I'm Brandon Sneed. This is my blog. It's basically an online notebook where I highlight good writing, storytelling, journalism and other acts of creativity, and explore how such things are made.
I'm an author and journalist who writes about people, sports, science, nature, and more. I love learning, adventures, life, and stories. I've covered everything from a guy who played Division I basketball while battling cancer ... to golf courses that eat golfers ... to turkey vultures invading a town. You can read all those and more below.
More about me and the blog: here.
The Good Hurt: How Ray King Lives and Plays Basketball with Cancer
(SB Nation Longform)
Golfer Swallowed By Golf Course
(Outside)
How A Tiny Southern Town Handles A Turkey Vulture Invasion
(Outside)
Blind Ambition
(ESPN The Magazine)
Mad For Carolina
(GQ)
Nobody Walks Alone
(ESPN: The Magazine)
The First Legend
(SLAM magazine)
Returning to the blog today with another awe-inspiring time-lapse video from the International Space Station. This one shows the earth at night, as did this one—but it also shows storms and much more. I also accidentally had Explosions in the Sky's "Snow and Lights" playing in the background, which, when I muted the ISS video, turned out to be quite the happy accident.
Enjoy.
In the video below, you can travel around the planet you live on.
The picture below it is one of many from a gallery provided by NASA of photos taken by the Mars rover.
Unbelievable.
Happy Monday, everyone.
Shoutout to Gawker for sharing this sweet time-lapse video from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) that records, so artfully, when Venus crossed the sun's face yesterday. It's the last time that'll happen this century. Video is below. Info on SDO after the break.
Didn't get to witness it myself. Weather sucked here in lil' ol' Greenville, N.C. I was bummed because, c'mon, we throw around that term "once in a lifetime" quite a bit. Michael Jordan was a once-in-a-lifetime baller. Tiger Woods, once-in-a-lifetime golfer. Albert Pujols, once-in-a-lifetime hitter. Christopher Nolan, once-in-a-lifetime director. Brandon Sneed, once-in-a-lifetime writer.*
*And sometimes we lie.
You could say that technically everything in life is once in a lifetime because nobody's ever exactly the same as someone else and nothing ever happens the second time exactly like how it happens the first time. But you don't want to be all obnoxious and hokey so no, you won't say all that.
What you could definitely say is that the transit of Venus is actually one of those things that will never, ever happen again so long as we all shall live.*
* Unless someone finds a way to make us part robot or something. Which could happen. And then which would be wayyy expensive.
Anyway: So yeah, it would've been cool to see that. But at least now we have technology that allows us to take that moment and make something from real life happen as though it happened in Hollywood.
I am a huge fan of space science-y stuff. (That sentence should indicate to you that my expertise is strictly limited to "fan.") I mean, I LOVE space. Before I loved baseball, ye verily, before I loved WRITING, I loved space. I remember clipping out pictures from magazines and newspapers and pasting them into this red spiral-bound notebook.
So yeah, this gets my inner supergeek totally geeked up. According to YouTube—so grains of salt all around—"On March 28, 2011, NASA's Swift telescope detected intense X-ray flares thought to be caused by a black hole devouring a star."
Based off that, NASA artists recreated a model of what it looked like, which is the below video and which is awesome.
Space