the brandensite

What Americans think about the Middle Ages 2025 Mar 28
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.

Don't use Brave 2025 Mar 25
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.

The Toys 'R' Us in Sunnyvale was haunted 2025 Mar 21
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.

Grumpy IT websites 2025 Mar 18
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.

Map of the Esoteric 2025 Mar 18
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.

Why Power Girl's tits 2025 Mar 18
Superhero women aren't generally known for being drawn with small breasts, but even among the buxom crowd, the size of Power Girl's tits is hard to ignore. Why? Well, in this interview with comic book writer and inker Jimmy Palmiotti (who was working on a Power Girl run at the time), Comics Bulletin staff Karyn Pinter just straight-up asks about Power Girl, "What’s with the tits?" and Palmiotti responds:

Okay. When the character was created Wally Wood was the artist that drew Power Girl, and he was convinced that the editors were not paying attention to anything he did. So, his inker said every issue I’m going to draw the tits bigger until they notice it. It took about seven or eight issues before anyone was like hey, what’s with the tits? And that’s where they stopped. True story.

Los Angeles has two conflicting street grids 2025 Mar 18
This 16-minute YouTube explains how Los Angeles came to have two conflicting street grids defining its streets 45-degrees offset from one another, and the history of how the city came to be placed where it is in the first place.

Part of Europe is in Canada 2025 Mar 17
The islands Saint Pierre and Miquelon are 20km off the coast of Newfoundland and 4000km off the coast of France, but part of France they are. You can spend your Euros visiting this distant part of the European Union and the 5000 Frenchfolks living there in a day trip, but official advice is to "take your time," and be sure to bring your Passport, as the islands are not part of the Schengen.

Nothing Good Comes From Nothing 2025 Mar 12
Chuck Palahniuk blogs on why the best writing attacks its core issue not head-on, but from an oblique angle.

Given the writing I'm mostly exposed to these days, I'm finding moral tales aimed at young children – even highly-rated books – to be the worst offenders. It's not that I disagree with the messages, it's that their effectiveness is atrocious. They're flagrant examples of crap writing that prove Palahniuk's point.

Except for Marcus Pfister's The Rainbow Fish. The message in that book is abhorrent and I don't understand its popularity. Summaries claim the story is about the importance of sharing, but that's a very generous reading. The rainbowfish character achieves "success" only when he's been badgered by his peers into giving away everything that makes him special, thereby making himself indistinguishable from the other fish in the reef. "Conform!" the book screams between the lines, "You must fit in before others will like you!" This has nothing to do with Palahniuk's writing advice; I just really hate this book.

The Eggman's Printers 2025 Mar 11
Here's a promotional short for an upcoming photo auction of William Eggleston's work, but what's interesting here is that the short (and the auction) feature front-and-center not Eggleston himself, but the technicians who printed his work: Guy Stricherz and Irene Malli. According to the auction house, Stricherz and Malli are the "acknowledged masters of the dye transfer printing process" who created the "perfected master prints by which subsequent prints in a respective edition were judged" – including the Eggman's most famous prints.