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 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, The Decemberists, mind.in.a.box, The National, genCAB, Project Pitchfork, purity ring, Röyksopp, Ott, 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 17,670 tracks from 2,159 albums from 880 musical artists. Since February 2006, the library has logged 516,991 track plays, or a total time I've spent listening to music:
running commentary
This guy breaks down exactly how the panopticon works – from banner ads on your phone to the ad brokers who put them there to the data brokers who skim their data off the ad auctions to the market where your data is sold. And he proves in plain text that no, it doesn't matter if you've selected "don't share my location" or "don't allow advertisers to track my identity" because the ad companies do it anyway.
Linked is a seven-part series by Silicon Valley veteran Jon Evans dissecting the weird underbelly of the rationalist/effective altruism communities, written in 2022 but surfacing again now due to the downright bizarre (and murderous) ZIzian death cult that's splintered away from ... mainstream rationalism? What in the five fucks is going on inside the rationalism movement that death cults can even exist within its sphere? What business do cults have with rationalism, effective altruism, cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence, Scott Alexander, and the technological singularity? Evans makes it clear that rationalist thought isn't a cult, but the movement sure is left smelling a lot like the techbro version of Scientology.
In light of this newest rationalist-cult mess spilling out into the larger world, Evans has written a piece updating us about the ZIzians and how their leader faked her own death before spurring several highly-educated data scientists to go about attacking people with swords among other implements of murder.
Ah yes, peak rationality.
No, really, it says so on the big wiki, saying she "was voted 'Most Talkative' in the 1961 school Hoss Election." This bold claim is referenced to my opening link, which now only exists in the waybackie. Although whether the archived page claims such is uncertain; images did not survive the archival process and only text persists. Midler is (in text) listed as being on the 1961 school newspaper staff, if that matters to you Bette aficionados.
But me and this lost Hawaiian WRX enthusiast in 2004 both want to know, what in the high hell is a hoss?
Midler grew up and went to school on Oahu, Hawaii, and while the islanders mix a good amount of Hawaiian language into their daily lives, the word hoss doesn't sound very Hawaiian to me. And yet, some quick a-searchin reveals that whatever a 'hoss election' is, it definitely is an island thing. In 2007, columnist for the Honolulu Advertiser Lee Cataluna ran a couple color articles on this topic. On June 24, 2007 she realized "that hoss is an exclusively Hawai'i phenomenon" defining them as beginning at least by the 1960s: "We all get the concept. Most high schools in Hawai'i have them at the end of the school year. You know, Best Dressed, Most Athletic, Cutest Smile, Most Likely to Succeed ..." before asking her readers, "Somebody has to know. What is a hoss election, anyway?"
A month later, Aug 26, 2007 she gets her answer when Larry and Henriette Valdez share their 1959 yearbook photo as winners under the banner "Horse Elections." She quotes Larry as saying, "Prior to 1960, it was a 'Horse' Election ... a blue ribbon for First Place, Red for Second Place, Yellow for Third Place. We only had Blue Ribbon categories for Most Likely to Succeed, Best Looking, Best Dressed, Best School Spirit, Most Athletic, Most Talented and Most Comical."
But is that correct? Hoss and horse kinda sound similar, especially if you talk with a cowboy accent or a fan of 1959's Bonanza, that old Western TV show where Dan Blocker played rancher Eric "Hoss" Cartwright, a large-but-friendly main character.
The internet abounds with various groups' hoss election results, but few of them delve into the origin of the term. I think it may be best summed up on this beautiful Angelfire page from 2003 (complete with an actual MARQUEE tag, omg I love it) for Kauai Community College's Filipino social club's "HOSS Elections" where they state: "No one knows for sure what HOSS really stands for or what it means."
stupid long horses
The Online Etymology Dictionary provides a decent overview of how the word shoddy evolved from a factory term meaning "cloth made of woolen waste and old rags" (perhaps related to shed) to its modern definition "having a delusive appearance of high quality." The material was originally used for padding, but then developed into a "commercial cheat" fabric for making cheap clothes, notoriously used in the manufacture of "army and navy cloths in and blankets" for the Union in the US Civil War. "The citizen-soldier's experience with it in the war, and the fortunes made on it by contractors, thrust the word into sudden prominence," the dictionary summarizes without mentioning any Jewish connection.
They then expand on this by providing this longer quote of a passage from Henry Morford, "The Days of Shoddy: A Novel of the Great Rebellion in 1861," published in Philadelphia in 1863: But unfortunately that's not the whole story, as I've discovered reading author Steven R. Weisman in his 2018 book The Chosen Wars: How Judaism Became an American Religion. On page 148 in the chapter Anti-Semitism in the North and South he writes:
Illuminatus! is one of my favorite books, featuring a narrative held together by duct tape and twine but absolutely brimming with cleverness throughout. In my mind it's the conspiracy version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with a similar wit and observational awareness shared equally between the two.
Ewige Blumenkraft ("eternal flowerpower") is, according to Illuminatus!, the first half of the passphrase for the Illuminati, ending und ewige Schlangenkraft ("and eternal snakepower"). References are layered on top of each other, alluding to hippies, sexual symbolism, and occult motifs. Blumenkraft is also the name of Ott's first LP, an acid trip into pure psychedelia.
This Angry Staff Officer blog makes the compelling point that Americans should stop calling our soldiers/marines/sailors/airmen "warriors" and that doing so is not only incorrect and a disservice to those who serve in our military, it's actually anti-American.
Here's a non-Ed ZItron reality checking about the "AI" hype that's encompassing any and all discussions around tech. Less hyperbole, more critical look at what's happening (and not happening) and how international politics are of course playing their part in this whole debacle.
This person has collected every single Mario game where Mario's name appears in the title in multicolor polygonal letters (at least 40 games meet this criteria) and analyzed which color is used for each letter. This is the sort of advanced nonsense on which we thrive.
Speaking of random shit from ancient times, how can anyone forget about Nanni's complaint to Ea-nasir in Babylon year 1750BCE?
Quoting the ancients:
older!