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 National, The Decemberists, genCAB, Project Pitchfork, Röyksopp, purity ring, Sigur Rós, and unitcode:machine.
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 18,103 tracks from 2,193 albums from 890 musical artists. Since February 2006, the library has logged 524,321 track plays, or a total time I've spent listening to music:
running commentary
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: Dahl insists that that analysis is wrong, missing the point when he says: Oh, so the disco-haters just coincidentally hated the music associated with the blacks and gays. Right.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
I once when going through an "I'll read anything" phase (these phases occur frequently) attempted Left Behind, the 1995 "Novel of the Earth's Last Days" from a decidedly Evangelical Christian point of view. This was a long while ago, but I remember losing interest maybe halfway through. I have only so much belief to suspend, after all.
So obviously I missed the subtext. The porn subtext that is. From Fred Clark at Slacktivist in 2012 we learn that: The article expands on this thoroughly, Clark arguing his seemingly-far fetched claim in a manner both compelling and convincing.
Post script: "Pretrib" (since I have never heard this term before and had to look it up) is shorthand lingo for "pre-tribulation rapture" – some esoteric antisemitic Christian nonsense that at least this Christian Research Institute blog decries (weakly) as "simply not great Bible."
I consider myself D&D-adjacent. I've never played it or any other tabletop roleplaying game or so much as even created a character, but I am familiar loosely with the concepts and lore, have read derivative works, and have listened to the experiences of those who have played. One of the best concepts to come from D&D is the "Alignment Chart" – basically, plotting a person's motivational "alignment" on a two-axis grid, ranging from "lawful" to "chaotic" on one axis and "good" to "evil" on the other. Obviously it's reductive, but so are all personality tests like the pseudo-scientific Myers-Briggs alignment chart and the blatantly-New Age Enneagram alignment chart.
The problem is, I forget the details sometimes, which is why I'm here and now linking to this pretty good explanation of the D&D alignments, along with example characters for each category.
No, really. Yes, that Moon.
Cliff Pervocracy (again, now) summarizes the Star Trek Writers' Guide so you don't have to read it yourself, reproducing the juiciest bits for us on their blog. Take-away from the take-away for The Original Series: Keep it cheap. Take-away from the take-away from The Next Generations: Gene Roddenberry is very horny.
older!