#boston real estate photography

[alittleveggies]

Dining Room - Traditional Dining Room

[sjzavala]

Freestanding - Home Office

Inspiration for a large timeless freestanding desk medium tone wood floor study room remodel with green walls

[sassy-john-watson]

Freestanding - Home Office

Inspiration for a large timeless freestanding desk medium tone wood floor study room remodel with green walls

[heymig]

Freestanding - Home Office

Inspiration for a large timeless freestanding desk medium tone wood floor study room remodel with green walls

[gobuyussomecoffee]

Freestanding - Home Office Inspiration for a large timeless freestanding desk medium tone wood floor study room remodel with green walls

[randomfurlong]

Freestanding - Home Office

Inspiration for a large timeless freestanding desk medium tone wood floor study room remodel with green walls

[bigeasybartender]

Freestanding - Home Office

Inspiration for a large timeless freestanding desk medium tone wood floor study room remodel with green walls

[sykesassist]

Home Office Built-In Boston Picture of a study room with a medium-sized elegant built-in desk, a medium-tone wood floor, and white walls.

[joelvdk]

Freestanding - Home Office

Inspiration for a large timeless freestanding desk medium tone wood floor study room remodel with green walls

[slavablazerphotography]

Real Estate Photography Boston

Turn your Boston properties into visual masterpieces with our extraordinary real estate photography. We capture the heart and soul of each space, transforming them into captivating works of art. From the historic charm of Beacon Hill to the modern elegance of Back Bay, our lens uncovers the hidden beauty that makes Boston real estate truly special. Get ready to make a statement with pictures that will blow people's minds and leave a lasting effect on potential buyers. Elevate your listings and unlock the power of exceptional real estate photography in Boston.

[typocode]

Deck - Rooftop Deck - mid-sized traditional rooftop deck idea

[maybe-boys-do-love]

The Only Friends Conspiracy Corner

Welcome to my Only Friends conspiracy theory corner, where I lose my mind on the regular and explain why I believe Only Friends is a veiled commentary on the Thai BL entertainment industry and its relationship to Thailand's soft power economic model, especially Thailand's gay (aka pink money) tourism. As The Heart Killers gets relatively explicit about issues of structural political and economic power, now seems as good a time as ever to talk about Jojo’s last show that seemed to me to put so much of its political work in the subtext. This is just the starter pack. Hit me up with more thoughts anytime!

The Only Friends Hostel business. We have business majors in this show, a rarity in Thai BL, and for their class project they're opening a hostel. Each member of the friend group has a business role to play--Ray provides the real estate, Mew takes on leadership of finances and accounting, Cheum provides PR, and Boston's tasked with creative direction--but the value of the individuals, their roles in the business, and their willingness to collaborate with one another is the tension that drives the series. The characterizations, dialogue, and events in the series ought to be viewed in light of this. Mew, for example, partners off with Top, who encroaches on the friends' trivia group to answer for them a question about Thailand's first hotel, The Oriental, which two Americans established for sailors in Bangkok shortly after the opening of the Kingdom of Siam to international trade in 1855 and later two Dutch business partners reestablished after a fire. A single answer links Top to the influx of Western capitalism in the form of a hotel in Thailand! To count up the economic references in Only Friends would take a massive spreadsheet.

Artistic Passions. Each boy in the Y.O.L.O. bar friend group is associated with one artistic medium. Boston with photography and visual arts more broadly, Ray with music, and Mew with books (lol there's a scene in the last episode in which the translation has Force use the word force in a sentence immediately followed by Book as Mew mentioning his "books"). These are the components of the television and film medium: visuals, sound, and writing. Their romantic entanglements are also colored by their preferred medium and the narrative styles associated with them. Boston has his sensual dark room developments *wink wink,* Ray hooks up with a musician to visit record stores and concerts like a romantic movie couple, Mew makes his ideal seme court him in bookstores and dates straight out of a BL romcom novel. Even Cheum’s girlfriend, April, makes indie movies that go over our token lesbian’s head.

Atom, Cheum, and Mew’s BL Fantasies. It’s not surprising Cheum’s not about those art house flicks. Her, her brother, and Mew all espouse some BL tropes with harmful consequences. The most blatant is Atom’s stated belief that he ‘turned gay’ because of Boston, which he’s corrected on, but Atom, Nick, and Mew all commit to the BL (and broader romance) trope of equating first affections with true love. And Cheum sorts the gay men of her life into simplified categories of red flags or green flags, predators or cinnamon buns. Not all BLs are so simplistic with their trope usage and characterizations, but Only Friends highlights damaging tendencies that occur in the genre and among its fans.

