Hello.

Background: Sunrise atop Bell Mountain

My name is Brain Brian Gaid.

Welcome to my website. I use this domain as a digital home, sharing thoughts, notes, photos, and more, as well as a sandbox or playground for learning new tools, and testing ideas — often sourced from other inspirational sources around the web.

Feel free to look around. You can start by scrolling further down for a few highlighted website sections.

Photography 📷

I started taking photos over a dozen years ago. The physical nature of pointing and capturing images hooked me. I spent ages teaching myself everything I could from books, online resources, and practice.

Early on, the use of manual focus lenses trained me to pay close attention to details in every image I took. I kept my camera close by in college and practiced often.

I take fewer images nowadays but still look for those special moments. Few of my early photos and albums are published on this site. I'm hoping to change that in the near future. I'm looking through my archives and — with re-edits where needed — will be sharing them here.

Here are a few of my most recent albums.

View all

Bookshelf 📚

I've read 69 books in 2020 so far (and counting).

I find good books everywhere I look so I tend to read a lot of them. I'm partial to science, biographies, historical narrative non-fiction, and sci-fi, but it doesn't stop me from looking elsewhere for anything with a few good recommendations.

Audiobooks, ebooks, paperback, comics are all fair game.

One of my favorite book-related memories as a kid (and I suspect of many kids my age and demographic at the time) was reading each new Harry Potter book cover-to-cover as soon as they were released.

I'm grateful that I still regularly get sucked into stories that fill me with emotion, shock me, scare me, make me laugh, or teach me a lesson.

The last eight books I've read:
(recommendations starred)

  • ★Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch

  • ★The Year of the Dogs by Vincent J. Musi

  • Underwater Ghost Towns of North Georgia by Lisa M. Russell

  • ★Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World by Vivek H Murthy M.D.

  • Heroes: The Greek Myths Reimagined by Stephen Fry

  • The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams

  • ★Mythos by Stephen Fry

  • ★The Plot Against America: A Novel by Philip Roth

View all finished books

Film Tracker 📽️

I've watched 358 films in 2020 so far (and counting).

It's easy to get carried away indulging on a medium as incredible as film (as well as the occasional well-produced limited television series, for that matter).

I've been entranced by the stories, visuals, and emotions inflicted by film since a young age and hope to never lose that same love I have for a great film that I felt when I was a kid.

In late spring (after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic), I noticed how rapidly my film count was growing and decided to be more proactive about what I watch, prefering new experiences to rewatches. It wasn't until August that I started writing brief notes about each film I watched, but for at least the entirety of 2020, I have ratings for each film watched.

Moving forward, besides merely sharing my watched films list, I plan to expand on my existing dataset and publish relevant statistics about my viewing habits. I'm still building the page where all of this information will live, so stay tuned.

The last dozen films I've watched:
(recommendations in bold)

  • Athlete A (2020)

  • Official Secrets (2019)

  • Feels Good Man (2020)

  • The Devil All the Time (2020)

  • Run (2020)

  • A Knight's Tale (2001)

  • Iron Man (2008)

  • AlphaGo (2017)

  • Last Breath (2019)

  • The Personal History of David Copperfield (2019)

  • Greenland (2020)

  • I Am Greta (2020)