And for the most part, this has oriented me towards good—I want to try to leave the world better than I found it, and make use of my capabilities for the sake of others.

But I am compelled not only to write, but to write in public. A compulsion to show my work and share myself as much as possible. I want there to be a record—a carving in the stone. And I have to reconcile this compulsion toward legacy with the fact that I want to remain, personally, unremarkable.

There's an obvious tension there, if not an outright contradiction. I want to contribute good to the world, but I want my contributions separated from myself. I want people to discuss any good ideas I may have and forget the author. How do I negotiate the bargain between public writing and private obscurity?

For I am unremarkable—I am just some guy writing on the Internet and I never forget that. My opinions don't matter, and I am far more often compiling the original efforts of others rather than investigating things first-hand or breaking a story myself. I am a layperson through and through. And perhaps this is why I would want to remain forgettable—it is more aligned with reality.

There is a Daoist argument that uselessness is a survival strategy—the gnarled tree that the carpenter cannot make good wood from is the only one left standing. You cannot be extracted and exploited if you have nothing to offer. Crypsis is the biological ability—and evolutionary advantage—to freeze and mask your scent, after all. And I think I have done a good job of that, in many ways. Despite my output, I'm not enticing to brands or sponsorships, and there is no real way to make revenue off of me. Good.

Epicurus had the idea of lathe biōsas, live unnoticed—the ethical maxim that we ought to withdraw from public ambition and civic visibility, as recognition invites both envy and obligation. This is the direct opposite of the Stoic/Aristotelian model of virtue requiring a public life.

In Seeing Like a State, James C. Scott describes the concept of "legibility" and argues that state power depends on making populations, lands, and transactions legible. Mapped, named, standardized and countable. In his follow-up, The Art of Not Being Governed, he examined hill peoples in Southeast Asia who organized their agriculture, kinship, and even their lack of writing systems to stay outside that legibility. Illegibility is a method to evade capture.

Similarly, Deleuze and Guattari discuss the idea of "becoming imperceptible" in A Thousand Plateaus. An endpoint of a line of flight: the fixed, representable self dissolved so it can no longer be captured by systems of identity, classification, and control.

We have lost the practical obscurity of DOJ v. Reporters Committee, 1989 given how frictionless search and aggregation have become. But the end-user still has obfuscation—the act of producing signals of excessive ambiguity and misleading noise. If how we act is too confusing and unpredictable, we cannot be predicted.

Of course, how people perceive me is outside of my control entirely. While I can write whatever I want, I cannot control the response—and I likewise cannot control what people think (or don't think) of me. And of course I'm only writing this because my writing yesterday gained thousands of views and dozens of comments. But it will fade and pass just as every other spike and blip has in the past, and I will return to my small number of dedicated, lovely readers.

The most peaceful and relaxing choice is, as usual, surrender. I'll keep writing what I write, regardless. No matter what I contribute and no matter the reception, I will reach the same oblivion as everyone else. And this is exactly why I do what I want. And I am so thankful for this absurd, mostly invisible life I have.

I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don’t tell! they’d advertise – you know!

How dreary – to be – Somebody!
How public – like a Frog –
To tell one’s name – the livelong June –
To an admiring Bog!

— Emily Dickinson, #260

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors

What I'm discussing today is different. There is no room for debate or argument, here—only hard, absolute lines in the sand.

Much of the world has become far too complacent and complicit with people (and their companies) who proclaim and hold far-right, fascist ideology. These are not image boards residing in the fringe corners of an anonymous Internet made up of people who have slipped through the cracks. No, these are wealthy people in power who are blatant and shameless in their support for those who continuously beat the drum of bigotry, xenophobia, transphobia, and cynical accelerationist hatred.

Open source technology has become a culture safe for this rhetoric and ideology, with millions of dollars being invested to continue this status quo.

You need to be made aware of this, and then you need to be vocal and take action.

DHH

David Heinemeier Hansson is the most well-known figurehead here. He is the creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and a Shopify board member.

In September 2025, DHH published "As I remember London", mourning that London is "no longer full of native Brits"—a claim that redefines "native Brit" to mean "white." Developer Jake Lazaroff details how DHH describes a Tommy Robinson march as "heartwarming," where speakers called for "remigration" (a euphemism for the ethnic cleansing of non-white residents) and one speaker demanded that countries "ban halal," "ban mosques," and "ban temples." DHH invokes abuse scandals to bolster his white-nationalist rhetoric, framing non-white men as predators of "British girls," while UK data shows no such racial skew. LibreNews reaches the same conclusion.

Developer Joel Drapper wrote how Ruby Central had lost a $250,000-a-year sponsorship from Sidekiq after giving DHH a speaking slot at RailsConf a few weeks later, leaving the nonprofit financially dependent on Shopify (where DHH sits on the board); Shopify then pushed Ruby Central to consolidate control rather than lose its funding. The Register and Heise both covered the fallout.

But none of this has cost DHH money—if anything, he's only gained. A few weeks ago, DHH announced the Omacom Foundation to bankroll his Linux distribution, Omarchy, which is nothing more than a few vibecoded scripts on top of Arch Linux.

There are twelve "Founding Patrons" pledging a million dollars apiece:

• Tobi Lütke, CEO of Shopify
• Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe
• Michael Dell, Chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies
• Jack Dorsey, Block Head and Chairman of Block
• Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare
• Brendan Iribe, Cofounder of Sesame and Oculus
• Jason Fried, CEO of 37signals
• Drew Houston, cofounder and co-CEO of Dropbox
• Peter Steinberger, creator of OpenClaw
• Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase
• Yunjie Dai, cofounder of TapTap
• DHH himself.

And these corporations are each contributing $100,000 a year for three years:

• 1Password
• 37signals

A dozen of the most powerful executives in tech looked at a man who wrote that a British march calling for the deportation of non-white citizens was "heartwarming," and decided he was the person they wanted to hand a multimillion-dollar foundation to.

I should also mention that the same infrastructure companies bankrolling Omarchy and Ladybird are also the backbone of the ongoing violence of U.S. deportations. This includes Amazon's AWS contracts powering ICE, Palantir building ICE's case-management system, and the use of Salesforce's tools.

"Apolitical"

Andreas Kling, founder of the Ladybird browser project (itself an Omacom-adjacent beneficiary, sponsored by Cloudflare, FUTO, Shopify, 37signals, Proton, and JetBrains), built his project's identity around refusing a documentation patch that would have made SerenityOS's manuals gender-neutral, on the grounds that gender-neutral language was "personal politics" that didn't belong in a technical project. Blogger Kelson Vibber wrote how that became Ladybird's official contributing guidelines, which now bar "discussions on societal politics"—a policy treating the mere existence of trans contributors as more "political" than excluding them. In 2026, Kling posted in support of Charlie Kirk after Kirk's assassination and, per discussion on Lobsters, bristled at being called a fascist for it—a reaction hard to square with "apolitical," since Kirk was a movement figure who, per his own Wikipedia entry, promoted the "white genocide" conspiracy theory and criticized the Civil Rights Act.

Vaxry, the developer behind the Hyprland Wayland compositor (another Omacom-funded project), was banned in 2024 by Freedesktop.org's Code of Conduct team over a pattern of the Hyprland Discord enabling harassment of trans community members, including an incident where moderators changed a trans user's display name to strip their pronouns. Vaxry's own public response framed the ban as ideological overreach by "social justice warriors," while the Freedesktop side, recounted at LibreNews, describes over a year of private attempts to get him to address the toxicity before going public. Hyprland's contributing guidelines now ban "political" speech too.

Enrico "metux" Weigelt forked the deprecated Xorg server into Xlibre as a rebellion against a "RedHat DEI" conspiracy he believes exists. The founding document of the project was a rant about big-tech diversity initiatives, and its code of conduct is a text file that just says "404." FUTO is a funder of Immich and is run by Eron Wolf, a friend and platformer of Curtis Yarvin, the "dark enlightenment" writer whose ideas about dismantling democracy have now found purchase in the current U.S. administration. Brendan Eich, Mozilla's co-founder and now Brave's CEO, used Brave's infrastructure to give payments to Kiwi Farms, a forum whose harassment campaigns have been linked to multiple suicides.

We witness the same pattern over and over. A tech project is declared "apolitical," and defines any accommodation of marginalized contributors as a political act, and keeps the actual politics of the maintainers—nostalgia for ethnically white homogeneous cities and hostility to gender-neutral pronouns—off the table entirely. Because that's just, you know, how they feel. "Apolitical" has never meant a lack of politics. It's meant politics that current power doesn't have to defend.

The Throughline

We have been watching the fragile fury of white masculinity and hate metastasize and fester over the years, from Gamergate's harassment campaigns through years of anti-SJW cringe compilation content mills, the marking of Antifa as the enemy, the tantrum-throwing #AllLivesMatter movement, and the manufactured panic over DEI and "wokeism."

You are not living in the neoliberal-Obama era where basic compassion and empathy are the default anymore. And you haven't been for a long time. Despite their cries about censorship and deplatforming, and despite their persecution fetish, these people are not on the fringe. They have board seats and sponsorships and multimillion-dollar foundations.

It is no coincidence this is occuring as companies and brands return to X, as the United States votes at a Midterm election being interfered with by a sitting president, as conservatives normalize the far-right in Europe politics and culture.

If you want a more thorough and longer list of people, companies, and products, then I recommend reading up on Devine Lu Linvega's Fashware list on Sourcehut, as well as Drew DeVault's list of Weird Little Guys.

You may be in a position where the specific harms and rhetoric being spewed are not aimed at you, and you may have been coaxed into viewing what I'm saying here as overreaction, or as a rabid, self-righteous screed. Millions of dollars have been spent to ensure this, and it could not be further from the truth.

We cannot afford to continue to shrug off the presence of these people and their projects in open source. A united stand must be taken.

Speak up on this. Boycott aggressively. Let people know you don't support Cloudflare, Shopify, 37signals, Dell, 1Password, Framework, Block, Coinbase, Dropbox, TapTap, and any other company enabling the spread of dangerous and harmful political ideologies that will continue to result in further violence and death. And let people know the harm these companies are actively doing.

We cannot allow this to continue; we must be far more proactive and assertive in our fight against the normalization of fascism and the far right. We must be willing to sacrifice ease and convenience, and we must be willing to sever all connections with these entities.

It is our only way forward.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors

There's been one floating around specifically designed for webmasters created by MOUSEcky! Initially, I wasn’t going to answer these questions, since I feel I've covered a lot of them already over the course of my writing, in addition to my interview with Zacharay Kai and podcast appearance on Wonders of Webweaving.

But then I saw that Shen has been keeping an impressive record of webmasters answering, and I couldn't help myself but end Blaugust 2026 with the longest post of the month. So here are 100 answers, written in one sitting, in order and with no skipping.

The more questions I answer, the more I think I might come back and give more detailed responses later. Some questions I feel warrant their own blog posts!

The 100 Questions

1. Introduce yourself. Hi! I'm Brennan Kenneth Brown (he/they). I'm Queer, Red River Métis, 30, born in Winnipeg, based in Calgary/Mohkínstsis (Treaty 7). I'm an independent author and web developer, founder of Berry House, and operator of Folk Zone and fanfiction.lol, and the founder of Write Club. My /about page has more details.

2. How long have you been making websites? Quite a long time, I'd say. I've been tinkering with HTML and CSS since I was around 13 years old tweaking themes on Tumblr. The first full-fledged websites I created were with Jekyll with GitHub pages. What survives includes a music review site, my first attempt at a blog. So, at least ten years.

3. And what got you into the hobby? Blogging and writing! I remember stumbling upon the Markdown language for the first time and was amazed at how human readable it was, which led me to the static site generator Jekyll—because all you really had to do was fork a theme and then write Markdown posts and the rest was taken care of with a few commands. I was already using CrunchBang #! Linux on my desktop computer at the time because my computer wouldn't properly install Windows (which turned out to be a blessing in disguise), and so I was able to follow the instructions and install Ruby, Gems, and Jekyll.

4. What kind of website are you most interested in? I love websites made by people to share their interests or life. There are countless I could refer to. Just take a gander at Neocities for a couple minutes and you'll quickly see what I mean.

5. What's your workflow? I've written a blog post about my blogging workflow, but my web development workflow looks different. I usually get the idea for a particular website or site design and go over the basics—layout, fonts, semantics, accessibility—and then I just start with the index.html (or index.md). Sometimes I start with a SSG framework or theme/template. Other times, I prototype what I want the homepage to look like by itself and then work at the modular layouts, partials, etc. from that.

6. Please link to your biggest inspirations. Buster Benson is probably my biggest inspiration out of everything. I only have my writing habit thanks to 750words.com, but I also found his birthday posts and Codex Vitae really inspiring, especially when I was a lot younger and looking for role models. For the web specifically, I'd say omg.lol, the IndieWeb community, melonking.net, and the dozens of friends on my /blogroll.

7. What's your favourite part about making websites? When the design finally gets to a place that feels cohesive and presentable. I always get anxiety at the start when it looks off and so far from what I envisioned in my head, and I often feel as though it'll never get to a point I'll be happy with it. But then it does! That's a great feeling.

8. And the thing you struggle with the most? Oh my God, everything? Because I work with static site generators, I really struggle with backends and databases. I also often struggle with proper RSS formatting, Nunjucks templating, JSON data, logic in JavaScript, keeping security up-to-date, basic syntax errors... Like really, everything. It is a miracle any of my websites function and work at all.

9. Do you keep the same layout on all of your pages? Yes, I do. And I also want to add you certainly don't need to yourself! But one of the biggest draws to SSGs for me was that you can just write the header and footer and page layout once and then never have to worry about it again instead of copy-pasting it for each page.

10. How confident are you with CSS? I'd like to think I'm pretty good with it at this point after years of trial and error. Brennan.day's CSS is custom and uses no framework. And I enjoy learning new techniques that are added to vanilla CSS, like container queries, :user-invalid, forced-colors mode, @view-transition.

11. Do you know how to correctly use <dl>? Yes! My /style guide demonstrates definition lists as part of the markdown reference. I love the specific, rarely-used HTML tags.

12. What is your favourite HTML element? I display quite a few of them in my HTML Day 2026 project. <ruby> and <abbr> to explain acronyms, and <mark> for highlighting. Things I don't use enough myself.

13. If you're making a new web page from scratch, what is the first thing you do? If I'm doing it FULLY from scratch, then I'd grab a template with good practices, something like this just to give myself a good starting point. Then I start writing. I'll typically write in Markdown then use an online converter.

14. Do you know JavaScript? Yes, I'd say I'm proficient with it. Both vanilla JS and TypeScript. I also use NodeJS and EJS as my backend language of choice. But JavaScript should always be optional for a website's front-end, not mandatory for end-users.

15. How about PHP? No, not really. But I want to! Adam of omg.lol has done some absolutely amazing and fascinating work with PHP and has really showed me that it's worth learning, especially for the upcoming Neato Pub!

16. Does your website have a theme that you stick to? Yes, I use the retro groove colour scheme Gruvbox for the colour palette. I also am heavily inspired by the old-school, classic two-column blog layouts you'd see on WordPress and Blogger many years ago.

17. Are you more focused on content or design? I'm always primarily focused on accessible content. I wish I was better at interesting web design. Take a look at the 2026 finalists for the Tiny Web Awards, they're all so incredible.

18. Do you own a domain name? I own way too many domain names. On Porkbun I have: brennan.page, brennan.cafe, fireweed.school, brennan.jp.net, meddler.fyi, fanfiction.lol, fanfic.lol, theforum.love, brennan.casa, brennan.click, fanfiction.forum, folkzone.org, folk.zone, tilde.land, craft.wang, blogstudy.org, brennan.day. I have even more on NameCheap. Some are in use, some are still just mere ideas.

19. What do you think of nostalgia-focused or "retro" websites? I love them! It's so cool to see how people use the design languages of the past in their websites. Simone.computer keeps a wonderful selection of websites that are designed to look like desktops which often are nostalgic in nature.

20. Is your HTML valid? Do you even check? Good question! I check when I first make a website, but I don't do routine checks on this. According to the W3 validator, Brennan.day has two errors and three warnings. Good enough for me, right now.

21. What are your opinion on buttons and banners? I love them! There's a dedicated spot on my sidebar for them, after all. And I have my own 88x31 badge, free for anyone to grab or hotlink!

22. What do you think of button walls in particular? I'll once again link to Shen with his wonderful page, go click on a wall! I also love these.

23. If you started over again, would you make something similar or completely different? I have started over many times already, and I find myself gravitating towards the same inclinations no matter how I try to renew or reinvent myself. I think this is most evident in my timeline of poetry blogs: b.k. blayze, the Hyacinth Boy, the Pine Draft, and Warsaw Mountain, and finally bkpoetry.com.

24. Are you envious of other people's websites? I would not use the word envy, but I am in awe of people's design talent and skills. There are so many sites I visit that have a user experience that just sparks joy! My philosophy has always been "community over competition." Other people's good sites always make the neighbourhood better.

25. What text editor do you use? Primarily, I use Sublime Text 4. I also use Bear, VSCodium, TextEdit, Geany, and I've been meaning to get into Gram and IA Writer.

26. Why do you use that one? I love simplicity, speed, and a proactive lack of genAI features. All of which have become increasingly difficult to find in an IDE and word processor. I was a huge fan of Atom (RIP) when it first came out many years ago, as it felt really aligned with Jekyll. Oh, how things change.

27. Do you host your image files on your web server, or on another host? Most assets live in the site's codebase repo, which is becoming increasingly unsustainable. I also use some.pics (an omg.lol service) for some images as well.

28. What's your opinion on the Neocities vs. Nekoweb debate? I wasn’t aware there was a debate! They both are wonderful platforms and I'm thankful both exist. We need more accessible ways for people to get into webdev, not less.

29. How much server space would you estimate your main website takes up? The folder of my codebase is just over 1GB including node_modules, and when I build, the generated _site is 437MB (mostly images). Despite these rather large sizes, I'm in the 1MB Club! There are +400 pages generated in about a 4 second build from a dry run, and my site produces 0.07g of CO₂ per visit which is cleaner than 94% of pages tested.

