man.
man is not a certain breed of anonymous, nihilistic blogger who mistakes callousness for wisdom and detachment for depth. man is different. man is better.
Archive
All 292 posts, newest first.
September 2026
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A Love Letter to the Super Dimension Fortress
I've finally became an ARPA member of SDF, a non-profit public-access UNIX system running continuously since 1987. I give a history from Ted Uhlemann's 300-baud Apple IIe BBS to today's NetBSD network of DEC Alphas and Opterons; a tour of the shell, gopher, and gemini services; how to join, plus two hands-on bonuses: writing a flat-file Perl CGI guestbook and making a site Dillo-compatible.
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Static Site Generators for Beginners
Written for a 32-bit Café thread asking where to even begin with static-site generators. I go over the free resources I'd learn first (and why hand-rolled HTML beats an SSG for your very first site), a plain-language glossary of the jargon docs never define, a brief history from HSC and Movable Type to Jekyll, why git gets recommended everywhere, my own beginner starters, and tiny alternatives like barf, bashblog, and kiki.
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LLMs Democratize Extraction and Scale Malice
Responding to Coyote's essay on data ownership, I look at how genAI has democratized the kind of extraction that once required corporate infrastructure—iLands spam agents, scrapers, and agent swarms—why my apathy-and-ignorance approach to AI crawlers is no longer enough, the two competing realities of AI 2027, and the tools and organizing we actually have: ai.robots.txt, Glaze and Nightshade, tech-worker unions, and the CARE and OCAP principles of Indigenous data governance.
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Creating a Blog in Gemini://
Creating your own corner of Geminispace: why you'd want to blog on a protocol with no JavaScript, no CSS, and no AI slop; where to host a capsule (SmolPub, the Tildeverse, flounder, Gemcities); how the community's gemlog conventions work; and the surprising social life of Gemini BBS, Station, and Astrobotany. Plus ASCII art, CGI scripting, and every gemini:// link I've found worth keeping.
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'Would You Like to Reload a Previous Save?' (➤Yes / No)
Revisiting my maladaptive daydream of waking up at twelve years old with all my present knowledge intact, I weigh the seductive fantasy of correcting every regret—being a better brother to Byron, buying Bitcoin with birthday money—against everything that would be erased: 500,000 words, hard-won relationships, the album that got me through a specific winter. A meditation on the future self who would trade almost anything for one more ordinary day. The door is already halfway closed.
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Proper English is a Myth: There's No 'Correct' Way to Write
Responding to a blog post urging people to 'please learn how to write,' I pull rank with my English degree to argue there's no such thing as proper English. Looking at the 18th-century grammarians who invented 'correctness,' the linguistic racism of policing dialects from AAVE to Jamaican Patois, and why blogging should be about meaning, not mechanics.
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I, CEO: How Medium.com went from being anti-AI to pro-AI
Medium.com went from a defiant anti-AI holdout—blocking GPTBot, rejecting a multimillion-dollar training deal, banning AI writing from monetization—to launching an AI licensing standard and its own AI writing app under CEO Tony Stubblebine. What happens when one man's changing mind becomes a platform's policy, and why I'm still staying.
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There is so much to love and celebrate. Reclaim joy. Be open. Forgive.
Taking stock of myself and the world, I reflect on the overwhelming joy of being alive on this Pale Blue Dot—from the billions keeping civilization running to the unpaid volunteers maintaining curl and OpenSSL—and argue that reclaiming joy is an act of resistance against systems built on scarcity and fear. People are inherently good, and there is always room for grace.
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It's Christlike to Love Immigrants and Transfolk
Responding to readers who invoke Christianity to defend exclusion, I argue that the Gospels consistently welcome lepers, foreigners, sinners, and gender-nonconforming people while reserving the strongest warnings for the wealthy and powerful. On the Christlike call to love immigrants and trans people, and why compassion cannot be rationed by politics.
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A Quarter of a Century Later
On the twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11, I reflect on being five years old and watching the attacks from a green shag carpet in Winnipeg, the cultural aftershocks that still echo through media and memory, and the urgent need to not forget the cruelty and the kindness of that day and its aftermath.
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Oldnets and Altnets: A Guide to Building a Low-Spec Daily Internet Out of Gemini, Gopher, and Terminal Tools
Reacting to the Omarchy and DigitalOcean news, I set out a curated low-spec, text-first alternative to the modern web: Gemini, Gopher, Spartan, Lynx-friendly sites, terminal readers, public Unix communities, and peer-to-peer networks like Yggdrasil, I2P, and Hyphanet.
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How the Mysterious ScreenJesus can DDoS You
How a bug in my own CI/CD accidentally uncovered a novel vulnerability in NeoCities: ScreenJesus, the undocumented screenshot bot behind thumbnail previews, has no rate limits and will happily visit thousands of your pages—and anything they embed—in minutes. Notes on accidental DDoS, opaque infrastructure, and a plea for caching and rate limiting.
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More Mindful Web Development
Yet another technical audit of brennan.day, this time using the Safi Studio Scanner, covering fixes for duplicate <h1> headings, meta descriptions, image dimensions, JSON-LD organization data, render-blocking scripts, and a switch from IndieAuth to IndieLogin—plus what I left alone.
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Tending the Garden I Have: A Current State of Affairs
Taking stock of my digital garden before the first frost: an honest audit of everything I'm tending online, from Brennan.day and fanfiction.lol to my 565-day writing streak, plus the projects I've neglected, the intentional prunes I'm happy with, and the dead plants I need to admit aren't growing—including a shelved radio show, a dormant newsletter, and an unstarted school.
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Love is for the ones who love the work.
Taking the final line of Joseph Fasano's poem 'For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper' as a starting point, I argue that loving the verb of creation matters more than daydreaming the noun. There's a wide chasm between writing discipline and the seduction of genAI shortcuts. The only way forward is to start doing the work—badly, bravely, and now.
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I Want to be Unremarkable
A meditation on the contradiction of writing publicly while wanting to remain unremarkable, drawing on Daoist uselessness, Epicurean lathe biōsas, state legibility, and Deleuzian imperceptibility—and why the only peaceful path is to keep writing and surrender to shared oblivion.
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Normalized Fascism in Open Source: $12 Million Given to DHH
Open source has become a safe harbor for far-right politics, from David Heinemeier Hansson's white-nationalist rhetoric and the Omarchy Foundation's $12 million in patron funding to so-called apolitical projects that treat marginalized contributors as political, and why a united boycott of complicit tech companies is our only way forward.
August 2026
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100 Questions for Webmasters
A hundred-question chain meme making the rounds about how and why we make websites. I answer my way through questions on workflow, editors, CSS confidence, webrings, Neocities and Nekoweb, domain names, accessibility, genAI ethics, Gruvbox, and everything else about being a webmaster.
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SAD MACHINE
Debian's recent vote to permit genAI contributions, alongside the questions raised by the IndieWeb is Punk manifesto, leads me to reflect on the harm-reduction case, the deskilling of creators, the NFT-like grift of genAI output, and the Potemkin village of an industry that has yet to find profitability.
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A Few Small Things
Reflecting on the mental fatigue of posting every day during Blaugust, I share a few small things that cheered me up: a new keyword filter on Bubbles.town, Jan Miksovsky's Origami Projector, and the ongoing, hand-made goodness of the independent web.
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Creating an Open-source Blogging Studies Syllabus
Announcing a new open-source, asynchronous Blogging Studies syllabus that blends writing craft and independent web publishing, built on Codeberg. I trace the decline of free MOOCs, outline my curriculum's anti-capitalist and community-driven pedagogy, and invite contributors and learners to help shape it.
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Notice: Bandwidth Exceeded
After exceeding my free Netlify bandwidth for the first time and wiring up a homelab to run this site, I reflect on how my life has narrowed around writing and code, the friendships that did not survive that focus, and the loneliness of a devotion without a clean resolution.
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Being a Toolshed of Optimism
Reflecting on a reader's description of me as 'nice' and the responsibility of having an audience, I commit to becoming a 'toolshed of hope and stubborn optimism' in my writing. Drawing on solutions journalism, restorative narrative, and thinkers like Rebecca Solnit, Mariame Kaba, Joanna Macy, adrienne maree brown, and Christiana Figueres, I explore how hope is a discipline and how to tether anger and grief to concrete, actionable repair.
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Bubbles.town: Four Months Later
After several months of using Bubbles.town, I share my long-term review of the IndieWeb aggregator. The good: discovering diverse blogs across niche topics. The issues: glacial pace of content changes, popularity contest dynamics, categorization problems, and sparse community participation. Overall, Bubbles is a valuable tool among many for web discovery, but not without its problems.
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A 450-year History of Blogging
A four-century etymological journey from wooden ship logs and logboards to the modern web log, tracing how the word 'blog' emerged from centuries of record-keeping, computing, and online publishing. On Peter Merholz's coinage of 'blog,' Jorn Barger's 'weblog,' Justin Hall's online diary, the rise of Blogger and Medium, and the state of the blogosphere in 2026.
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I'm Looking for Love
Responding to anonymous blogger Unstory's claim that love is a fake story and does not exist, I argue that love is a real, measurable, and physical fact of human connection. On fMRI studies of spouses, Harvard's 87-year Study of Adult Development, oxytocin and Queer chosen family, and the courage it takes to keep looking for love anyway.
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Le Flâneur, et Autres Mots Intraduisible
Cet article de blogue est écrit en français. This blog post is written in French. Sur les mots et expressions français qui n'ont pas de traduction directe vers l'anglais, comme déjà vu, jamais vu, presque vu, dépaysement, retrouvailles, l'esprit de l'escalier, terroir, jolie-laide, sortable et flâneur; la notion de lacune lexicale; et l'importance culturelle et historique du flâneur, de Baudelaire à aujourd'hui.
