My first podcast appearance is out!
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!
Remote
Brennan Kenneth Brown
@brennanbrown@me.dm
mastodon 4.5.18MAIN ACCOUNT: @brennan@social.lol
This account shares *only* my Medium articles.
Calgary-based writer, poet & web developer.
🌿 Métis • Queer • advocating for: accessible web, IndieWeb, digital autonomy
I write about: poetry craft, Indigenous literature, disability representation, tech criticism, analog practices, literary community
🔗 blog.brennanbrown.ca | berryhouse.ca
46 Followers
87 Following
50 Posts
Joined March 06, 2023
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#Selfie, #Indigenous, #Métis, #Writer, #WritingCommunity, #IndigenousWriter, #BeadworkJewelry, #FediSelfie, #NewPost, #Photography
the small web is having a renaissance.
finger:// from 1971. gopher:// from 1991. gemini:// from 2019. three protocols with their own communities and cultures. None require a GUI, JavaScript, or Chrome's monopoly.
a gemini capsule runs on a machine from 2005. a chromium browser needs 2GB of RAM.
The Daily Wire spent $100 million trying to build a conservative Disney. Bentkey is dead. Ben Shapiro produced Terror on the Prairie, it grossed $804 in theatres. You cannot purchase hunger, truth, and empathy.
https://blog.brennanbrown.ca/right-wing-conservatives-cannot-make-good-art-why-96e66aa1cc6d
HUGE NEWS: my personal site is being acquired by BuzzFeed. My open-source code is now closed and owned by Meta. All visitor data (retroactively) has been sold to Palantir. Future writing will be sponsored by OpenAI. There's a crypto miner running in your browser as you read this. Every post I've ever written is being minted as an NFT. Site search is now a Google widget with sponsored results first.
https://brennan.day/great-news-brennan-day-is-being-acquired/
Yesterday's April Fools prank went up and... a surprising number of people thought I'd actually sold out to BuzzFeed. So today I wrote a post-mortem.
There's prank etiquette (you should always be the fool yourself), the genuine satire literacy crisis and how it connects to the Balanced Literacy debacle, and a full technical breakdown.
What does it mean to be taken seriously as a writer on the internet… without sanding down the parts of yourself that make the work alive?
My site has a chubby custom cursor. Rainbows. A guestbook. Little weird, joyful things I added because I could.
And yet, some of my essays are now reaching thousands of readers. People are showing up expecting a “serious publication”… and finding something much stranger.
https://blog.brennanbrown.ca/being-taken-seriously-as-a-writer-453198c551f9
I'm super excited to announce that I'm launching https://fanfiction.lol, a fun and discourse-agnostic alternative to AO3! It is still under active development, but registration is open. <3
There are a lot of steps for making a post on your own server.
You need to SSH into the server, navigate to the right folder, manually create a file with the right frontmatter (YAML or TOML), remember the exact date format your SSG wants, open an editor, write, save, run the build, check for errors. Then, if you use git, you need to run git add, git commit, and finally push.
so, I created a CLI tool that does all of this with a single command.
https://brennan.day/introducing-writer-cli-a-bash-tool-i-built-from-scratch-to-blog-in-the-terminal/
"I added +10,000 lines of code to my project thanks to my LLM MCP Agent!"
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 point.
Code is what you write after you've found something that needs it.
https://brennan.day/adding-thousands-of-lines-to-your-codebase-isnt-impressive-its-actually-bad/
The AI bubble is finally starting to deflate. But the culture around it reveals something darker.
I wrote about /r/SlopcoreCirclejerk, the gender gap in AI enthusiasm, crypto-bro continuity, the history of the Luddites, and why pro-genAI culture is rooted in contempt for artistic labour and introspection.
https://blog.brennanbrown.ca/r-slopcorecirclejerk-and-the-men-who-are-pro-ai-33a8815519cd
We spend ~90% of our time indoors. That air is either managed or it isn't. Right now, it isn't.
MERV 13 filters. Corsi-Rosenthal Boxes. Local building codes. School board meetings. The disability denial wall. What those of us with capacity owe to the people too sick to climb it themselves.
git commit message conventions were designed for npm packages and software library authors, not writers and bloggers.
so, i decided to try to fix that for myself.
https://brennan.day/every-commit-a-sentence-git-commit-messages-for-bloggers/
I've been writing publicly almost every day for 7 months, 430k+ words.
So I went looking at history's most compulsive writers: Chesterton dictating past midnight, Simenon sweating through the same shirt for 11 days straight, Chinese web novelists hitting 10k words/day.
But the volume isn't the point. The showing up is.
https://brennan.day/compulsion-the-writers-who-wrote-the-most-in-history/
I turn thirty years old tomorrow.