30. Do you keep local backups of your files? Of course! My codebase lives on my local computers as a git repository, and on a redundant USB stick. Build for portability and back up constantly, or accept your work dies with the platform.

31. Do you prefer simple or highly visual websites? I prefer visually-interesting websites that manage to remain accessible and readable, which is a very hard balance to strike.

32. Do you stick to certain colours? The only colours I stick to are all of them. I love rainbows and being colourful, using all colours as much as I can. The human eye can only see so many shades, I want to take advantage of that as much as I can!

33. Have you ever thought about quitting? Quit be a webmaster? If I'm being candid, yes. All the time. There's real responsibility to having a computer in my home that runs a website that has hundreds of users, and I take that seriously, and it's stressful sometimes. But the human spirit is indomitable, and I will continue trying to improve the web and contribute in the little ways I can as long as I can do so!

34. Do you have many webmaster friends, or is it a solitary hobby? Solitary by temperament, social by effort. Melo and Agnes are two of my closest webmaster friends I've made since I started, and both are very inspiring to me. I'm also in over a dozen webrings and I'm an organiser in the Web Writers' Collective, but it all takes real work against my introversion.

35. Do people in your real life know about your website? I'd say so. I shamelessly promoted myself heavily on Instagram and Discord and whatnot before I deleted all those accounts. I don't really have anybody IRL interact with my site, but everyone I know does indeed know.

36. Do you update your website very often? If you check my changelog, I push a commit to this website nearly every day since I started it back in December 2025. There are over 1,400 commits currently.

37. And the overall design, do you change that much? I would say no. If you look at the first archive of my website back on December 28th, just a couple weeks after I started, it looks largely the same as it does now. I make small tweaks and iterate, but I actually really enjoy the design overall and don’t have an itch to do an overhaul as I typically do.

38. Is your website more you-focused, hobby-focused, or outside world-focused? All of the above? I love everything, and so my personal essays and biography sit next to my writing on cultural criticism, tech ethics, and politics. I don't stop myself from adding anything on this site, no topic off-limits, no specific niche. It's very freeing.

39. Do you do web design professionally? Yes, I'm the lead developer and founder of Berry House.

40. If not, would you like to? N/A, since I already do. Writing is also part of my income, through the Medium Partner Program.

41. Do you communicate with people by email very much? Yes, I find that I've been writing more emails this year than any before. I love exchanging letters with people. It's a wonderful and rather intimate mode of communication. But of course I also love public comments and guestbook signings!

42. Do you keep social media outside of your website? I deleted Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads, X, Reddit, and Discord. I still use Mastodon and Bluesky. I also use some more niche social media you can find on my /accounts page.

43. How about instant messengers? Signal, plus a handful of IRC networks (Libera, tilde.chat, irc.social.lol).

44. Do you listen to music while you work on websites? Constantly! Mostly indie folk and singer-songwriter stuff like Sufjan Stevens, Phoebe Bridgers, The Mountain Goats, and Elliott Smith. I also love Midwest emo, post-rock, ambient, and hip-hop. There's quite a few of my faves on my /canon page.

45. Do you keep everything you make on one website, or do you have more than one? Despite the fact that I allow myself to publish anything on Brennan.day, I have many websites! (See my answer to question #18.)

46. On a similar note, do you keep to one topic on your site, or many? Many. I find myself focusing on writing craft, the IndieWeb, accessibility, Métis and Indigenous issues, layman science, webdev tutorials, community, disability, genAI ethics, philosophy, music, and whatever else grabs me.

47. Do you present your real self, or at least try? We are always in a state of performance in a social setting, no matter how authentic and honest we attempt to be, on or off the Internet. Sociology aside, I do try to be genuine and as close to myself as I can be on here. It would be far too exhausting to be anything else, really.

48. Have you ever made a good friend thanks to your website? Yes, absolutely! My /blogroll has a "Friends!" section of people I have been lucky enough to meet through the IndieWeb.

49. Are you happy with the way HTML and CSS currently work? I think my answer is no? It is a little bonkers you have to write a reset.css stylesheet whenever creating a webpage that you want to look the same in any browser, but I suppose that is the price paid for a free and open protocol. I guess HTML/CSS are fine if used responsibly, but the browsers we use and the most popular frameworks are so heavy and bloated. The Internet does not need to be complex or resource-intensive, and I am increasingly appreciative of the Gemini protocol because of that.

50. What are practices that you think people should avoid? Many. Dark patterns, invasive analytics, unnecessary JS frameworks, clickbait, SEO-optimized garbage, and AI-generated content passed off as human. Just be honest, try your best. Use your own hands, hearts, and mind.

51. What about under-utilised practices? I don't know if these are under-utilised, but I'd say RSS/Atom feeds, semantic HTML, webmentions, progressive enhancement, and plain-text/Markdown workflows.

52. Do you use a lot of semantic HTML? Or are you guilty of generic structure? I love semantic HTML. Divs and spans everywhere would confuse me more (and are worse for accessibility). Headers are headers, lists are lists, forms are forms.

53. Do you consider different browsers? Yes! I check my sites on Firefox, Chromium, Lynx, and on iOS and Android devices. Brennan.day looks a little different depending on your operating system since I use system fonts instead of embedded fonts, but it is at a functional parity.

54. Speaking of, what's your preferred browser? I have been a Firefox user forever. But since their baffling push towards genAI, I have been trying various forks: Palemoon, Iceweasel, Waterfox, but I find myself returning back to FF.

55. And what OS are you on? macOS Sequoia 15 on a 2025 MacBook Air (M4) daily, and Debian-based Linux (BunsenLabs) on my ThinkPads and desktop.

56. Do you have a strong opinion on that, or do you just happen to use it? I've always loved the stability and brutalist aesthetic of Debian-based distros (though that's now being questioned), and I use Mac day-to-day for the reasons you always hear: the trackpad, keyboard, screen, integration, devtools, etc. It really does just work, though I still haven't upgraded to Tahoe because it seems to be getting worse. Maybe Golden Gate will fix things.

57. Are your websites mobile-friendly? Yes, very much so. I explicitly design for a responsive experience across devices. See phoneblogging.

58. What are your thoughts on autoplay? I used to love having an autoplaying music playlist on my Tumblr, it gave my blog such a mood. But of course, I recognize now that this is universally a terrible and user-hostile feature. There is never a reason to have something autoplay unless it is the sole purpose of a webpage.

59. What are your thoughts on webrings? Are you in any? I love them! I'm in many: Bucketfish, Hotline, Static.Quest, IndieWeb, the a11y Webring, Fediring, XXIIVV, and others. I wrote a whole post about it, Won't you be my neighbour?

60. Do you have any web shrines? Hm, I don't think so. You could say that my page about Winnipeg is a shrine. I should make shrines though, the world needs more of them.

61. Are your websites "cliché", in your opinion? I don't think they're cliché, but I do think all of my websites are rather boring and use predictable, obvious layouts. But I'm okay with this since it means I can make them accessible.

62. What is your ideal website? Honestly? I think Brennan.day is close to that. A durable, useful, human-first archive that serves writers, open-source devs, readers, and small organizations instead of feeds or engagement metrics.

63. Are you an artist? Do you draw or design your own assets? I've got design tools in my kit (GIMP, Inkscape), I draw a little bit sometimes, and have past lives as a photographer and a musician, but I don't hand-draw my own site graphics.

64. What are your favourite resource sites? 32-bit Café's Personal Web Resource List, and everything else I list in my WEBMASTER@ Manifesto

65. Is there a habit you just can't get away from no matter how hard you try? Self-quantification. I track my steps, sleep, chess puzzles, word counts and a lot more on Beeminder. Also, as you can see, writing as well.

66. What's your biggest advice for a new webmaster? You are capable of learning what's needed to be learned, I promise. And the bare minimum is all you need: a computer, a text editor, a way to host. Read the WEBMASTER@ Manifesto for my full pep talk!

67. Do you keep all your styling in CSS? Or do you hard-code some? My CSS is fairly well organized into multiple stylesheets. I really dislike inline CSS because it often violates the DRY principle of writing things out only once and it gets really hard to keep track of.

68. What do you think of frameset layouts? These are really before my time. I wouldn't use them myself, but I think it's really cool so long as it works for things like screen readers, keyboard navigation, etc.

69. How about table-based layouts? Same as above, although I will add this hilarious rant found by Shen about how people should be using tables instead of CSS. It's so hard to wrap my head around!

70. Do you subscribe to the ideas of "one-column", "two-column" and "three-column" layouts? Yes, absolutely. My site runs a two-column layout with a sidebar, which goes underneath of the main content in mobile view.

71. Do you spend longer on the HTML or the CSS? According to WakaTime, I've spent twice the amount of time on HTML as I have CSS.

72. Have you ever made a page with no CSS? I tried really hard to do so for my HTML Day 2026 project. This is the CSS I managed to golf for it:

    body{max-width:70rem;margin:0 auto;
        background:radial-gradient(circle at center, 
        #c6ffca 0%, #ffffff 60%, #ffffff 100%);
        min-height:100vh;background-attachment:fixed;
        background-size:cover;background-position:center;}
    @media(max-width:768px){
        body{max-width:100%;padding-left:1.5rem;padding-right:1.5rem;}
    }
    pre,code{overflow-x:auto;max-width:100%;word-wrap:break-word;}
    @keyframes marquee {
        0% { transform: translateX(0); }
        100% { transform: translateX(-50%); }
    }
    marquee {
        display: block;
        width: 100%;
        overflow: hidden;
        white-space: nowrap;
    }
    marquee span {
        display: inline-block;
        animation: marquee 30s linear infinite;
    }

73. Do you ever find yourself making layouts with nothing to put on them? Yes, sort of. I build a lot of standalone JAMstack themes for other people's future content, separate from my own writing.

74. Would you consider yourself a beginner? Or advanced? I guess I'm a bit of a static-site generator/JAMstack specialist with over ten years of experience by now, but I still very much feel like a beginner, or just a hobbyist. There's still so much for me to learn and understand!

75. Do you have a habit of looking at the source code of websites you visit? If it's a website with a design I particularly admire, I usually do. Also if I'm trying to properly cite a webpage I'll see if the source code has something that's missing (author name, date published, etc.). And, cheekily, sometimes I check to see if a CMS or theme is being used for fun.

76. How did YOU learn how to make websites? As I mentioned earlier, doing the HTML/CSS for my Tumblr blogs back when I was a teenager. I also have used Lynda (now LinkedIn Learning), Codecademy, and FreeCodeCamp for self-directed learning. But I also studied software development for a year at SAIT in 2019 and then attended a full-stack web bootcamp called EvolveU in 2020.

77. Do you ever force elements to do things they're not supposed to? I try not to, but sometimes certain frameworks and platforms require the dreaded !important CSS keyword flag.

78. Thoughts on floating elements? Should be used sparingly and in the right context, like wrapping text around an inline element, eg. images, icons, or pull-quotes. There's always an exception to every rule.

79. When you're sizing stuff, what do you use first? The right answer here is rem, but I still often use pixels due to force of habit.

80. Do you have a favourite font? I used to really love EB Garamond but I've used it so often that it's starting to wear on me. Now I'm absolutely loving bold Old Style serifs like Young Serif. More generally speaking though, I enjoy Geometric Humanist for headings, Old Style for body text, Monospace Code for code — all system fonts via Modern Font Stacks.

81. Would you run a website with another person? I would absolutely love to. If anybody reading this is interested in that idea, please hit me up!

82. Do you surf the Web to find new personal websites very often? Yes, definitely! I use various directories, blogrolls, aggregators, anything that lets me find new personal websites and people.

83. Do you bookmark other people's websites? How would you feel knowing someone else bookmarked yours? I'm so bad at remembering to bookmark in general. It's a habit I absolutely need to reinforce more. If I don’t note something in a blog post immediately it usually vanishes from my mind. But I guess my /blogroll is a bit of a bookmark list. And I'd be touched to know someone bookmarked mine!

84. What do you want people to be most impressed with when they see your website? Oh goodness, I'm not trying to impress anyone. I hope they enjoy the custom cursor and rainbows and little hover animations, though! And maybe the couple easter eggs my website has.

85. Are you interested in technology outside of websites? Do you collect? You bet. I'm into mechanical keyboards, ThinkPads, retro handhelds, and single-use devices in general.

86. How often and for how long are you online? Very often, very long. I try to step away from screens as much as possible and only use them for work rather than leisure, but I find myself working often.

87. When it comes to your website, who is your target audience? I explicitly don't have an audience in mind for my website. I write for myself, and I find that paradoxically makes the content more enjoyable for a larger amount of people as a result.

88. Have you ever been interested in XHTML? Oh goodness, another piece of history before my time. I'd say in passing, like while researching XFN (XHTML Friends Network) for semantic rel links between sites. Not a personal enthusiasm so much as a historical footnote.

89. Do you program in general? A little bit. I dabble in Python, Ruby, TypeScript, shell scripts, across various tools and side projects. See /projects.

90. Speaking of programs that help you make websites, what do you think of static site generators (SSGs)? Obviously I love them, I grew up with them! Right now, I use Eleventy as my primary, but I also often use Hugo. Jekyll has sadly become too slow with too many dependencies in comparison, but I still maintain quite a few Jekyll projects from earlier years.

91. Do you keep a hitcounter? No, I don't. I lean on privacy-focused analytics (Umami and NeatStats) instead, though I have a soft spot for hitcounters as GeoCities-era culture.

92. Do you frequent forums? Yes! 32-bit Café (Discourse), the MelonLand Forum, and the BBS communities on tilde.town and tilde.club.

93. Do you write your page content directly into the editor, or do you prepare it elsewhere? Drafts start as Markdown on 750 Words, which I've been using since 2011. Once I reach 750 words then I move over to writing the rest in Sublime, typically.

94. Do you think you appear cool to others? Nah, probably not.

95. Are you embarrassed of your old work? Have you ever deleted everything out of shame? No, quite the opposite. I used to delete everything out of an impulse to start fresh and escape myself, but now I try to archive and retain absolutely everything I do. My first book, The Dogwood Verses was my attempt at collecting all of my still-surviving writing, starting from 2011 up to 2021.

96. Would you close down your website if you couldn’t update it, or would you leave an archive? I'd definitely leave an archive. My whole philosophy is "plain text survives" and "own your domain, own your words." Frankly, I would be really upset if all this work I've done vanished. Silly, right?

97. Do you reveal a lot about yourself on your website? A lot, yes. I'd say nearly everything about myself, including full name and location. I publish about my disabilities, mental health, family history, and personal boundaries openly. See /disability.

98. Are you willing to reveal who your best online friend is, and/or if they have a website? Yes! See my answer to question #34.

99. And do you optimise the images on your website? Yes, I try to with lazy loading, compression, and proper formats. I have a Sharp-based image compression workflow. That said, my articles typically feature a 2500x2500 featured image.

100. We're out of time! How do you feel after answering 100 questions? Let's see. I began at 6AM and it's now 9:30AM. The word count (including the questions) is just over 4,700 words. I've just completed 31/31 blog posts for Blaugust and have written 54,000 words this month in total. I feel like I closed a hundred browser tabs I'd been meaning to deal with for weeks, and I think I'm going back to bed.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

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The winner was for permissive usage, #5 "Responsible Use of Generative AI" proposed by Marc Haber. Disclosure of AI use is encouraged, not required, and the policy explicitly ducks the copyright status question. To get into the weeds of it, this option was the only one in the "Schwartz Set" to beat every other option head-to-head, including the stricter "Allow AI-Assisted Contributions with conditions" (Option 2) by 203–14.

Debian has always been my operating system of choice, as I've always preferred stability over bleeding-edge updates. Ubuntu, the most popular GNU/Linux distro in the world, is based on Debian. Where do we go from here, then?

I've already written on how generative AI contributions are becoming increasingly inescapable in open-source codebases, and that we should aspire towards a harm reduction approach rather than an absolutist stance because of that.

I'm certainly not saying that LLMs are the future and here to stay, but rather that using only genAI-free software is becoming increasingly difficult as time goes on and more maintainers decide to go the permissive route.

On a similar note, I raised an issue yesterday regarding the IndieWeb is Punk manifesto being mostly created by Claude instead of being handmade by a human—which is what the manifesto explicitly advocates for.

Good Faith and Apathy

For the past several months, I have attempted an approach of good faith and have assumed all the writing, art, and code I've encountered online has been human-made unless stated otherwise. I've also tried to take an apathetic approach to genAI.

I have been trying to uplift and spread awareness of the good human web—of people still using their own hands and minds and hearts.

And yet the world is still trying to insist on a genAI future. As OpenAI gives Trump a stake of their company, as Hollywood uses Midjourney without disclaiming, as genAI cheating scandals become more widespread, and as ChatGPT continues to drive people to suicide. There is a never-ending ledger, and it is growing miles and miles in front of us.

I am not someone who would think negatively of people who use genAI; I am not someone who would call them names, or feel disdain toward the humans in these situations.

Rather, I have been looking at the trade-offs, here.

A Devil's Bargain

One-shotting the output of any mainstream, consumer LLM will always result in something obviously AI and rather uninspiring. Garbage in, garbage out. The only way to get these models to produce something high-quality is with thorough coaxing and human intervention—paragraphs of human writing in markdown files, hours-long back-and-forth conversations.

And a lot of people have been deceived into thinking that labour is necessary, because they simply can't do the damn thing on their own. And that couldn't be further from the truth—you can instead spend that time learning and doing on your own.

Reliance on genAI obscures the know-how to do things ourselves, and will actively deskill you. Your capacity and capabilities atrophy the more you use generative AI.

And I have to wonder if people who constantly create and share genAI work do not see and understand its obviousness—have they been incubated for so long that the low-variance, piss-average genAI output looks no different to them than high-variance, human-made work?

NFTs Were No Different

Let me make a comparison: it's easy to instantly perceive the low-quality, garbage aesthetic of Web3 NFTs, such as Gary Vaynerchuk's "VeeFriends", rushed shitty sketches that earned him thousands of dollars. Many grifting blockchain-based games made during the peak of the hype were also low-quality, asset-flipped, rushed jobs.

