the brandensite

Jewish Vengeance 2025 Jun 2   tabletmag.com
The Nuremberg trials prosecuted 22 high-level Nazis for the war crimes of World War II. The charter under which the trials operated was limited in its definition of "Crimes Against Humanity" because the governments involved didn't want their own baggage to qualify (such as American treatment of blacks). And yet, there were far, far more than 22 Nazis responsible for the Holocaust. Linked is a brief look into the story of how, in the wake of the Shoah, Jewish operatives hunted down and killed Nazi leadership while the world remained indifferent to their crimes. The article was penned by Robert Rockaway in 2020, a professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University.

Vagina Musuem FAQ 2025 Jun 2   vaginamuseum.co.uk
I feel like I've learned more about vaginas in 5 minutes reading the Vagina Museum's FAQ page than I ever did in the school's sex ed curriculum. And having never taken any other physiology/anatomy classes, I'm not sure where else I would have learned this stuff.

The Vagina Museum was founded with the intention of busting the stigma of the gynaecological anatomy and be part of a societal shift from bodily shame to celebration.

And the stigma is strong.

The Biting Pear of Salamanca 2025 Jun 2   deviantart.com
On February 28, 2006 painter, children's book author, and deviantArt user Ursula Vernon posted this linked deviation of a surrealist scene – in a verdant, rolling hillside, a large pear with grinning teeth poses for a chipmunk with a camera on a tripod while giraffes wander in the background along the way to a distant tower.

But Vernon had no way of knowing that their artwork was going to become internet famous. They were just a biting-pear-obsessed artist. How could they have? Reflecting on this in 2009, Vernon writes:

I have a strange relationship with my beloved pear–on the one hand, I love it and am very proud of it for having gone on to such weird internet fame. On the other hand, it went on without me, despite the best efforts of fans to point out the original creator, and it has gone to some REALLY strange places...

The View From The Other Side 2025 May 23   pervocracy.com
Worth reading Cliff's entire article about his experience transitioning to being a man, but the most fascinating part (to me) is this:

I have been a man in the eyes of the world for almost eight years now. ...

The main thing I’ve learned is something I suspected all along – it doesn’t make that much of a difference. This is weird to say when I’ve spent years on the project of changing my gender, but on a day-to-day basis, I’m still me.

Kowloon Walled City: Heterotopia in a Space of Disappearance 2025 May 21   mascontext.com
Kowloon Walled City is a place which cyberpunk enthusiasts such as myself hold up as a real-life representation of what life in a such a gritty, ultra-capitalist society would look like. This article, featuring fantastic photography by Greg Girard, delves into the political and cultural underpinnings that allowed Kowloon to exist and operate as it did for so long.

Disco Demolition Night 2025 May 14   chicagohistory.org
We are a stupid people. Sure, every once in a while we manage something clever like sending someone to the Moon or making microwavable french fries. But these acts of brilliance are balanced out by events like Disco Demolition Night, where, in 1979, 24-year-old Chicago radio shock-jock and avowed hater of disco music Steve Dahl encouraged tens of thousands of his disco-hating listeners to come to a White Sox doubleheader and literally blow up their disco albums. With explosives, in the middle of the field. Why did this sound like a good idea? Why would disco-haters even own disco albums? Were they buying the albums new only to destroy them? I don't know, that's not answered in the linked Chicago History Museum article from last year nor in this rather-more-celebratory 2004 ESPN article.

So the disco-haters showed up in droves, overfilling the stadium and – once the gates closed – climbing over the fences to get in. And Dahl did it. Between games, he blew up a small box of disco albums. Cool. Having witnessed the explosion and found it wanting, the massive crowd of disco-haters were apparently unsatisfied with the level of destruction, and so they started a riot. They stormed the field and damaged the ballpark and chased the players back into the clubhouse, ultimately causing the White Sox to forfeit to the Tigers.

Could this be any stupider? You betcha! Because, also bigotry. Of course there's also bigotry. From the Museum:

Disco was originally connected to Black, Latine, and queer spaces before it saturated the mainstream market and met with backlash, often from white, heterosexual, male rock-music listeners. Ushers at Comiskey Park noted that attendees also brought funk and R&B records—other genres associated with Black artists—to be destroyed.

Dahl insists that that analysis is wrong, missing the point when he says:

The worst thing is people calling Disco Demolition homophobic or racist. It just wasn't. It's really easy to look at it historically, from this perspective, and attach all those things to it. But we weren't thinking like that.

Oh, so the disco-haters just coincidentally hated the music associated with the blacks and gays. Right.

the brandensite 2025 May 13   branden.me
I learned how to format text with HTML way back when I was about 14 years old, in 1996. I did that because I wanted to make a website and back in 1996, when you were 14 and had no money and lots of free time, that's how you made websites: by hand, in a text editor.

Somewhere along the way – maybe when CSS became a thing – the world started calling all this fancy HTML-formatted text "web design" and actual graphics designers with actual artistic vision got involved.

I am not a graphics designer. And yet, just like when I was 14, I still want to have a website. This website, where I write crap like this. And I'm still writing all the HTML (and CSS, and scripting) by hand because that's just what I've always done.

Below is a screenshot of what this website looked like about six months ago. It looks a little different now. The boxes are still mostly in the same place but the colors are different and it maybe looks a little sleeker, a little easier to read. I don't know. Like I said, I'm no graphics designer – I just know some ancient HTML.


Like it says in the sidebar, the brandensite has been in continuous existence for coming up on thirty years now. It's always changing, always morphing into whatever whim I follow. Somewhere I've got screenshots going all the way back. But for today, here, you can see what six months of updates have wrought.

Thanks for looking

Frozen Peas 2025 May 12   youtube.com
in 1970, the world-famous actor and filmmaker Orson Welles was deep into his career when he was, in order to finance his movies, stooping to record some voice-over work for advertisements. Many of the actual advertisements have been lost to time, but what hasn't is this bootleg blooper reel of a very grumpy Welles cussing out the director and other recording staff working on commercial for frozen peas, among other basic foods. Welles himself finally heard the bootleg nine years later after complaining to a friend that he was upset about his voice-over paychecks drying up, reportedly laughing during the playback. It must've had some effect, as following that moment history tracks a resumption in his voice-over work.

Earthquake fault rupture captured on video for the first time 2025 May 12   reddit.com
Watching the land on the right side of the fence in this surveillance camera footage from Myanmar, you can see in this Magnitude 7.9 earthquake the tectonic plates literally moving past each other as the structures shake and the ground cracks.

lebitla la mosadi ke bogadi 2025 May 10   web.archive.org
Reading something online, I stumbled across this African phrase in its translation: "a woman’s grave is at the place/home of her husband" and I had a difficult time understanding, being removed culturally from the phrase's origin. There's not much online about it (or even which language the phrase is in), but I still managed to find the absolute nerdiest source: an academic research paper from 2015, the PhD thesis written by Seepaneng Salaminah Moloko-Phiri at University of Pretoria, South Africa (they are now an associate professor at South Africa's North-West University in the School of Nursing).

According to the doctor:

The proverb “lebitla la mosadi ke bogadi” is used as a language tool during premarital counselling to instruct African women on the value of marriage and to encourage married women to stay in their marriages. However, some African proverbs which are commonly used to define the marital relationship between men and women appear to be gender-biased and focus more on women only therefore perpetuating ill-health, discrimination and oppression.

The study concludes that some women found the phrase positive and some negative, which doesn't seem like much, but at least does convey a culture wary of the implications.