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
I've been poking my way through the Blues and it's leaving me dumbstruck how much Blues influence is obvious in the later generations of music I grew up with. There's a Bo Diddley song called Mona (I Need You Baby) from 1957 and when I first heard it last week, I immediately said, that's How Soon Is Now by The Smiths! So I looked it up, and whaddya know, I'm right. Turns out that just this last April (in the linked interview), Johnny Marr himself confirms that back in 1984, when he was composing the song, Bo Diddley was a direct influence.
This photographer modified the infamous Hasselblad XPan to take a, of all things, Samyang 8mm fisheye lens. And his results are far better than they have any right to be. I'm impressed.
Kol Isha (literally: voice of a woman) is a Jewish teaching which says it is forbidden for men to hear singing from a woman other than his wife. Some even take it further, and say it is forbidden to even hear a woman speak publicly. The root of this prohibition is extracted most ridiculously from a single line in Song of Songs where Solomon praises his lover's voice, which the rabbis of the Talmud (Berakhot 24a) then take to mean that a woman's voice constitutes nakedness.
it's difficult for me, as a Reform Jew, to take this seriously. It reads like a gossamer-thin chain of tenuous logic backfilled in to explain after the fact why women are treated as second-class citizens. But (unfortunately) a Reform Jew's outrage doesn't stop religious zealots from using this restriction to silence the voices of women. Luckily we have organizations such as a linked Women of the Wall who are capable of arguing Jewishly, from an orthodox perspective, against teachings such as this.
Check out the fricking amazing MÅ“bius-esque Digital illustration artwork of Amir Zand.
Did Judas Priest songs contain subliminal messages which employed to young Colorado men to kill themselves in 1980? Well, obviously no. And yet the band was forced to defend themselves from said accusations in court. Grunge Magazine's Branden C. Potter (no relation) reports on all the details in this ridiculous incident in pop music history.
Here's a great new photography tool that just launched – a web app that helps you keep your gear pile index, sorted, and inventoried.
Isn't it neat how those conspiracy theories about how everyone in power are secretly pedophiles have turned out to be completely true? Anyway, here's all the actual Jeffrey Epstein emails released by Congress.
This programmer was digging through the source code for NCAA Basketball Final Four 97 because I guess that's what people do nowadays in their spare time and he found embedded deep within the game, a marriage proposal screen. He even went so far as to track down the culprit, finding not only that the proposal worked but that also the couple are still happily married to this day.
older!