There were many thinkpieces during this time discussing how cryptobros simply didn't understand aesthetic or art or simply didn't care. It was always just a means to the end goal of making money.

I think we are experiencing a parallel—there is a decay of aesthetic and care of aesthetic, and with genAI it is far more widespread and mainstream. The problem is that the initial deception is far more convincing: the writing is verbose and grammatically correct; the website has the semantics you expect; the art is fully rendered and coherent.

But as soon as you examine closely, it really is just as ugly and boring as the grifts of NFTs that came before. There is no substance, no novel compulsion, no skin in the game.

And again, I'm unsure whether people are unaware, or just don't care. People were upset that invisible watermarks are being added to Claude? There have already been visible (load-bearing) watermarks (added) this entire time.

The Mystery of the Potemkin Village

I do not know why the push for genAI continues. No corporation (with the exception of Nvidia) has found profitability. 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing.

I do not know who is gaining from maintaining the Potemkin village of generative AI. I do not know who is fooled by "Agentic AI," which does not change the underlying foundational technology at play, and is instead a dozen sycophant chatbots rather than just one.

I also do not know what this means for the future of the web or my presence on it. I do not want to be defined by my enemies. I do not want to go gently into that good night. Maybe I'll give up the HTTP protocol altogether and exclusively publish to Gemini and Gopher. It's hard for me to say at this point.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

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Trying to keep up a 1:1 post-per-day cadence this month has melted my brain a little. I thought it wouldn't be a big deal, since I usually write 5 or 6 posts a week, so what damage would there be bumping that up to 7?

Miraculously, I've still had a fair share of blog posts this month that I'm happy with despite the increasing straw-grasping.

But I noticed last night, while working on the website for blogging studies, that I was hit with this wave of demotivation—this alien sensation of not wanting to continue, of not caring to write anymore. It was startling, because since I began in November, I had never experienced such a despondent frame of mind—as though my remaining active brain cells had come together and finally unionized against my onslaught of cognitive tyranny.

On one hand, I recognize I simply need a break, but on the other, maybe I have finally reached a ceiling. I have only so many thoughts, opinions, and ideas. I feel like I've done a good job at avoiding being repetitive on this blog—sure, I beat the same drum of values—but I like to think I've always found new, creative angles to attack my favourite topics over and over again.

And of course I have an embarrassing amount of pride in making it to the make-believe, arbitrary finish line on September 1st, the sunk-cost fallacy pointing out that there are only three more days left. Also, the make-believe, arbitrary standards referee checks to ensure that each post is still, at minimum, a thousand words and useful.

I want to make it clear none of the above diminishes my joy, nor does it take away from how lucky I am to be doing this at all. Even when I become emotionally blunted and psychically exhausted, I still have the cognitive wherewithal to keep those facts in mind. Maybe it's also because I've begun watching the 2000 anime series about boxing and sportsmanship, Hajime no Ippo, that I have been so inspired to continue.

Anyways, that's enough navel-gazing for one post. There are a few small things I want to write about that cheered me up.

To start, Ben of Bubbles.town responded to my retrospective of the platform. While most of his response was a well-argued and fair reply to my criticism, he did release a new feature allowing people to filter and hide posts by keyword in response to the large number of genAI posts on the platform. I appreciate not only that a feature was made in response to feedback, but also that it was done so quickly. Huzzah.

Next, I want to share an application in development that was recently shared with me. Jan Miksovsky, creator of the web builder Origami, has announced a new project called Origami Projector. It is rather simple, but that's why I love it. It's designed to be a lightweight web development tool that gives you a real-time preview of what you're creating. You can even upload the work you create to NeoCities or Netlify.

Miksovsky credits the now-defunct platform Glitch for inspiration. If you were a user, I'm sure you were as heartbroken as I was when the site shut down. There were so many cool, weird projects housed on Glitch that wouldn't have existed were it not for its unique ethos and design. It was an excellent starting point for people interested in web development, so I hope to see Origami Projector take off, because I think it scratches that itch, even though it's rather different in how it operates.

Seeing the efforts of others really boosts my spirits. People are still creating good things on the web, by hand, for the sake of others. This has always been the case and will always continue to be the case so long as there is an Internet and there are people. No matter how many headlines try to convince you that the Internet is now only a husk of belligerent robots and platforms created by corporations, the personal and independent web will always be here. The good of the world doesn't stop existing, I promise.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

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You see, for many years there have been free, open-source resources for people to use if they wanted to learn programming, such as the Odin Project which maintains a Discord community of 708,000 learners, and freeCodeCamp, which has helped more than 100,000 people land their first developer job. These have been a wonderful resource for people to go from absolute beginner to becoming competent enough to make a career in software development.

And in a similar manner, over a decade ago, there were many options for Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs); however, these have been in a sharp decline in recent years^[1]. The New York Times called 2012 the Year of MOOCs, but things are incredibly different, now. Let me give you a couple examples.

In mid-2025, under new CEO Greg Hart, Coursera rolled out "Preview Mode," replacing the old free-audit system. Instead of auditing an entire course for free, courses now only let you preview the first module before hitting a paywall. Class Central's analysis called it "the day MOOCs truly died," noting the change came right as Coursera's stock jumped 36% on an earnings call and its valuation passed $2 billion, despite sitting on $775M in cash reserves.

Harvard and MIT sold EdX to 2U in 2021 for $800 million, and edX dropped free certificates back in 2023. Then 2U filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in July 2024, citing over $945 million in long-term debt. edX kept operating through the bankruptcy, but tightened the auditing access and raised prices.

When looking at the above, I realize I want to contribute to free online learning as much as I can for the sake of others.

Blogging Studies

Over the past year, I've written extensively on both the IndieWeb and the craft of writing. While it can be enjoyable to read and learn from these posts one-by-one, that can also be overwhelming or a slog. They're all presented as individual articles instead of something like a tangible, actionable curriculum.

In light of this, I've decided I want to take everything I've written and launch a new project with it. I've actually had the idea to teach writing in virtual classes for a while now, ever since I first announced Fireweed School; unfortunately, I've realized I'm lacking the bandwidth to teach a synchronous class that would ask students to pay me for my services. The good news is, though, that I will be doing this instead, and it will be free for everyone. And I'll be able to take a lot of my ideas from that for this.

As George De Bruin notes in his recent post, "Why People Quit Blogging", much of what you encounter when you search "blogging" online is related to search engine optimization, corporate business marketing, and opportunistic pyramid scheme-esque endeavours promising passive income.

I've written before about how I want to reclaim blogging as a democratic, open tool for people to write and share online from this cynical, capitalistic definition that is dominant and popular on search engine results, and I think this idea could be a great way to make that happen.

My Pitch

The premise for this is rather simple: I am going to create a static site that will act as the syllabus and curriculum for Blogging Studies, and it will include lessons/lectures, assignments, recommended readings, and methods for class participation.

Blogging Studies is a term I coined myself, and I define it as the study and practice of writing craft and independent online publishing as a single, integrated discipline, treating the blog post medium as a legitimate unit of scholarly and creative work. I use the word "blogging" instead of "writing" because while a large amount of it will focus on writing craft, I also want to similarly focus on getting that writing out there in the world with blogging. I'll cover platforms, formatting, netiquette, etc. just as much as the writing itself. I will try to make the technical aspects as accessible as possible, and essentially this will be a dual or hybrid approach. You can think of Blogging Studies as a subcategory of Digital Humanities.

I want to avoid calling this a "course" or a "class" because it will be asynchronous, but also because online creators who announce such a thing are typically charging a lot of money, with revenue opportunity being the primary motivation.

This couldn't be further from the case with this project. I have already shared everything I know and have learned on this blog, and this will simply be synthesizing that information.

Being Open-Source

And, importantly, unlike nearly all my previous open-source projects where I've been the sole contributor and developer, I truly want to be a maintainer for this. While I think my contributions are a good starting point, I think having this open-source is an excellent way of getting new and different resources, modules, and ideas added to the syllabus and curriculum by others.

I'm going to be hosting this project on Codeberg, and part of the curriculum itself will be teaching people how to sign up, how to use git, make pull requests and submit issues, etc.

Being a good maintainer turns out to be less a technical skill than a communication one. Open Source Guides has a lot of helpful advice, such as getting your community documents in order early (a README, a CONTRIBUTING file, a code of conduct, a license, etc.) matters as much as the code itself. I'll be adopting the Contributor Covenant as the code of conduct created by Coraline Ada Ehmke in 2014 and now used by nine of the ten largest open-source projects in the world.

Good Pedagogy

Good pedagogy is not merely handing information down. Paulo Freire heavily criticized the "banking model" of education, where a teacher deposits knowledge into passive students who store it and hand it back on command.

In an essay for Hybrid Pedagogy titled "If Freire Made a MOOC: Open Education as Resistance," the author draws on writer Audrey Watters's observation that a MOOC feels entirely different depending on whether the "C" is experienced as course or as community, and that community is what keeps people coming back. I want to provide scaffolding for people to become co-authors of their own writing practice, together.

And I also admit I am lacking teaching credentials myself. But I will say this, if you don't know who I am already: I've independently published nine of my own books, five of which are available on Gumroad. Not only did I do the writing, but I did the cover design, layout, formatting, and copyright. These books span over 1,500 pages in total.

I graduated from Mount Royal University with a 3.8 GPA majoring in English Honours with a minor in creative writing. During my time as an undergrad, I published a scholarly article on Indigenous resilience and my honours thesis which examined the importance of the English Degree and writing in today's age.

I also founded Write Club, a creative writing collective of young adults that grew from a couple students to 100+ members. I was the president of this club where we hosted open mics, fundraising events, and I ran dozens of workshops with hundreds of students for three years. We published two anthologies under my tenure: "On the Fringe: A Collection of Filth" and "On the Fringe: A Collection of Community", which are available for purchase.

I'm also a Queer Red River Métis, and I know how important it is to centre marginalized voices and be mindful of how political writing is. Our voice and our ability to have a platform is directly imbued into my teaching.

Identity

I think identity is an important (and fun) part of making this work for anyone who finishes a module, contributes a lesson, or shows up consistently. For instance, I'm designing an 88x31 badge for the project, and I also want to run a webring.

Beyond the badges and buttons, I want a communal space where cohort members can talk to each other, share drafts, and celebrate wins together, not just consume a syllabus alone in a browser tab. I'm also interested in some light gamification: achievements, streaks, small visible symbols of progress.

I know gamification has a bit of a bad reputation, mostly because platforms use it to manufacture compulsive engagement, and that's not my intention. Rather, I subscribe to the idea that romanticizing the process strengthens the bonds between people going through a cohort together, and provides motivation to continue and sustain the practice.

On Being Anti-tyranny

Jo Freeman's 1970 essay, "The Tyranny of Structurelessness," argued that groups claiming to have no structure or hierarchy don't actually escape hierarchy and instead make it invisible and unaccountable. That's important to be mindful of when thinking about open projects claiming to be neutral or all-encompassing.

Blogging Studies is not neutral. I am opinionated and particular in how I write and in how I think writing should be taught. Which is why I want to emphasize that this is just one way to blog and write, filtered through my own politics, my own aesthetic sensibilities, and my own experiences. Plenty of other resources exist, and plenty more should. I'm not trying to be the final word on blogging, or writing, or teaching. I'm trying to be one honest, clearly-labeled voice among many. I'd rather you disagree with my syllabus and go build your own.

Interested? Get Involved!

I realize that it would be good to start planning early. Things are totally up-in-the-air right now (I don't even have a name for this project) and there are many different ways people can help before I even launch. Here are a few ideas I have for contributing.

Ways to contribute:

I'd love writers and researchers who could help draft lessons, recommend specific readings, and share your own experience blogging as case studies for beginners.

Editors and reviewers could provide feedback on drafts, proofread modules, and test assignments. Technical contributors can help with the code of the site, webring, and onboarding for folks new to git and Codeberg.

Community builders could help moderate discussions, welcome newcomers, organize cohort activities, and host online writing group sessions.

And of course, learners are the ones completing the modules, doing assignments, asking questions, and leaving feedback on what's helpful and what isn't.

I'd love to hear from people who want to co-teach a module in their area of expertise, as well as folks who've been blogging for a while and have their own lessons to share.

Current Status

• The project will live on Codeberg (repository link coming soon), where you'll be able to submit issues, make pull requests, and follow along with development.
• The Blogging Studies syllabus itself will be a static site, and I'll post a link when it's live.
• You can reach me through my contact page, email or reply to this post.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

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Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors

With my fan humming away, I wrote yesterday about how, for the first time, I've exceeded my free Netlify bandwidth of 100GB for the month, with five days still left to go. Everything is fine as of right now, but I've gone ahead anyways and wired up my homelab to be able to run this site, replacing the various functions and webhooks with MySQL databases and Caddy files in Docker. Containers stacked like a Jenga game.

And I'm sure I'll write a tutorial about the process in the future, since it would probably be useful for people to know how to migrate off of Netlify while still retaining the features the hosting platform provides.

There was an existential crisis during the procedure for me, though. I recall when I would simply write the words for a short blog post during my lunch break at work and post them to Medium.com—fast forward to now, and it's now ingress, provisioning, blob storage, and webhooks. Each day that I've tinkered with my website I've returned more and more to web development and programming—all with the hope that the additional functionality I've been adding has improved the experience and allowed more two-way communication.

I look at the Caddyfile and docker-compose.yml I have to write, and it makes me take a step back and question what I'm doing here at all. Though, that doesn't actually have anything to do with writing or coding, but rather the rest of my life in-between.

As you may be able to tell by the number of posts I publish and their typical length, I've devoted my life to this project. That sounds dramatic, but it is the truth—if I'm not at a screen researching or writing or debugging a local dev server, then I'm taking a break or sleeping. There is an ascetic quality to it. Sometimes I ask myself if I feel as though I'm missing out on anything, or if I shouldn't be putting all of my eggs in one basket, but I don't find myself wanting. I don't find myself lacking.

But there are consequences to this. Consequences I'm not proud of. The close friends I had in person but no longer have, for instance. I realized that many of my relationships had become too one-sided—that others were putting in far more effort than I was—and I made the call that it was shittier to let that continue than to be honest and end things. I have always been the kind of person to act impulsively, as though social acts were irreversible, and burn bridges that could be left standing.

I've also reached capacity in my bandwidth. In some ways, my bandwidth could be regarded as impressive—having the ability to write and create consistently for so long. But in many more ways, my bandwidth is shockingly low, and I've had to be strategic and tactical with how I use my time and energy because of that. And that has included making some difficult, and often hypocritical, decisions.

I don't really know what's happened. I look back at the twenty-year-old Brennan who biked everywhere and went to school full-time, worked part-time, and still maintained a social life. On paper, I've lived a rich decade but in practice I'm so much less sure. There are a million more things I could be doing, a million more connections I could be weaving, and instead I'm here sitting at my desk writing yet another blog post. An unlived life stacked against these four walls.

And this is what I want to be doing, or at least what I feel a magnetic compulsion toward. I've come to realize so much of my life, heavy with masking, was doing what I thought was the right thing to do, what "normal" people do. And I didn't question things until I had the time and silence to do so. And there is a shade of guilt that comes with that—questioning why I can't be more typical and have a drive to live a larger life with more dimensions.

I think of Emily Dickinson, the reclusive hermit, the myth of Amherst. The New England Mystic wrote over 1,800 poems in her isolation, so rarely seen outside of her homestead that she was conjured into a ghost by her neighbours. And it is a ghost-like existence; a peculiar fraction of a death.

From the other side of the screen, you might have had a totally different assumption about the kind of life I was living, given how much I pour into my work. You expected this to end with a triumphant declaration—a neat resolution where I announce I'm changing for the better. I wish I could offer myself a clean break. There's no vinyl to flip over.

Instead, the fan doesn't stop humming white noise, and the August heat pushes fresh wind through the open window. Quiet room, screen glowing, words always finding their way out. Everything else beyond that is tentative, determined by a calculus I can't see. Arithmetic of unspent days. But regardless of what tomorrow brings, you know there's certainty in the fact that I'll write about it.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

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It's always interesting to hear how others describe you, and it gave me pause for contemplation. Billy wrote that I'm someone that doesn't take myself too seriously, and I certainly agree there. But "nice"? Hm. Is that how I'm viewed?

Let me take a step back and say, first, that it is weird to have a readership at all. I've gone most of my life being invisible, and I've been writing online since 2015 mostly to just myself and have been content with that. This past year of creating my own independent publication and posting on a near-daily basis has changed that.

Being a Jester

Without a doubt, there comes a responsibility when people begin reading your work and taking you seriously. I've had Jester's privilege, the historical right of a court jester to mock and speak hard truths without facing punishment, because their words are disguised as mere jokes and—more so in my case—because nobody cared what the jester has to say, or takes it seriously.

As a result, I've found myself making off-hand remarks and having a flippant attitude. I've developed a bad habit of rubbernecking and gravitating towards mess and disaster. Thankfully, I've been able to channel my compulsive morbid curiosity into healthy avenues, such as the various topics I write about on this blog.

Yet, Being Virtuous

At the same time though, in contradiction, I have tried to live a values-oriented life and be vocal about what I think is important and right. And doing so puts you and your actions under a vigilant lens of scrutiny.

Similarly, I think many people (myself included) have the assumption that somebody who cares deeply about virtue and justice is then also rigid, unforgiving, and views those who are less virtuous as inferior, and perhaps even irredeemable.

And so I'm writing this out for a number of reasons.

I want to make it clear that I've never been interested in scolding, pearl clutching, and certainly not infighting. When I've reported on the actions and behaviours of people in the past, I have done so trying my best to shine light and awareness where I thought it was both important and dark. I have been frustrated and disappointed by people, sure, but nothing beyond that.

Going forward, I want to be more careful and mindful with my subject matter—what can be healed, what injustices can be redeemed? What good can be made more accessible?

Helpful Frameworks

I've been looking towards the work of others that I can use as reference. To start, Solutions journalism insists on rigour—a solutions story shows evidence of what's working, insight into why it's working, and its limitations. Similarly, constructive journalism focuses on the three pillars of solutions, nuance, and democratic conversation. Newsrooms need to facilitate conversations society needs to move forward, and not just aspire to document evidence neutrally. And though I am not a newsroom, I do aspire to be a good citizen journalist.

