Well it would seem that the end of the world failed. I’m quite glad about that because I happen to be very fond of it, our world. It’s beautiful, it’s intense, it’s cruel, violent and sometimes incredibly hard to understand – after all it is a concoction of so many complicated and seemingly incompatible ingredients: an intelligent race or two, countless competing species, an extraordinary plant kingdom, powerful weather patterns, immense oceans, theoretically self-regulating eco and bio systems, and chaos, and entropy, and chance. Beautiful, I tell you. But I digress.

There are many lost souls whose shoes I would not want to be in this morning, and in particular one broke Staten Island fool who must still be wondering what the heck went wrong. Or right, for that matter. My advice? Wake up dude, this is your salvation. Right here, right now. Make the best of it, you won’t get another one.

Abandoned building at the Floyd Bennett Field, Brooklyn

Anyway, I had prepared a series of carefully tagged doomsday pictures I was going to post here while the world was falling apart, hoping to time my effort well enough to gain a lot of extra-terrestrial traffic (they surely would be looking on the internet for updates) and thus getting Coriolistic Anachronisms listed in the Intergalactic Annals of Disappearing Worlds, or maybe the next edition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in the “Places to Scratch Off your List” chapter.

Now I feel a little self-conscious about my images. I don’t know. They’re just a little too cheery. I should have made them darker. I rarely use this conventional HDR technique with tone mapping, but it is superbly appropriate for end-of-the-world ruins, as it creates stunning textures. So, here they are just the same.

After all, while one should always doubt a prediction issued on Staten Island, who knows, it might still all end soon. Choose a new date, Harold, Robert and lost followers. And maybe, for practice, until you get it right, start by predicting the extinction of a specie. That’s easy, we lose them all the time, just pick one…