Brennan's Weblog 🌈

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.

Why I redesigned the blog—trading gruvbox for greyscale and 'Moonflower' palette and Bunny-hosted serifs—as a small ceremony to give my writing weight and gravity. On tradition and ritual as a grammar of gestures and the shared shadows of Plato's Cave. Plus, the Year of the Fire Horse—Japan's 1966 birth-rate collapse, my own Fire Rat clashing with the year, and next year's Fire Sheep as a tender, brave omen.

Why writing—and writing back—is never wasted time. From Patricia Lange's troll whispering to reparative civility, deep canvassing, Daryl Davis, Megan Phelps-Roper, and moral elevation, I defend engaging difficult people as a deliberate ethical practice rooted in curiosity, grace, and love.

The world needs more intentional kindness. There's a manufactured backlash against empathy from Elon Musk to Gad Saad's 'suicidal empathy.' Kindness already operates as a design constraint: the IndieWeb's eleventh principle, Elm's code of conduct, Recurse Center's social rules, Ubuntu's 'I am because we are,' Audre Lorde's anger as care, and Coraline Ada Ehmke's Contributor Covenant. We must reclaim Ruby's MINASWAN culture from the Rails era, and I announce LearnWebDev.fyi, my restoration of Flatiron's retired Learn.co curriculum with 1,672 free lessons.