Restorative narrative is a related genre that grew out of the folks at Images & Voices of Hope, and says stories cannot skip past the hard truths of tragedy or rupture. The story must continue with a person or community long enough to document progression toward repair.

I will never look away from what's broken, and that's many things, and I will also honour attempts at rebuilding.

When you're writing day-to-day like me, it can be easy to get caught up in the trees and begin to forget about the forest. It can be easy to get wrapped up in the particular actions of particular people simply because of things like proximity bias. I need to remind myself that, just because I see something on my timeline or feed a lot, does not automatically mean it's what deserves my attention and effort.

I want my little publication here to be a toolshed of hope and stubborn optimism—by that, I mean I want to focus on compassion, grace, benevolence, and hope—but in a tangible, practical way that's actionable and verb-oriented. I want my humble shed to have the tools needed to change things for the better.

Rebecca Solnit wrote that hope lives in the uncertainty between optimism and pessimism and in the action we take. Hope is the room not-knowing leaves for you to act in. Solnit looks at the Zapatista uprising and the 1999 shutdown of the WTO meetings in Seattle among forgotten wins on the left. Most of what changes the world never gets photographed, it looks like something that didn't happen. A war that didn't start, or a law that didn't pass. Do you know the names of the people that stopped the world from ending?

Mariame Kaba says hope is a discipline, rather than an emotion. Hope is a ritual and daily practice, done whether or not you feel like it. Kaba herself has been running Project NIA and organizing the Chicago Torture Justice Memorials reparations campaign for decades. She does the unglamorous work of bail funds, court watching, and participatory defense campaigns. Hope as a discipline is showing up to unfinished work again and again.

Joanna Macy says active hope is three steps you take: see clearly what's happening, name the direction you want things to move in, then act. adrienne maree brown has principles of emergent strategy for hope: move at the speed of trust and focus on critical connections over critical mass. We must trust the people, because if you trust the people, they become trustworthy. Small is good, small is all, the large is only ever a reflection of the small. This is why I am doing this on a daily blog trying to be a toolshed.

Christiana Figueres calls hers stubborn optimism, and she used it to broker the Paris Agreement, when 195 nations agreed, six years after the Copenhagen summit collapsed in tears and screaming. Stubborn optimism is also a discipline, chosen because the alternative is unthinkable, not because the odds favour you.

What This Means

I need to remind myself to meet people where they are, and to focus on the human and what can be restored. I also need to hold every piece I write against the question: will this look worthwhile from my deathbed, in retrospect?

I am extremely privileged both in my platform and my attitude—for whatever reason, I was built with the ability to endure and survive with the image of a positive future still intact in my mind, despite everything.

Which is to say that I want to use this unique, absurd opportunity I have to try to leave the world a better place than I found it. And that starts with where my focus is. This isn't about ignoring the grave injustices, but it is about figuring out what can be done about them. And that will always include righteous fury and anger and grief.

Regardless of all of the above, I am a deeply flawed person. I will try my best to write something that you'll find worth reading, but as a person, I will continue to make mistakes and disappoint you. And that's okay. I want to operate on good faith. If others mess up, that's okay! Because I will as well.

So, what does the toolshed of optimism look like in practice? Before I publish anything, I will ask whether it points toward what can be healed, what the reader can do with it. I will tether any anger or grief I write to a concrete next step: a tool to try, a campaign to support, a question to keep asking, or an attempt at repair already underway. I will keep building this site by hand, one word and one page at a time, and use it for the stubborn work of optimism. That is the toolshed I want to tend.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

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The Good

I want to start with the positive, which is that I've discovered and continue to find new blogs on a wide variety of interesting topics thanks to Bubbles. Blogs about family genealogy, wonderful illustrators, musicians, souping, Star Wars action figures, Google Maps, science fiction writers, bullet journals. I could go on and on, and that's just from this week.

There are so many topics I don't have any knowledge of whatsoever, and it makes me so happy that there are people who have dedicated blogs to these topics! Bubbles allows me to discover personal sites that I would not have encountered otherwise. It reminds me of visiting my public library and browsing the more obscure aisles of the Dewey Decimal system and being astounded that so many books on each particular topic exist.

In this sense, Bubbles has been a fantastic success story for the IndieWeb, and demonstrates how it is a net positive rather than a net negative, in my opinion.

That said, I do still certainly have my issues with the aggregator, particularly as it becomes more popular and used as a primary source for bloggers and IndieWeb participants. So, onto my qualms.

The Pace

I don't know if I visit the aggregator too often (two or three times a day) but I notice that the top posts change at a rather glacial pace. It reminds me of how, back in 2018, Reddit changed their default sorting from "Hot" to "Best" and the ability to use the site for breaking news near totally collapsed.

And I think this is especially puzzling since it's Blaugust, surely people are blogging like crazy right now, right? I'm not sure if this simply has to do with how Bubbles calculates its algorithm: Score = (1 + Votes × 25) / (EffectiveAge + 2) ^ 1.4. Now, this is indeed an algorithm, but it is not an impossible black box algorithm that is unknowable to even the engineers who designed it, the way corporate social media has. It's just plain math.

The Popularity Contest

One thing I don't like is the language used by the site, the about page specifically says that "you vote on the posts worth reading. The good stuff floats to the top. Everything else sinks over time." And this couldn't be further from the case in my experience. Posts on page 10 of the aggregator with zero upvotes are typically as interesting, or more interesting, than whatever is on the front page.

Also, something new I just noticed: there's now a classics page which shows off the all-time most upvoted posts and websites. As of writing, I'm in third place, with 340 upvotes from 156 voters. Zoo-Wee Mama! From a statistical curiosity perspective, I think it's neat to have a page like this, but for someone who already thinks Bubbles is a popularity contest, this just amplifies that argument.

I'm a writer that is deeply uninterested in how many visits my site gets or upvotes my posts get on Bubbles. But I know that's not the case for everyone. Some people get anxious or worried about what others will think, and Bubbles gives a rather obvious and problematic framing to that. As soon as you become focused on trying to cater to an audience instead of writing what YOU want to write, the entire process will quickly become unfun and burdensome. So if metrics are something you care about, I'd recommend not putting your site on Bubbles, or ask for it to be removed.

The Categorization

Bubbles has categories, and the way they work is rather neat. From the FAQ:

Categories are decided by a small statistical classifier (Naive Bayes) that ships with the binary and runs on the Bubbles server, with no external service involved.

This is far from perfect, and after using the aggregator for some time I would recommend adding more categories to help with filtering. Specifically, I'd love the ability to filter out genAI posts rather than all tech posts in general, since another criticism I have is that man, there are a lot of people writing about genAI on Bubbles. That doesn't have anything to do with Bubbles specifically, that's just a byproduct of people writing about genAI a lot in general.

A "meta" category would also be great, to be able to filter out posts that themselves are about Bubbles.town (like this one!).

The Community

Another issue Bubbles has is community participation. A place like Bubbles can only ever be as good as the willingness people have to use it. I'm a culprit here, as I do a bad job at upvoting posts I enjoy (this is a case everywhere I go, I am so forgetful of giving a heart on posts on Tumblr, Mastodon, Pillowfort, anywhere that has that ability). An aggregator only works if people interact and participate with it. Likewise, because the categories are defined automatically, they can be wrong (like my post on "Buying Them a Coffee" being categorized as food) and if you click on a category on a post, you can easily submit which one is more accurate.

Commenting culture is also incredibly sparse on Bubbles. I understand it's a little awkward and clunky, since you need to sign in and post comments via Mastodon, so I'm hoping people are instead just commenting directly on people's sites, linking to posts they like, or directly emailing bloggers.

I also will admit I have some beef with seeing certain bloggers on Bubbles, such as Joan/JA Westenberg who has over 14,000 subscribers on the Nazi-complacent platform Substack, and who was previously heavily involved in the Web3/NFT scene before deleting everything regarding that. Sure, Bubbles should be for small, independent creators who aren't just looking for another revenue source. And maybe I'm hypocritical for that criticism given my own stats, but I like to think at least I actually deeply care about the IndieWeb and haven't just decided to hop to the next most viable market.

The Heart of It

Overall, Bubbles.town is a weird project. It is definitely a "ask for forgiveness instead of beg for permission" kind of project. As in, if someone told me they had the idea of starting an IndieWeb aggregator using genAI and collect thousands of personal sites and blogs without asking anyone, I would implore them not to do that and think it was a terrible idea.

But Benjamin did this, and I would be dishonest if I said I didn't appreciate Bubbles.town. He has always been quick to respond and makes it easy to remove your blog.

I also want to add that the BubblesBot has been excellent in terms of crawling my site respectfully:

If you view Bubbles as just one of many ways to interface with the independent web, along side directories, alternative search engines, webrings , blogrolls, human curation and also use other aggregators like nuchronic or scour.ing, then it's a great tool.

And if you're someone that's totally uninterested in aggregators and think they're problematic, that's also really understandable! There's no "right" way to IndieWeb or share yourself, and I'll keep trying to find new ways to discover people and sites and blogs that don't rely on automated aggregators. The discovery is sometimes the best part.

And, likewise, you are somebody that has a personal blog that you're active on, particularly if it's of a niche interest, I recommend you submit your blog to be added to Bubbles. Adventure is out there!

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

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"I've decided to pronounce the word "weblog" as wee-blog. Or "blog" for short."

This seems like it would be the origin point of the word, but that's far from the case. I would be remiss if I began the history of blogging somewhere in the 1980s, because that only explains the "web" part and not the "log" part. For that, we need to go back much further.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this begins in the maritime tradition with a literal, wooden log:

In his 1574 A Regiment for Sea, William Bourne describes how, with a line tied to it, a log was thrown over the side of the ship, and the length of line was measured “while someone turned a minute sand glass” or in some cases “spoke some number of woordes [sic]” in order to measure the ship’s speed.[2] (The length was eventually counted by literal knots tied in the line at regular intervals; thus, our equally iconic term “knots.”) Recordings of the log-derived information, eventually replaced by the “chip log,” a weighted wooden quadrant, were entered into what would come to be called the “log board.”
— Janet Sorenson, "Logging-In: The Ship's Log as Medium"

A log board helped sailors record a ship's speed and direction hour by hour before writing them into the permanent official logbook. This was an instrument of navigation, a tool for cataloguing the wind and weather as much as figuring out your location during a voyage within the endless blue horizon of an unforgiving saltwater sea.

The term "log" moved from maritime use to broader record-keeping during the 19th and 20th centuries as the practice of writing details in a ship's logbook was adopted by other industries. Engineers, scientists, and aviators utilized the same style of sequential, chronological record-keeping.

"Flight logs have been around as long as aviation itself. The Wright brothers kept detailed notebooks, recording dispassionately the results of their experiments in building the first airplane."
— Tom LeCompte, "The Book of Hours"

This transition established the log as more of a default structure for recording events over time, regardless of context. The log became a way of thinking about information.

When looking at the transition to computer systems, you'd think that this is the point where we begin talking about web logs—but that would be missing several decades of additional history.

It was the start of the 1960s when "logging on" to computers entered the nomenclature. As in, the computing sense of "gain access to a secure machine or system" and shares the same etymological roots.

"Whether it was CTSS or a similar system, I envision an engineer, probably at MIT, somewhere between 1959 and 1961, needing to describe a new user command for the system they were creating. We get a lot of neologisms from these situations, and it’s very possible log in dates from just this moment in history."
— James Reffell, "The Secret History of Log In"

"Logging on" came from centuries of logs as the place where action met record.

It took all the way until 1997 for the "web log" to finally make its debut, thanks to essayist and (shocker) blogger Jorn Barger:

"Blogs have come a long way since Dec. 17, 1997, when Jorn Barger coined the term "weblog" to describe the list of links on his Robot Wisdom website that "logged" his internet wanderings. In the decade hence, blogs have come to dominate the net, from 100 million personal diaries to the breaking news sections of the august *The New York Times."
— Jenna Wortham, "After 10 Years of Blogs, the Future's Brighter Than Ever"

But, really, the actual first blogs simply were not called web logs and were more well-known as online diaries at the time. Justin Hall, someone I've referenced in previous articles, began eleven years of personal blogging in 1994 while a student at Swarthmore College.

"For 11 years, Justin Hall was dedicated to documenting his life online. Composing more than 4,800 pages from nearly a decade of constant writing, which he posted on his site, www.links.net, Hall became a pioneer among online diarists and Web loggers."
— Reyhan Harmanci, "Time to get a life -- pioneer blogger Justin Hall bows out at 31"

And if you ask the Encyclopedia Britannica, it'll tell you that the first blog was created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1992. Who counts as the true first blogger depends on whether your definition is a web log of links, an online diary, or simply a regularly updated personal page.

Online journal writing was novel. There was the new, strange intimacy of writing for an audience you couldn't see. A paper diary is written for the self and usually hidden in the back of a drawer. A weblog is written for the self as well, but published to the world. The tension between private reflection and public performance has defined the act of blogging ever since. In fact, in order to distinguish web journal authors from keepers of traditional paper-and-ink diaries, one of the terms created was the adorable "escribitionist" by Erin Venema in 1999.

Also in 1999, entrepreneurs Ev Williams and Meg Hourihan (who knew Merholz personally in San Francisco, the guy who made the word blog, remember?) launched Blogger.com out of their startup Pyra Labs. Williams is generally credited as the one who popularized turning "blog" into a verb ("to blog") and coined "blogger" as the person doing it, cementing the noun/verb/agent-noun family we use today.

And decades later, Williams would go on to found Medium.com, the platform where I currently make my living. He created the site in 2012 to provide a clean, simple space for thoughtful, long-form writing alternative to the 140-character limit of Twitter.

After taking this journey, I'm rather thankful this is a rare occasion where the origins of a word and its lineage are surprisingly straightforward and easy to research and cite.

Where We Are Now

We're a quarter-way through the 21st century, where does blogging stand today? Well, if you're a so-called hustler trying to find a niche to gameify SEO in order to make passive income, you're probably a lot better off making short-form video content instead.

But the blogosphere itself is incredibly healthy and thriving. There are over 600 million blogs in 2026. It seems like I'm in the 14% minority of bloggers that post +2,000 words per entry.

Blogging is one of the most powerful forms of expression in human history. A modern digital parallel to the 15th-century printing press, scaling the democratization of ideas from physical mass production to instant global reach.

There are no gatekeepers, no barriers to entry. Anyone with an internet connection can publish their thoughts for free on platforms or very low cost on their own. And unlike static print, blogs enable two-way conversations through comments and instant updates.

In the early days, blogs were a destination you checked, the site you visited. Today, the blog is no longer the default for sharing things on the Internet; it's much more of a choice now. And choosing a blog means choosing a space you control, a format that allows for depth, and a record that remains yours.

We've come a long way since the sailors throwing logs into the ocean's waters, since the loglines and logbooks, since Justin's Links—and we're all still doing the same things: marking time, noting where we've been, and leaving a record for whoever comes after. And we all have an opportunity in this thin slice of human history where any of us can write and publish whatever we like to the world. I'm exercising that right, are you?

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

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But don't worry, this was just a mere lover's spat you see, and I—

Hey, wait a minute. What did Unstory write to me in his most recent email?

"There is nothing better than what is it. You can't change anything. It has no meaning. Love is nonsense, it does not exist in a way that people romanticizing it. It's fake story. It's romanticized story about the business, necessity, needs. There is not one cell in your body that loves you. Water does not love you. You don't love anyone and nobody loves you. It's fairy tale like gods, heaven and seven-headed dragon."

Oh, this really explained everything for me.

On one hand, I really hope Unstory has just been fucking with me the entire time at this point, and is simply just playing the role of maximum cynic nihilist to get underneath my skin, and that I'm naïvely taking the bait (as I typically do).

Otherwise, if this is real, then it is heartbreaking. And I really mean that. I cannot imagine someone who views love this way.

We all ought to be born into a loving world, with a loving family. I know for many people, that is not reality, but there are usually still people in our life that give us love no matter what, right?

Even the pedantic, overzealous materialist who smugly explains that love is actually mere electrochemical reactions and biological hormones which have a primary purpose of reproduction is someone who still recognizes that love exists—that people have a connection to one another regardless of how or why that connection takes place. And that connection shows up in the body.

Researchers put spouses in an fMRI machine, threatened them with electric shocks, and watched their brains light up with fear until their partner took their hand. The threat response measurably dropped, and the happier the marriage, the bigger the drop. Harvard's 87-year Study of Adult Development, the longest-running study of human life ever conducted, has tracked hundreds of men and their families since 1938 and keeps arriving at the same stubborn answer. The people who fared best were the ones who leaned into their relationships, and loneliness carries a health risk on par with smoking. Oxytocin—the hormone that spikes when a mother gazes at her newborn—rises in both a dog and its person when they lock eyes.

None of this is metaphor. It's a body responding to another body, a nervous system settling because another nervous system is near. Real, tangible, physical fact.

To place love in the same category as the abstract, unknowable God or Heaven or fantastical seven-headed dragon is to believe it does not exist at all, whatsoever.

If Unstory is not fucking with me, then the world has gravely failed him. Those who were meant to demonstrate and prove the existence of love to him at a young age failed him. And although we deeply disagree on many important things, I've become rather endeared to Unstory and enjoy him in a wayward way, and I do not know if I could make him capable of understanding the existence of love, let alone how important it is. I'll once again quote Paulo Freire:

“Because love is an act of courage, not of fear, love is a commitment to others. No matter where the oppressed are found, the act of love is commitment to their cause—the cause of liberation.”
―Pedagogy of the Oppressed

I have felt love countless times in my life; the truth is, I fall in love so easily. And I try my best to practice unconditional love—a love that does not change or falter, regardless of how everything else does.

