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, mind.in.a.box, Röyksopp, Project Pitchfork, purity ring, genCAB, The National, Rotersand, and Jon Hopkins.
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 18,178 tracks from 2,203 albums from 892 musical artists. Since February 2006, the library has logged 531,688 track plays, or a total time I've spent listening to music:
running commentary
The story of Robert Hall's death in the early 20th century is horrific: American racism at its most extreme. A wealthy black man living in Georgia targeted by the authorities for harassment, torture, and death, there was no ambiguity in who perpetrated Robert Hall's murder, Baker County Sheriff M. Claude Screws. In a case that got all the way to the Supreme Court, the sheriff, via an all-white jury, was acquitted. Not of killing Hall, for that the sheriff wasn't tried for some reason I do not understand, but 'not guilty' of "violating Hall's constitutional rights." What a crock of shit. In case you're wondering what the local community thought of this, Screws went on to not only be reelected, but to be later made into a state senator. The linked article claims that while Hall's family saw no justice, the net result was, for legal precedent reasons, an overall win.
Yet this Legal Clarity article provides more nuance (emphasis mine): There is still no justice for Robert Hall.
I have clear and distinct memories of using the robber emoji, the exact one linked above. And yet, the internet is now telling me my memories are false – that they are the result of the Mandela effect. And as far as me personally digging through the Unicode history can show, this appears to be the case – the robber emoji has never existed. So what do I do with my implanted memories of using this emoji?
Comedian Brian Frange has created this website which lists all the available varietals of apple in North America, and their relative merits. Metrics include Visual appeal, texture, crispness, skin, density, and of course taste. Each apple gets its own page with a full description, along with photos and videos, certainly been far more work dedicated to ranking apples then I would've thought necessary. Or maybe that's the joke? I mean, no offense to this Frange guy, but I've never heard of anything else he's ever done. He jokes of this is his legacy, but I think maybe it's not really a joke. Anyway, whatever, neat website.
Seth Purcell writes a compelling peace about something that I've noticed without noticing, putting his finger on the problem of what's wrong with modern children's museums: screens are not as interesting as actual physical demonstrations, things you can actually play with using your actual hands.
Maybe that's why I found the small, low budget children's museum in downtown Lodi, California so compelling: they hadn't "modernized" with a bunch of screens.
I just stumbled across a reminder that, back in 2021, lowtax died. Founder of somethingawful, lowtax was always a jerk, as this Vice article reminds us. But it's still strange to me that lowtax is no longer with us.
French photographer, 1933-2000, beautiful photographs for your inspiration.
What if we replaced all writing and art and media in the world with "content"? What would that look like? Or have we already done that? This is a long and interesting blog post, a little winding, but well worth the read, digging into the state of modern Internet culture.
The linked article convinces us of the that Meta (aka Facebook) and Zuckerberg lacks any overall long-term vision or goals. They make announcements every few years following whatever trend is fashionable but don't follow through once the wind shifts. But the article also observes that 98% of Meta's revenue comes from – and its real profiency is – ad sales, and that's all investors care about.
Which really means that so long as he doesn't disturb the gold egg-laying goose, Meta is actually just a giant slush fund for whatever floats Zuck's fancy.
This interactive essay is subtitled "A history of Mac settings, 1984–2004" and is best viewed on a large and powerful system, as it emulates many versions of macOS to illustrate its point. My ancient laptop gave up about the "2001" entry but maybe yours will fare better.
older!