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Brennan's Weblog 🌈

Hi, this is my indie publication and site I built from scratch. 🌱 I write about tech criticism, Indigenous issues, the craft of writing, and whatever I can't stop thinking about. All totally free for you to read, without ads or trackers.

Recent Posts

brennan.day

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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