The Pairings. Speaking of fans, one of the key strategies for creating fan interest are the pairings. While not unique to the BL industry entirely—Hollywood’s been pairing actors for publicity and dollars from pretty early on—BL pairs have a pretty distinct flavor, and Only Friends’ casting takes advantage of that. For our pair associated with the most fluffy BL narratives, we have ForceBook, a CP only ever paired together who have known one another since kindergarten. The maturer second love romance goes to FirstKhao, who both worked in other pairings before landing in their current contractual partner relationship. The situationship to end all situationships goes to two actors who, at the time, were not in a CP, something that Jojo has specifically mentioned as relevant to his interests when casting.

The Boeing of it all. Named after a fucking airplane manufacturer, with multiple references to his dreams of traveling internationally (concerts with Sand), flight (he's working to be a airline attendant), and flightiness (both his flightiness toward his bf’s and his encouragement of others to fly away from their partners). In a show explicitly about the hospitality industry? In a genre dependent on international viewers??? In one name, we get such a fountain of economic insight!

Begin Again. In the finale episode, Ray tells Sand he always wanted to wander around listening to music like they did in Begin Again. In fact, Mew and Top’s silent disco moment plays homage to the same sequence. Begin Again, however, is not a romance, despite what the marketing and weak reviews (from critics who expected a swooning repeat of indie gem Once from its director) implied. Instead, Begin Again uses romantic expectations as a trojan horse for an insider portrait of the music industry as the streaming industry changed its operating models. The leads are Mark Ruffalo who plays a has-been alcoholic producer (an important reference to even better understand Ray’s role in the hostel business) and Kiera Knightly, playing a singer-songwriter betrayed by her rising star boyfriend (acted by Adam Levine from Maroon 5). Spoiler alert: If you imagine something more between Knightly and Ruffalo’s characters than the deep relationship creatives can form making art together, you’ll be sorely disappointed. Ruffalo’s character goes back to his ex-wife (a bad omen for SandRay stans since the characters spend the time preceding their romantic walk in the last episode arguing about whether they still have feelings for their exes). Knightly’s chanteuse gets her former boyfriend to apologize and sing her song without pop theatrics on stage but she chooses not to join him and stick to her own independent path. Importantly, the film by the end respects both the popular and auteur artistic sensibilities, reserving more ire for the business models. No one character or method is completely demonized or sanctified. I can’t help but recognize a similar spirit in the portrayal of the three gay romance narratives in Only Friends—Boston’s queer tragedy, Ray’s tear-jerking gay romantic drama, or Mew’s BL comedy. The show acknowledges the formative role of those storytelling modes in the BL industry and even touches on some economic realities of choosing one mode over another. Some exemplary dialogue from the Begin Again: 

“I just think that an A&R [a record label’s artists and repertoire representative] man telling an artist how they should dress or come across is total bullshit. People don’t want that. They want authenticity”

“Authenticity! Give me the name of one artist that you think passes your authenticity test…I’m not saying you can’t be a real bona fide motherfucker in this business but you’ve got to do whatever it takes and get people in to see your shows where THE MUSIC can start to do its real work.”

Personal Hygiene Lessons. In the last two episodes, we witness Ray’s community service teaching children about hygiene. “Once upon a time…” he begins, which immediately alerts me to television writers depicting the act of storytelling. It’s a story attempting to encourage daily toothbrushing to protect from plaque, but Sand steps in and scares them with the threat of a bug crawling into their body if they don’t brush their teeth—suspiciously more similar to issues of sexual health than teeth brushing. The next clinic presentation is about washing out your nose. Either Thailand’s got some hygiene practices I don’t know about, or Jojo’s writing team snuck in a sneaky reference to douching. Watching, I was reminded that Jojo and his good friend and fellow director Aof Noppharnach (Bad Buddy, ATOTS, so many other huge GMMTV series!) began their careers writing and directing a series directly about sexual health for GayOK Bangkok, produced by an HIV testing organization. After the first presentation, Sand explains, “I’m approachable to all ages and genders,” a prime marketing demographic if I’ve ever heard one! Just like Sand, Aof, who is now the senior director of content production at GMMTV, has made inroads for himself and others into a massive market by developing a writing, directing, and producing strategy for integrating queer content (here’s my post about his recurring motifs around HIV treatment) within family-friendly BL shows, often with a romantic fairytale-like quality hearkening back to Ray’s “Once upon a time…” 

