the brandensite
hello and welcome to my website
I live Santa Clara, California – not far from where I was born. I work in IT and make a lot of photos. I'm Jewish. My dream vacation involves sitting at a sidewalk cafe for hours, sipping coffee.
the brandensite is a vanity project where I collect all of things I've put onto the internet in a big, fat glorification of myself. I've maintained this monument to arrogance in one form or another since I was thirteen years old in 1995. This is my social media.
Lawrence Expressway (Pinhole, April 2021)
I love photography. I love learning about photography and making my own photos. I share my new photos on Flickr almost every day, and I have a photo portfolio website. I will talk about photography at the slightest provocation. This website is one such provocation. Beware all ye who dare:
If prints be what you crave, I will mail you a photo I've made.
Observation (2020)
As a kid I played action and strategy video games. But since becoming an old curmudgeon I've lost my patience for those. I've now grown fascinated with exploration and storytelling games, surprised to find there a fantastic wealth of hidden universes and subtle gameplay:
My recent favorite musical artists are VNV Nation, mind.in.a.box, Project Pitchfork, The Decemberists, Röyksopp, Moby, Rotersand, Ladytron, The National, and unitcode:machine.
I obsess over an extensive, curated, eclectic and growing library of music which is meaningful to me. I put the library metadata online (not the music) and it consists of 17,045 tracks from 2,087 albums from 861 musical artists. Since February 2006, the library has logged 480,670 track plays, or a total time I've spent listening to music:
In English, the days of the week are named after Germanic gods. All, that is, except Saturday, which is instead named after the Roman diety Saturn. How did the big guy pull off such a feat?
running commentary
Table of irregular verbs 2024 Apr 13
I love verbs which reach their various tenses through irregular means. They're great.
Massive corruption conviction in Vietnam worth ~9% of GDP 2024 Apr 12
Truong My Lan has been convicted of embezzling some impossibly huge percentage of Vietnam's gross domestic product alongside 85 other prominent bankers and government officials. What is clearly internal party politics boiling over as economic news, things are shaking up in the country in a way that's easy for an outsider like myself to miss the nuance of. But as each place on Earth struggles with adapting old strongman practices into modern power structures, it's interesting to see what's the Vietnamese version.
The Past and Future of Flickr 2024 Apr 11
Linked is an interview by This Week in Photo's Frederick Van Johnson of SmugMug/Flickr COO Ben MacAskill which is surprisingly frank and transparent, talking about the challenges that Flickr has had in the past, why SmugMug of all company's are their latest (and probably last) acquirer, some of the technical feats the team pulled off in freeing Flickr from Verizon (including datacenter specifics), and a glimpse at the fascinating factoid that SmugMug was the very first Amazon Web Services customer (back before it was even called AWS). I'm not just linking to any random Flickr videos, this one's actually good.
Santa Justa Lift 2024 Apr 11
There's a beautiful and fantastical industrial age elevator in Lisbon, Portugal that's still operating, partly as a tourist attraction but also as a real part of the city's public transit network. Imagine if we took such care and interest to pedestrian needs in America.
The world of estranged parents' forums 2024 Apr 9
I am blessed to have no estrangements in my family but boy do I love reading about them in other families via the joy that is internet gossip. Used to be just us dorks online back in the old days, but now that literally everyone is online, so with it comes those narcissistic parents who claim they don't understand why their children have stopped speaking to them. And apparently there's forums full of them, reassuring each other that their children are indeed selfish and that surely they themselves are not the problem. The trick is to remember that when they say "I just don't understand" it's codeword for "I refuse to understand" – the rhetorical refuge of assholes.
Compounding our Modifiers 2024 Apr 8
Why do we sometimes hyphenate between two otherwise normal words? The hyphen shows up when two words are used together in a single thought to modify the noun which follows them. This well-researched article from the American Copy Editors Society from 2005 dives through the whole story and its sources.
Transitional Landscapes - JM Golding 2024 Apr 8
JM Golding is a photographer and artist who works largely with Holga and other toy cameras. Transitional Landscapes is a collection of ethereal landscapes made from multiple overlapping exposures.
Photographer Mike Hawkins 2024 Apr 7
Another long-time Flickr contact of mine Mike Hawkins was today featured on the Flickr Blog due to his astounding backyard astrophotography.
Robert Scoble interviews Thomas Hawk in his home 2024 Apr 4
Apologies for linking to
TwitterX but that's where this interview is posted. It's a half-hour video stream of Robert Scoble chatting with photographer Thomas Hawk about his slide scanning "obsession" where we learn a bit about Hawk's motivations and process and inspirations. I've been tracking Hawk for decades on Flickr (and have met him) but this was still a fascinating behind-the-scenes insight.Olympus OMPC 2024 Apr 3
The perfect camera write-up doesn't exisI have now discovered the perfect camera write-up. I don't own and have never used an Olympus OMPC but now thanks to this article I don't have to. It's everything I ever wanted to know. Every camera write-up should strive for this article's perfect and concise brilliance.older!