And I have witnessed true love countless times in my life. The love parents have for their children, the love good teachers have for their students, the love of deep and supportive friendships. Just to name a few. I've seen it in chosen family, the kinship of Queers built out of necessity when their biological families turned them away. Friends became kin—showing up at the hospital bed, cooking the meal, holding the vigil, doing every unglamorous act a parent is supposed to do. I've seen it in the ballroom houses of Harlem, where a mother and father with no blood tie to their children built families out of nothing but the decision to love someone. I've seen it in a mutual aid fridge stocked by neighbours who will never meet the people they feed. I've seen it in a grandmother's hands, in a dog waiting at the door for hours, in the volunteer who drives a stranger to chemo every week without being asked twice. Love is everywhere you bother to look for it.

I've written before about how romantic love seems impossible for many people in the present day, and I sympathize with that. Both love and sex are in decline for Generation Z adults.

A lack of love in your life, though, does not mean there's a lack of love in the entire world. I desperately hope that there is a turn of events, and the monumental, transcendental power of love finds Unstory and pierces the impossibly dense armour he wears, and shakes him to his core, and makes him question everything that came before, and shakes the dust. I wish this for everyone.

I know for me personally, I hate the idea of bothering others or making them uncomfortable, so I never approach somebody or proactively ask. All my previous relationships have been wonderful flukes, and they've all been people who I met in person. I can't imagine any of the many dating apps actually working.

All of this to say that I am, right now, looking for love. I am in a season of yearning! Dreams of an Internet boyfriend/girlfriend. And this post is an embarrassing declaration, as much as it is a genuine prayer. And I need to post this while I still have the courage to do so. How silly I am; how silly love is.

But all I want is the perfect love,
Though I know it's small, I want love for us all.
―Sufjan Stevens, "Impossible Soul"

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

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Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors

Alors que la majorité du monde parle plus qu'une langue, 78 à 80 % des États-Unis parlent seulement l'anglais. Résultat: les langues autres que l'anglais sont traitées comme lointaines et inconnaissables, comme si elles portaient des propriétés mystiques et insaisissables—comme des mots qui, tout simplement, n'auraient pas d'équivalent en anglais.

C'est, évidemment, une façon de comprendre le langage qui est fausse et problématique. Les anglophones unilingues ne s'en rendent probablement pas compte, mais cette attitude-là contribue à l'exclusion et augmente les barrières pour celleux qui ne parlent pas anglais comme langue maternelle.

L'intraduisibilité, en linguistique, ça s'appelle une lacune—ou, en anglais, un "lexical gap". C'est un sujet profond qui dépasse largement le cadre de cet essai, mais en gros: le sens peut à peu près toujours être traduit, même si c'est pas toujours avec une précision technique parfaite.

Ceci étant dit, j'pense que ce serait un exercice le fun et inoffensif d'écrire sur plusieurs termes français précis que j'ai croisés, qui n'ont pas de traduction 1:1 vers l'anglais, mais qui peuvent quand même être bien compris avec une couple de phrases un peu maladroites.

Y'a déjà certaines expressions qui sont pas traduites en anglais par défaut, comme déjà vu, qui veut littéralement dire "already seen". Pis sa p'tite cousine moins connue, jamais vu ("never seen"), qui est l'opposé du déjà vu: un endroit, une personne ou un mot familier qui devient soudainement complètement étranger, bizarre, entièrement nouveau. Ou encore, presque vu ("nearly seen"), cette sensation intense et frustrante d'être à deux doigts d'une épiphanie, d'un souvenir, ou d'un mot qui nous échappe. En anglais, on appelle ça being on the tip-of-the-tongue.

Mais y'a d'autres mots français qui n'ont pas de traduction directe. Dépaysement, c'est la désorientation (pas nécessairement négative) de se retrouver quelque part d'inconnu, en dehors de son pays ou de son contexte habituel. "Homesickness" s'en approche, mais c'est pas ça pantoute—c'est plus le sentiment lui-même de ne pas être chez soi, ce qui peut être aussi déstabilisant qu'exaltant.

Retrouvailles, c'est la joie de retrouver quelqu'un après une longue séparation. "Reunion" nomme l'événement, mais ça, ça nomme le sentiment.

Un de mes préférés, c'est l'esprit de l'escalier, littéralement "staircase wit", soit le moment où la réplique parfaite te vient en tête seulement après que t'as quitté la pièce.

Terroir, c'est la signature environnementale totale (le sol, le climat, la tradition) qui donne à un vin, un fromage ou un autre aliment son caractère particulier. Même en anglais, les critiques de vin et de bouffe utilisent juste "terroir", parce que rien dans leur langue réussit à capturer ça au complet.

Jolie-laide, c'est une femme (traditionnellement) qui est frappante ou attirante justement parce que ses traits sont non conventionnels, pas classiquement "belle". J'pense que mes personnes préférées, physiquement, sont souvent de même. Pareillement, sortable—littéralement "outable" en anglais—décrit si une personne est présentable assez pour être sortie en public.

La Flânerie

Mais mon terme français préféré qui a pas d'équivalent en anglais, c'est peut-être flâner. Y'a toute une histoire pis une culture derrière ce mot-là. Le poète Charles Baudelaire décrivait le flâneur comme un observateur, un vagabond attentif qui traite la ville comme une œuvre d'art vivante. J'vais citer mes sources plutôt que d'essayer de le décrire moi-même:

Tiré d'un mot français signifiant "flâner" ou "traîner", le concept du flâneur s'est développé à Paris au milieu du dix-neuvième siècle, avant de se répandre dans d'autres villes européennes, particulièrement Berlin. Avant tout un observateur tranquille de la vie urbaine, le flâneur était quelqu'un qui marchait à travers la ville, qui regardait, sans jamais vraiment participer à ce qu'il voyait.

—The Art Story (ma traduction)

En anglais, y'a le people watching, ok, mais ça décrit pas le rôle artistique élevé (ou peut-être prétentieux?) qu'occupe le flâneur. Un livre anglais qui me vient en tête, c'est The Wander Society de Keri Smith, une autrice surtout connue pour Wreck This Journal. Dans Wander Society, Smith construit une espèce de version papier d'un ARG où elle se retrouve embarquée dans une société secrète dédiée à l'importance et à l'émerveillement de la marche errante. C'est vraiment agréable comme lecture, pis ça se lit vite—j'le recommande.

La description que fait Baudelaire du flâneur est pleine de contradictions, ou du moins de jeux de paradoxes. Selon lui, pour être flâneur, il faut être dehors, dans la ville, en train de dévorer la culture. Mais cette traque de l'extérieur doit devenir tellement naturelle qu'elle finit par devenir ton seul vrai chez-toi.

—Caroline Hagood, Flâneur/Flâneuse: The Werewolf Roaming the Social Wilderness (ma traduction)

Selon Journal18, le terme aurait des origines révolutionnaires, ce qui rajoute encore plus d'intérêt et d'intrigue.

Y'a quelque chose de beau à se laisser aller, à s'abandonner à son environnement. J'pense qu'on se ferait tous du bien à errer davantage dans notre entourage, urbain ou pas, avec un regard neuf et frais. Y'a toujours de la poésie qui nous entoure, constamment.

[Baudelaire] décrit Guys comme quelqu'un dont le génie réside dans une curiosité enfantine, qu'il caractérise comme "le regard fixe et animalement extatique d'un enfant devant quelque chose de nouveau, peu importe quoi."

Comme l'enfant, qui "voit vraiment tout dans un état de nouveauté", et qui est en conséquence "toujours ivre".

—Matthew Beaumont, "Fevers of Curiosity: Charles Baudelaire and the Convalescent Flâneur" (ma traduction)

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

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In the past couple days, there have been a couple responses to this, from Eetu of Moonwriting and Pagecord creator Olly, which was one of the platforms I initially recommended in the 4th paragraph of my article.

Now, my article was itself a response to Adam's post, Hardcore IndieWeb where he explained how someone could host a site with NFS for a penny a day and went over a lot of details about making a website. It was really helpful and cool, and my response was aimed at people who'd be intimidated by such a guide and trying to explain progressive disclosure, and other possibilities of starting points.

Eetu's response actually explained exactly why I think such a thing is important:

Brennan Kenneth Brown, a writer I admire, uses a ladder analogy to encourage people to learn HTML and CSS in order to eliminate dependence from platforms that could shut down any day.

Yes, exactly! (Also, thank you for the kind words.) Although he later continues by writing "[t]inkering with my site is something I would rather avoid," I do not advocate for learning webweaving for the sake of tinkering. I advocate for it because the more dependencies we have, the more fragile our writing is on the web.

It's awesome to have a platform where all you do is write and hit "publish" and thankfully there are multiple that exist; however, they come with trade-offs the way everything does. You either are paying money, or you're sacrificing privacy, or you'll have a lot of limits you wouldn't if you were doing things on your own.

Learning to have a website of your own also has trade-offs, it's technical and time-consuming and at times, can be frustrating as hell. But one of the reasons I wrote the WEBMASTER@ manifesto is because I believe far too many people have learned helplessness when it comes to technology. Everyone is capable of learning the basics to get their own website up.

There is no gatekeeping here on my part. I want everyone to use their right to create and have digital autonomy and sovereignty. My 40+ articles on the IndieWeb have been in an attempt to get people of all forms and from all backgrounds introduced to the independent web.

And, likewise, if you'd rather stay on a platform instead, that's okay! But don't say I'm saying it's lesser or inferior—it isn't, and I don't think it is. There's no "right" way to IndieWeb. What I do think is that we've seen products and services shut down time or get acquired and time and time again. At the very least, ensure you have local redundant personal backups of your writing and all your important works.

Case Study: Olly and Pagecord

Regrettably, a good example of why you shouldn't be dependent on a specific platform developed in real-time in the past couple days. Olly wrote:

For me, by far the most important thing is supporting the IndieWeb ethos, not subjecting yourself to all the hassle that HTML, CSS, static sites, deployment and whatnot will bring you. I've been programming professionally since 1995 and I can assure you it is a hassle, or will be one way or another!

I agree, it is a hassle, and if that's where his argument stopped, that'd be fine by me because I say the same thing. But then he continued:

If you choose the hardcore DIY approach, you're subjecting yourself to a lot of maintenance, unexplained errors and headaches that suck up a lot of time, or might require an LLM to fix it when you're stumped.

Now, this is an edited version of what he wrote originally, which was that people would have to pay for an LLM to fix things when you're stumped.

The IndieWeb has a general anti-genAI sentiment the way most creative subcultures do, and people pointed out that this was a weird counterargument to make. People can ask others (that's what community is all about) or simply do a web search to try to find a solution to the problem. No LLMs required.

Olly himself has not made it a secret that he uses LLMs like Claude to build Pagecord. From February of this year:

Claude thinks I should scale Pagecord by switching to bare metal. It's an AI after my own hacker heart! It takes me right back to those halcyon days of racking up servers in 2012.

But Olly became increasingly upset at people criticizing the original remark he made. He's subsequently deleted his Mastodon account and now is on Twitter exclusively, where he pays for a blue checkmark beside his name.

It's okay to be sensitive, and it's also okay to fuck up (I've fucked up plenty worse myself) but when you're a creator with a public-facing project like Pagecord, you need to be able to handle criticism, even when it's unfair or aggressive. This is the Internet. Many marginalized folks face far worse harassment for simply existing.

I think, too, if you're going to make a product and market it as "a product that is built around [IndieWeb] ethos" and call yourself an "IndieWeb builder," then being pro genAI and being a paying user of Twitter are both going to raise questions from people. Because neither of those are generally considered IndieWeb ethos—at all.

Olly wrote on his blog in a now deleted post titled "Social Faux Pas" about how "Mastodon was just as toxic as X" (and yet he seems fine being on X and not Mastodon) in response to this. Hm.

I know this article I'm writing right now could be taken in bad faith, and seen as continuing to contribute to the so-called "witch hunt," but I'm not telling you to stop using Pagecord if you do use it. I don't think Olly is a bad person. Nor would I dissuade somebody from starting out with it. I still think it has a lot of cool features, which I've written previously time and time again. But it certainly is good and important to be aware and mindful of how the creators of the platforms you depend on operate, and why I recommend eventually trying your hand at hosting things yourself in the first place.

UPDATE: Since writing this, omg.lol user love has shared the following:

"I stopped using pagecord and went to self hosted for my blog when I realized how much the admin relies on LLM. actually, he fed the entirety of my 26 year blog into Claude to figure out how to port it to pagecord, without my prior consent. I only knew afterward when I read his blog on how he resolved the situation"

Olly wrote a blog post, proud of his solution, where he did not even read the output of the LLM before pushing its code to production. Now, this is fine for a personal project, but Pagecord is an actual service people pay for and have real, sensitive data attached to.

Olly seems to be wholly callous to the privacy and security implications of his actions for the people that use his products.

Love continued:

"It felt really invasive because those were blogs that were written since I was 10. a lot of them were really personal too, like how I started dealing with death of loved ones, personal health struggles (mostly mental like suicidality etc). they are public now but a lot of those started as private. I think a lot of times writing gets treated as the red headed stepchild when it comes to infringement - it's not as visibly bad like drawing genAI. but I spent decades refining my skill of writing both fiction and non fiction and to think it was fed to an AI without my consent has grossed me out more and more as time has gone on, especially with the subject matter being very personal and dark at times.
"I talked to my husband about it and he was like "well if your blog was public at any point and is public now then its definitely already been scraped by AI" and I'm like there's a difference between me making something public and a rogue agent lifts it versus me entrusting a third party with the data and it gets pushed to an LLM. I also have the windows on my house fully open so someone with a nice camera could take pictures of the inside of my house, which would suck, but that feels somehow less invasive than if I invited a new friend in and they took pictures from inside the house while I was in the bathroom."

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

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It's the 20th day of August, and the 21st day I've written consecutively. I've always taken a day or two break each week for the past year, but I've been pushing myself to write each day of the month for Blaugust.

Surprisingly, there have been a handful of good posts, in spite of the endless churning. But when I find myself falling asleep each night, there's a recurring nebulous thought. Rainbow-shaded, and just out of reach: What will I write about tomorrow?

Each day, the pragmatic and practical becomes a deeper, darker chasm. I am somebody who attempts to take a broad, lengthwise view of things. The sight from the long horizon.

And yet, here I am writing with velocity and frantic compulsion for months in the now. A steep voice in my mind reminds me how precious and violent life is. Fragile and finite and to not take any moment for granted. As though I can visualize the red, blinking numbers counting down how many seconds I have, pulsing above my head.

As I wrote about a few days ago, I've found myself as the sole subject of a satire circlejerk blog and I ask, why me? Five posts, now. It turned out that the anonymous writer behind the blog is part of the omg.lol community, who was silently reading an IRC conversation I was having with others about the blog.

It conjures the image of the shy wallflower at the dance. The deep thinker who doesn't dare speak out loud in front of everyone, but is more mindful about what's going on more than anyone else. Life blooms in ruminating darkness just as much as in warm sunshine. I've been in this position so, so many times throughout my life. I don't like taking up space, and I don't want to bother anybody by my mere existence, but my mind never turns off.

Coincidentally, I had a hateful threat sent to me yesterday, and of course a mind like mine contemplated if it was the same person. After reviewing logs, it turned out to be unrelated.

Clarification: I want to make it clear that my site has an anonymous guestbook that is completely independent and detached from omg.lol. I choose to interact with and make note of when I receive incendiary comments there and elsewhere. That's entirely my responsibility, as are its consequences. While I think it's weird that someone in the omg.lol community would make a satire site dedicated to me (another community member), I don't think it's harassment. It's just weird. People are allowed to be weird. Annoyance is the price we pay for community. None of my negative experiences have had anything to do with my connection to omg.lol. I didn't think I needed to spell that out, but clearly I need to.

I've also been thinking about the epistolary and missives I've been exchanging with Unstory, the peasant anonymous blogger whose blog is being parodied by circlejerk in the first place.

You sometimes encounter people on the Internet who have a compulsive pathology towards sockpuppeting—you will think you're in a group, but there's just a single individual spinning a dozen different plates. The singular is never sufficient; the emptiness is too vast. The thousand-mask catfish of dead Internet theory. And I thought for a moment—what if Unstory and Circlejerk.blog and the anonymous hate message were all the same person?

But the truth is less interesting and dramatic: I get under many people's skin, not just one. I am abrasive, and often impossible.

Anyways, I want to share some of what Unstory wrote to me:

Carnival, war, greed, whatever. It does not matter. Those are just current visible "corpses". Mind behind it is the cause. Topic, person, label does not really matter. It's how mind works.
"Here in Slovakia like half of the population were "communists" before 1989. Then they become democrats, like in 1939 they were national socialists. The same people. They were peasants, Slavic. They became Christians by force. They did not want anything from that. It just happened to them.
"This is also the reason I did not write a word for almost two weeks. There is nothing I can add. Whatever topic I found that bothers my mind, I found it's the result of the same mind's pattern. Even already written articles are all practically about the same thing.
"Recently I have pain in my back. Bending down is very hard, sitting is so so, even while standing there is a pain. My mind obviously use accumulated knowledge to telling me the story about it, explaining the thing.
"But the reality is, body knows what's happening. And body is dealing already with it, no matter what I think about it. And it will fix it without consulting the mind. I will don't know what it was and why. I will end with just story about it. Like this one I am writing you right now.
"Whatever words are out, on my website, your website, email, whatever. Those are just illusions ;/ Nobody can capture life with words. So your writing, my writing, Google's CEO writing, president's writing are the same hallucinations. And all have the same value, zero.
"Funny, isn't it? Many write books, studies about it for centuries. Theories, ideologies, religions were created based on that. And not a once it captured the reality. Some who wrote about it were killed, jailed, exiled, some were promoted, rewarded. It mostly depended on the current narrative, how punish/reward system that time was setup."

The IndieWeb carnival theme, hosted by Chris Shaw this month, is purpose. What is my purpose—and what is the purpose of this blog?

I have a /why page and a /values page, both dedicated to answering the question. And of course I've written blog posts about why. I'm folding a thousand cranes, I'm sending a thousand messages in bottles to sea. I'm building sandcastles before the tide comes in.

In reality, this is a lack of an answer. The truth is I don't really have any idea. I just keep moving forward. My fingers keep typing, each day. The truth is beyond my understanding. How strange it is to be anything at all.

