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. medium.com/p/e864da080ab8

On the tradition of citizen journalism (Drudge to Salam Pax to Darnella Frazier to Zhang Zhan), Postmedia's gutting of local press, Andrew Callaghan's compromised platform, and the four pillars of the SPJ Code of Ethics. blog.brennanbrown.ca/being-a-citi...

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. blog.brennanbrown.ca/follow-up-an...

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. blog.brennanbrown.ca/frances-widd...

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. blog.brennanbrown.ca/right-wing-c...

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

why do I write every day? Theophrastus dropped bottles into the Mediterranean. Sadako Sasaki folded 1,450 paper cranes 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. brennan.day/a-thousand-c...

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. What those of us able-bodied with capacity owe to the disabled. blog.brennanbrown.ca/clean-air-lo...

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. blog.brennanbrown.ca/memes-metal-...

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 centuries on digital stewardship, the wood wide web, and planting seeds in a garden you'll never see 🌱 blog.brennanbrown.ca/good-standar...

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. blog.brennanbrown.ca/grain-elevat...

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. blog.brennanbrown.ca/poetry-saved...

Hi 👋 I'm Brennan. I've been writing poetry for 15 years and blogging for a decade. 270+ articles and counting! Here's what I write about: 📝 The craft of writing itself 🪶 Indigenous issues 🎨 Culture + Philosophy 💻 Tech criticism 🌿 Whatever I'm obsessed with brennan.day/start-here/

Just caught a stream of my first-ever boss @fivetail.bsky.social playing Featherbent for Homestuck day!! I did some of the soundtrack for this visual novel back when I was still in high school. They're such a funny duo w/ @veggiebltail.bsky.social on stream!! Go watch sometime and sub!! <3

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. brennan.day/30-finding-m...

selfie time! #Selfie, #Indigenous, #Métis, #Writer, #WritingCommunity, #IndigenousWriter, #BeadworkJewelry, #FediSelfie, #NewPost, #Photography

In around a half hour from this post, Artemis II reaches its furthest distance from Earth, with its closest approach to the Moon. www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-j1...

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. blog.brennanbrown.ca/thats-home-t...

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 time actually looking for alternatives. i found something far better. brennan.day/the-internet...

Yesterday's April Fools prank went up and... some people thought I actually sold out. So today I wrote a post-mortem. On prank etiquette (you should always be the fool yourself), the satire literacy crisis, and the connection to to Balanced Literacy. blog.brennanbrown.ca/the-fools-au...

HUGE NEWS: my personal site is being acquired by BuzzFeed. My 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. brennan.day/great-news-b...

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. blog.brennanbrown.ca/incels-won-t...

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? medium.com/p/5e8d397e1f60

the word and the world are not two things. they're one indivisible event. 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. blog.brennanbrown.ca/storytelling...

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. Weird, joyful things I added because I could. Am I serious? blog.brennanbrown.ca/being-taken-...

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, and myths about story I debunk. blog.brennanbrown.ca/storytelling...

In January 2026, the United Nations formally declared the dawn of an era of global water bankruptcy. Not a water crisis. Bankruptcy. Defined by insolvency and irreversibility. I spent time researching what that actually looks like country by country: 🔗 water.brennan.day

wrote something about what it actually means to build a better internet, and what we owe each other in doing so it's a response to some great discussion that came out of my last piece, and an attempt to be clearer about what I'm actually after. blog.brennanbrown.ca/building-the...

a tutorial about downgrading to macOS Catalina but it's also about planned obsolescence, 62 million tonnes of e-waste, and Tim Cook handing a gold plaque to Donald Trump and calling himself apolitical work close to the metal. high-level tools have opinions. blog.brennanbrown.ca/downgrading-...

I now unconsciously scan every piece of art I see for AI tells before I've even experienced it. This is a terrible way to live. Also: 500k people watched the IndieWeb revival video. A handful built a site. We have a door problem. blog.brennanbrown.ca/trust-and-fa...

There's a repo called open-slopware tracking FOSS projects that have let genAI into their codebases. The well is much deeper than you think. This moment rhymes with free software absolutism, BDFL politics, and old arguments that we never finished. blog.brennanbrown.ca/massive-soft...