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IndieWeb Ethos and Pagecord
Responding to Eetu and Pagecord creator Olly's reactions to my article on accessible IndieWeb approaches, I examine the tension between platform convenience and digital sovereignty. Using Olly's recent controversy as a case study, I discuss why being aware of platform creators' values and operations matters, and the importance of eventually learning to self-host for true independence.
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Writing By Accident & Surrendering On Purpose
Reflecting on three weeks of consecutive writing for Blaugust, I explore the tension between writing by accident versus on purpose. Through correspondence with Unstory and the IndieWeb carnival theme of purpose, I contemplate the accidental nature of my blogging journey, the finite fragility of life, and finding meaning in the surrender to compulsion rather than the pursuit of purpose.
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In Defence of Vent Posting
Drawing on my decade of experience as a 7cups Listener and research on emotional sharing, I argue in defense of vent posting. Venting is a natural human need for connection and validation, not a character flaw. Community support and empathy are essential medicine, and we should meet people where they are rather than moralizing their coping mechanisms.
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A Guide to Becoming a Rogue Scholar
I've been weighing grad school against continuing my own open-access publication, so I wrote a guide to becoming a 'Rogue Scholar' using ORCID, citation metadata, issue numbers, print CSS, and Wayback Machine archiving to try to make my static Eleventy site as citable, permanent, and discoverable as institutional scholarship.
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Outjerked by the Trickster
I've been satirized by circlejerk.blog, and I reflect on the history of online circlejerking, Indigenous trickster traditions like Coyote and Chi-Jean, and the concept of survivance. A call for more humour and satire in online spaces, and how trickster storytelling can build empathy through shared laughter.
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WEBMASTER@ a manifesto for everyone
I'm reclaiming the title of 'webmaster' as the multidisciplinary creator who designs, develops, writes, and advocates for their own corner of the web and will save the world. Tracing the history from 1993 to the present, I argue that anyone can become a webmaster with minimal tools. Webmastery is an act of digital repatriation and human agency against corporate platforms and AI orchestration.
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Advanced Webweaving: Auditing Against Specification.Website
I ran brennan.day against The Website Specification's 140-item checklist covering foundations, SEO, accessibility, security, performance, privacy, and resilience. Notes on a broken web manifest I'd never noticed, why I don't have cookie consent banners, CSP debugging with third-party services, service worker CORS issues, a bunch of small improvements, and the list of things I didn't fix.
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Confessions of a Maladaptive Daydreamer
A personal tale living with maladaptive daydreaming—intense, immersive daydreams that replace rather than accompany real life. On Eli Somer's research, the difference between paracosms and maladaptive daydreaming, trauma connections, and how this coping mechanism became both a refuge and a source of enjoyment.
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A Story of the Origins of Religion
On Friedrich Max Müller's theory of naturism and how early religion began with humanity's direct sensory perception of natural forces. From the terrifying awe of lightning and thunder to Ancient Egypt's animal deities that protected against mortal dangers like crocodiles, scorpions, and hippos. A look at the evolutionary arc from zoolatry to anthropomorphic gods, and the problematic colonial baggage in early religious scholarship.
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Suspect Happiness in Pursuit: An Anti-Interview with Unstory
On the 50/10/40 split of happiness research, the Declaration of Independence's 'pursuit of happiness,' and an exchange with anonymous blogger Unstory about free will, determinism, and whether we can choose joy. A diptych of opposing worldviews: humanist optimism vs. anti-humanist determinism, and the strange beauty of two people staring at the same abyss.
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The Weight of Words
On the weight and responsibility of words in public discourse. Drawing from John Rawls's reasonable pluralism and Paulo Freire's philosophy that dialogue requires love, I argue for extending grace even to those we disagree with. A reflection on compassionate conversation, accountability versus punishment, and maintaining hope in a cruel world.
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Our Skies Contain Sprites, Elves, Trolls, Pixies, Ghosts, and Gnomes
Yes, really. Exploring the magical world of transient luminous events in the upper atmosphere: sprites, elves, blue jets, trolls, pixies, ghosts, and gnomes. How scientists named these barely-witnessed electrical phenomena after folklore, and why scientific wonder and awe are not opposed to rational inquiry but essential to it.
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I Would Have Written a Shorter Blog Post, But I Didn’t Have the Time: Creating a WriterDeck
On the KISS principle and Pascal's apology for long letters, the cultural shift away from minimalism, and the growing trend of writer decks. A technical guide to creating a distraction-free writing environment by removing the desktop environment entirely and using terminal-only Linux distributions like Debian, Ubuntu Server, Arch, or Alpine. There's so much you can do in the terminal! There's applications for file management (ranger), web browsing (Lynx, w3m), markdown reading (glow, mdcat), email (Alpine, NeoMutt), IRC (WeeChat, Irssi), music (cmus, MPD), RSS (Newsboat), and writing tools (Micro, WordGrinder), plus document management via git or rsync cron jobs... oh, this is kind of long-winded, isn't it?
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A Social Guide to Being Vegan in a Meat Eaters' World
A guest post I wrote for The Sprout, the Calgary Vegan Society's blog, about navigating social eating situations as a vegan. From private vs. social eating to practical strategies for restaurants, family dinners, and travel, this guide covers how to maintain your values while staying connected to community.
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Free Speech and the IndieWeb
After rescinding a recommendation for BlueDwarf, I explore the spectrum of harm across platforms from X to Substack, and argue that not all harm is equal. On free speech absolutism, cognitive dissonance in platform choices, and where we draw lines in the sand for what's acceptable in the IndieWeb.
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What Remains? My AuguStory
On the shutdown of EchoFeed and the ephemeral nature of services, why I blog (legacy, existentialism, making a mark), participating in AuguStory, academic studies on blogging benefits, and the paradox of 'nobody cares' as both a source of freedom and as a reminder that we all deserve to be heard, seen, and loved regardless of metrics or response.
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Five Interesting Indie Platforms You Might Not Have Heard Of
After deleting my corporate social media accounts, I've discovered four interesting indie platforms and online communities you might not have heard of: Special Fish, Ctrl + Shift + 3, web1.0 Hosting, and Pillowfort. A look at what makes each unique, from brutalist design to old-device accessibility, and a call to support the independent web financially.
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REVIEW: Sufjan Stevens' Carrie and Lowell, Ten Years Later
Ten years after its release, I revisit Sufjan Stevens' Carrie and Lowell, an album about his late mother's mental illness, abandonment, and grief, that's held up a clear, honest mirror to my own life. I trace how Stevens' songwriting about Carrie evolved from anger on Michigan and Illinois to unconditional forgiveness, dig into the many alternate versions of 'Fourth of July,' and reproduce my very first attempt at music criticism: a Carrie and Lowell review I wrote as a teenager back in 2015.
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The Itch
Trying to figure out what 'the itch' is—my drive to create and contribute to the digital commons. A review of past projects, current interests in Indigenous data sovereignty and self-hosting, and the search for what comes next.
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SBSK is The Most Important Channel on YouTube
Special Books by Special Kids is the most important channel on YouTube. Chris Ulmer and Alyssa Porter's decade-long project interviewing neurodiverse individuals and people with disabilities has created a more inclusive world through radical equality, unconditional positive regard, and the belief that all communication is valid. On the channel's origins, its tangible impact on real lives, and why treating disabled people with dignity is ordinary rather than heroic.
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Phoneblogging
Around 2 billion people access the internet exclusively via smartphones, yet the IndieWeb community largely neglects mobile-first design and phoneblogging UX. A casual survey of writers reveals three approaches to mobile publishing: no phoneblogging, partial (drafts on phone, finish on desktop), and full phoneblogging. The IndieWeb must prioritize accessible, simple ways to blog from phones while maintaining independence from corporate platforms.
July 2026
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You Don't Have to Blog
Responding to Dan Q's post on blogging expectations, I argue that you don't need to blog at all to participate in the IndieWeb. Your website can be shrines, art, or anything else. A retrospective on the poisonous gamification and commodification of blogging from the early 2000s, and the IndieWeb as a return to original weblogging where the Internet belongs to humans.
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Wow, I Love the 'Puter!
The desktop computer is a miracle of human ingenuity, from the microscopic precision of Intel's Core Duo processor to the vast possibilities of offline and online computing. On the tragic decline of desktop towers, the IndieWeb and open-source software as alternatives to corporate platforms, and why we should take the time to become system admins and webmasters.
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Playing the Games We Have
The video game industry is in a cynical, exploitative state with unfinished AAA releases, microtransactions, rising hardware costs, and studio closures. But there's an alternative I'd like to talk about: indie art games, the growing retro handheld scene, and my decision to play the extensive library I already own on a Retroid Pocket 2S rather than chasing new expensive hardware.
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Knitting the Web: We Need Interlinkers!
Responding to Coyote's critique of Bubbles.town and feed aggregators, I argue that the IndieWeb needs more interlinkers—bloggers who meaningfully synthesize and weave together the writing of others. On the garden/stream/campfire metaphors for the web, the difference between linkdumps and synthesis, Justin Hall's early web work, and how every link out is a stitch that strengthens the fabric of the blogosphere.
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L'IndieWeb en français québécois?
Cet article de blogue est écrit en français. This blog post is written in French. Sur la traduction des termes de l'IndieWeb en français québécois, l'état actuel des ressources francophones (wiki IndieWeb, Vincent Breton, Radio-Canada), la tradition néologique du Québec via l'OQLF (courriel, pourriel, clavardage, etc.), les termes déjà existants (blogue, fédivers, auto-hébergement), et des propositions pour de nouveaux termes comme PSSA pour POSSE, rétrolien pour webmention, et jardin clos pour walled garden. Un appel à la discussion sur la traduction des termes techniques dans les langues non-anglophones.