Across cultures and centuries that never spoke to each other—Judaism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Zoroastrianism—all somehow point to 30 the same way. It was so bizarre to me that I had to write about it.
a history of memes, from Dawkins' The Selfish Gene in 1976, through Advice Dog and the death of shared internet monoculture, to Metal Gear Rising's Monsoon delivering the most honest account of cultural transmission I've encountered.
https://blog.brennanbrown.ca/memes-metal-gear-solid-and-you-57106388f234
a love letter to the mathematics hiding inside video games, and a protest against "I'm just not a math person"
from parallel universes in Super Mario 64 → Balatro → tetration → Graham's number → TREE(3)
a history of notation catching up to the infinite
https://blog.brennanbrown.ca/video-games-that-secretly-teach-mathematics-03570399ac03
my first ever IndieWeb Carnival entry is up. The theme is love letters, and I couldn't pick just one thing.
so I wrote to all of it: the infrastructure, the open-source maintainers, the IndieWeb friends I've made, and finally, to curiosity itself. The embarrassing willingness to fall in love with a static site generator or a transit system or a protocol nobody's heard of.
curiosity kept me alive. I mean that.
https://blog.brennanbrown.ca/a-love-letter-to-everything-6f4094150ee4
a quarter of the entire internet runs through cloudflare. one man's mood determines who gets to stay online.
i needed DDoS protection and i could not use cloudflare in good conscience. so i spent some time actually looking for alternatives. i found something far better.
Philosophers have debated consciousness for thousands of years.
We cannot be certain genAI isn't conscious, either.
https://blog.brennanbrown.ca/a-case-for-the-ethical-treatment-of-ai-chatbots-b77783b7a858
You don't need to be a web developer by trade to have your own website.
The Internet was made for everyone, at every skill level, and we need to reclaim it.
https://brennan.day/softcore-first-hardcore-eventually-a-ladder-for-the-indieweb/
How do we improve the web? The way you improve any web: by adding more connectivity.
A web becomes stronger and more durable the more interlinking threads and strands there are.
When we link to each other in a way that meaningfully synthesizes, the web gets stronger and the ecosystem of the blogosphere improves.
I shoplifted Ginsberg and Neruda from Chapters as a teenager. I snuck off school grounds to write in a back alley instead of eating lunch. I kept going because my notebook demanded another line.
https://blog.brennanbrown.ca/poetry-saved-my-life-f5830f50ef33
I've started a digital garden that also let's me keep track of my daily word count.
Full technical write-up here: https://brennan.day/creating-a-digital-garden-in-11ty-tracking-my-daily-word-count-with-urlminder/
launched a silly web project. it blew up on tumblr. people were mad, then kind, then both.
it got me thinking about organizational theory, boundary spanners, and why the indie web only survives if some of us are willing to be the weird person who shows up at the other table.
https://blog.brennanbrown.ca/the-internet-needs-more-cross-pollinators-3e96cf9fb365
I'm deleting my accounts on the following platforms: Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads, X, Reddit, Discord.
It's surprisingly more complicated than I thought, so I wrote a guide:
https://brennan.day/a-full-guide-to-properly-delete-corporate-social-media-accounts/
I started a self-hosted internet radio station.
AzuraCast. A cron job pulling public domain recordings from the Internet Archive. 78rpm records, old-time radio dramas, LibriVox poetry, CBC audio drama.
But this is really about public access television: Paper Tiger Television, the Manhattan Neighborhood Network, Let's Paint TV. People who showed up with borrowed cameras and heart.
I want to fail in public and keep broadcasting anyway.
In 1995, China abducted the six-year-old Panchen Lama and broke the chain of mutual recognition of Tibetan Buddhism. My great-grandmother spoke Michif and my father never learned the language himself.
Both are the same: colonialism's weaponization of continuity.
https://blog.brennanbrown.ca/what-we-lose-with-cultural-extinction-the-red-thread-cut-fcc929bbb381
Ex-MRU prof Frances Widdowson has raised $50K+ fighting what she calls the #Kamloops215Deception. The "deception" being, apparently, the grief of Indigenous communities over children who never came home.
15 hours across Saskatchewan with my brother, watching grain elevators, compass points in the flat dark.
About prairie masculinity, carrying too much education into the passenger seat, and a midnight motel clerk who broke the rules for me.
https://blog.brennanbrown.ca/grain-elevator-country-86aa527448d4
Black American culture produced hip hop, BET, 27 billionaires. Indigenous North America produced one billionaire—a truck stop chain.
I'm not here to diminish either. I'm asking what the gap means. And the answer is in the direction of dispossession.
https://blog.brennanbrown.ca/where-is-the-indigenous-cultural-revolution-de7c1dbb8ded
why do I write every day?
Theophrastus dropped bottles into the Mediterranean in 310 BCE. Sadako Sasaki folded 1,450 paper cranes from medicine wrappers in a hospital ward. Johnson's Rambler sat unread until someone gave it to the future.
maybe one post in a hundred lands on the right shore. by the logic of drift bottles, that's enough.
https://brennan.day/a-thousand-cranes-why-i-write-every-day/
Land back means land back. Not meaningful dialogue or land acknowledgements. Jurisdiction returned, unceded territory returned, treaty annuities paid at actual value, not 1870s dollars. Canada wrote UNDRIP into law and still won't honour it. The treaties were never surrender, they were sharing agreements Canada broke unilaterally. Flags flown today are on stolen and unreturned land. Return it. Happy Canada Day. 🇨🇦
Japan calls them hikikomori.
