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, mind.in.a.box, Project Pitchfork, purity ring, genCAB, The National, Jon Hopkins, and Rotersand.
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 18,273 tracks from 2,215 albums from 897 musical artists. Since February 2006, the library has logged 533,864 track plays, or a total time I've spent listening to music:
running commentary
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.
My latest obnoxious pondering into the English language concerns the short phrase have to, a version of must with a little bit more impersonality to it. But nuance between have to, must, mustn't, and can't aside (which the linked content delves thoroughly through) what I find particularly fascinating is that it's the unique combination of words have to that together make a new meaning Beyond fat of the phtase's individual words, with the whole expression adding up to more than the sum of its parts. I'm sure there's many other English phrases with similar stories, but I don't know the name of the phenomenon to search it out.
Damn, does the truth hurt to read.
This YouTube video delves into one of those little architectural detail things that are ubiquitous in western culture but that I've never spared even the slightest thought for. Basically, it's fascinatingly nerdy, something right up my alley. Well worth the 8-ish minutes.
Why are some letters in the Torah written larger than others? This sofer catalogues and indexes all of the examples he can find, tying them back to their scribal or Kabalistic or otherwise unknown origins.
This happened back in 2020, so I'm late to the news, but iconic music joint Slim's in San Francisco closed after more than 30 years and 10,000 bands. I've seen a few great shows there, so I'm sad to see it go.
Flickr "Explore" is a daily feature of the photo sharing website, highlighting the 500 best photos posted that day. It's an engagement trick, a way to boost interaction for chosen users. So how do you get your photo into Explore? This question has long been the topic of discussion in the Flickr community.
Well, here comes the Flickr Blog offering to finally demystify Explore! They explain that Explore is algorithmically determined by a score called interestingness. And what is interestingness? Emphasis mine: Ironic if you ask me, considering that this is their attempt to demystify.
So how do you get your photo into Explore? For real, no bullshit? Only one consistent way I've ever found in 20 years of using the site: take a break from Flickr for a week, then come back to it. Post something good, it'll hit Explore.
older!