The Politician. The parents included in the series have distinguished economic and political circumstances they're associated with. Bear with me on the political-economy history lessons here. Boston, most prominently, has a father running for political office, and we meet him for the first time while Boston's wearing a 1998 t-shirt, the year the Thai Rak Thai (Thais Love Thais) party was founded by Thaksin Shinawatra, telecom billionaire and Thailand's first prime minister to lead a democratically elected government through a full-term in office beginning in 2001. He led key initiatives to promote tourism, make healthcare accessible, and, controversially, crackdown on drugs. Essentially, he provided the vision for the government that kick-started Thailand's move to its current project of soft-power. In fact, his youngest daughter, Paetongtarn Shinawatra, (who describes herself as a "socially liberal capitalist") is the current prime minister partly responsible for overseeing the equal marriage bill into law. Thaksin was ousted by a military coup in 2006 following his family's decision to sell its shares in major Thai telecom group to a Singaporean company and, faced with corruption charges in 2008, lived in exile (until September 2023, less than a month after Only Friends started airing). Ousted for not playing his part in supporting a Thai business? Boston, is that you? There is also a comment in the first episode about the massage parlor Boston's father built his financial success off of, and there's a conversation to be had there about Thailand's Thaksin-led shift away from and crackdown on its sex tourism industry. (The Department for Communicable Disease Control shirt on Style's shirt in episode 3 of The Heart Killers is a government organization in Thailand, not Alabama as the shirt says, which among other things monitors direct sex workers for STDs.) How might a focus on constant financial and moral improvement harm those who fail sanctions against promiscuity? What I find so artful about Boston's potential linkage to Thaksin is how he's constructed as Thaksin's parallel--in his journey toward exile and the over-consumption that led him there--and his antithesis. Boston's the victim, at least in his emotional well-being, of a neoliberal legacy. Thaksin's policies, similar to those of Rudy Giuliani and his predecessors in NYC, promoted family-friendly tourism and industry growth by supporting the corporate partnerships and broken window policing to price out and criminalize those unconventional populations who had taken refuge or even just found themselves in these locales after being marginalized elsewhere. In the same vein, the privileging of monogamous pairing in both BL narratives and BL fan-service expectations serve important goals encouraging breadths of people to accept and embrace gay love socially and politically—Thailand’s upcoming marriage rights bill, more expansive than most western countries, certainly has the BL industry’s influence to thank. Without further input, however, they neglect queer experiences beyond the realm of the first love or marriage plot. They neglect greater issues of equity, compassion, and freedom due to each individual human being (both actors and the general population), which the LGBT population, among others, has historically had an intimate experience with being denied or limited. 

Nick’s Digital Underworld. Nick’s our little tech wunderkind in OnlyFriends. His character fixes phones, hooks up cameras and recording equipment, makes digital campaign posters, you name it! And I personally love that he’s both a skeevy pathetic tech wizard and radiantly beautiful. His cute-factor almost lets us forget about his voyeuristic tendencies. He’s just a content enjoyer, and Boston loves creating content—he just doesn’t want himself recorded…So why doesn’t Nick just get off to some porn instead? Only Friends didn’t name itself so closely to the amateur adult content website for no reason! In fact, we got an OnlyFans reference in The Heart Killers episode 4. Imma have to thank this post for noticing an OnlyFans sign in the background of Addicted Heroin Th and pointing out that it’s illegal in Thailand, cuz I had never considered anything about the country’s pornography laws or internet censorship. I’ll try to restrain myself from blabbering too much about the history I found here and here, but the important part: Thaksin’s once again our guy kicking it off. The Thaksin government censorship focused heavily on antipornography and the 2006 military coup brought in a more Orwellian political flavor to the proceedings, both of which have basically proliferated with continuing regime changes. In 2020, mainly because of increased censorship of adult websites (which is a current global conservative trend—I’m looking at you Project 2025—so don’t hate on Thailand too much), Thailand dropped to the third-lowest tier of internet freedom, according to the company Comparitech (which focuses on cybersecurity and online privacy), only above North Korea, China, and Iran. Both content creators and consumers can have some harsh punishments under the laws. With that in mind, it’s hard to imagine Jojo’s team giving us Boston’s pornographic art and Nick’s digital pornographic consumption as mere character dressing. The fact that they are the two excluded from the friend group at the end, excluded from the local business, from acceptance! Meanwhile, having censored the “deviant” contingent out of the equation, romance is alive and well at the OnlyFans—I mean, Only Friends hostel. As one kind of gay content is uplifted, another is suppressed and banished. No, Boston and the pornography industry he seems to signify are not perfect, but neither are his friends, nor the entertainments and political-economies with which they’re equated. 

