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.
the 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:
If prints be what you crave, I will mail you a photo I've made.
Observation (2020)
As a kid I played action and strategy video games. But since becoming an old curmudgeon I've lost my patience for those. I've now grown fascinated with exploration and storytelling games, surprised to find there a fantastic wealth of hidden universes and subtle gameplay:
My recent favorite musical artists are VNV Nation, mind.in.a.box, The Decemberists, The National, genCAB, Project Pitchfork, Moby, purity ring, unitcode:machine, and Röyksopp.
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 17,383 tracks from 2,129 albums from 870 musical artists. Since February 2006, the library has logged 508,221 track plays, or a total time I've spent listening to music:
In English, the days of the week are named after Germanic gods. All, that is, except Saturday, which is instead named after the Roman diety Saturn. How did the big guy pull off such a feat?
running commentary
Why Diego Garcia? 2024 Oct 16
There's a tiny little scrap of dry land in the middle of the Indian Ocean named after two of the first people to report seeing it: Diego Garcia. It's an atoll a thousand miles from nowhere administered as a lingering remnant of the British Empire. Mauritius really wants Diego Garcia and the rest of the outlaying nearby atolls for itself, though, saying they were promised them when they split off from the British Empire and became a country 50-someodd years ago.
So why not give it to them? Well, famous British enemies-turned-allies USofA have built quite the military base on the island, using it for our favorite Just Superpower Things, housing all sorts of fun toys up to and including nuclear weaponry. Because of course we have.
But I guess the powers that be have finally figured out a deal. As of earlier this month, after decades of bickering (including UN resolutions calling the UK a bunch of wankers for kicking out the islands' original ~1,000 inhabitants) Mauritius, the UK, and the USA have come to an agreement. Mauritius gets the Chagos Archipelago, but can't settle anyone on Diego Garcia (the biggest atoll), and the American military base gets an "initial" lease of 99 years (making this the next generation's problem).
Why do I care? Well, its interesting, in the way all edge cases are interesting. But it's also interesting in that this struggle of tiny population of Chagos Islanders versus big old mean Britain has recently adopted the narrative of colonized versus oppressors, even though (in my opinion) that's not really what happened here. The Chagos Islanders aren't exactly indigenous to the islands, having their own inhabitation of the place only date back a few hundred years, and Britain didn't exactly colonize Diego Garcia as there is no colony there, only a military base. But there's no arguing against the narrative, I suppose, and so after an increasing Mauritian PR campaign against the UK, and the UK looking for international support on its other concerns, the British Empire has peacefully surrendered one of the last remnants of its once-massive holdings.
Don't worry, though, about the Falkland Islands. Saith the Falklands governor, Alison Blake: "The UK’s unwavering commitment to defend UK sovereignty remains undiminished."
Exploring 120 years of timezones 2024 Oct 15
This article puts to graphs what 120 years of changing timezones look like. From the origination of them, to the alignment of them onto the integer adjustments off Greenwich Mean Time, to the adoption and then gradual rejection of Daylight Savings Time. Kinda fascinating.
Appendicitis Mountain 2024 Oct 14
Journeying my way around Google Maps, as one does, I did a double-take when I stumbled across a mountain in Idaho with an unlikely name: Appendicitis.
Well, as this link describes, that's what happens when the government surveyor sent to measure the mountains gets struck by a sudden case of Appendicitis while out surveying. The surveyor, Bannon, survived thanks to a local doctor, and and its been Appendicitis Mountain ever since.
CANS 2024 Oct 13
Explore old abandoned sites from America's westward expansion, and the thing you'll be most likely to encounter is cans. Yes, old tin cans. Why cans? This website explains why, going into the history of canning and their popularity among people living on the periphery of their civilization, and also how to identify the can's age and possible contents, if for some reason that is important to you.