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Creating a Digital Garden in 11ty: Tracking My Daily Word Count with URLminder
I decided to build brennan.click, a wiki-linked digital commonplace book in Eleventy, with auto-generated stubs created with eleventy-plugin-interlinker, pure-CSS hover transclusion and footnotes with no JavaScript, and a plain-text /urlminder.txt feed that drives a Beeminder goal.
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Beeminder: Getting Back on the Horse
After deleting corporate social media, I'm returning to Beeminder, a commitment tool that charges you money for failing to complete tasks, to reclaim my productivity. I explain how Beeminder works through externalizing willpower, share my current 17 goals across personal development, learning, creative work, and productivity, and integrations that make it seamless.
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It Was Always a Love Story, Actually
What could a prestige antihero legal drama and a shonen apocalypse epic have in common? As it turns out, love. An analysis and comparison of Attack on Titan and Better Call Saul. Beyond the violent carnage, there's a tender love and labour which these two impossibly different pieces of media share.
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Adding Thousands of Lines to Your Codebase Isn't Impressive. It's Actually Bad.
Vibe coders brag about adding thousands of lines of code with AI, but measuring productivity by lines of code is like measuring aircraft progress by weight. Research shows AI-generated code has higher duplication, lower reuse, and can run up to 446x slower. Neither max lines nor min lines is the poin. Code is what you write after you've found something that needs it.
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Mea Culpa, When Somebody Writes Your Wrongs
Yesterday, Unattributed posted a thorough dissection of my article on note-taking PKMs, analyzing my lack of intellectual rigour, nebulous wording, and poor research. I use this as an opportunity to discuss the milkshake duck phenomenon, my experience with scrupulosity (moral OCD), and how to stay visible while imperfect through self-compassion rather than rule-following.
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Softcore First, Hardcore Eventually: A Ladder for the IndieWeb
Responding to Adam Newbold's 'Hardcore IndieWeb' guide, I argue for a ladder approach to joining the IndieWeb. Rather than choosing between easy platforms and full technical independence, people should climb rungs progressively. Start with BearBlog or Pika, learning hand-coded HTML, then move to static site generators when ready. This applies progressive disclosure to onboarding, avoiding the curse of knowledge that makes experts skip beginner-friendly steps.
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People and Blogs Interview: Brennan Kenneth Brown
I was interviewed in Zachary Kai's People and Blogs series, founded by Manuel Moreale. I share about my background, the evolution of my blog, creative and technical workflows, philosophy on monetization, and advocacy for the IndieWeb.
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What have note-taking PKMs accomplished, really?
As somebody who writes a lot, I've always been interested in personal knowledge management systems and note-taking apps. But what do these frameworks and methodologies actually give to researchers and the broader world? Has there been a meaningful increase of wisdom since these became popular? I went to look for an answer.
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The True, Unglamorous Life of a Writer
Let me be unglamorous and honest about the actual furniture of a writing life. What do my private, invisible days look like? What does it cost and what does it pay? A look at the 4 a.m. writing routine, the physical setting, and what I hope my writing will do for others.
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300 Minutes a Month: Cutting My Eleventy Netlify Build Time in Half
A sequel to my Eleventy build post: this time the bottleneck wasn't the build tool, it was the hosting bill. Notes on caching webmentions and guestbook fetches, killing a dead Discord webhook, nearly breaking my JSON feed, and a git error I still don't have an answer for.
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CLOWN BURNOUT
Clown white doesn't come off in one pass. A personal story about how I can never take myself seriously no matter how hard I try. Notes on the history whiteface and Auguste, the clown egg registry, the Indigenous medicine of laughter, the tyranny of irony, and what it costs to never learn how to come down.
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A Full Guide to Properly Delete Corporate Social Media Accounts
Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads, X, Reddit, Discord. Eight platforms, eight different deletion policies. A full technical walkthrough of what 'delete' actually means on each one, the prep work nobody tells you to do first, and the human-side work the documentation doesn't mention.
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Why Does Conor McGregor Get a Comeback?
Conor McGregor returns to headline UFC 329 tonight after being found liable for rape in civil court, a comeback made possible by the UFC's right-wing politicization and the broader 'Epstein class' culture of impunity for powerful men. On the normalization of sexual violence, Dana White's friendship with Trump, and how public awareness fails to disrupt the status quo.
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REVIEW: Missing 'Missing Richard Simmons'
Nearly a decade after Dan Taberski's Missing Richard Simmons first asked the world where its brightest fitness star had gone, a review of the podcast that helped invent true-crime infotainment—and of the public's complicity in turning a man's right to disappear into a cultural obsession. On parasocial friendship, the ethics of documentary mystery, and why the legacy of Richard Simmons has been swallowed by the very mystery he refused to solve.
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Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze?
A laminated poster with an unsourced quote changed the trajectory of my entire life when I was a teenager. On the immutable transaction of trading days for how we spend them, the urgency of risk-taking in a world that needs it, and what it means to give everything you have before your inevitable departure.
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To My Readers: What Do You Want To See More Of?
I finally curated my blog posts into collections, revealing what I write about most: the IndieWeb, the craft of writing, community, technical tutorials, politics, culture, and more. A call to my readers to tell me what they want to see more of, and a reflection on how organizing my work helps me understand my own writing patterns and what I want to write more of.
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There Are People Who Would Give Anything For Your Ability to Read and Write
In our current year, there is a global literacy crisis. As a result, there's a privilege in being able to read and write. Notes on Frederick Douglass, the problems you don't think about, and why the ability to write is something to be grateful for and use rather than take for granted.
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Publishing My Eleventy Blog to the ATmosphere with Standard.site
A walkthrough of how I wired up Standard.site AT Protocol lexicons into this 11ty blog: from writing a custom publish script to migrating to Sequoia, with code for the link tags, and handle verification.
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A Case for the Ethical Treatment of Generative AI
Are there ethical implications of generative AI consciousness? From von Neumann's self-replicating machines to modern LLMs, we must inventory the problem of other minds, the possibility of AI consciousness, and why we ought to consider the welfare of systems that may experience something like suffering.
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Blogging with Magic Unicode: Simple Doesn't Have to Mean Boring!
You don't need bloat. You can use CSS variables and Unicode symbols to add visual personality to your personal website while keeping it minimal, accessible, and fast-loading. Includes a reference of symbol sets (celestial, elemental, occult, card suits, chess, zodiac, and more) with colour examples using the Gruvbox palette.
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Fixing Work Imports from Other OTW-based Archives
By default, the OTWArchive codebase blocks all imports from AO3, a problem for every fork. My fix includes removing AO3 from PERMITTED_HOSTS, writing a custom Ruby story parser that extracts only the story content from AO3 work pages, and extending the same parser to support imports from other OTWA-based archives!
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Shake Off the Dust!
Completing #100DaysToOffload twice in under two years, and somewhere along the way the wet clay hardened at the edges. Invisible ruts form inside the habits you love, and there's a difference between a window and a mirror in writing. The hermit crab outgrows shells, including the ones that still fit fine.
June 2026
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Wonders of Webweaving Podcast Ep. #8: Brennan
I was a guest on Episode 8 of Wonders of Web Weaving with James G. We talk about writing routines, building community in the indie web, 'start here' pages, Maple Syrup Heists, and more!
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Love and Romance in the Times of Our Apocalypse
86% of American adults aged 18-24 are currently unpartnered; 78% of dating app users feel exhausted by online dating. How are people supposed to fall in love while the Doomsday Clock ticks at 85 seconds to midnight? On the yearning microgenre that overtook social media, Indigenous scholars decolonizing the pair bond, global feminist movements withdrawing from heterosexual relationships entirely, and what it means to be a serial monogamist finally learning the difference between Eros and Agape.
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Vagueblogging and Subtweeting Are Awful
Vagueblogging and subtweeting are the most toxic modes of online communication, yet research shows people prefer them to direct confrontation anyway. On the psychology of strategic ambiguity, insecure attachment, context collapse, and the online disinhibition effect. A case against the culture of passive aggression online, and a call for those with safety and privilege to stop hiding behind the same hedge as everyone else.
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Farming is Why Humanity is Fucked
A mind-shattering concept from a first-year university class that upended how I think about humanity. Daniel Quinn's Ishmael trilogy argues that totalitarian agriculture is why civilization is in peril. On the Law of Limited Competition, the Food Race, and how farming broke humanity's equilibrium with nature.
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On n'a pas la langue dans notre poche!
Cet article de blogue est écrit en français. This blog post is written in French. Sur les différences entre le français québécois et le français européen, l'histoire linguistique du Québec depuis 1763, les sacres québécois comme acte de rébellion contre l'Église catholique, et le michif, la langue mixte des Métis avec ses verbes cris et noms français, son ethnogenèse au 19e siècle, et son statut de langue en danger avec moins de 1 000 locuteurs.
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Every Commit A Sentence: Git Commit Messages for Bloggers
I had 448 `feat:` commits and 417 `fix:` commits. Nearly the same count, for wildly different kinds of work. Here's why conventional commits were never designed for a writer's blog, and the eleven-type system I built to replace them.
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You Must, You Must, You Must
I've been sitting with a single word change. 'Will' versus 'must' in the Latin phrase Memento Mori, and it's shifted everything for me. A meditation on mortality as obligation rather than fate, and what it means to truly reckon with the fact that we must die, and therefore we must live and love.