Without too much moralizing, these are the sorts of observations and hypocrisies Only Friends highlights. In my reading, at least, it depicts these media and economic trends through its characters, allowing them to play out and contend with one another as they have in reality. Sometimes the allegorical tensions or pairing of genres and capital occurs in the dynamics between characters. Other times, as I pointed out with Boston and his Thaskin connection, the tension exists within a single character. These strategies allow the show to engage with political issues while under the government’s censorship laws, but this is also just what great literary political writing looks like! It speaks to its time, but it will stand much longer as simply a character-driven story about the contentions that arise between money, sex, love, and friendship. I cannot wait for Girl Rules to give us Jojo’s GL perspective on related issues and for Only Friends Dream On to explore this territory in the context of an actual BL production! Let the chaotic theorizing ensue!

[destinyc1020]

From the book, the location:

The map on his phone wasn’t loading, so he didn’t know where exactly to find John’s house on this two-mile pinkie of land jutting from the southern shores of Massachusetts.

Single-lane Cutters Neck Road, bisecting and snaking down the peninsula, was quiet except for birdsong and the metallic chirr of insects. Roadside honeysuckle sweetened the tangy ocean air. To his left, a sailboat drowsed in the calm bay. The Atlantic was visible on the other side of the stiletto-shaped neck, too. Conor had seen aerial photography of the place from real estate sites, but he hadn’t been quite prepared for the essentially unspoiled beauty of what he was now walking through—for what, incredibly, he was about to live in (on?) for the summer. He snapped a picture of the ocean to send to his mother once he had service. He passed the first driveway, a gravel arc before a house studded with porthole windows, its slate-gray shingles blackened in spots like overripe bananas. The porch reassuringly featured a BLACK LIVES MATTER sign; he’d had no idea what to expect politically from a gated community in deep-blue New England. The story is set in 2020

Oh interesting Anon! This is a very very interesting narrative! Sounds like I was right! I haven't even read the book yet, but I envisioned an east coast/northeast vibe as far as location. So yea, New England sounds about right. I think I even mentioned Boston in my previous post lol. Wow...this was set in 2020 as well?? Does it reference the covid pandemic at all?

[danbusler]

The Halloween Photobooth at Focus Real Estate

Hundreds loved the fun at Focus Real Estate

“Be in Love with your Life..Every minute of it!” – Jack Kerouac The Focus Real Estate Annual Halloween Party and Photobooth Extravaganza! on October 31, 2022, brought out the kid in the hundreds of people who stopped by for some photos with the characters, lots of candy, and tons of fun.

[timmurleyart]

‪Happy Allston Christmas to all the returning students. 🎄 Come find the best gifts on the sidewalk. 🎁🎅🏻🎄

[elekinetic]

How do you envision Nancy’s future?

we have Boarded The Vessel.

Nancy moves to boston for college. She goes to emerson and gets involved in radio. she ends up involved in a heavy rivalry between emerson's and harvard's radio stations. jonathan goes to nyu and they do long distance again, but this time its a lot healthier. they see each other at least once a month and try for more. post-vecna/UD shit i like to think that the govt paid them BIG BIG money to shut up (and as compensation). nancy uses her share to invest in real estate. she buys a small condo in connecticut and slowly flips it over the course of a few years. (this is where she and jonathan meet up a lot.) she enjoyed working on hop's cabin, and its a fun side gig for her. post-college she sells the place and uses the money to buy an apartment in new york. she and jonathan move in together, and eventually she flips it and they move closer into the city. nancy works as an investigative reporter for the NYTimes (and then AP for a minute before moving back to the Times). she wins a pulitzer in the late 90s for an exposé on a state senatorial bribery scandal, which was directly responsible for the defunding of DV/abuse shelters and eliminated pro-bono medical practices. jonathan does photojournalism for a bit, but finds his niche in arts photography. he and nancy have a kid when they're in their mid-thirties. a girl. nancy isn't the perfect mom, but she does everything she can to be what her mother couldn't. jonathan is a fantastic dad and a great partner, despite his insecurities. their kid grows up feeling loved. she likes her grandma joyce and her aunt holly best, but she guesses her parents are pretty cool too.