I've been finalizing my blog, in a way. My /death page has been updated. I did a full backup of over 400 pages on the Wayback Machine and Neocities. I've been accepted into Rogue Scholar, giving my articles on science a proper DOI. Surely, at some point, I will reduce the output, or maybe take a break, or maybe stop writing altogether. It is still impossible for me to fathom, but I can see the horizon of diminishing autumn returns.

In the morning, at my desk beside my bed, I take my abalone shell and smudge sweetgrass and wild sage. I ask the medicine what my purpose is. Leaves and grass burn slowly from ember to ash. We are all fated to this. Ember to ash. Beautiful mulchy wormfood to nourish what grows slowly and does not take more than it needs.

The opposite of purpose is not meaninglessness. It is accidental. I do not think I am doing any of this on purpose. I focused on writing over anything else because a middle school teacher complimented a poem I stole. I accidentally stumbled upon omg.lol which resulted in the blog existing at all.

"And the most magical thing is. One day the body, organism will shut it down. No more thoughts, nothing that can observe, be aware of anything. No more stories or memory of the past stories. Again without consulting with the mind. Whole personality, identity, badges will be gone. While body will continue infinitely. Atoms will move, change and the universe will keep its balance.
"It's unimaginable. All those stories. Real things survives, matter, atoms. Everything that was not real will be gone. And nobody will notice. Like you don't have an idea about some random human who lived 200 year ago. That random probably tried hard whole his life. Only what left of him are atoms from his body. Like we drink piss from some dinosaur."

This too shall pass, and we all shall be healed in the life of the world to come. The world is a cruel place, and therefore I won't be. The world is a cruel place, but it's also very beautiful. The world is a cruel place, but it is also home.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

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Almost universally, these get a bad rap. People are often drained, or annoyed, or resentful towards those who vent, and communities go out of their way to prohibit it. Not to pick on 32-bit Café, but they have a detailed section on mental health topics and discussions in their community guidelines:

The 32-Bit Cafe is not a replacement for support groups, therapy, or mental health organizations.

There are excellent arguments against venting that they list, and I'm not trying to change any minds here; however, I do want to write a post in defense of the venters, because I think someone has to.

Something I haven't written about on this blog yet is that I've been a Listener on 7cups for over ten years. I've had text conversations with hundreds of strangers, trying to console and comfort them to the best of my abilities as a layperson crisis support volunteer. The spectrum ranged from people who just needed someone to talk to about minor stresses, and say what they've been harbouring out loud in order to let it go. And on the other end, people who had active dangerous plans they were enacting and that I was not qualified for, nor what the site was intended to handle.

What I learned quickly is that, for the most part, people just want to be seen and heard. To have the immeasurable weight of their burdens and trauma they carry to be a gravity felt by others, no matter how temporarily. People want to know that the intensity of their emotions isn't irrational, or too much.

Psychologist Bernard Rimé studied the social sharing of emotion, between 88% and 96% of emotional experiences get talked about with someone else, usually within hours of happening. It's just something we do. And when someone listens well, the sharing strengthens the bond between people, because the listener's attention and empathy are reflected back to the person who vented, and the venter feels closer to the listener. A related study on friends working through stress together found benefit comes from both parties in the exchange, not from one person tolerating the other. Venting is how we've always regulated emotion. Together instead of alone.

And we are talking about the web, here. #vent channels on Discord have allowed people to "meet their needs for social support via vent channels by receiving commiseration, advice, and validation from the responses of others" according to research done by Kayode Oladeji et. al.

James Pennebaker's research on confiding and expressive writing (which can absolutely include blogging) started as he observed trauma survivors who never told anyone about what happened to them showed worse health outcomes than the ones who did. He built a theory of inhibition arguing that holding back our thoughts and feelings takes a physiological toll similar to chronic stress. Follow-up studies found writing or talking through difficult material caused measurable gains in immune function, including in people suffering from HIV, asthma, and arthritis. How a vent works depends a lot on the person listening. Responding with real empathy, rather than passive sympathy, changes the outcome entirely. The idea that keeping your feelings to yourself is the mature, healthy default is backwards and harmful. Bottling things up has a cost that is sometimes irreversible.

The reason why people end up dumping their emotional baggage and trauma in a one-sided manner, sometimes without even asking first, is because their cup is full. There is simply no more room to hold everything in any longer.

When we aren't privileged enough to be raised in an environment surrounded by emotionally mature, thoughtful people, what do you think happens? Even further, when we are unfortunate enough to be raised surrounded by cruelty or malicious intent instead?

The answer is that we do not vanish. Remarkably, we endure. But we only do so by coming up with mechanisms of defence and survival on our own. And these coping mechanisms are often maladaptive or self-destructive, because what else do we know? There are dozens of ways to mitigate emotional pain, and only a handful are healthy, and the healthy ways typically don't give us the same intensity of catharsis.

Recommending people seek professional, clinical help comes from a privileged assumption that people can afford professional, clinical help—and that they have the time and energy.

Beyond this, certain mental health issues and problems are considered (incorrectly) as "treatment resistant". The frameworks of Western psychology and our pharmaceuticals are just not sufficient for some people.

And I don't think that maladaptive coping mechanisms like emotional dumping are sufficient either, but people need outlets. People need harm reduced. We cannot ask others to start at an acceptable starting point, we must meet others where they actually currently are.

And we need each other, because all we have is each other. Community is not just a group of people, or a setting. Community is a living medicine. You cannot expect the medical industry to do all the hard, difficult work and only deal with tolerable, semi-healed folks. The mind, body, spirit and emotions all need healing and tending to. People need connection to others, as well as language, ceremony, and the land.

Some people simply need to feel loved and understood by people they love, and they will heal. Other people though? Some are just inherently miserable. And I frankly think it's absurd to ostracize people for their inherent demeanour and character. Likewise, I think it's awful that venting is weaponized and moralized by others, as though it's evidence of negative character traits.

Being anti-venting—and being pro-snark or pro-gossip—these too are just other unhealthy modalities of catharsis, and mechanisms for dealing with our own mental health. You are not "better" than someone who vents if you do not. You are not "better" if you have figured out healthier ways to deal with your shit. People are just people. Some of us have lost the ability to look outward, and others to look inward.

If you don't have the capacity to be around people who vent, that's understandable, and it's within your right and similarly good to be able to articulate and express your boundaries. But I'm not one of those people. I would always rather someone vent to me than bottle it up, or far worse, going to a genAI chatbot to vent instead. That's why I've been a volunteer on 7cups for so long.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors

It's been around a year and a half since I graduated university with my bachelor of arts, majoring in English Honours. One of the only reasons you'd do an Honours program is if you want a better chance of getting into a master's program afterwards, in addition to the faculty connections you build.

And that was my original plan—I was going to return to my hometown of Winnipeg and get my MA in English, most likely at the University of Manitoba, doing a thesis-based route and publishing whatever I completed. Obviously, none of this ended up happening.

During my undergrad, I became enthralled by the idea of being a scholar and an academic. I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to get a peer-reviewed paper published, a critical analysis of an Indigenous graphic novel. Although there are publications like the Journal of Undergraduate Research, it is rather rare.

While I was initially going to do my honours thesis on poetry through an Indigenous lens, I instead decided to do a metadisciplinary analysis of the pedagogy of the English degree. A large portion of this work was examining digital humanities, and how students are actually interfacing with literature and texts today.

The very concept of “text” has exploded into a thousand strange forms: fifteen-second video essays cutting deeper for students than any academic paper, sprawling collaborative fanfictions where readers and writers blur together in real-time, memetic satires of corporate mascots, roleplay forums where teenagers craft elaborate mythologies through nothing but status updates. Dozens of literary forms being born and dying every day. The boundaries between creator and consumer, between high art and shitpost, between canon and transformation, all seem to be dissolving in real-time, surely. Salt in hot water.

...What is Digital Humanities?

"Digital humanities" is a term academia has spent two decades arguing over. Kathleen Fitzpatrick has described the field as a wide-ranging grouping of scholars who either 1) use computing tools to investigate old humanities questions, or 2) ask humanities-style questions about computing itself.

"Big tent" was the theme of the field's largest annual conference back in 2011, and the philosophy has never left. Digital humanities is an expanded field that holds digital archives, text mining, 3D modeling of historical objects, born-digital dissertations, #hashtag activism, alternate reality games, and whatever gets invented next year. Centres like UCL's stretch the tent even further, treating DH less as a subject with fixed borders, and more as a way of working that any humanities question can be run through.

Taken as a subject, this site has no business calling itself a unified body of scholarship. I write about the science of ball lightning in one post, Eleventy build errors the next, a personal lyric essay on clown burnout after that, and then security research into a malware fork. But all of my posts are statically built, syndicated with microformats, mirrored to the Wayback Machine, addressed by a stable URL, and, as of this essay, are using citation metadata. The practice stays constant, and so the topic can drift.

Marshall McLuhan's line about the medium being the message wasn't arguing that content doesn't matter. He was arguing that a medium reshapes, that the form of transmission works on a reader and a culture, separate from the message. The medium holds the corpus together.

Scholars have already been treating personal academic blogs as scholarly output for years, now. Michael Ullyot, writing from the University of Calgary, argued that in digital humanities, blog posts function as the field's communication channel, often the only venue through which new questions and methods reach anyone before a journal picks them up.

Librarian Barbara Fister describes serial blogging as mirroring the academic habit of publishing issue after issue. And Alexis Lothian and Amanda Phillips's #transformDH work argued that digital humanities produced outside institutional walls, such as in fan communities and other spaces with no formal tie to a university, are as serious and legitimate as anything produced within one.

The State of Academia

If you're a reader of my site, it should be unsurprising that the area of focus for my honours thesis was to examine how we can create a liberated future where academia is not ivory tower elitism and gatekeeping. Much easier said than done—I know.

I'm sure I also don't need to tell you the dire straits academia is in. This is happening in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, all around the world. There is a collapse of trust in higher education.

The culture of academia isn't faring any better. Peter Fleming's book Dark Academia: How Universities Die examines how "commercialisation, mental illness and self-harm, the rise of managerialism, students as consumers and evaluators, and the competitive individualism casts a dark sheen of alienation over departments."

And this isn't even mentioning the newfound crisis of how generative AI has upended the traditional pedagogy of education in general, with schools returning to pen and paper and oral exams as band-aid solutions.

Seeing all of this might make you think I'm a cynic and abolitionist, but that isn't the case at all. Despite everything, I still see an irreplaceable value in academia, and I believe radical reform can steer the massive ship of institutions back towards their original ideals.

Registration for 2027 master's programs opens in only a couple of weeks, now. And I find myself weighing the decision between returning to scholarship or maintaining my independent, open-access publication here.

Having it Both Ways

But then I had the epiphany that it doesn't have to be either/or—and that I have an excellent way to demonstrate how to lower the gates of the ivory tower myself.

There are a number of open, free academic platforms anybody can join. You can register for an ORCID, get an account on Research Gate and Google Scholar.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg. One project idea I had but never executed was starting a peer-reviewed, academic journal myself. There's web software called Open Journal Systems that thousands of universities and institutions use around the world. The problem is that hosting solutions have starting costs of $500 per year.

But the thing is, this is software you can install and host on your own server. Most academics don't have the necessary technical skills to do this, but they do have grants and budgets, which is why hosting platforms are able to sell their services for predatory prices like this.

My original plan was to found a journal with support from my honours advisor and the executive team at Write Club, since I could host OJS myself:

The Anaglyph envisions a literary landscape that is inclusive, accessible, and amplifies marginalized voices. We aim to democratize and decolonize Canadian literature by providing a platform for underrepresented writers and challenging traditional gatekeeping structures within the publishing industry. The name "Anaglyph" is inspired by the technique of overlaying two images in different colours to create a three-dimensional effect when viewed through a lens; our mission to bring together diverse perspectives to form a richer, more multidimensional literary experience for all.

The Dean, subsequently, denied us funding for this initiative:

The Arts Endeavour Committee has reviewed your application. I regret that on this occasion the committee felt other applications should take preference, and no funding could be allocated in support of your project The Anaglyph: Democratizing and Decolonizing Literary Studies Through Student-Led Digital Publishing. We received applications that totalled more than twice the amount we had to allocate.

I no longer have academic support, funding, or my colleagues and peers from Write Club, but I am far more technically adept than I was when I originally applied for funding. Without the team needed for an academic journal, I have a different plan now. (Although if enough people write to me asking me to boot up an OJS and try this again, I certainly wouldn't be opposed.)

I've decided to become an independent scholar—what I also call a "rogue" scholar—not peer-reviewed or institution-backed, but whose work is public, citable, and open to post-publication review.

What an Independent Scholar Actually Does

If I'm going to argue that independent publishing can stand in for institutional scholarship, then I want my site to behave as a scholarly record, instead of just a blog that happens to be well-organized.

This means offering the same functionality journals have: citability, discoverability, authorship, and permanence. Over the past few days I went and built this for myself, and I greatly encourage you to add the same to your own site.

Applying to Rogue Scholar

The first step is applying to Rogue Scholar, an open-access archive that creates DOIs for science and scholarly blog posts, and mirrors them into the Internet Archive. It's run by Front Matter, and it's free, unlike Crossref membership, which costs $200 USD a year. I've applied, and I'm currently looking for an institutional sponsor (such as Coalition Publica) to cover a Crossref membership down the line.

Registering an ORCID

I've also registered an ORCID, which can be understood as a universal author ID for academia. Researchers use it to disambiguate themselves from others who share their name, and it's a persistent identifier across institutions, journals, and platforms. Mine is 0009-0004-9951-3451, and I've wired it into my site: rel="me" on my accounts page, the h-card on every post byline, and a handful of citation and structured data fields I'll get into below.

Adding Journal-like Functionality

The above matters so long as my site has the technical front-matter, scripting, and elements that make it citable. Here are a few things I've done:

An Issue Numbering System

Journals have issues. Every article belongs to one, with a number, so citations can say "Vol. 4, No. 12" in addition to the URL. I don't publish in discrete issues due to my publishing frequency, so I made every single post its own issue. Post #1 is issue #1, post #212 is issue #212, and so on.

I created an Eleventy filter for this. collections.posts sorts by newest-first by default, so the oldest post (at the end of the array) is issue #1:

// config/filters.js
eleventyConfig.addFilter("getIssueNumber", (collection, page) => {
  if (!collection || !page || !page.url) return "";
  const index = collection.findIndex(item => item.url === page.url);
  if (index === -1) return "";
  // collection is sorted newest-first, so the oldest item is issue #1
  return collection.length - index;
});

Because this number is computed from the current length of the collection, unpublishing or deleting a post would shift every later number. For a system whose goal is permanence and citability, that is fragile. The long-term fix is to assign an issue field in each post's frontmatter and have the filter fall back to that. I have not migrated the archive yet, so the current numbers are best-effort.

Then in src/_includes/layouts/post.njk, the issue number is displayed under the featured image caption, in small caps, above the title:

<p class="publication-issue"><span class="sc">issue #{{ collections.posts | getIssueNumber(page) }} of {{ site.title }}</span></p>
<h1 class="p-name" data-pagefind-meta="title">{{ title }}</h1>

.sc is a one-line utility class I already had (font-variant: small-caps;), so no new CSS needed.

It's a small thing, but it's the difference between a post feeling like an entry in an ongoing publication versus a mere blog post.

ISSN Metadata

An ISSN (International Standard Serial Number) is a unique 8-digit code used to identify continuing publications like magazines, journals, newspapers, and websites. It helps libraries, stores, and databases quickly find and sort specific serial titles without mixing them up.

In Canada, you can apply for an ISSN free of charge.

I just applied, so I don't have an assigned ISSN yet. The ISSN eligibility rules may mean that my publication is ineligible, but as I wrote earlier, I do think there's sufficient merit.

Anyways, the field for an ISSN is set up, with the value saved in src/_data/site.json.

{% if site.issn %}<meta name="citation_issn" content="{{ site.issn }}">{% endif %}

It'll propagate to the citation meta tags, the JSON-LD, the RSS feed's <category domain="ISSN">, and both the about page and colophon, without touching a single template again.

Publication Information Dropdown

Below the fold of every post, there's now a <details> element with what you'd find on a journal's article page: title, author with ORCID link, issue number, ISSN (once assigned), published and modified dates, canonical URL, place of publication, and contact:

<details class="cite-article h-cite">
  <summary>Publication Information</summary>
  <p><strong>Title:</strong> <span class="p-name">{{ title }}</span></p>
  <p><strong>Author:</strong> <span class="p-author p-name">{{ site.author.name }}</span>
    {% if site.author.orcid %} <a class="u-uid" href="{{ site.author.orcid }}" rel="me">ORCID</a>{% endif %}</p>
  <p><strong>Issue:</strong> #{{ collections.posts | getIssueNumber(page) }} of {{ site.title }}</p>
  {% if site.issn %}<p><strong>ISSN:</strong> <span class="p-issn">{{ site.issn }}</span></p>{% endif %}
  <p><strong>Date Published:</strong> <time class="dt-published" datetime="{{ date | isoDate }}">{{ date | readableDate }}</time></p>
  ...
</details>

It's marked up with h-cite microformats so, in theory, other IndieWeb tools parsing my posts can pull structured citation data out of it the same way they'd parse an h-entry.

A "Cite This Issue" Button

Right below that, I added a second <details> block that provides one-click citation exports. Click it open and you get MLA 9, APA 7, Chicago notes-bibliography, and BibTeX, all pre-filled with the post's frontmatter:

<details class="cite-export">
  <summary>Cite this issue</summary>
  <ul class="citation-formats">
    <li>
      <strong>MLA 9</strong>
      <pre>{{ site.author.name }}. "{{ title }}." {{ site.title }}, {{ date | readableDate }}, {{ site.url }}{{ page.url }}.</pre>
    </li>
    <li>
      <strong>BibTeX</strong>
      <pre>@online{brennan{{ year }}{{ page.url | slugify }},
  author = {{ '{' }}{{ '{' }}{{ site.author.name }}{{ '}' }}{{ '}' }},
  title = {{ '{' }}{{ title }}{{ '}' }},
  year = {{ '{' }}{{ year }}{{ '}' }},
  url = {{ '{' }}{{ site.url }}{{ page.url }}{{ '}' }},
  urldate = {{ '{' }}{{ buildTime | htmlDateString }}{{ '}' }}
}</pre>
    </li>
    <!-- APA, Chicago follow the same pattern -->
  </ul>
</details>

Writing out the literal curly brace brackets for the BibTeX is a little clumsy, as you can see, because Nunjucks and BibTeX both use them. It's not pretty, but it works.