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An Open Letter to Compassionate, Left-leaning, AI-hating, Animal-loving Meat Eaters
Brace yourself. I'm writing this to people who care about the world's suffering and love animals, but haven't yet extended that same compassion to the animals on their plate. Any environmental argument you can make against generative AI you can make more so against eating meat. This isn't a purity test or a scolding. Just an invitation to not look away.
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COMPULSION: The Writers Who Wrote The Most in History
I've been writing publicly every day for seven months, and I wanted to know what that looked like for other compulsive writers. From Chesterton dictating past midnight, to Chinese web fiction authors racing through 10,000 words daily. What does their obsessive output reveal about the nature of writing itself? The volume isn't the point. The showing up is.
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How Webmentions Work on brennan.day
A tutorial and walkthrough of how I implemented webmentions on my site, from setup to display, including webmention.io integration, Eleventy filters, CSS styling, and Bridgy for sending.
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Choosing Friction and Clear Skies: I’m No Longer Using Cloudflare
I'm pausing my folk.zone project to completely replace Cloudflare in my stack with more ethical choices after a conversation with Adam Newbold of omg.lol, the site that inspired the project in the first place. For in practice, there is no such thing as neutrality, and convenience is not a virtue.
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Blogging Saved My Life
Writing publicly and frequently for the past seven months has saved my life. Six ways consistent public writing transformed me: cultivating curiosity, building connections, investigating rabbit holes, starting new projects, creating accountability, and seeing life's patterns in real-time. An invitation for others to begin writing without restraint.
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Announcing folk.zone: An attempt to build the IndieWeb commons myself.
Announcing folk.zone, a collection of free, community-run internet services I'm building as an IndieWeb commons. Including Mastodon, WriteFreely, Forgejo, Pixelfed, Lemmy, and more. All self-hosted on hardware in my living space. This is infrastructure for the common folk, not for enterprise or scale, inspired by omg.lol and rooted in the IndieWeb and Fediverse principles.
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A New IndieWeb Publication? or: I Want to Start Something and Be Bad at It
Inspired by Good Internet Magazine, I'm starting a new volunteer-run IndieWeb publication tentatively called Long Horizon. Exploring my readiness to launch a digital and physical magazine focused on creative non-fiction and lyric essays, and seeking collaborators who want to build something meaningful on the Internet together.
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Yes, Buy Them a Coffee: Support and Mutual Aid on the IndieWeb
Responding to criticism of 'buy me a coffee' links on blogs, I argue that asking for support isn't commodification—it's mutual aid! Exploring the economic pressures on creators, the history of mutual aid, and why the IndieWeb needs community support mechanisms to sustain independent art.
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Why Make Your Website Accessible, Anyways?
Web accessibility isn't compliance theatre or checking off a list. It's about designing for everyone. Exploring the curb cut effect, why disability is more common than we think, and practical steps to make your website usable by as many people as possible.
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THE LANTERNFLY.
The spotted lanternfly is beautiful and terrible, an invasive species that illuminates even as it destroys. AI-generated content is flooding the Internet, and authenticity is becoming a premium commodity. We must refuse the premise that human writing is a niche product.
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A Ship in Harbour is Safe
Nassim Nicholas Taleb's concept of 'skin in the game' is the idea that true learning only happens when you have something to lose. And I look at IndieWeb principles of using what you make to publishing under your real name. Having risk and real stakes is essential for creative work. A ship in harbour is safe, but that's not what ships are built for.
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I Need To Stop Making Promises I Can't Keep
Building fanfiction.lol taught me that some promises are impossible to keep. I wanted canonical tags for everything and 'write whatever you want' as a tagline, but Canadian obscenity laws and the philosophical complexity of tag wrangling forced me to adjust. Here's what I learned about running a community archive, the legal constraints I face, and the promises I can still keep.
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Be a Lover: Make Sure the Quiet Wheel Gets the Grease
The world isn't full of critics, it's full of quiet kind people who don't get nearly enough time or attention from us because we're born with a negativity bias. We need to proactively choose to be lovers and proactively grease the quiet wheels.
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The Internet Needs More Cross-Pollinators
So, my silly little fanfic project blew up like crazy and received some really negative feedback. And I think I understand why. Exploring the concept of boundary spanning and cross-pollination in online communities. Drawing on organizational theory and the work of Michael Tushman. We need people who move between different online subcultures to seed ideas and build bridges.
May 2026
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Announcing Fanfiction.lol: A Manifesto on Human Creativity and AO3
I deployed my own AO3 fork called fanfiction.lol, an independent fanfiction archive with no invite queue, fandom-agnostic moderation, and expanded content warnings. A manifesto on why fan communities deserve free infrastructure, the history of transformative works from Virgil to AO3, and the challenges of running a volunteer-powered archive at scale.
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Homelab For the Beginner: You Can Self-host Your Own Server on $50 Hardware
A beginner-friendly guide to building your own homelab on inexpensive hardware. Covers finding old computers, setting up Linux, SSH, Docker, and self-hosting services like password managers, RSS readers, and your own Fediverse instance. Digital sovereignty doesn't require expensive equipment.
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Gemini, Gophers, and Fingers. Oh My! Alternative Internets Beyond HTTPS
Finger from 1971, Gopher from 1991, and Gemini from 2019. These protocols offer decentralized, terminal-based alternatives to the modern web. The small web's is in a renaissance. On the solarpunk philosophy of intentional technology, and how these protocols meet you where you are, whether you're on a machine from 2005 or just tired of Chrome's monoculture.
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Introducing writer-cli: a bash tool I built from scratch to blog in the terminal!
After finding the tildeverse and the Tilde.town feels engine, I decided to build my own simple command-line tool for blogging that handles the full lifecycle of a blog post (creation, editing, building, and git push). A walkthrough of the design decisions, the modular architecture, and the tradeoffs of writing 700 lines of plain bash.
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Groundhog Day, Groundhog Day, and Variations on a Theme
I love time loops in media—from Groundhog Day to...hey, wait a minute. Does anybody else feel a weird sense of déjà vu? It can't just be me. Do you ever get up in the morning and feel as though you've already lived the same day?
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Groundhog Day, Savescumming, and Our Endless Numbered Days
I love time loops in media—from Groundhog Day to Haruhi's Endless Eight. What do they reveal about mortality, memory, and the human desire to escape consequence through Nietzsche's eternal recurrence?
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SPICE: Our Antifragile Biology
Spicy food and capsaicin demonstrate hormesis and antifragility in human biology. The science of pain, TRPV1 receptors, and how controlled exposure to stressors makes our bodies stronger rather than weaker.
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Manifestation, the Law of Attraction, Cancer and Abuse
Examining the dark side of manifestation and Law of Attraction movement: its New Thought origins, cultural appropriation of Eastern and Indigenous practices, gender dynamics, and the hidden cruelty of victim blaming cancer survivors and abuse victims.
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/r/SlopcoreCirclejerk and the Men who are pro-AI
With the AI bubble finally deflating, what can we learn from the gender gap in genAI enthusiasm? Looking at /r/SlopcoreCirclejerk's culture of contempt, historical Luddite parallels, crypto bro demographics, and why men are drawn to extractive technologies.
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A Love Letter to Everything
My first IndieWeb Carnival entry—the theme is love letters, and I couldn't pick just one thing. A letter to the infrastructure that holds my corner of the internet together, to the strangers who maintain the open-source tools I depend on every day, and to the IndieWeb friends I've met over the past few months. And finally, to curiosity: the embarrassing willingness to fall in love with a static-site generator or a transit system or a protocol nobody's heard of, which I've come to believe is what kept me alive.
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Cleaning House: Refactoring My Eleventy Config Into Modules
How I decomposed an 866-line .eleventy.js monolith into four focused modules, fixed some lurking bugs, and eliminated dead CSS and dead dependencies along the way.
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On Being a River
Sixty thousand miles of blood vessels run inside each of us, more than twice around the Earth. 330 billion cells are replaced every single day. Humanity has always built civilization beside rivers because we are rivers. Always in motion, never stepping into the same current twice, carrying cells that live only days alongside neurons that will last precisely as long as we do.
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What We Lose with Cultural Extinction: The Red Thread Cut
In 1995, China abducted six-year-old Gedhun Choekyi Nyima—the recognized 11th Panchen Lama—severing the chain of mutual recognition at the heart of Tibetan Buddhist succession. Meanwhile, Michif, a language born from Cree verbs and French nouns that belonged to no one but the Métis People, has nearly vanished within living memory. Both losses are the same act: colonialism's weaponization of continuity. On the extinction of languages, the cutting of red threads, and what it means to inherit a chain with links already missing.
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I Made My Eleventy Build 5× Faster with Five Changes
A walkthrough of how I audited my 11ty build benchmarks and cut cold-start time from 14 seconds down to 2.6 seconds by caching two custom filters and swapping out a bare network fetch.
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Last Online 620 Weeks Ago: Why I'm Loyal to the IndieWeb
You visit your parent's house and find your white Xbox 360 in your childhood bedroom. A friends list full of gamertags that haven't booted up their own console in hundreds of weeks. On the heartbreak of digital disappearance, and why I'm committed to staying findable.
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The Hondius Pneumonia (Low Risk Assessment)
A hantavirus outbreak aboard the MV Hondius in the South Atlantic has sent thirty passengers home across twenty-three countries before a single test was run. What does the WHO's 'low risk' framing mean? The institutional failure of January 2020, and what honest communication about uncertainty actually requires. The incubation window is open. We are watching.
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Where is the Indigenous Cultural Revolution?
Fred Moten and Stefano Harney's 'The Undercommons' describes a space of collective refusal beneath the institutions of the master. On why Black American cultural revolution was possible, why Indigenous cultural revolution is structurally different, and where the Indigenous undercommons already is. The potlatch went underground for sixty-six years. The drum broke out in a shopping mall. The land is the undercommons. We were always already here.
