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, Röyksopp, mind.in.a.box, Project Pitchfork, purity ring, genCAB, The National, Jon Hopkins, and Rotersand.
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 18,273 tracks from 2,215 albums from 897 musical artists. Since February 2006, the library has logged 533,864 track plays, or a total time I've spent listening to music:
running commentary
Why are some letters in the Torah written larger than others? This sofer catalogues and indexes all of the examples he can find, tying them back to their scribal or Kabalistic or otherwise unknown origins.
This happened back in 2020, so I'm late to the news, but iconic music joint Slim's in San Francisco closed after more than 30 years and 10,000 bands. I've seen a few great shows there, so I'm sad to see it go.
Flickr "Explore" is a daily feature of the photo sharing website, highlighting the 500 best photos posted that day. It's an engagement trick, a way to boost interaction for chosen users. So how do you get your photo into Explore? This question has long been the topic of discussion in the Flickr community.
Well, here comes the Flickr Blog offering to finally demystify Explore! They explain that Explore is algorithmically determined by a score called interestingness. And what is interestingness? Emphasis mine: Ironic if you ask me, considering that this is their attempt to demystify.
So how do you get your photo into Explore? For real, no bullshit? Only one consistent way I've ever found in 20 years of using the site: take a break from Flickr for a week, then come back to it. Post something good, it'll hit Explore.
is something some people claim Bill Gates once said, yet he denies.
And from what he has actually said, I believe his denial: Thing is, I can understand where a misquote like this began. Someone could have sarcastically put words into Gates' mouth, making fun of the limitations of the early Microsoft systems. And someone else hearing this, but not understanding the sarcasm, could have took it seriously. Is that what happened? Nobody will ever know. But it's possible.
The Golden Arches' first big surge in popularity coincided with the civil rights era in United States. And when residents in the predominantly black central urban area of Cleveland pointed out that none of the area's massively successful five McDonald's franchises were owned by local, black residents but rather by distant white owners, they organized a boycott.
And that's the story as presented by this Case Western Encyclopedia of Cleveland History article. And it's probably true. But further down the page, they admit that the boycott was organized by none other than "Rabbi" David Hill, but only on his biography admit to him being a conman cult leader infamous for belligerent negotiation tactics against McDonald's corporate who also swindled those supporting him. And when convicted of his crimes, he fled the country.
So what was the boycott? Was it tapping into real community resentment? Or was it all the ploy of a crazed conman?
Leave it to the Etymology Dictionary to finally answer the age old question "where does Halloween come from?" with the definitive nobody knows. But it's a very well researched "nobody knows".
All this AI bullshit doesn't make money. That's been pretty clear since the get-go. But this Futurism article digs into exactly how bad it is, and then this second article points out how our entire economy is currently being propped up by spending on AI equipment. But don't worry, as Fortune points out, AI isn't only the cause of all our economic problems, it is also the solution – just don't ask for specifics on how that works.
They quote Ruchir Sharma, chair of Rockefeller International:
While we're on the topic of Tesla, I've stumbled across this linked article which so thoroughly debunks some of Tesla's wildest claims (without becoming one of those obnoxious anti-Tesla propaganda pieces), and explains exactly where the errors lay, and how they continue to propagate modern conspiracy theories. Tesla did contribute some amazing inventions to our society, yet, apparently, he became a victim of his own success.
I'm playing that new House of Tesla puzzle mystery video game, and featured in the story are of course Tesla's associates who you'd expect – JP Morgan and Mark Twain, to name the two most prominent. But who surprises me by their appearance in the game is Aleister Crowley. I had never even before considered that Crowley and Tesla even lived in the same era, let alone would have known each other. But did they know each other? The game is obviously fantasy, but draws on real historical events for plot points, so is this relationship something that it's just making up?
Thankfully, back in 2021, this website pop matters wrote an article examining the exact relationship, or lack thereof, between Crowley and Tesla. Because while there is no evidence that the two have met, they apparently ran in the same circles. And the article is well researched and well referenced, making a convincing and nuanced argument.
Linked is an Amusing Planet entry on Fukushima's bizarre umbilical cord border. The article explains how this came to be, which can be summed up as: the ridge of this mountain range is culturally important to Fukushima Prefecture, so much so that it was made to remain inside its borders even when the surrounding land was reassigned.
And the article has a map, but weirdly, no pictures of the mountaintop shrine in question. The one bland photo of the empty ridgeline they do have seems to be sourced from the Wikipedia article on the umbilical cord border, with the Wikipedia having no more photos or an article on the shrine itself. Or at least, the English Wikipedia doesn't. But the Japanese Wikipedia certainly does, along with many photos. Check it out for yourself, the shine so important it necessitated this strange salient.
older!