The Once-Great Salt Lake 2024 Oct 13
Utah's Great Salt Lake is going away. Like so many other salt lakes across the world, such as the Aral Sea, a combination of less precipitation, higher heat, and greater diversion of its sourcewaters to irrigation have cost the lake to the point that it's near to going away. And as salt lakes go away and leave dry lakebeds in their wake, those dry lakebeds turn into dust bowls with far-reaching harms.
It's ok, though, Utah is working on plans to save their lake. Water conservation is one obvious answer, you'd think. There's also plans to steal water from other watersheds, robbing Peter to pay Paul, basically, and some cockamamie idea to just pump in the Pacific Ocean. But Utah's favorite answer, of course, is to pray for rain:
Plat of Zion 2024 Oct 11
I was previously unaware that the founders of Mormonism Joseph Smith and Brigham Young, in addition to creating their modern spin on Christianity and convincing their friends that sleeping with dozens of woman (many below the age of consent) was actually fulfilling a religious obligation, had utopian dreams of planned cities. And they're about as successful as you'd imagine: enforced in Salt Lake City despite leaving the place unfriendly and hostile to everyday folks.
A Protest County 2024 Oct 11
Protests take many forms. But rarely, I would imagine, do protests take the form of a state legislature creating a county. Yet exactly that happened in Nevada in 1987, when the federal government planned a nuclear weapons waste dump at Yucca Mountain. Nevadans, not wanting to be the country's nuclear trash dump (understandable), used some political funny business (the legislative vote took place at 3:45am, for instance) to create a the tiny "Bullfrog County" directly around Yucca Mountain, with prohibitively high property taxes which would go directly to the state government.
Nobody actually lived in Bullfrog County, and so its county seat was placed at the far-away state capital, Carson City, and officers were appointed rather than elected, and the rules allowed a single person to sit in multiple (or all) the offices. There were no courts, no paved roads, no buildings, and almost all the land was closed to the public. And it was entirely an enclave inside Nye County. So Bullfrog County was a county like none other.
This created problems. The lack of courts created a legal paradox. As the taxes flowing directly to state government now incentivized the creation of the nuclear dump they originally sought to dissuade, there were political problems. And there were government problems, as the Department of Energy was not happy about this development (understandable) and redirected their funding to Clark County.
But mostly, Nye County residents, who existed and were not happy about this new lawless, people-less enclave popping up in their territory and potentially robbing them of the economic benefits of having a nuclear dumpster in their backyard (a federally funded nuclear dumpster, I should say), challenged Bullfrog County's very existence in court. And they were successful. The Nevada Supreme Court ruled Bullfrog County to be unconstitutional, as it had no residents and thus no representative government. And so Bullfrog County was dissolved two years after it was created, and Yucca Mountain went on to be selected as American's nuclear weapons garbage repository.
Good news, though. Due to political complications, the nuclear dump has yet to be built, and since its funding has been eliminated, maybe it never will. And so we bury our nuclear weapons trash instead two thousand feet beneath New Mexico in a salt... thing, as the Founding Fathers intended.
Nobles Emigrant Trail 2024 Oct 11
The Nobles Emigrant Trail was a key route into California during the Gold Rush times. The trail is now preserved by the Bureau of Land Management. The very well-produced short video on the BLM website about this trail, though, goes into more than just the history, but also how the BLM researches and identifies these trails, including consulting with the Native American authorities in the area who have their own history and opinion about these "emigrant" trails.
Why 85mm focal length is misunderstood 2024 Oct 11
Linked is a YouTube video from a long-time working portrait and landscape photographer Martin Castein, one of his series of videos about photography. YouTube abounds with this stuff (and much of it's not very useful) so why am I linking this one in particular? Because, unlike most, I feel like I actually learned something here.
I've always struggled with that 85mm field of view, but Castein breaks down in this video how to compose compelling shots at this angle, how to include backgrounds, how to go about piecing together the elements you are including and not including in the frame when using these short telephoto focal lengths.
Fraser Project 2024 Oct 8
A fascinating collection of photography, rendering the world in bright and flat lighting and completely devoid of people.
older!