Brennan's Weblog 🌈

We tell ourselves we want to meditate, learn the language, start the Etsy—and then we doomscroll anyway. On the 'excellent use of free will' meme, Kierkegaard's dizziness of freedom, and Sartre's bad-faith gambler. On lockdown as an accidental experiment in free time, and why it was never about willpower or grit. On Socratic akrasia, Mercier and Sperber's argumentative theory, and the cleverness of our worst selves. On Meghan O'Gieblyn's Will and Attention, Evagrius's watchfulness, and smokers who quit by witnessing their cravings.

Democrats flipped both chambers of Congress on Tuesday, and the markets shed $2 trillion. What we want is safety rather than power, and the Seville Statement's insistence that war isn't in our nature. On Salon announcing its end after thirty years, and why nothing we build is promised permanence. On Ginsburg's pendulum, bell hooks' optimism, Shakespeare's seven ages, and the decomposers that break down finished work so something new can grow.

AO3 went dark after a security breach, and fanfiction.lol doubled overnight. On the blur of breaches and Sam Altman calling it 'terrible' that people have RAM in their PCs. On the end of affordable hardware and DDR4 prices quintupling, 2026 hard drive production sold out to hyperscalers, and what we surrender when we're compelled to rent and lease and borrow. On Repair Cafés, Buy Nothing groups, Snowflake proxies, ArchiveTeam Warriors, and two junk-bin computers joining the server farm.

The holy clean and the October urge to shake the dust and start again. I have gratitude for this absurd life. On Marcus Aurelius leaving his warm blankets and existence as a freefall kicked off a precipice. On thanking the bus driver, coral growth, the Moon's tides stretching the day, and Alberta Time holding the clocks still for the first fall in fifty years. On the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address spoken before anything else is done. On maarsii and kinanâskomitin, the Cree verb that won't let you give thanks without saying to whom. What are you grateful for?

A childhood meditation of closing my eyes to imagine myself grown, and opening them twenty years later to find it true. On myelin, telomeres, and the cellular wear the body registers as mid-life. On PHP2Shell as a canary in the coalmine and why I don't want a read-only Internet anyway. On shaving my head as the first snow settled, the longest stretch of not-writing since this blog began. Big Magic gone quiet, forgiveness as giving up hope the past could be different, and learning where to walk when the sidewalk ends.

A response to Aaron Parecki's response: on the false dichotomy of rewriting with Claude or shutting down, why 'understanding matters more than tools' severs craft from ethics, and the heartbreak of 'code was never the interesting part.' On the leadership responsibility of IndieWeb founders. 'Have fun' as a principle, but not at the expense of others, and Pillowfort—one of the last platforms with a full genAI ban—closing in December. If we don't build a better web, a human web, a living web, who will?

On #RezTok, a berry picker is a man who comes home without the moose. On fruity men and Canada's fruit machine, Man the Hunter and the women who hunted anyway, and pemmican, the food made of meat, fat, and berries that the Métis Nation first stood up for at Seven Oaks. On the serviceberry and its many names, saskatoon wood that became arrows, and the Michif word for a little pear. On bananas being berries and strawberries not, a Supreme Court that decided the tomato is a vegetable because of when you eat it, and a Eucharist that was already made of fruit. And on ode'imin, the heart berry: love, emotional truth, healing, forgiveness, the first medicine of spring.

The IndieWeb's pro-human, anti-genAI consensus has met its own infrastructure: Aaron Parecki, co-founder and the movement's 'single point of Aaron,' now commits with Claude Code to webmention.io, indielogin.com, Meetable, IndieNews, and micropub.rocks. On the fragility of relying on one maintainer. On lowercase indie web vs. uppercase IndieWebCamp, the funding nobody provides, and whether we fork the work, bend the knee, or wash our hands of fifteen years of protocols.

On October 11, 1869, nineteen unarmed Métis stopped a Canadian survey crew by standing on its chain, refusing to let a square grid be laid over our river lots. On the Whanganui River, declared a legal person in 2017 after 140 years of Māori struggle; Te Urewera, which owns itself; the Atrato, the Magpie, the Klamath, and wild rice suing the state of Minnesota. On Two-Spirit, a word that arrived in a dream in Winnipeg in 1990, Balboa's dogs, We'wha shaking the president's hand, and a province named for the sound water makes. Liquid has no shape of its own, and bodies can refuse the container. On Shoal Lake 40, acknowledgement, and rewilding ourselves. Both us, in whole, and our land must be sovereign.

After cataloguing the computers I already own, I asked the fediverse to share things made with their human hands, and they delivered. On itch.io games and the free tools anyone can start creating with (Twine, Ink, Inform 7, Bitsy, Godot, GB Studio), my new digital-art habit on affordable hardware, NoAIlist and ScienceFind, and a /carless slash page. Plus Cloudflare killing Deno, Anthropic letting Claude rewrite Bun, Eltrac's Clojure Webmention receiver, the Golda fork of Hugo stripped of LLM code, ApricotBB forums, a call to invest in small Bubblers, and a tiny atlas of free things.

Workers are being forced to choose between their ethics and their livelihoods—Coinbase employees fired for refusing AI tools, professor Kim Crawley pushed out for refusing genAI in her classroom, 50 Google workers fired over Project Nimbus sit-ins, EPA dissenters purged, a Mount Sinai social worker fired over a 'Gaza Must Live' postcard. On why silence is not neutrality, why those with the least to lose should speak first, and the small acts of solidarity left to us: sign the petition, join the union, say the true thing.

Why I'm putting folk.zone's social services on hiatus? 500 spam users, my embarrassing WriteFreely database blunder, and the legal weight of self-hosting in a Canada without Section 230. On Bill C-22 and Psiphon's planned exodus, slowing down to a wintering and a beginner's mind, sharpening the axe in public on Cosmic Voyage, and why I reach out instead of blocking.

The essay I promised back in May. A history of public-access Unix from Dennis Ritchie's 'fellowship' and Grex's potluck dinners to Paul Ford's drunken tilde.club and ~vilmibm's birthday gift to themself; a tour of the seven tildes I call home (including the starship I captain on cosmic.voyage); what kernel exploits and an rm -rf / taught the tildeverse about fragility; and how to move in yourself.

The Internet isn't a story, but a setting—our agora and town square—where the stories worth telling are still human ones. Drawing on Nathan Jurgenson's digital dualism, Jessa Lingel's gentrification of the Internet, danah boyd's digital white flight, and Amnesty's digital landlords, I trace the enclosure of our commons and lay out my own resistance: redundant backups, Gemini capsules, pubnixes, and an enduring optimism that isn't for sale.

You are a worn-out horse, not a beautiful green stone. You must do the hard, awkward and right thing anyways. On the Cornell Chi Phi lawsuit broken by the Daily Sun's two-year investigation, and how men's exhaustion is no excuse for silence. Men change what other men think is normal. Silence is a choice.