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
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, mind.in.a.box, The Decemberists, The National, genCAB, Project Pitchfork, purity ring, Röyksopp, unitcode:machine, and Moby.
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 17,984 tracks from 2,176 albums from 888 musical artists. Since February 2006, the library has logged 521,532 track plays, or a total time I've spent listening to music:
running commentary
Versacad was never the biggest CAD software. It's been around since 1989 but the website hasn't been updated now since 2017, so I guess it's now defunct. But sometimes we need to open old Versacad files, if only to convert to modern formats when the still-existing structures built from those files need work done.
So I went to install Versacad and the background photo on the installer is ... well, not what I would have expected. Typically, software uses opportunities such as this to show off what it can create. Here, not so much. But it does have a button "About this Picture" which of course I had to go back and click. And so I present, a relic of what once was:
Nilay Patel of the Verge on why, if you're looking to buy a printer, you should get a Brother, and also why these types of articles suck and are only getting worse.
What happens when you're so hated that the Oxford statutes personally snub you by name? What happens then when you're not memorable enough to be biographied in any other form, and your sole contribution to history is your legal snubbing? In 2013, Oxford's Bodleian Libraries finally dug up the answer.
zompist's creator put a free PDF on his Patreon a few years ago, talking about nuance at the intersection of fantasy world creation and monarchies. How could a writer take notes from real world history in creating a story about a king that's believable and thoroughly thought-through?
YouGov has released their poll results from when they asked Americans questions about the Middle Ages. Unsurprisingly, there is some bonkers stuff in here, like some people "viewing the black plague favorably" (wtf???) and some people thinking the assassination of Julius Caesar and the French Revolution both took place during the Middle Ages but that the Crusades did not (wtf???)
The real surprising thing here, though, is the revelation that Americans think more often about the Middle Ages than they do Ancient Rome, and with less gender separation between the results, too.
Linked is a detailed list of all the reasons Brave is not the privacy-focused web browser it claims to be. Firefox hasn't escaped its own controversies lately, what with adding AI bullshit nobody wants, but it's a lot less underhanded and duplicitous than what Brave's been up to.
It's not there anymore, but there used to be a Toys 'R' Us in Sunnyvale. It was haunted. Growing up here, having friends that worked there in high school, everyone knew this. Linked is an article by Katie Dowd of the SF Gate who, upon the building's purchase by REI in 2021, gets to the bottom of this, concluding that the haunting was merely a publicity stunt involving pop psychic Sylvia Browne, but that's preposterous.
There's a genre of websites such as the one linked that address pet peeves common in how people interact with IT folks. While I can relate, I've also done enough IT to know that nobody who needs to is reading these websites, let alone taking the advice on for themselves. It's a nice thought, though. Something to commiserate with.
Another YouTube, this one to a guy who explains convincingly the flowchart of how Western Esotericism came to be, and how the different movements are related to and have descended from one another. His pronunciation of names is either a touch odd, or my understand of how to pronounce those names is wrong. But that's a minor thing.
older!