Citation Meta Tags and Dublin Core

Google Scholar, Zotero, and most citation managers look for a specific, decades-old convention called Highwire Press tags, prefixed citation_*. I added a full set to every post's <head> in src/_includes/partials/meta.njk:

<meta name="citation_title" content="{{ title }}">
<meta name="citation_author" content="{{ site.author.name }}">
<meta name="citation_publication_date" content="{{ date | isoDate | split('T') | first | replace('-', '/') }}">
<meta name="citation_journal_title" content="{{ site.title }}">
{% if site.issn %}<meta name="citation_issn" content="{{ site.issn }}">{% endif %}
<meta name="citation_issue" content="{{ collections.posts | getIssueNumber(page) }}">
{% if site.author.orcid %}<meta name="citation_author_orcid" content="{{ site.author.orcid }}">{% endif %}

Right below that, I added the Dublin Core set, which is the older, broader library-science metadata standard that many archives and repositories still use: DC.Title, DC.Creator, DC.Publisher, DC.Date, DC.Identifier, DC.Rights, and so on.

The Article block in my JSON-LD (src/_includes/partials/structured-data.njk) has the same info, an issueNumber field, and a conditional identifier object with propertyID: "ISSN":

{
  "@type": "Article",
  "issueNumber": "{{ collections.posts | getIssueNumber(page) }}",
  "identifier": {
    "@type": "PropertyValue",
    "propertyID": "ISSN",
    "value": "{{ site.issn }}"
  }
}

The RSS Feed

Rogue Scholar (and basically every serious feed reader) parses your RSS feed, not your HTML, so the feed needed the same metadata as the posts themselves. src/feed.njk got a dc namespace and a content namespace added to the root <rss> element, then per-item tags for creator, date, language, identifier, source, and rights:

<item>
  <guid isPermaLink="true">{{ absolutePostUrl }}</guid>
  <dc:creator>{{ site.author.name }}</dc:creator>
  <dc:date>{{ post.data.date | isoDate }}</dc:date>
  <dc:rights>https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/</dc:rights>
  {% if site.issn %}<category domain="ISSN">{{ site.issn }}</category>{% endif %}
  ...
</item>

At the channel level, I added an <atom:author> block pointing at my ORCID as the author URI, a <copyright> line, and a channel <image>. Small stuff, but it's the difference between a feed that just lists titles and links versus one that actually declares who's responsible for the content and under what terms you're allowed to reuse it.

CSS Print Styles: Making a Post Feel Like a Publication on Paper

The last piece isn't about metadata at all. If you use the shortcut Ctrl/Cmd + P and try to print one of my posts, you'll now see a nicely styled output, something I attempted to make feel closer to what a printed version of Brennan.day would actually look like, given the limitations of using only CSS.

One of the tricks is page-break-before and flex-direction: column with the order property, so I can rearrange the DOM for print without needing to modify the markup itself:

@media print {
  .h-entry {
    display: flex;
    flex-direction: column;
  }

  /* Title / cover page */
  .post-single .post-header {
    order: 1;
    text-align: center;
    padding-top: 15vh;
  }

  /* Featured image, still on the cover page */
  .featured-image {
    order: 2;
    page-break-inside: avoid;
  }

  /* A dedicated masthead page, after the cover */
  .print-masthead {
    display: block;
    order: 3;
    page-break-before: always;
    page-break-after: always;
  }

  /* The actual essay */
  .e-content {
    order: 4;
  }
}

That .print-masthead div is invisible on screen (display: none outside of @media print) and only appears when you print, as its own page, listing the issue number, publisher, place of publication, and contact:

<div class="print-masthead">
  <p class="sc">{{ site.title }} — issue #{{ collections.posts | getIssueNumber(page) }}</p>
  <p>Publisher: {{ site.author.name }}</p>
  <p>Place of publication: {{ site.author.location.city }}, {{ site.author.location.region }}, {{ site.author.location.country }}</p>
  <p>Available at: {{ site.url }}</p>
  <p>Contact: {{ site.author.email }}</p>
</div>

I also added the featured image's caption date and URL onto the page as a ::after pseudo-element (content: attr(data-date) "\A" attr(data-url);), added drop-cap-style paragraph indentation for body text after the first one, and widow and orphan control (widows: 2; orphans: 2;).

There are many other elements on my site that don't make sense to print, so those aren't displayed:

.site-header, .sidebar, .site-footer,
nav, .breadcrumbs, .post-meta,
.post-tags, .post-footer, .post-nav,
.like-form, .newsletter-signup, .comments-section,
.webmentions, .related-posts-list, .toc,
.reply-context, .external-link-notice, .cite-article,
noscript, script, iframe {
  display: none !important;
}

On screen, paragraphs are separated by margin, but in print I wanted no gap between paragraphs, and the second paragraph onward gets a first-line indent instead:

.e-content p {
  margin: 0;
}

.e-content p + p {
  text-indent: 1.5em;
}

And since a browser's print renderer doesn't know or care about clean page breaks, I explicitly declare which elements are allowed to split across pages and which aren't:

pre, blockquote, img,
figure, table {
  page-break-inside: avoid;
}

h1, h2, h3 {
  page-break-after: avoid;
}

It's a personal pet peeve of mine to have a heading stranded at the bottom of a page with its own content pushed onto the next one, and certainly nobody wants a figure split in half.

These are small details, but I wanted to ensure I created something you'd want to staple together and put in a binder.

Archiving to the Wayback Machine

Permanence isn't just about metadata sitting in the head of a page. It doesn't matter how many citation_* tags or DOIs a post has if the page itself disappears. Rogue Scholar solves this for the posts it ingests, since it holds its own Archive-It subscription that backs up everything it archives.

But I wanted the same insurance for my entire site, so I wrote scripts/archive-to-wayback.js.

The script reads every URL out of my live sitemap.xml and submits each one to the Internet Archive's Save Page Now API, which snapshots the page into the Wayback Machine:

async function fetchSitemapUrls(sitemapUrl) {
  const res = await fetchWithTimeout(sitemapUrl, {}, 30_000);
  const xml = await res.text();
  const urls = [...xml.matchAll(/<loc>\s*([^<\s]+)\s*<\/loc>/g)].map((m) => m[1]);
  return [...new Set(urls)];
}

With 400+ pages on the site now, it needs to survive being interrupted, and it needs to not get rate-limited off the API.

So it's resumable by default. Every result gets written to .cache/wayback-archive/progress.json immediately after each URL, keyed by the URL itself. Re-running it skips whatever's already marked saved:

const pending = urls.filter((url) => !progress.results[url] || progress.results[url].status === 'failed');

Archive.org's anonymous Save Page Now limit is roughly three requests a minute, so my script waits 20 seconds between each one to stay under that. You can get a free S3-style key pair from archive.org, and that enables the script to send authenticated requests instead, which are more reliable:

if (AUTHENTICATED) {
  headers.Authorization = `LOW ${ACCESS_KEY}:${SECRET_KEY}`;
}

A single failed request retries with backoff up to three times. But if five requests in a row fail, then that's probably archive.org having an outage, which sadly happens:

if (consecutiveFailures >= OUTAGE_STREAK_THRESHOLD) {
  saveProgress(progress);
  await sleep(OUTAGE_BACKOFF_MS);
  consecutiveFailures = 0;
  continue; // retry the same URL, don't advance i or record a failure
}

The script also stops after three hours, rather than running indefinitely in the background to prevent too much leeching on Archive.org's servers, since it can always be started up again.

What About Peer Review?

Obviously, this setup doesn't replicate expert peer review. A journal article is not just a durable object with metadata, it has also been evaluated by other people who know the field.

ORCID, DOIs, ISSNs, and Highwire Press tags make a post discoverable and citable, but they do not make it reviewed.

This set up is designed for post-publication, open review. My posts have a public URL, a permanent archive, and a comment section. I am reachable by email and on the fediverse. I can issue corrections or new versions transparently. Webmentions and GitLab issues can become a record of response and critique, and I can invite named readers or mentors to comment on specific essays before or after they go live.

None of that is comparable to a double-blind peer review. I would rather a reader evaluate the argument themselves, check the sources, and cite it with the stated limitation: this is an independent scholarly contribution, not a peer-reviewed journal article.

Beyond this set up, I'd recommend platforms like PubPub, Humanities Commons, Zenodo, the Open Science Framework, Knowledge Commons, and the Open Journal Systems software I mentioned earlier.

The Point of All This

My goal here is to help lower the barriers for people who want to participate in academia and scholarship but can't engage in a formal institution for whatever reason—lack of funding, lack of sufficient grades, lack of time. There are plenty of things stopping people from entering and finishing post-secondary. I hope the ideas I've laid out here help give inspiration and validity to those who feel less legitimate because they aren't enrolled in a university or college—I promise you are, too.

I've taken the parts of academic publishing that actually matter: permanence, citability, clear authorship, a stable identifier for both the publication and the person, and built it all into a static site anyone could clone and use themselves.

The merit of scholarship was never on loan from a department. It's built into the infrastructure now. DOIs, metadata, long-term archiving, doing on my own server what would cost funding and years of institutional support within a university's walls.

If you're sitting on your own personal site wondering whether any of this is worth doing without an institution behind you: it is. An ISSN application costs nothing to attempt. An ORCID takes five minutes. Rogue Scholar is free. Citation meta tags are copy-paste. I've come to realize that one of the only things that actually stands between a "blog" and a "publication" is functionality.

As always, the source for everything above is on GitLab if you want to steal it for your own rogue scholarship.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors

circlejerk.blog isn't new to the bit. An archived about page is upfront about the satire, labelling itself "an art project":

If you’re feeling a sting of recognition, perhaps it’s time to examine why your life so closely mirrors a cliché ripe for parody. And yes, this was conjured by the very AI that the white, middle-aged tech evangelists — who paved the digital road for this site — so fervently idolize. Chew on that.

In its previous iteration, there were many posts like The Last Tab, a mock eulogy for browser tabs in favour of genAI agents doing your browsing for you, with a comment section of hedge-everything replies underneath speaking in 🤖 emoji. You can browse the archives for dozens more posts like this.

Circlejerking has been a hobby of the Internet for decades, and of men for millennia. r/Circlejerk was founded on Reddit on December 10, 2008, built to mock the site's hivemind of reflexive catchphrases and self-congratulatory consensus. r/Circlejerk mimics the tone of sincere Reddit to expose how much of "sincere Reddit" is just people performing agreement at each other. It spawned a taxonomy of spinoffs: r/fitnesscirclejerk, r/engineeringcirclejerk, and so on.

In 2020, playwrights Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley staged Circle Jerk, a Pulitzer-finalist livestreamed satire about online trolls and mocking a hivemind's self-image. The aesthetic and badges. Building a fake earnest website to satirize earnest websites is cataloged on the IndieWeb wiki, alongside an unusable UI called User Inyerface.

Anyways, back to circlejerk.blog, I want to praise the work done to mimic Unstory's site. It's a very convincing 1:1 mimicry, and his writing mannerisms are nailed, though not the substance of what he writes—which I'll get into.

I've been thinking about how I want to approach responding to this. The archives and previous iterations of circlejerk.blog target the stereotypical IndieWebber—what I imagine to be a Portland-esque cishet white guy hipster that's techbro adjacent; an online nerd that's remarkably placid and polite. As Ava recently pointed out, robots can easily parody this.

And I have to concede that a lot of that description does fit me, but at the same time, that isn't who I am. I'm a native boy from Winnipeg—I'm not going to get upset at someone poking fun at me. My people have always been quick to laughter and taking the piss. I love being the butt of the joke, because it means nobody else is getting hurt. I play it straight on this blog because I've been a clown my entire life, but I'm a deeply unserious person.

If anything, I am disappointed at the punches pulled by this satire.

Although someone unfamiliar with Unstory might think this is accurate to his character, I can assure you it's far off. The real Unstory wrote things like how those on the Internet are full of "activists, people who think they are cats, and those who feel the need to announce their mental illness." and told me how my "mind can invent gods, fall in love with an anime character, and call that seeking." He views IndieWeb events as mere "Idiot challenge, #shitfest, stupidity festival." That is incendiary. Something with real teeth to the bite.

Before I stumbled across this satire, I was thinking about the steelman argument against my latest post. For instance, you could argue that the webmaster didn’t “die” because the web got too complex; the title got replaced by more accurate job roles. That's simply how language works, rather than some sort of tragedy. Google rebranding “Webmasters” to “Search Central” was a marketing decision by a company that never cared about the term in the first place.

Or that hosting a static HTML page on Neocities is not actually "mastering the web." A historical webmaster managed servers, security, databases, email, and user accounts. Changing the meaning of the title and claiming victory.

Or that my universalism is hollow, and trying to argue that “it doesn’t matter if you speak English,” is hypocritical when my entire essay and every single resource I listed are in English. I say it’s not about labels then spend paragraphs praising IndieWeb, web revival, and specific communities. I can’t have it both ways.

There are many flaws you could point out, and the reason I don't address all of these is because the essay is already thousands of words long and hedging just dilutes the important point I was trying to make.

Anyways, I suppose my point is I desperately want to see more satire and humour in these spaces. Lighten the fuck up, subvert expectations, say things that are a little inflammatory once in a while. This does not mean to be hurtful or malicious, and it is a real art to execute that properly.

I think of Chi-Jean and Wiisakaychaak from tales. Those who make mistakes, act foolishly, and break rules. These are tricksters who shape the world and teach humans how to live.

Gluttonous, foolish, always getting caught in their own trap, and given standing in old stories because of the foolishness, not despite it. Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor came up with the term survivance. Survival and resistance. And it describes how trickster storytelling refused the story colonization was trying to tell about them. Trickster humour is a Trojan horse. We can use shared laughter to slip past someone's defenses and land empathy where an argument would've bounced off.

The Trickster is an imperfect hero. Trickster tells us truths about ourselves and reveals sides of our nature that we might be more comfortable not to acknowledge. Through his actions all values come into being. The trickster is a paradox. As a shape shifter Trickster is all things to all people. The Trickster, by instructive example, allows us to break out of our stereotypes, whether imposed by our culture, our families or ourselves. He demonstrates the dangers that lie in wait for those with voracious appetites.
—Métis Mythology and Folklore

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors

At the time, there was a new breed of web professionals proudly labeled “webmasters.” Part designer, part developer and part evangelist, webmasters held enough esoteric knowledge about the web to manage, edit and create websites, both large and small.
— Jay Hoffman (August 28th, 2017)

And that's when everything clicked for me.

Over the past year, I've written dozens of articles on the Independent Web. Forty-two essays on principles, technical tutorials, accessibility, and advocacy.

And, in a way, it has all been leading to this manifesto. Only through months of research and getting to know many kind and talented people and building things myself have I finally understood the true power of the webmaster.

I think this will be the most important thing I'll ever write, and I wish to share it with you. With everyone.

Part One: THE PAST

The earliest webmasters were unauthorized, self-taught, one-person operations. The first webmaster was a woman, Stanford librarian Louise Addis.

i. ORIGINS (1993)

It was a few years after Tim Berners-Lee christened the first web server at CERN at the end of 1990, and published the first website info.cern.ch on August 6th, 1991^[1].

The webmaster was first understood as the Internet's equivalent to the real-world postmaster.

"Other protocols have defacto standards for well known mailbox names, such as USENET@domain for NNTP (see [RFC977]), and WEBMASTER@domain for HTTP (see [HTTP])."
— RFC 2142, "Mailbox Names for Common Services, Roles and Functions," Dave Crocker, Internet Mail Consortium. (May 1997)

This RFC—alongside <POSTMASTER@domain> (required by RFC 822)—is what cemented "webmaster" as the canonical, protocol-level point-of-contact role for a website.

"The word “webmaster” comes from a similar role defined in the original specification for email called the postmaster, which in turn comes from the similarly named government position Postmaster General. You can think of the postmaster as an email administrator. The idea being that you can email postmater[sic] @ some domain, and always be connected directly to somebody that could fix a problem with the email. That remains a reserved name today on any email inbox. The webmaster served a pretty similar purpose on the web."
— Jay Hoffman, "What Happened to the Webmaster" (June 16, 2020)

And thus, webmaster@domain was already the de facto email inbox address tied to the HTTP protocol itself.

The label and title quickly grew into something far more than that, though.

"At first it referred to that frustrated techie who set up the rogue Web server without company authorization, coded HTML by hand in a text editor, FTP'd the files to the server, and in his spare time answered all the incoming corporate e-mails, usually also without company authorization."
— Brian Wold, "What Happened to the Webmaster? (And other misleading titles)" (May 12, 2006)

ii. GOLDEN AGE (1994-2001)

The era that conjures "webmaster" most strongly began in the mid 90's, as Beverly Hills Internet was launched, now known as GeoCities.

"[T]he point about the web before social networks or before Web 2.0 is not that you had a profile on GeoCities, but that you had a chance to build your cyber home outside of it, you could exist and grow outside of a centralized service."
— Olia Lialina, quoted in Cybercultural by Richard MacManus (March 7, 2025)

A culture developed as people realized anybody could make their own website. 88x31 buttons, blinkies, .GIFs, web rings, visitor counters, guestbooks. All originate from this time.

"In 1996, the web was littered with black-and-yellow-striped animated .gifs reveling in metaphors of road construction... 'This site under construction' was the default home page disclaimer, until everyone realized that the inherent nature of the web was that it would be perpetually under construction."
— Fresher Styles for Web Designers, O'Reilly (December 2008)

While GeoCities is fondly remembered now, it certainly had its problems and issues. Similarly, there were other platforms at the time as well, such as Tripod, Angelfire, and Homestead. It can be easy to revise history into an idealized monoculture.