I've written 120 blog posts in the past 140 days and I still can't bring myself to take a break. So I wrote a piece about what that's actually been. The patterns I didn't notice until I looked back. The ideas I keep circling. What I think I'm trying to say. blog.brennanbrown.ca/constellatio...

understimulation as creative necessity. the default mode network. heidegger's boredom revealing time. cree mamahtowisowin and plains dream epistemologies as dispatch rather than symptom. my SSRI-thinned hypnagogic membrane. the kimchi metaphor blog.brennanbrown.ca/fermenting-b...

my nostalgia is hypercapitalist and i can't do anything about it kraft dinner. mcdonalds plaplace gamecube kiosks. msn messenger door sounds. limewire malware. omegle. liveleak. pawning the computer to make rent. blog.brennanbrown.ca/childhood-hy...

I'm tired of how we sort people into those whose deaths register and those whose don't. Whose suffering qualifies as the real emergency. Who gets the vigil and who gets the statistic nobody reads. Universal human rights must be universal. blog.brennanbrown.ca/a-more-perfe...

Three months of tinkering on my personal site, and I finally wrote it all up 🌻 Building My Blog From Scratch: IndieWeb, New Features, and Three Months of Iterations Static does not have to mean simple. blog.brennanbrown.ca/building-bre...

the missing stair doesn't get fixed because communities would rather warn newcomers than have the conversation they've been dreading Susan Neiman, Elinor Ostrom, the banality of evil, and a reader comment that broke something open in my thinking blog.brennanbrown.ca/how-do-we-ac...

the linkedin advice to write in all-lowercase and drop em dashes to not get flagged as AI is ridiculous. you aren't fooling anyone. write weird shit. the oil-slick prophecy in gasoline puddles. the one-legged magpie. the chewed, spat out, swallowed again. blog.brennanbrown.ca/write-weird-...

Yesterday was International Women's Day. Today is the day after, which means the work continues. I wrote an open letter to the men in my life and around the world about what it means to show up. What does positive masculinity looks like? blog.brennanbrown.ca/we-as-men-mu...

r/Calgary is totally fine if you link to the Calgary Herald, which is owned by American hedge fund Chatham Asset Management. But you're not allowed to link to an independent publication run locally by a Calgarian.

got permanently banned from r/Calgary today my article about the city's AI artist residency was the top post of the day. 50k views, hundreds of comments from Calgarians who cared about it then a mod deleted it because I wrote it myself. that's "spam" apparently. brennan.day/r-calgary-de...

My article was the top post in /r/Calgary today and was deleted without a reason given.

The Calgary Public Library is paying $8,000 for an AI Artist Residency while Canadian artists earn a median income 44% below average and compete for grants at a 16% acceptance rate. This is happening in arts around the world. I wrote about why. blog.brennanbrown.ca/why-is-my-lo...

They hit their funding goal in ONE DAY and still cancelled the Kickstarter. I have an update on the Build Awesome / 11ty situation. Plus a list of SSG alternatives that deserve your attention. blog.brennanbrown.ca/build-awesom...

Question for any independent authors in my network: How do you format your books? I used Microsoft Word in the past (it had a lot of advanced layout features) but 1) I do all my writing in Markdown now and 2) they literally changed the software into AI for some reason.

A CEO took a tiny bite of a burger. The internet lost its mind. In the same week: the US and Israel launched 2,000 strikes on Iran. A 17-page draft executive order to seize control of the midterms leaked. The Senate voted down a war powers resolution. blog.brennanbrown.ca/the-big-arch...

Font Awesome just rebranded 11ty as "Build Awesome" in al $40k Kickstarter. We've seen this before. Gatsby. Stackbit. NetlifyCMS. Every attempt to monetize the SSG space fails because the people who care about static sites don't want a subscription. 🔗 blog.brennanbrown.ca/the-end-of-e...

I've written over 230 stories on Medium since I joined the site over ten years ago. Where do you even begin with that much? To help people get started with my work, I've decided to make a handy guide! blog.brennanbrown.ca/new-to-my-wr...

I wrote up the routine that's gotten me to nearly a post a day for four months straight. Not a guide, more of a behind-the-scenes. Because you can never replicate someone's output by replicating their input. All you can do is choose joy. blog.brennanbrown.ca/how-ive-post...

25% of web pages from the last decade are already gone. 66% of links are dead. Half of U.S. Supreme Court opinions contain broken links. Link rot isn't a future problem. It's happening right now. I wrote about what it means to build for 2046, not just 2026. blog.brennanbrown.ca/the-internet...