmas decorations kick ass. Want a tiny fox? Yeah you fucking do, because it’s cute as hell. You put that shit on your tree, and all the hipsters will come out of your bushes and be like “whoa, that’s twee.”

oh my god it’s so freakin’ adorable

Present is not only awesome because it contains many cool gifts, but also because it represents the Clam’s vision of what Gloucester is growing towards: a hip, artsy community of makers. We don’t need to import cheap plastic gifts – we can make our own right here in town from old sweaters and they are way more awesome! It’s ingenuity at its finest. And when we have homegrown stuff like Present and the Farmer’s Market and the other craft fairs that happen here, it grows our hipfrastructure, as well.

Heck, we’re so good at making stuff right here in town, maybe next year we can get locally 3D printed stuff at Present (Stevens I’m looking at you – make it happen).

Anyway, TLDR: Present is what makes Gloucester hip, and you can pick up locally-crafted stuff there for reasonable prices.

like a disco jellyfish.

We told staff photographer Stevens Brosnihan to take some great pictures of 3d printers. This is what he came up with.

A couple of weeks ago, I was told to cover what was billed as a community effort to assemble “3D printers” for a one-to-one maker-inspired curriculum at O’Maley Innovation Middle School. Naïvely, I enlisted my trusty 1951 David White Stereo Realist camera (in the spirit of 3D) with it’s handy bulb flash and some contemporary Arista EDU film (in the spirit of education) to shoot what I assumed would be a typical after-school parent-teacher collaboration. What I discovered instead was a sinister and obviously Soviet-backed plot to enslave unsuspecting sleeper agents, forcing them to manufacture, test and deploy an army of self replicating, semi-autonomous, nuclear powered robots! After much paranoid deliberation along with liberal applications of poultices of crushed Xanax™ tablets and raw honey to my face, neck and genitals, I’ve decided to come forth with the terrifying truth, even if it means risking my own safety.

Mikhail Golubkin posing as ‘’Jim Dowd” – soldering the contacts on the guidance system of the latest Russian nuclear powered combat exoskeleton

Sweden thinks it has it bad with its russian U-boat infested waters! Friends and comrades are working in our midst, assembling the tools of the neo-Soviet uprising. Their overseer, a KGB agent code named “Colin” was blaring on multiple screens, straight out of a scene from 1984. He gave step-by-step instructions to the room full of sleeper agents and kept referring to his ‘dog’ while still remaining mysteriously anonymous. His hands often worked off-camera on complex tasks he would describe in his perfectly practiced American accent only to return on camera with a completed assembly, brandished as if to taunt the enslaved workers. Gasps of frustration would ripple through the room every time this happened and yet the workers would plod on.

Don’t let that smile fool you, Pyotr, aka “Tad” is under his monthly quota for gyroscope assemblies and will likely be sent to mine yttrium in outer Mongolia.

Food and drink were supplied in uncharacteristic abundance, including cappuccinos, undoubtedly laced with truth serum and the antidote to a slow acting poison used to ensnare and retain the laborers.

I snuck away from the primary laboratory–craftily disguised as a Middle School library–into an underground bunker that housed a massive inventory of completed and partially assembled high tech mechanisms, each with it’s own computer brain, sensors, and actuators. I could smell the radiation.

What appears to be a storehouse of mostly-assembled self-replicating, nuclear powered, semi-autonomous robots.

This series of anaglyphs is rock-solid evidence of a complex and terrifying plot being orchestrated in our midst by Vladimir himself who intends to undermine and eventually enslave our entire population. Use standard issue red/cyan goggles to get the full 3D effect. остерегайтесь козёл!

Image courtesy of Snowden/NSA/KGB/Pixar®

A close-up of what I speculate to be the fuel rod insertion mechanism.

These devices are a testimony to the success of the underground neo-Soviet menace that is plotting to re-emerge as the earth’s dominant superpower.