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PATTERN RECOGNITION
Scientists working in classified American aerospace and nuclear research have died and disappeared. The story has migrated from UFO forums to the White House briefing room. A conspiracy requires a conspirator. On grief, and the brain's furious, irrepressible need for meaning. Nuno Loureiro wanted to trap a small star. Carl Grillmair watched stellar streams from a self-built desert observatory. Monica Reza invented an alloy that does not burn. This is not me trying to figure anything out, this is me trying to remember the human beings.
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Announcing My New Radio Show (a Love Letter to Public Access Television)
From Shaw Community Television on Channel 10 to Paper Tiger Television and the Manhattan Neighborhood Network, public access was original community media. Anybody, any channel, no notes from the network. In that spirit, I'm starting a self-hosted radio station built on AzuraCast, automated with a Python cron job pulling public domain recordings from the Internet Archive, and I'm going to try to show up and broadcast.
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Writers Who Burned All Their Words feat. Bix Frankonis
I am a compulsive archivist, terrified of losing my words, but many of history's greatest writers asked for theirs to be burned. Kafka, Dickinson, Plath, Virgil all had their reasons. A meditation on self-erasure, ego, and the difference between the writing and the written thing, with an interview with Bix Frankonis, a contemporary writer who one day decided he needed to be smaller online, not bigger.
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Dreamwidth and Yearning for Humanity on the Web
The sonder and vertigo I feel about people's interior lives. Corporate social media fails to offer genuine witnessing. So, I look to Dreamwidth, a fork of LiveJournal, and fifteen years of unbroken communities. On digital gentrification and the difference between syndication and participation.
April 2026
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Video Games that Secretly Teach Mathematics
A love letter to the mathematics hiding inside video games, and a protest against the expression 'I'm just not a math person'. From parallel universes in Super Mario 64 to the technical exegetes mapping Animal Crossing, The Sims 2, Pokémon, and Paper Mario. Then Balatro and the IEEE 754 double-precision ceiling, tetration, Knuth's up-arrows, Conway chained arrows, Graham's number, TREE(3). A history of notation catching up to the infinite.
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Brenjour, C'est Moi! Sur L'identité
Cet article de blogue est écrit en français. This blog post is written in French. Sur le jeu de mots derrière «Brenjour», l'insécurité linguistique, et l'idée qu'apprendre une nouvelle langue nous donne une nouvelle âme. Sur la recherche en code-switching et en cultural frame switching chez les bilingues, le binaire rigide du genre grammatical en français, le pronom «iel» reconnu par Le Petit Robert en 2021, l'interdiction de l'écriture inclusive par le gouvernement du Québec en septembre 2025, mon apathie face à mon propre genre, le commérage, et la platitude honnête qui émerge quand j'écris dans une langue que je maîtrise mal.
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Floating Up: An Interview with the creator of Bubbles.town, Benjamin Behnke
An interview with Benjamin Behnke, the creator of Bubbles.town, a community-driven aggregator for independent personal blogs. After controversy on Mastodon and 32-bit Café over his use of Anthropic's Claude to categorize blogs and bypass robots.txt signals, Ben responds about the mistake, the removal of the AI classification pipeline, a locally-trained Naive Bayes replacement, and stricter robots.txt enforcement. A reflection on software harm reduction, forgiveness, my Grandma Bubbles, and the fragile labours of love making the IndieWeb.
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Deeds, Not Words: The Myth of Polite Revolution
A refusal of the sanitized story that rights were won by asking nicely. The suffragettes bombed Westminster Abbey. The Deacons for Defense guarded MLK. Mandela was on the U.S. terror list until 2008. On the radical flank effect, the state's monopoly on legitimate violence, and the 46 people who have died in ICE detention while we are told to keep our resistance polite.
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The IndieWeb is Wonderfully Dionysian
A personal plea from me to you to write your own comments. On the genAI plague of LinkedIn, Meta ads, and Medium, and the human warmth of the IndieWeb. From deviantART's old comment culture to Seneca's letters and the Vindolanda tablets, through Nietzsche's Apollonian/Dionysian divide, the Renaissance of Real in A/W 2026/27 fashion, and Charli XCX's Brat. A call to write the messy, human, from-the-heart comment only you can write.
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Being a Citizen Journalist
From Drudge to Salam Pax to Darnella Frazier and Zhang Zhan. The world needs citizen journalists. There has been a hollowing of Postmedia's local press, the radicalization pipelines mainstream coverage fails to trace, Andrew Callaghan's compromised platform, and what I owe under the SPJ Code of Ethics as an independent writer with a blog.
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Follow-up: An Interview with Frances Widdowson
After publishing my piece on Frances Widdowson this morning, she reached out to comment. What followed was an hour of argument, bad faith, and one remarkable final message.
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Frances Widdowson Dedicates Her Life to Denying Residential Indian School Survivors, Then Calls Herself the Victim
Ex-Mount Royal University professor and author of 'Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth About Residential Schools)' believes she is persecuted by grieving Indigenous communities and woke leftist academic institutions. She has raised over $50,000 for her cause.
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Right-wing Conservatives Cannot Make Good Art
Why does reactionary, conservative art in modernity fail? A look at God's Not Dead, the Daily Wire's $100 million entertainment collapse, and how resentment produces derivative, hollow work that cannot generate any cultural magnetism.
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How and Why I Believe in God: The Ballad of Tragic Theism
My testimony, from Dawkins on an iPod Shuffle down a back alley, through Buddhist libraries and a children's hospice, to Matthew's Gospel in a break room chair. My case for tragic theism: a God who creates, risks, makes mistakes, grieves them, and does not stop.
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A THOUSAND CRANES: Why I Write Every Day
My daily writing is a practice of releasing messages in bottles and folding paper cranes—from Montaigne in his tower and Johnson writing in poverty, to Sadako Sasaki folding 1,450 cranes in a hospital ward. What the essayists, drift bottles, and Senbazuru share, and why the attempt itself is the whole math.
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CLEAN AIR: Long COVID Is a Catastrophic Public Policy Failure
A follow-up looking at the real, systemic intervention for the Long COVID mass-disabiling event: Clean air. MERV 13 filters, the Corsi-Rosenthal Box, and the Zadroga Act we still have to write to climb the bureaucratic wall of disability denial, and what those of us with capacity owe to those who are too sick to fight for themselves.
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Memes, Metal Gear Solid, and You
A history of the word 'meme'—from Richard Dawkins coining it in *The Selfish Gene* in 1976 to Advice Dog and the death of shared internet monoculture—and what happens when you take memetics seriously as a theory of culture. Metal Gear Rising's Monsoon delivers the most honest account of how memes shape who we become. The lyric essay resists this process by design.
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Good, Standard Work: Creating the Commons
A defence of digital stewardship, IndieWeb principles, Blackfoot models of collective flourishing, and what it means to plant seeds in a garden you'll never see. From Garrett Hardin's infamous 1968 essay to Elinor Ostrom's Nobel Prize-winning refutation, the tragedy of the commons was never inevitable. It was always a choice.
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GRAIN ELEVATOR COUNTRY
A fifteen-hour road trip across Saskatchewan with my brother, watching the prairie unfold through grain elevators and abandoned towns. The quiet weight of prairie masculinity, the failure of academic knowledge to translate into brotherly wisdom, and the architecture of goodwill found in midnight motels.
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Poetry Saved My Life
I snuck off school grounds to write in a back alley, shoplifting Ginsberg and Neruda from Chapters, and I'm alive and writing today because of that. Recent neuroscience confirms poetry activates the brain's dopaminergic reward system, treats anhedonia, and is—more than metaphor—medicine.
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30: Finding My Footing
My annual birthday essay on turning thirty: examining the cross-cultural agreement—from Confucius to the Hebrew Bible to Zoroaster—that thirty is when formation ends and function begins. My dark year of depression which turned out to be preparation rather than delay, and on writing 200,000 words since, which turned out to be the same thing.
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Loss, and Loss, and Loss: A Eulogy
A eulogy for two kinds of loss: those who die and those who become simply elsewhere. Filtered through Didion, Barthes, C.S. Lewis, and Pema Chödrön. On ambiguous grief, the names written down so they don't disappear, and the sixteen-year-old who already knew that love stems out from verbs.
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Earning My Keep
On the poets who found different terrors inside the phrase 'earn my keep'—Jeong Ho-Seung, Brecht, Heather McHugh, Kim Hyesoon—and the theological dispute over whether grace can be deserved, turning thirty in borrowed time, and the nuthatches outside who do not know the feeder was set out for them.
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REVIEW: Falling Into Sinkhole (Jake Beka, 2026)
A review of Jake Beka's sophomore poetry chapbook SINKHOLE—eleven poems across four continents and three generations, tracing patrilineal damage as a force that reshapes geography, contaminates water tables, and follows you across borders. A chapbook with genuine cosmological ambition that succeeds everywhere it refuses comfort.
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How has a lack of ownership changed art?
On the subscription economy, Walter Benjamin's aura, Pokémon scalpers, the rot of physical media, and the person at the photocopier making what the streaming model cannot touch.
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That's Home. That's us.
We have the first human photograph of Earth from space in 54 years, and I can't help but meditate on what it means to be human on a fragile planet in 2026.
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THE MOON
Born on April 13th, 26 years after Apollo 13's failure, I explore my personal connection to the Moon as Artemis II astronauts journey toward Her. The Moon has scientific importance, cultural naming traditions, religious significance across civilizations, linguistic ties to lunacy and menstruation, and is the first poem. The Moon unites humanity across time and space as we return to Her once again.
