the brandensite
hello and welcome to my website
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
I've never read Fifty Shades of Grey but like anyone alive back when it came out I knew of its existence and the reputation surrounding it. Wikipedia as usual does it's usual sloppy gloss over the book's contents, somehow failing to adequately describe the situation despite being intently focused on both the forest and the trees in that uniquely lackluster way that the questionably-human Wikipedia editors are known for. Enter Cliff from Pervocracy, who back in 2013 suffered through 23 of the book's 26 wretched chapters of abuse, emails, and abusive emails all the while snipping out excerpts for us, their readers, and commenting upon them as only Cliff can do. Take a stroll through these 5SoG Cliff's notes (lol) and enlighten yourself as to just how bad the book truly is in it's writing, storytelling, depiction of healthy relationships, and understanding of the fundamentals of actual BDSM.
The two-hit-wonder band The Spin Doctors always reminds me of an addicted arcade game I used to play back on MacOS 7 when I was a kid, called Spin Doctor. In the game, the player controlled a bar which had to spin from peg to peg avoiding obstacles and hazards. With a name like that, though, and being an obscure title, I've never been able to find corroboration of my memory or any proof that I didn't dream the whole thing up, until now. Some combination of search terms led to me this old games website where they've documented and made available for play a game called Ultimate Spin Doctor which isn't quite what I remember playing but seems to be a very similar DOS port. So that's cool.
A dying breed, the Tollway Oasis is a travel stop set on a purpose-built overpass, allowing vehicles passing in either direction easy access to the amenities. I didn't realize that only four remain, having lost favor to traditional roadside stops. Quoth the official website:
The Nuremberg trials prosecuted 22 high-level Nazis for the war crimes of World War II. The charter under which the trials operated was limited in its definition of "Crimes Against Humanity" because the governments involved didn't want their own baggage to qualify (such as American treatment of blacks). And yet, there were far, far more than 22 Nazis responsible for the Holocaust. Linked is a brief look into the story of how, in the wake of the Shoah, Jewish operatives hunted down and killed Nazi leadership while the world remained indifferent to their crimes. The article was penned by Robert Rockaway in 2020, a professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University.
I feel like I've learned more about vaginas in 5 minutes reading the Vagina Museum's FAQ page than I ever did in the school's sex ed curriculum. And having never taken any other physiology/anatomy classes, I'm not sure where else I would have learned this stuff. And the stigma is strong.
On February 28, 2006 painter, children's book author, and deviantArt user Ursula Vernon posted this linked deviation of a surrealist scene – in a verdant, rolling hillside, a large pear with grinning teeth poses for a chipmunk with a camera on a tripod while giraffes wander in the background along the way to a distant tower.
But Vernon had no way of knowing that their artwork was going to become internet famous. They were just a biting-pear-obsessed artist. How could they have? Reflecting on this in 2009, Vernon writes:
Worth reading Cliff's entire article about his experience transitioning to being a man, but the most fascinating part (to me) is this:
Kowloon Walled City is a place which cyberpunk enthusiasts such as myself hold up as a real-life representation of what life in a such a gritty, ultra-capitalist society would look like. This article, featuring fantastic photography by Greg Girard, delves into the political and cultural underpinnings that allowed Kowloon to exist and operate as it did for so long.
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
older!