If you can't tell, I've been trying to scratch an itch. What is this itch exactly? To be honest with you, I don't know the specific answer to that. I just know what I've been orbiting and circling:

I love trying to solve the existential problem that is our (read: humanity's) relationship with technology. I love contributing to the digital commons and using my web development skills to give back and try to create things that are useful to others. I love asking the question "what do we owe each other?" and then attempting the impossible task of building the infrastructure necessary for the answer. And, of course, I love writing.

But love can only take you so far, can't it?

I've attempted to scratch this itch by being a hospice cook for four years, and then by running a creative writing collective for three years. I've tried by sharing my poetry with the world, and by being an academic.

More recently, I've tried to scratch the itch by starting an online public access radio show, or a digital garden, or an inclusive transformative works archive, or an IndieWeb Commons for everyone.

And don't get me wrong, I am very glad I am attempting to do so much. There is a great joy to throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. But much more importantly, I've learned so much and built meaningful connections and relationships with others in the process.

And even as I write this, trying to figure out my next iteration and recalibration, I am an organiser for the upcoming Web Writers' Collective, which I think will answer my desire for a new IndieWeb publication. But I am not leading this initiative—which I admit I am a bit relieved by after running Write Club. I would love the ability to support, amplify, and centre others instead of myself for once.

But the itch still needs scratching. The kiln still needs pottery to burn. The forge still needs iron to fire.

Something I learned recently which is helpful is that 1) I love computers and 2) I love being a sysadmin self-hosting projects with my homelab set up with simple port forwarding.

Often times, I don't even think about it. I effortlessly wander into a new curiosity and inadvertently pour hours of time into something, and the result is a blog post or small project I'm happy with. For instance, right now I've been experimenting with creating a new blog theme, mostly due to finding new typefaces and falling in love with them. Nearly all of them are old style, like Young Serif or Instrument Serif.

But when I go prototyping the theme, I realize it kind of looks like what people consider the "genAI aesthetic". And I'm not sure if this should be demotivating. Is this an example of genAI imitating good principles, or normalizing bad ones? Sometimes, I feel like I'm in a hall of ouroboros-shaped mirrors.

Anyways, switching gears, I am going to try to map out where my intuition is leading me right now. To start, I'm happy that my little 11ty digital garden was at least a wonderful proof-of-concept that it's easy to track word count via Beeminder with some 11ty scripts. But do I need to track word count? No, not really. I've been writing and writing and writing rather effortlessly, so it isn't tracking-as-a-discipline-tool.

I've also found myself continuing to be more appreciative of smaller blogging platforms, like Pika and Pagecord. I really love the robustness of Pagecord's capability of publishing blog posts—something I praised in my recent blog post on phoneblogging. But again, this isn't something I actually need to work on or implement. My blogging workflow is already settled and works well.

I think this is largely why I have radically started over so often in my life. Once I get to a place where I've built everything I need, then what?

I mean, sure, I have been slowly working on compiling certain blog posts into my next book, and also I could definitely collect poems I've written in the past few years into another chapbook, but I don't have the fire in my gut to do so the way I did during my undergrad. I could go and apply for my Masters and return to academia, but I don't have a need to—and it would be detrimental to this blog and my productivity, I think.

I do not want a fifth foundation myth, a fifth thing-I-started. To scratch the itch doesn't simply mean to build more. No, the obvious and expected answer is rarely the correct one. The best writing is inevitable, but not predictable, and I think life works similarly.

I ask myself what I want to do, and also what I can offer to the world. I do not think building another blogging platform or community is the answer. I do know I definitely want to advocate for already-existing platforms and communities that I've been deeply enjoying—some of the more recent ones have been Special.Fish and Ctrl+Shift+3 and Pillowfort and BlueDwarf. See? So much exists already.

Five Patterns I've Noticed

Back in March, I wrote two retrospectives: Constellation of Living Stars, looking back at 120 posts and 250,000 words of writing, and Building brennan.day Part Two, a tour of everything I'd shipped on Brennan.day. It's been four months since then, and so why not take another retrospective look?

On the writing side, I've published 113 more posts since that March post, totalling 267,572 words, more than what I had written in the entirety of the blog's existence up to that point. My blog as a whole now sits at 246 posts and 545,077 words.

What have I've done since then?