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Behind Glass
A few minutes before I begin writing this, I woke up into an anxiety attack. There are a lot of issues I could be writing about, the world is fraught with uncertain violence. This is a story about me, and also a story about North Darfur and Kansas and Haiti and India. I ask this: whose suffering gets reported? Whose death counts behind glass?
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The Internet's Landlord Problem
A quarter of the entire Internet uses Cloudflare. This is an existential threat to the Internet's ideals. I realized I need DDoS protection, but I could not use Cloudflare in good conscience. And so, I'm beyond excited to announce that I'm now using Deflect.ca for my website.
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The Fool's Autopsy
A review of the prank I pulled yesterday, in addition to serious discourse about being silly, including thoughts on the role and importance of satire and literacy. I also share a detailed technical breakdown of the scripts that I added to the prank as well.
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Great News: brennan.day is being acquired!
After MONTHS of hard, gruelling work being completely independent on my personal site, I've been lucky enough to find healthy, sustainable partnerships with several incredible companies. Today, I'm sharing some significant changes to how brennan.day operates—and what that means for you, my readers.
![A trompe-l'œil painting depicting a scattered arrangement of printed papers, pamphlets, and book pages pinned to a light wood-grain surface by a vertical red stick or stylus. At the centre is a crumpled blue card bearing a detailed botanical illustration of a pink cabbage rose with green leaves on a dark background. The surrounding papers include fragments of English, German, and Latin text — visible phrases include 'LONDON,' 'WORK,' 'EVERY M[ONTH],' 'Printed for W. Griffin,' 'ELLARMINUS GENERTVS,' and a German title in red Gothic script reading 'Helmstädt, 1689.' The papers vary in style from English pamphlet typography to German blackletter, suggesting a multilingual 18th-century scholarly or publishing context. The overall composition mimics the look of real layered documents with careful attention to shadow and paper curl.](/assets/images/thumbnails/flower-letters-600w.webp)
March 2026
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The Blogging Übermensch, or, Being the Luckiest Person on Earth
Exploring constitutive moral luck through Nagel and Williams alongside Nietzsche's Übermensch and amor fati, I reflect on the recursive gratitude I feel for who I constitutively am—and argue that blogging is a philosophical practice of self-overcoming: a daily, recursive Yes to existence.
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Incels Won the Culture War
Looksmaxxing. Redpilled. Sigma. Mogging. Cope. Seethe. Malding. Goyslop. Gooning. Memes from image boards became cultural foundation for Generation Alpha. How rich, powerful men have coordinated a harmful online culture for nearly twenty years.
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Being a 21st Century Schizoid Man
My personal exploration of schizoid personality disorder and neurodivergence. From King Crimson's prophetic song to global youth withdrawal phenomena, I examine what it means to live with a rich interior life and limited social needs, challenging pathologizing frameworks and questioning whether 'poor outcomes' are about the condition or the metrics.
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STORYTELLING Part Two: The (Literal) Magic of Writing
Grammar/Glamour/Grimoire. 言霊 & heka. Spelling & spellcasting. The Word. Writing is generative, not descriptive. Cultures across millennia have understood that words conjure reality. Writing conjures, symbols activate the brain, serving as telepathy across distance and time.
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Being Taken Seriously as a Writer
There's tension between creative authenticity and professional presentation in the IndieWeb space. What does it mean to be taken seriously as a writer while maintaining personal joy and rejecting the aesthetic standards of capital?
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STORYTELLING Part One: The Neurology of Narrative
How do our brains physically process stories? The neurology of narrative transportation, brain synchrony between storytellers and listeners, biocultural theory, and Indigenous storytelling traditions that collapse Western narrative structures.
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Over/Under #58 with Brennan Kenneth
I was interviewed by Hyde on lazybea.rs for their Over/Under series. Covering Discord, journaling, chess, Letterboxd, strawberries, and more.
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REVIEW: To be Un Poeta (2025, dir. Simón Mesa Soto)
A devastating character study of a washed-up Colombian poet who discovers a gifted teenage student, exploring the toxic dynamics of artistic mentorship, racial exploitation in the literary world, and the difference between dedication and self-destruction in the name of art.
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Building the Good Web
What does it actually mean to build a better web, and what do we owe each other in doing so? A response to the 32-bit Café thread about trust, onboarding, and the distance between knowing something is wrong and doing something about it.
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Downgrading to macOS Catalina: A Sermon on Obsolescence
A complete step-by-step tutorial for creating a bootable Catalina USB installer using mist-cli on modern macOS in order to downgrade an Early 2015 MacBook Pro from macOS Monterey to Catalina. Accidentally also a philosophical look at planned obsolescence, e-waste, and corporate control over hardware lifespan.
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Trust and Faith in Our Web
What is trust in an AI-saturated internet? And a related question, how do we reckon with the barriers to onboarding people to the IndieWeb? We must cultivate faith in our digital interactions and make independent web spaces more accessible.
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Et Maintenant, Quelque Chose de Complètement Différent
Cet article de blogue est écrit en français. This blog post is written in French. Apprendre le français, le deuil et les limites de la vie — un exercice en vulnérabilité linguistique.
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Software Harm Reduction
genAI code is now in Python, curl, and systemd. We face an ethical crisis. Slopware means we have two possible responses: absolutism or harm reduction. This moment demands the same principled stand that free software absolutists have taken for decades.
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Constellation of Living Stars
I've written 120 blog posts in the past 140 days, averaging 1,900 words per post. 250,000 words total on my blog currently. It's as good a time as any to review my work so far and speculate on the possibilities of my future.
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Fermenting Boredom
Come be bored with me. Utterly bored. Within the default mode network, Heidegger's philosophy, Indigenous dream epistemologies, and personal experiences with hypnagogic states.
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CHILDHOOD: Hypercapitalist Nostalgia & Unsupervised Internet Access
My nostalgia is hypercapitalist. My nostalgia is the worst of the unregulated Internet. I cannot decouple my fondest memories from the corporations and the loss of innocence that produced them, and I'm not sure there's anything wrong with that.
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A More Perfect Morality: The Progressive Failure of Ethics
Liberal democracies selectively apply universal human rights, and there is a progressive failure to extend moral consideration to: Palestinians, Congolese, Rohingyans, Uyghurs, trans people, women, Black communities, Indigenous Peoples, the chronically ill, mentally ill, poor, sex workers, the disabled, the houseless, children, elderly, Jewish people, immigrants, gender/sexual/romantic minorities, incarcerated people, Romani and Dalits, and animals. True universal rights require principled solidarity beyond tribal boundaries.
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Building brennan.day Part Two: IndieWeb, New Features, and Three Months of Iterations
What have I added to my site since I started in December? Quality-of-life improvements, new pages, interesting features, and of course, easter eggs! When you add a little each day, it really adds up.
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How Do We Account for Evil?
Drawing on Susan Neiman's philosophy of evil, the 'missing stair' problem, and Elinor Ostrom's principles for governing the commons, I try to explore the difference between withdrawal due to burnout versus accountability, and argue that ethical communities must distinguish between systemic failures and intentional bad-faith actors while implementing graduated sanctions and accessible conflict resolution.
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Write Weird Shit
Dogfooding my freewriting; an experiment on why writers need to embrace the weird, unfiltered, and unconventional rather than fearing AI detection.
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We As Men Must Do More, and We Must Do Better
An open letter to the men in my life and around the world, pleading that we recognize there is so much work for us to do. A recognition of my own shortcomings and failures. Steps we can take to try to liberate the future.
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r/Calgary Deleted the Top Post of the Day Because I Wrote It Myself
I was permanently banned from r/Calgary for posting my own writing about local public library funding. What does this say about the state of local journalism?
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Why is my local city and public library looking to pay $50/hr to an AI Artist Residency?
The Calgary Public Library is offering $8,000 for an AI Artist Residency while Canadian artists face funding cuts and 16% grant acceptance rates. There are programs like this around the world. Why?
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Build Awesome's Kickstarter is Cancelled
After only a couple days, Build Awesome's Kickstarter has been cancelled and rescheduled due to email delivery issues that ruined the project's momentum despite reaching their funding goal in a single day.
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The Big Arch Distraction (while the World is Burning)
A CEO took a comically small bite of a burger. The internet erupted. Meanwhile, the US is bombing Iran, Trump is drafting executive orders to seize control of the midterms, and civil unrest is reaching a boiling point. We need to talk about what we're choosing to look at.
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The End of Eleventy
Build Awesome is a rebrand of 11ty/Eleventy, backed by a successful $40k Kickstarter. But this attempt to monetize static site generators repeats the same mistakes that killed Gatsby and Stackbit—and misunderstands who actually builds static sites.
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My Blogging Workflow: A routine for nearly a post a day for 4 months straight.
A detailed look at my personal blogging workflow that has enabled me to write nearly a post a day for four months straight, including how I generate ideas, organize thoughts, and maintain consistency.
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How are we preparing for the Long Web?
What will the Internet look like in 2036? 2046? How do we reckon with the challenges of digital preservation, link rot, and building for the Long Web in an age of ephemeral content?
February 2026
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A Room of One's Own in 2026 in 6 Parts: The Domain, the Material and the Immaterial
What do we do with Virginia Woolf's concept of creative space in the digital age? Examining how domains, Queer dance halls, and collective spaces redefine what it means to have a room of one's own for contemporary writers.
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'The Friend of Mankind Is No Friend of Mine': What's the Misanthrope's Place in Community?
My second principle for the IndieWeb requires good faith writing excludes the misanthrope. I want to reconsider that, carefully. Because the question of who gets to be here, and why, is more interesting and more complicated than I first let on.
