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
The linked article convinces us of the that Meta (aka Facebook) and Zuckerberg lacks any overall long-term vision or goals. They make announcements every few years following whatever trend is fashionable but don't follow through once the wind shifts. But the article also observes that 98% of Meta's revenue comes from – and its real profiency is – ad sales, and that's all investors care about.
Which really means that so long as he doesn't disturb the gold egg-laying goose, Meta is actually just a giant slush fund for whatever floats Zuck's fancy.
This interactive essay is subtitled "A history of Mac settings, 1984–2004" and is best viewed on a large and powerful system, as it emulates many versions of macOS to illustrate its point. My ancient laptop gave up about the "2001" entry but maybe yours will fare better.
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.
older!