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.
I've created some postcards and now they're just laying around my house. If you send me your address, you will
get a free postcardEvery once in a while I update my ultimate list of the best
storytelling video gamesDoes it bug anyone else that in English
it's called Saturdaythe 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.
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:
My recent favorite musical artists are VNV Nation, The Decemberists, Röyksopp, purity ring, Project Pitchfork, mind.in.a.box, genCAB, The National, Jon Hopkins, and Ott.
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 18,497 tracks from 2,238 albums from 904 musical artists. Since February 2006, the library has logged 535,369 track plays, or a total time I've spent listening to music:
running commentary
Just like the Sun has solstices, the Moon also at times reaches standstill points in the sky. Read through LA's Griffith Observatory report on why this happens and how best to observe it with your own eyes.
Late at night on August 26, 1895, the "tax paying citizens" of Yreka, California grew upset at the presence of four murderers (from three separate incidents) in their county jail and took matters into their own hands, smashing open the jail cells sledgehammer and executing the men, vigilante style – hanging them from a railroad tie suspended between two locust trees.
Dax Pierson was a Bay Area-based musician who suffered a spinal cord injury while on tour in 2005, paralyzing him from the chest down. I remember seeing him at shows in the years following while he was in his wheelchair. He passed away last year Christmas time, but in the intervening years while disabled he didn't stop making music. It was difficult for him at first, with limited use of his hands, but once the iPad was created and became a music making tool, it reopened Dax's access to being a musician. Even though he has now passed, his music is still available on Bandcamp.
I just learned the concept of a border blaster – that is, a radio station that broadcasts from one country specifically over the border and into another. The term was coined when describing stations that skirted American broadcasting rules by being based in northern Mexico, but with programming in English carried by strong signals situated specifically to reach American audiences.
And then there's KICY. By day, it's your normal Nome, Alaska AM radio station transmitting Christian programming at 5000 W in English for all the people of Western Alaska. But each evening at 11 PM, they crank it up to an amazing 50,000 W of power so as to scatter their now-Russian language Christian programming to all the peoples of Siberia. And apparently the FCC is completely on board with this. Although a small part of me can't help but speculate at the State Department's involvement and that approval – I mean, the local senator donates use of his private airplane to fly the staff on retreats to an exclusive hot springs vacation. C'mon.
A spit of landfill sticks out into the San Francisco bay from the small city of Albany, and emergent peninsula built on what is literally trash. That's so cyberpunk.
Where is your cloistered writing sanctuary?
Linked is a reminiscence about an era of Internet culture history that I'd lived through but since forgot – stick figure death theater.
A real thing that is actually happening, "in the wake of multiple major music events at the pyramids" attended by over 15,000 people: The accompanying photo is incredible.
The structure of language is amazingly full of nuance. When what you're saying isn't as important as how you're saying it, that's what linguist called a phatic expression.
older!