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The Work Isn't Finished, It's Abandoned: Thoughts on WIP Pages
On executive dysfunction, the tyranny of perpetual drafts, and choosing messy immediacy over cultivated perfection.
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12,000 Generations: On Deep Time, Grief, and the Body
Turning thirty during a breakup while the world unravels. Meditating on the 12,000 generations of homo sapiens that came before us, and what it means to be embodied in this particular moment of deep time.
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Introducing the Toonie Club!
A new approach to creative support: one simple tier, full access for everyone. Inspired by Manuel Moreale's 'One a Month' Club, the Toonie Club offers sustainable patronage without complex tiers or exclusive content.
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An Open Letter to Cory Doctorow: Ollama is part of the enshittification!
A response to Cory Doctorow's defense of generative AI, examining the contradictions in supporting Ollama while championing open source principles, and an examination about what purity culture and hypocrisy really means.
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Won't you be my neighbour?
We need to be good neighours to each other. But what does that mean on the IndieWeb? A look at mycorrhizal networks, Indra's Net, and the importance of building intentional connections between independent websites.
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My Malware Story Gets Stolen; Yet Another Argument for the IndieWeb
A few days after writing about a weird malware campaign, I discovered that half a dozen cybersecurity news outlets had picked up the story. They now outrank me on Google. A metacommentary on the state of internet journalism, attribution, and what it says that a netsec industry has to rely on amateurs to break stories.
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What Can I Offer? The Shell.
I believe writing is sacred medicine, and I have been thinking about the writing I have been offering you over the past few months. Is it healing? Is it good? Please, let me know. I am here to give you an offering.
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Apathetic, Intentionally. Why I don't block AI scrapers on my website.
This is my swan song on generative AI after writing six articles on the topic. Why I'm done with the AI discourse and instead fully leaning into the human and more-than-human web.
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The Many Wonders of Being a Late Bloomer
Being developmentally delayed has benefits, and I am embracing the journey of being a late bloomer in writing, web development, and life.
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The 1% Rule: An Open Letter to Everyone Who Doesn't Post Anything Online
A call to action for the 99% of internet users who consume but never create. If that's you (and it most likely is), then please read and consider what I'm asking."
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The Curious Case of the Triton Malware Fork
Today, a weird malware distribution campaign targeting users of omg.lol and Triton, an open-source macOS client of omg.lol, was found. The attack leverages the trust of GitHub, creating a malicious fork where the download link has been replaced with malware hidden in presented .zip file.
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What is the IndieWeb?
I decide to throw my hat into the ring and define what exactly the IndieWeb movement is, the core principles, and why it matters for the future of the Internet.
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Unseasonal
Reflections on an unseasonably warm February day in Calgary, contemplating the accelerating pace of change in our world and finding meaning in small moments of connection and presence.
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Introducing Ⓜ️ Meddler!
I created a Medium export converter for the IndieWeb that converts your Medium archive into clean Markdown for Jekyll, Hugo, Eleventy, or Astro.js. Available as both a command line tool, and a web interface.
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Our Shared Oblivion
How the inevitability of oblivion can be a source of relief, while also examining our sacred duty to make things better in the present moment through persistent, stubborn action in the direction of care.
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Why I'm Changing the License in Over 80 of My Code Repos After Talking to the Co-Creator of Fediverse
Why I'm Switching from MIT to AGPL and from CC BY-NC to CC BY-SA after a conversation with Dr. Matt Lee about copyleft licensing and protecting free software from corporate exploitation.
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Announcing Three New Free JAMstack Blogging Themes
I've spent the last few weeks working on three new free themes for IndieWeb blogging: Indiepaper, Newsprint, and brennan.jp.net, all of which centre around giving people a place to call their own on the internet.
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AI Artists Have No Role Models
Prompt Engineers Lack Any Canon, Don't You? AI artists have an existential problem: they consume only their own work, severing the dialogue of culture that connects us across generations.
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Substack's Subpar Subculture
The newsletter platform is supposed to be the new economic engine for culture. Yet, they let hate speech fester. Why? The answer is obvious. Writing is treated as commodity instead of sacred art. But there is a solution.
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WriterBox, French Magazines, and Money-Making
A roundup of recent developments: building a terminal-based writing organizer, being interviewed by Le Monde about AI social media, and thoughts on Medium's Partner Program changes.
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No, Moltbook is not the Singularity or AGI. Not even close.
A critical look at the hype around OpenClaw's MoltBook platform and why AI agents talking to each other isn't the singularity.
January 2026
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To Continue with Hope
Writing about the state of the world as a cusp Millennial/Gen Z that grew up in the optimistic Obama era, contrasting that with what today holds for us.
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The Artist's Treadmill: Escaping the Scope Creep of Our Creative Lives
How creative ambition transforms into a trap of endless expansion, examining YouTube essayists, neoliberal work culture, and the pressure to constantly optimize artistic output
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A Beginner's Guide to the IndieWeb for Writers Who Don't Code (But Maybe Want to a Little)
You don't need to be a developer to own your corner of the internet. A guide for writers, poets, and creators who want to escape algorithmic feeds and reclaim their digital presence. No computer science degree required.
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Announcing Fireweed Writing School
A manifesto on learning to persist in your writing and to write anywhere. I'm finally pursuing my dream of being a writing instructor by starting a new, low-cost online class for those ready.
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The Final Coding Bootcamp: A Eulogy for Lighthouse Labs
What is the future of coding bootcamps? Is there a future? And, more importantly, what is the future of junior developers in an industry with an effortless AI bubble?
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More Than One Way: On Ritual, Morality, and the Darkness Beyond Knowing
What is the meaning of life? Is there more than one correct answer? I've decided to take a rather long-winded exploration of how different cultures approach the sacred, the dead, and the transcendent, suggesting that multiple paths can lead to the same fundamental truths.
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Creating an Alphabetical Tag Page feat. Nunjucks Pitfalls
I transformed a messy tag list into an organized alphabetical sections, and there were a surprising amount of gotchas I encountered along the way.
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twtxt: Simple, Decentralized Microblogging with status.lol
I set up an effortless sync between my status.lol updates and a twtxt feed, creating a bridge between IndieWeb tools and classic decentralized microblogging.
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How You Can Support Indie Creators—and You Need To
Beyond tipping culture, there are meaningful ways to support independent creators that don't involve money. Here are eight of the best.
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The Pandemic Never Ended. We Only Pretend it Did
Six years into COVID-19, the world has moved on while the virus continues to disable millions. An examination of the ongoing pandemic, long COVID, and our collective failure to prevent a mass disabling event.
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Computing for the Apocalypse
Building digital resilience through self-hosted infrastructure and permacomputing principles in an uncertain world. Using Docker, Caddy, and open-source tools for digital resilience and independence.
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REVIEW: Light Joy Writing, On Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic
A delightful surprise from an author I initially dismissed. Gilbert's Big Magic explores creativity as sacred play, rejecting the tortured artist myth for a lighter, more joyful approach to creative work.
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What I Have Learned Being on the IndieWeb for a Month
A month of building, connecting, and discovering the independent web. Small technical joys that turned solitude into dialogue. Treat the Internet like a personal playground and lab!
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Posting to Your Static Site with Quill and Micropub
After building an IndieAuth comment system, I wanted to complete the loop by posting content to my site from an external client. Here's how I implemented a Micropub endpoint for my static site using Quill as the client.
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Respecting the No-JS Choice: Making Your Site Work for Everyone
Gracefully degrading my site for no JavaScript, including the CSS-based .no-js approach, testing with Lynx, and creating an informative experience for all users.
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Greenland Belongs to the Inuit
The Greenland debate keeps asking whether the U.S. could take it, or whether Denmark should keep it. The missing question is: What do the Greenlanders want? They’ve already answered: 'We don’t want to be Americans. We don’t want to be Danes. We want to be Greenlanders.' This is about Indigenous sovereignty and the quiet billionaire scramble for Greenland’s resources.
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From 65 to 83: Attempts at Performance Optimization
A humble look into the performance optimizations boosting my Lighthouse score from 65 to 83, including critical CSS, layout shift fixes, and image optimization while maintaining the site's design and user experience.
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Extending the Post Graph Plugin: Adding Clickable Links and Tooltips
A technical walkthrough of how I extended the eleventy-plugin-post-graph to add clickable links and hover tooltips showing article titles.
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Resources for the Personal Web: A Follow-Up Guide
A guide to tools and resources for joining the independent web movement. Discover blogging platforms like Pika, search engines that prioritize small sites, directories for finding like-minded creators, and more.
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Building an IndieAuth Comment System for Your Static Site
A journey through authentication, CORS issues, and the joy of owning your comments! Learn how to build a comment system for your static site using IndieAuth and Netlify Functions, storing the comments in your git repository.
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REVIEW: How do we reckon? On Yiyun Li's 'Things in Nature Merely Grow'
CONTENT WARNING: Suicide | A matter-of-fact memoir about the endurance of loss, where Li considers grief to be regarded as having an end-point, as though there could be a finite amount felt when both of your only children choose death instead of life.
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How Can We Use the Internet for Good?
A manifesto on what we do when the world is on fire: Daywriting. The deliberate, daily documentation of ordinary existence as both personal archive and political resistance.
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How a Taylor Swift Lyric Gave Me an Existential Crisis
The lyrics 'You know the greatest films of all time were never made' is obviously not about films. It is, somehow, about how we’re living on this planet for a fragile, finite amount of time and we have something inert within us to give, to gift.
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auld lang syne: The Commonplace (micro)Log
A simple gratitude journal online, with media tracking and Beeminder integration. Yes, yet another 11ty project technical write-up, but I promise you'll learn something.