China calls it lying flat.
South Korea calls it the N-po generation.
In the West: NEETs, hermits, basement dwellers.
Across cultures we keep inventing names for people withdrawing from social life.
What if some of them are actually fine?
AI is the most Apollonian technology ever built. It generates the statistical centre of all human expression. Beautiful, coherent, and completely unable to intoxicate anyone.
I wrote about why the messy IndieWeb comment is a Dionysian act of resistance.
the word and the world are not two things. they're one indivisible event.
to name grief on the page is to call it into the room. to write "healing" is to begin the healing.
grammar, glamour, grimoire. heka. 言霊. the Word. cultures across five millennia, on separate continents, in languages with no common root, arrived at the same claim.
https://blog.brennanbrown.ca/storytelling-part-two-the-literal-magic-of-writing-c2807e974b74
A man cannot step into the same river twice. The river cannot be stepped into by the same man twice. On Orpheus, Pandora, cellular biology, and what it means to be a watershed.
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.
https://brennan.day/what-have-note-taking-pkms-accomplished-really/
Accessibility isn't compliance theatre or a checklist. It's about making what you create usable by as many people as possible. Designing for disability often improves the experience for everyone.
I wrote about the curb cut effect, why disability is more common than most people think, the history of web accessibility, and practical things every web developer can do today to make the web more inclusive.
https://brennan.day/why-make-your-website-accessible-anyways/
Hardin's "tragedy of the commons" was always a myth. Elinor Ostrom spent a career proving it. The Blackfoot had already been living the refutation for thousands of years.
on digital stewardship, the wood wide web, and what it means to plant seeds in a garden you'll never see 🌱
https://blog.brennanbrown.ca/good-standard-work-creating-the-commons-d7d28bcea469
Looksmaxxing. Redpilled. Sigma. Mogging. Goyslop. Gooning.
Memes from image boards became cultural foundation for Generation Alpha.
Rich, powerful men astroturf’d harmful online culture for nearly twenty years.
https://blog.brennanbrown.ca/incels-won-the-culture-war-9544be7dbf4b
In around a half hour from this post, Artemis II reaches its furthest distance from Earth, with its closest approach to the Moon.
NASA’s Artemis II Crew Flies Around the Moon (Official Broadcast)
What happens in your brain when you read a story?
Your visual cortex fires as if you're witnessing real events. The prefrontal cortex goes quiet.
There's also the Libet gap, Gazzaniga's interpreter, choice blindness experiments, and why the Aristotelian arc is a cultural choice, not a law.
https://blog.brennanbrown.ca/storytelling-part-one-the-neurology-of-narrative-1e52db9e0f59
Clown-white greasepaint doesn't come off in one pass. You need cold cream first, then a soft cloth for the corners of the eyes.
On whiteface & Auguste, Richard Simmons, DFW's tyranny of irony, Wisakedjak & the Windigoken, and never learning how to come down.
For my entire lifetime, no human being had photographed the complete Earth from space. That changed on April 2nd.
On Sagan, the Blue Marble, Gaza, the Golden Record, and why this new image is lit by the Moon instead of the Sun.
https://blog.brennanbrown.ca/thats-home-that-s-us-0d7ce6bc190b
I've written thousands of words about the state of the Internet and ways to improve it. But at some point you have to stop blogging and actually build.
So I registered folk.zone. collection of free, community-run internet services: Mastodon, WriteFreely, Forgejo, Pixelfed, Lemmy, a wiki, a pastebin, IRC, and more.
All self-hosted on hardware in my house. All open source. All free.
Infrastructure for the common folk. Not for enterprise. Not for scale.
If you want in, DM me or email.
Nuno Loureiro wanted to trap a small star. Carl Grillmair built his own observatory in the Mojave because the darkness there was best for seeing stellar streams. Monica Reza invented an alloy that does not burn.
They are dead or missing. The story has reached the White House briefing room.
This is not me trying to figure anything out. This is me trying to remember the human beings.
https://blog.brennanbrown.ca/pattern-recognition-9ddc9c19cad4
I just launched Syntax, a simple static site to test out different coding palettes using Shiki!
17 Dark themes. 11 Light themes. 15 Fonts. 27 Language examples.
→ syntax.brennan.day
This morning I published a piece on Frances Widdowson. Shortly after, she reached out to comment.
What followed was an hour of argument about “truth,” evidence, and what gets centered.
I’ve published the full exchange.
https://blog.brennanbrown.ca/follow-up-an-interview-with-frances-widdowson-66c5736efb6a
You boot up your old Xbox 360 and hover over a gamertag. Last Online: 640 Weeks Ago. 12 years, and you hadn't thought of him in 11.
On the heartbreak of digital disappearance. Why I'm committed to staying findable.
https://blog.brennanbrown.ca/last-online-640-weeks-ago-909e2e3c8ef7