Well, to start, I've found a love for interviews. I was interviewed for Over/Under, People and Blogs, and the Wonders of Web Weaving podcast. I interviewed Bix Frankonis about self-erasure, Benjamin Behnke of Bubbles.town about AI and forgiveness, and Frances Widdowson, a residential school denier who messaged me after I wrote about her.

I've started a monthly French series. Et Maintenant, Quelque Chose de Complètement Différent, Brenjour, C'est Moi, Quebec French and Michif, and L'IndieWeb en français québécois. Written entirely in French, about language insecurity, code-switching, and translating IndieWeb jargon.

March's "deep time" throughline was about scale and proportion. Since, I've become direct and imperative about mortality. You Must, You Must, You Must reframes memento mori from fate to obligation, Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze and Earning My Keep both wrestle with what's owed given how little time there is, and A Thousand Cranes makes the daily writing itself the answer. Death is a deadline.

I love writing technical post-mortems. Such as the backlash to fanfiction.lol taught me about cross-pollination, then about the promises I couldn't keep once Canadian obscenity law and tag-wrangling reality hit. folk.zone got announced and then almost immediately paused so I could rip Cloudflare out of my stack on principle. When I build, hit a wall, and the wall becomes the post. Similarly, I wrote my first Mea Culpa about my article on PKMs, the response of which recently hit the front page of Hacker News.

I've been getting into Blogging Studies (if you could call it that) "Compulsion" researches history's most obsessive writers, "Blog Recollection" audits my own archive, Every Commit a Sentence rebuilds git conventions around blog work, and Shake Off the Dust diagnoses the rut.

Reading this back, the itch looks less like a hunger for a new project and more like a hunger to narrate myself in real time, through whatever form is closest at hand. A build log, an interview, a second language, a eulogy, a diagnosis of my own habits. That really isn't an answer, but it is an interesting observation.

Animikii, Niiwin, and Mukurtu

I noticed something while reading about Animikii. They're a Victoria-based, Indigenous-owned tech company that's been building things like Niiwin, a data-sovereignty platform, as well as the digital infrastructure behind the Witness Blanket archive. They're building the infrastructure necessary to answer the question: How do we give what we owe each other? And this is why I've been looking at Indigenous data work.

OCAP(r), which stands for Ownership, Control, Access, and Possession. A framework the First Nations Information Governance Centre formalized in 1998, meaning a Nation owns its own data collectively, deciding who accesses it and how. Mukurtu is a free, open-source CMS built on Drupal and designed so communities can attach cultural protocols to archival material with specific permissions.

FirstVoices is an open-source platform, Django and React under the hood, that's helped digitize reel-to-reel tapes of elders that had been sitting in basements. And the Gabriel Dumont Institute has Michif To Go and Northern Michif To Go, dictionary apps with audio pronunciation banked from Michif experts like Norman Fleury and Vince Ahenakew.

These are important initiatives, and I definitely want to share them, but even these do not spark that passion and desire—and most importantly, compulsion—within me.

Yesterweb

There's a page on the IndieWeb wiki and Melonland Wiki about Yesterweb, a community that I sadly didn't get a chance to join. It started in February 2021 as a small retro-web and hobbyist chat, the community expanded fast after an anti-web3 campaign later that same year.

Organizers experienced severe fatigue trying to match community standards with volunteer capacities, they were building a social and philosophical apparatus around web nostalgia. A place people could share their manifestos. It grew fast and then buckled under the weight of the moderation and ideology work its own founders had designed for it, and it shut down on May 1st, 2023.

At least, that's the typical story. It's actually quite a rabbit hole and this write-up is a good place to start. And I'm sure some of my readers have a much better understanding of the community.

I bring this up for a couple reasons. Everything we make, especially online, is finite, fragile, and mortal. Everything we will ever create are just sandcastles that'll be eroded by the tides.

Beyond this though, it is a little demoralizing to see a good thing collapse under its own weight, isn't it? The road to hell is always paved with good intentions. It's so hard to organize something important and meaningful without skepticism and in-fighting, or milkshake ducking. Sometimes it seems like the only alternative is to build something small enough that nobody gives enough of a fuck about to actively dismantle.

Conclusion?

None of this helps me compass more towards an answer, though it does help me know what isn't the answer. I suppose I just keep blogging, especially for this month. Maybe something will present itself, conjured by the act of writing and thinking out loud.

All I know is I want to get my hands dirty. I want to apply overwhelming force. I want to keep moving forward.

If you have an idea, drop it down in the comments, or in my guestbook, or email me.