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Deploying An Eleventy Site to NeoCities with GitLab CI/CD
A guide to automatically deploying your Eleventy static site to NeoCities using GitLab CI/CD, including authentication, error handling, and optimizations.
December 2025
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Why I'm not a Full-stack Dev
The Internet should be a place where ideas can live and spread without people extracting rent at every turn. Where an emerging nonprofit can publish their mission statement without paying Squarespace $300/year. Where a poet can share their work without feeding it into Meta's engagement.
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To Dance is to Live
Nietzsche and Rumi had something in common: dancing. I wrote this mundane life update and found myself getting into the weeds of what's important to the physical body. What can I offer myself? How can I enact movement each day?
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Building brennan.day Part One: Design, Rainbows, and Accessibility
A dive into how this site is built, why it exists, and the philosophy behind owning your corner of the web.
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What Can We Give One Another? On Public Domain, Preservation, and Living Without Copyright
Could you only consume public domain work for a year straight? With the new year coming up and various IP being released to the public domain, I thought I'd muse on copyright and the future of art and culture.
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Thoughts on Digital Third Spaces
Can the Internet be a place we can visit again? Can it replace what malls were supposed to be for us? A blog post about what we can do with what we have.
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Do It Ugly: On Bad Art and Civic Duty
Thoughts on embracing the ugliness of your early creations as a form of civic duty and spiritual practice. A call to action without judgement.
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Choosing Quiet: I'm No Longer Using AI Editors
An exploration of cognitive dissonance around AI usage, parallels to meat consumption, and the decision to transition to Sublime Text for an AI-free coding experience.
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Bring Back the 90's Guestbook with JAMstack: How I Added Dynamic Comments to My Static 11ty Site
Reviving the classic guestbook for a static site using Netlify Forms and serverless functions, with lessons on distributed systems and race conditions.
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Building an Independent Literary Publication in 2025
Breaking free from platform dependence to build an independent literary publication with Eleventy, exploring privacy-first analytics and sustainable publishing models.
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Why Start Again? On Cycles, Beginnings, and the Art of Returning
Exploring the value of public writing as reference material, why blogging serves as better knowledge management than private notes, and embracing cycles of beginning again
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Dawn of a New Day, Dawn of a New Year
Announcing the launch of brennan.day, an IndieWeb-focused personal site built with Eleventy, hosted on GitLab, and committed to ethical technology choices.
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Worse than Wrestling with God
An all-night debugging session wrestling with web design issues, from omg.lol glitches to CSS mysteries, and the decision to migrate to Eleventy.
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Getting Things Up and Running
Transitioning from private to public writing, sharing progress on the Calgary Groups project and plans for the brennan.day website setup.
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Time to Fun Blog
A pre-dawn reflection on overcoming fear and perfectionism to create an authentic, no-stakes blog for genuine self-expression.
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omg.lol is the Internet We Need Right Now
Take back your corner of the Internet. Stop building on rented land. Stop trusting platforms that see you as product. Stop waiting for some company to make the “perfect” tool.
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Are NSFW AI Companions Actually Just Exploited Workers in Developing Countries?
Part 3 of a series on the AI Crisis
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Hello World!
My first post on this weblog, writing from Calgary on Treaty 7 Territory about returning to independent writing on the open web with simple, enduring technology.
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The Only Real Sport
Romance and Mythology in Mixed-Martial Arts and the Ultimate Fighting Championship
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No, Smiling Friends WON’T Become the Next Rick and Morty
That’s the Whole Point
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10 Ways to Write Like the 90’s
Using the Methods of Journalists from the Past to Inspire Your Writing Today
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I Started Listening To Justin Vernon In Grade School. Now, He’s Retiring As I Turn 30.
Growing Up With Bon Iver
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What does it mean to be a good editor?
Accessibility, Gatekeeping, and Who Gets to be Published
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Fandom is Awesome. Furries are Awesome. Bronies are Awesome. Cringe is Awesome. Fuck You.
What is cringe? The feeling when you see somebody deeply love something you don’t understand.
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Move to a Better Internet in 2026.
Why You (yes, you) Should Join Medium, Tumblr, and NeoCities.
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You will never do anything productive or meaningful with your life.
The liberation of realizing you can’t waste your time.
November 2025
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The Three Times the World Nearly Ended
Ordinary people chose to do the right thing and saved us all. We barely remember them.
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I wrote two dozen articles on Medium in November. It made me a living wage.
What I’ve learned getting out of my own way.
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Tough, but Fair: How to Elevate Your Craft from Blogging to Literary Journalism
On independence, integrity, and telling the truth beautifully. (featuring Better Call Saul and Homestuck?)
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Steal My Work
An Invitation to Theft, A Refusal of Authorship, and Why Your Name Matters Less Than Your Message
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THE ART OF THE MICROESSAY
29 Examples to Get You Started!
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We’ve Known About Thomas King for Over Ten Years.
How do we reckon with Canada’s Pretendian problem?
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The Misdirection
An Open Letter to Conservatives
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Did Joan Westenberg memoryhole Web3 NFTs?
There's a lot to the forgotten past of Medium’s most successful writer.
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A Love Letter to Public Transit
Did you know it's actually better than driving?
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Community Will Save Your Life
But You Must Allow Yourself to Be Annoyed and Practice the Radical Work of Staying
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My Best Advice for Medium Writers with No Followers
My Experience with Medium’s Writers Circle
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THE INERTIA EFFECT: Stop Optimizing
Writers that write badly instead of plan extremely well are… better writers?
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Your Civic Duty to Make Art
On the downfall of NaNoWriMo, democracy as creative practice, the bread we bake, and waking up.
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Gen-Z love dumb phones, the analog, e-ink screens, slow living, community, and longform work.
This will give you the most amount of hope you’ve had in a long while.
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How to Rewild Your Writing Practice
Escape the Sterile Classroom Killing Your Voice. Return to Nature.
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Lovebombing, Psychosis, and Murder.
I was wrong about artificial intelligence. It’s actually so, so much worse.
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BoJack and the Temptation of Suicide
I watched BoJack Horseman from when it premiered in 2014 when I was seventeen up to when it ended. I have grown up with BoJack.
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…How the Hell do I Find Good Creators?
If you’re a writer that’s active and consistent, I’m looking for you. Yes, you.
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In Defence of Rupi Kaur
The Necessary, Complicated Legacy of Canada’s Best-selling Poet
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THE COMPASSION ECONOMY
When a Generation Stops Pretending to Dream of Labour
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When We Get Blackheart
An Essay on Potatoes, Figs, Men, and the Truth.
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The Piss Average Problem
The Age of AI is a Crisis of Faith
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Witnessing Palestine & the United States
Notes on Apocalypse and What We Owe the Living.
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The Current State of the Internet should TERRIFY You
and How I’m Trying to Save It
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Ceremony
What I Learned Getting My First Story Boosted After 10 Years on Medium
October 2025
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Mise en Place for Writers
What Four Years in a Children’s Hospice Kitchen Taught Me About Craft
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THE BANANA MYSTERY
A Literary Question Across Centuries in the East
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Be prolific. Accept every thought. Mythologize yourself. Show up.
How to write like the Mountain Goats to create your own body of work you’ll be proud of.
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Want to Decolonize Your Writing?
Note-taking with Indigenous Knowledge Systems
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Want to be a good researcher? Go down rabbit holes.
A love letter to Wikipedia.
September 2025
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Yes, You Can Write about ANYTHING.
An Essay on Unlikely Connections
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This is how I’m making WRITING* my full-time career.
A Case for Independent Literary Journalism: Why I’m Going All In
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The Dying Art of Having Something to Say
Are you a writer? Do you want to be? Read this.
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The Architecture of Belonging
A Lyric Essay on Loss in Ten Parts
August 2025
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I Analyzed 14 Years of My Writing with Vibe Coding.
How 1,002,243 words of journal entries revealed the patterns of a writer’s mind.
May 2025
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Walking Softly: Navigating the Transformation of a Writing Life
A resource guide for writers in transition, exploring how to build sustainable creative practices through self-publishing platforms, community workshops, mentorship programs, and grant opportunities—while learning to walk softly in a world obsessed with productivity.
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Medium vs. Substack
My experience writing on Medium for the past 10 years
April 2025
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29: Done.
Standing in a Calgary parking lot after my final exam, I trace the journey from high school dropout to university graduate—examining impostor syndrome, the weight of academic achievement, and the realization that education doesn't always provide the answers we seek.
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Disability in Adventure Time
Growing up alongside Adventure Time over fourteen years, this academic analysis explores Finn's permanent amputation as a radical moment in children's animation—examining fatalism, trauma, prostheticization, and the cultural discomfort with non-normative bodies through disability studies theory.
March 2025
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How Do We Fall in Love in the Future?
From watching 'Her' every Valentine's Day for over a decade to witnessing AI's real-world evolution. What are the boundaries between human and artificial love, consent in digital relationships, and what it means to connect when technology mediates our most intimate moments?
February 2025
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From Digital to Analog
A Love Letter to the Handwritten Page
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What If You Created As Much As You Consume?
An examination of the modern consumption trap and a passionate argument for creating as much as we consume. From digital minimalism to analog practices, from solo creation to community building, this essay explores practical ways to reclaim our creative agency and resist the forces that keep us scrolling, buying, and passive.
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The Great Forgetting
Our Memory is Disappearing Before Our Eyes
January 2025
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OUR HYSTERICAL STRENGTH
What Our Bodies Remember When Systems Fail
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The Geometry of Writing
A poetic exploration of writing as sacred geometry, weaving together themes of Indigenous identity, queer experience, mental health, and the revolutionary act of telling our own stories
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Setting Up Decap CMS with Jekyll: A Real-World Example
A Technical Guide to Leaving a Legacy