I was interviewed by Hyde on lazybea.rs for their Over/Under series. Covering Discord, journaling, chess, Letterboxd, strawberries, and more.
brennan.day
Brennan Kenneth Brown is a Queer Métis writer and web developer exploring Indigenous identity, digital culture, and creativity. Personal essays on technology, craft, and human experience from Calgary, Alberta (Treaty 7).
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Write Weird Shit
Dogfooding my freewriting; an experiment on why writers need to embrace the weird, unfiltered, and unconventional rather than fearing AI detection.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.