the brandensite

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.

Left Behind: Pretrib Porno 2025 May 10   patheos.com
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:

Our porn star hero, Rayford Steele, interacts with women just like any porn star does — minus, of course, the sex. It's all about dominance, exploitation, titillation and the stroking of — in this case — egos.

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."

D&D Alignments Explained 2025 May 10   gamersdecide.com
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.

Finding Populist Equilibrium 2025 May 7   snowdentodd.substack.com

The obvious problem with ruthlessly enforcing E-Verify is that most people, in their day-to-day reality, like consensual exchanges, including with illegal immigrants. What people don't like are videos of undocumented Guatemalans setting subway passengers on fire, or caravans flooding across the border. They want a sense that things are “under control.”

The distinction here can be thought of as daytime and nighttime preferences. At night when watching the news, many people are worried about illegal immigration—this is the realm of abstraction, where pixels of a woman burned alive by a Guatemalan migrant grace TV screens like shadows on the walls of Plato’s cave. Here, law and order prevail. But in the day-to-day, people go back to behaving like mostly rational economic agents, entering consensual exchanges with undocumented Guatemalans. The correct equilibrium if you are a skilled politician, of course, is to pander to the former while preserving the latter. Results may vary depending on the immigrant population in question, but suffice it to say, this isn’t so difficult in Texas.

Andy Warhol Drew a Penis on the Moon 2025 May 6   en.wikipedia.org
No, really. Yes, that Moon.

Star Trek Writers' Guide 2025 May 5   pervocracy.com
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.