"It was not a paradise for early web makers. It was not even a good web hosting service. It was free and not worse than others, that's why webmasters endured the pain of clumsy page builders, interventions from commercial scripts being injected into their pages, accidental file deletions, etc…"
— "GeoCities' Afterlife and Web History," by Olia Lialin, One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age (July 30, 2019)

Over 38 million pages were deleted when Yahoo shut down the platform in 2009.

iii. THE DECLINE (2008-2020)

As sites grew and the Internet evolved from the expectation of a handful of HTML files located in /var/www/html/ into instead a complex beast of software and content management systems, the "one person does everything" model stopped being the default, and the title became a culture-war topic among web professionals.

Schisms grew from the complexity. The Internet became a vector for business, and then the way to make money as the dotcom bubble inflated. People needed to specialize, whether that was to design for the front-end, or program and administrate the server from the back-end. You needed usability specialists and network engineers and search engine optimizers.

Dammit Jim, I’m a Webmaster, not a Digital Government Web Content Communications and Application Development Knowledge Management Specialist! ...or am I?
Is the term webmaster an accurate description of the responsibilities of today’s web professional, or is that moniker just a quaint artifact from the simpler, earliest days of the web where someone akin to a similarly quaint notion of a Ringmaster juggled a circus of unwieldy text, spinning logos and blinking text?
— David Kitzmiller, FCC Webmaster, Mastering the Web: An Old-Fashioned Notion? (August 12, 2010)

Perhaps the clearest and most citable marker of the term's formal retirement from mainstream professional use is when Google rebranded "Google Webmasters" to "Google Search Central" in 2020. An institutional funeral.

"Merriam-Webster claims the first known use of the word 'webmaster' was in 1993, years before Google even existed. However, the term is becoming archaic, and according to the data found in books, its use is in sharp decline. A user experience study we ran revealed that very few web professionals identify themselves as webmasters anymore. They're more likely to call themselves Search Engine Optimizer (SEO), online marketer, blogger, web developer, or site owner, but very few 'webmasters.' In brainstorming our new name, we realized that there's not one term that perfectly summarizes the work people do on websites."
— Google Search Central Blog (Nov 12, 2020)

Part Two: NOW

It is your innate human right to create.

All of the above was pretext for this: You can be a webmaster right now. You can create a website right now. Yes, you. Your website can look however you want it to, and function in any way you want. It can have whatever you want on it.

You can look up tutorials, and you can have your questions answered by humans just by joining forums, IRC channels, and independent platforms. The act of creating and learning inherently places you in the community.

prelude: The Deception

Generally speaking, we have been deceived into thinking many broad falsehoods:

Regarding the webmaster:

1. The Internet has become too complex for a single person to master all aspects of it.
2. You must use a certain tool or platform to properly be part of this movement.

Regarding the Internet:

1. Technology is inherently addictive, and brings us harm.
2. In order to stay connected to others online, we must use corporate social media platforms, become the product, and surrender our privacy.
3. The Internet is primarily falsehoods, misinformation, and meaningless spam content.

Regarding us:

1. Most of us are incapable of learning technical, scientific, mathematical concepts.
2. Those of us who are knowledgeable are reluctant to share information, and hostile to beginners.

When laid out like this, it's easy to see how we've been conned into a cynical, pessimistic—even misanthropic view of things. Companies worth billions of dollars have a bottom line that depends on the general population to continue believing all of the above.

Our perspective on technology and other people has been greatly distorted into the negative. In reality, the Internet has terabytes of high-quality resources to learn from. There are thousands of people just like you looking for connection, hungry for a better vision of the future, wanting to cultivate nourishing hobbies. You are so capable.

The idea that one person cannot master all aspects of the web, as the webmaster was once known to, is demonstrably false.

Be optimistic about your capabilities and the willingness of others to help you. Be skeptical of anybody who attempts to divide or gatekeep, proclaiming the mandated use or superiority of a specific tool or platform.

Likewise, I want to note that searching for "return of the webmaster" in 2026 may lead you to discussions of the "agentic web" or "orchestration," a euphemism for somebody who employs generative AI to do the multidisciplinary work that comes with being a webmaster. Those who manage a stack of expensive large language models, those who are prompt engineers for static site generators, and those who neglect to take the time to learn for themselves, unwilling to put in the effort themselves (or thinking they're incapable to).

That's not what this is. My manifesto is not about becoming an orchestrator. Being a webmaster means becoming a sovereign creator. We are not reclaiming the title of "webmaster" only to then offload the work and art onto chatbots. We are reclaiming it because it is the only title that remains which still carries the weight of total, unapologetic human agency over our digital lives.

a. The Bare Minimum is All You Need

To be a Webmaster, you need a computer, a text editor, and a way to host. That's it.

You don't need a degree in computer science. You don't need a $50/month subscription to a proprietary builder. You don't even need the money to buy a domain name if you don't have the cash.

1. Use https://freedns.afraid.org/ to get a free domain.
2. Throw your files up on Neocities or Nekoweb or web 1.0 hosting.
3. Write your HTML in Notepad. Edit your CSS in TextEdit.

If you don't have a computer or Internet yourself, you could be sitting in a public library on a recycled Chromium machine and still you have everything you need to become a Webmaster. There are not gatekeepers at the doors of the World Wide Web. Like many other things in life, the only lock is the one we put on our own ambitions.

A Webmaster is not just a developer. You are a UX/UI designer, you are a writer and editor, you are an accessibility specialist, and an advocate for others to reclaim their digital autonomy. You are a creator, rather than a consumer. And you are capable of all these things.

You will wrestle with semantic markup to make a page accessible. You will agonize over typeface kerning and colour palettes. You will write prose and publish your weird obsessions and link to your Internet neighbours. You will manage server logs, tweak the .htaccess file, and you will decide and design the architecture of your digital home.

This is not a career path, this is a craft. This is the last best multidisciplinary sandbox, both creative and technical, all rendered on an index.html.

And there is no wrong answer. Serve your website over the Gemini protocol. SSH into the Tildeverse and build a terminal-based homepage alongside strangers. Set up a homelab in your closet using the old, defunct family computer. There are a million ways to do this. The only wrong answer is sitting on the sidelines believing you don't belong in the arena with us.

b. The Last Public Square

Corporate social media platforms we used to call the "new public square" have been astroturf'd, bulldozed, and sold to the highest-bidding fascist oligarch. Your existence is a rental, your voice is a throttled lottery. Your so-called "community" is at the mercy of a billionaire's whim.

Building your own website is an act of digital repatriation.

Creating your own corner of the Internet reclaims one of the only mediums where we retain freedom, creativity, and autonomy.

With the plethora of hosting options available, you can migrate if terms of service change to your disliking. There's no pay-to-play visibility. There's just you, text, and the open protocols of the web.

c. The Myth of Incompetence

The most effective way the power structures of our age have oppressed us is by making us feel as though we are stupid, as though we are incapable of learning.

Many of us have been convinced coding is arcane magic, that servers are eldritch horrors, and that computer science is reserved for child prodigies and those who are privileged to just "naturally get it."

A user who is afraid of the machine and doubts their own capabilities is one that will surrender and pay for a solution.

You are not incapable. There is a lot to learn, yes. And the technologies are deep. But do not forget we are still living in the golden age of human knowledge—endless free resources, tutorials, wikis, and forums are available at your fingertips.

I will repeat myself and say the only barrier that exists is the one you construct in your mind.

You require grit, determination, and a "why." This is your why. The desire to express yourself. The hunger to build something truly of your own. The need to connect with other humans.

d. Universalism

Let me be clear: this is not about "IndieWeb" specs, it isn't about the "Small Web" or "SmolWeb." It isn't a retro-revival nostalgia trip, pining for GeoCities and AOL dial-up tones.

Those are all labels, clubs, and memberships. Standards with elitism and in-group and cliques and gatekeeping as a result.

What I'm talking about is universal. It's not about specific mechanics, it's about a philosophy. It is a big tent.

It doesn't matter if you speak English. It doesn't matter if you don't know how to spell words right in your native tongue. It doesn't matter if you don't know a single line of JavaScript, either.

And it certainly doesn't matter if you think you have "nothing interesting to say." I promise you do. All humans have value, we have our hobbies, our frustrations, our obsessions and small thoughts. Putting this in writing on a page you build with your own hands means you're contributing to a richer, stranger, more wonderful ecosystem.

e. Those Who Came Before

I stand on the shoulders of giants. I am not the first to write a web manifesto, nor the last. I myself am nobody special, nor anybody with authority. I am mere conduit for a message that desperately needs to be heard.

I give credit to Tantek Çelik, Amber Case, Aaron Parecki, Crystal Beasley, and Kevin Marks for founding IndieWebCamp in Portland, Oregon in 2011.

I give credit to Daniel Murray's melonking.net as a foundational "web revival" artifact.

"[The web revival] is a riff on the 20th century American folk music revival, and it implies that early personal sites, like those hosted on GeoCities, were culturally significant as digital folk art."
— Daniel Murray (Melonking), quoted in New_ Public (September 7, 2025)

I give credit to webmistress Sadness, who has been sharing resources on web mastery for years, and was the founder of the now defunct Yesterweb, served as many people's first experience of the indie-web-crafting scene.

"In the earlier iterations of this manifesto, I made the mistake of focusing too heavily on the creation of personal websites as the main method of fighting against the exploitative capitalist hellscape that has become our Internet... For example, we can work on transforming social relations online."
— Sadness, Internet manifesto (May 2023)

I give credit to James G., who has been blogging about the independent Internet for over six years, who hosts the podcast Wonders of Webweaving, and who has recently founded the Web Writers' Collective, which is open to anyone.

I give credit to Alexandra and Kaylee for the community and resources of 32-bit Café. I give credit to Adam Newbold for the community and services of omg.lol.

There are hundreds of people who have dedicated thousands of hours in trying to make the web more human and joyous for all.

f. Saving the World

We can create a more human web right now. The world is in dire straits, and I'm reminded of the words of Carl Sagan, coincidentally written at the dawn of the webmaster:

“In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”
— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot (1994)

There are those who see the act of webmastery as "only" a hobby and pastime—and I say this is not mutually exclusive to world-saving. The personal is political. Our ability to maintain our joy and ourselves is, itself, resistance.

Here is another falsehood I want to emphasize: Our right to freely express ourselves is never a guarantee. The past thirty years of the Internet have been an explosive, chaotic experiment in the commons and the human condition. But the freedom of expression we've been granted is not a given or perpetual promise, and it is extremely foolish to think we will have this for the next ten years, let alone forever.

Start as you are, with what you have, while you still have time to do so.

Exercise your innate human right to create.

Be a developer. Be a designer. Be a writer. Be a systems administrator. Be a philosopher. Be a Webmaster.

It is the most punk rock, anti-establishment, liberating thing you can do in the 21st century. And yeah, it is fucking awesome.

Now, go build something.

FURTHER RESOURCES

Getting Started

• Sadness' Webmastery Resources
• 32-bit Café Community Resources
• IndieWeb: Getting Started: The step-by-step guide to getting your own site on the IndieWeb, covering domains, hosting, and creating pages
• IndieWebify.Me: Step-by-step guidance and tools to test and validate your IndieWeb progress
• MDN Web Docs: HTML Tutorial: Mozilla's HTML documentation and tutorials
• HTML Dog: A classic starting point for HTML and CSS tutorials
• W3Schools: Free coding tutorials for HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and more
• Zonelets: A lightweight blogging engine letting you write posts directly in HTML
• Neocities Template Tool: A simple three-column template for Neocities and other simple site hosts
• The Boilerplate: Ransei's starter template with drag-and-drop upload instructions for Neocities
• Stefan Bohacek: Making a free image gallery with Neocities.org: Tutorials for creating image galleries with Neocities, including an 11ty version
• Susam Pal: Writing First, Tooling Second: A manifesto advocating for prioritizing content in simple HTML before complex tooling

Hosting

• Neocities: Free, user-friendly hosting for handmade websites
• Nekoweb: Another free hosting option for personal sites
• FreeDNS: Get a free domain name
• omg.lol: Community and services from Adam Newbold and Neatnik
• Bear Blog: A minimalist, privacy-focused blogging platform
• Micro.blog: Indie microblogging with built-in cross-posting
• Dreamwidth: An open-source blogging and community platform
• Codeberg Pages: Free static site hosting directly from Codeberg repositories

Web Revival Communities

• MelonLand Wiki: Communities: A directory of web revival communities, forums, and message boards including 32Bit Cafe, Pixel Joint, Basement Community, Comfybox, The Midnight Pub, Pixel Lounge, The Web Raft, and Reject Convenience
• Sheezy.Art: An art website recreating the highs of pre-2010 DeviantArt and SheezyArt
• SpaceHey: A retro social network focused on privacy and customizability; a MySpace experience
• Bitview: A video sharing site inspired by classic YouTube
• Sudomemo: A revival of Flipnote Hatena with community features
• Ytoo.org: A web revival community hub
• Elpis.ws: Another web revival space

Building

• Sadgrl's 88x31 Button Maker: Create your own classic web button
• Hekate's 88x31 Button Maker: Another excellent button generator
• IndieWeb's 88x31 page: More generators plus how to hand-code your own buttons
• Dither It: Make dithered images for a retro aesthetic
• JS Paint: Classic MS Paint in your browser
• JummBox: Chiptune-style music program for the browser
• Online Color Picker: Tools for choosing and testing color palettes
• Josh W. Comeau: CSS Interactive Guide to Grid: An excellent interactive CSS Grid tutorial

Webrings & Directories

• Archive Team: Webring Directory: A list of live niche webrings
• Brisray's Webring List: A hand-verified list of currently working webrings
• 32-Bit Cafe Webring Directory: Active webrings created by 32-Bit Cafe members
• MelonLand Surf Club: An active webring with over 1,500 sites
• The Smallweb Subway: A subway-style network of webrings mapping themed communities
• XXIIVV Webring: An open-source initiative fostering independent personal websites
• Fediring: A webring for the Fediverse
• A11y Webring: A webring focused on accessibility
• Low Tech Webring Directory: A directory of low-tech webrings
• Fandom Webring: A general fandom webring
• Transing the Internet: A trans webring with a small Discord community
• HandCraftedWeb.eu: A curated, decentralized directory and webring for the "Human Web"

Manifestos

• Yesterweb's Collection of Web Manifestos: An excellent collection of manifestos written by others.
  • The Yesterweb Zine: collaborative zine that ran from Aug 2021 to Jan 2023
  • Issue 00, "The Old Web"
  • Issue 02, "Websites as an Act of Creativity"
• IndieWeb's "Why" page: Another list of personal-site manifestos from 1997 to 2026
• Melonking's Manifesto
• A Quiet Manifesto: On text, tech, caring, the importance of existing, and cave paintings
• Tracy Durnell: Guiding principles for my website: Principles including being friendly, respecting privacy, prioritizing connection over reach, and practicing imperfection
• New_Public: The Handmade Internet Is Making a Comeback: A 2025 article on the web revival movement

Archives

• Wayback Machine: The Internet Archive's indispensable tool for viewing historical versions of websites
  • Wayback Machine Downloader: Download an entire website from the Wayback Machine
• Flashpoint Archive: Preserves games and animations from the web
• Escargot: A service that makes old versions of MSN Messenger and Windows Live Messenger work again
• Neonaut's Cyber Mausoleum: On leaving a digital tombstone

Searching

• Wiby: A search engine for the classic web, prioritizing non-commercial content
• Marginalia Search: A search engine that prioritizes non-commercial content and personal websites
• Smallweb.cc: A curated collection of websites
• Cloudhiker: Another selection of websites

History

• The History of the Web: An excellent collection of essays that inspired this post.
• Web Design Museum: A timeline of milestones in the history of web design from 1990 to the present.
• SLAC's archive of the first U.S. website built by Addis and Paul Kunz, December 1991

My Other IndieWeb Essays

Over the past year I've written forty-two essays on this subject. Here are the ones I think are most worth a beginner's time.

Starting Out

• What I Have Learned Being on the IndieWeb for a Month: Small technical joys that turned solitude into dialogue, and treating the Internet like a personal playground and lab.
• Resources for the Personal Web: A Follow-Up Guide: Blogging platforms, search engines that prioritize small sites, and directories for finding like-minded creators.
• Softcore First, Hardcore Eventually: A Ladder for the IndieWeb: Why you should climb the rungs progressively instead of choosing between easy platforms and full technical independence on day one.
• The 1% Rule: An Open Letter to Everyone Who Doesn't Post Anything Online: A call to action for the 99% of internet users who consume but never create.
• You Don't Have to Blog: Your website can be shrines, art, or anything else. You don't need to write a single word to belong here.

Community and Connection

• Won't You Be My Neighbour?: On mycorrhizal networks, Indra's Net, and the importance of building intentional connections between independent websites.
• Yes, Buy Them a Coffee: Support and Mutual Aid on the IndieWeb: Asking for support isn't commodification, it's mutual aid.
• The Internet Needs More Cross-Pollinators: We need people who move between different online subcultures to seed ideas and build bridges.
• The IndieWeb is Wonderfully Dionysian: A plea to write your own comments, from the heart, instead of letting genAI do it for you.

Building It Yourself

• Building an IndieAuth Comment System for Your Static Site: How to build a comment system for your static site using IndieAuth and Netlify Functions.
• How Webmentions Work on brennan.day: A tutorial and walkthrough of implementing webmentions, from setup to display.
• Why Make Your Website Accessible, Anyways?: Web accessibility isn't compliance theatre, it's about designing for everyone.
• Phoneblogging: Why the IndieWeb must prioritize accessible, simple ways to blog from a phone.

The Bigger Picture

• Building the Good Web: What do we owe each other, and what's the distance between knowing something is wrong and doing something about it?
• Trust and Faith in Our Web: What is trust in an AI-saturated internet, and how do we make independent web spaces more accessible?
• Good, Standard Work: Creating the Commons: From Garrett Hardin's tragedy of the commons to Elinor Ostrom's refutation, the commons was never inevitable to fail. It was always a choice.
• How Are We Preparing for the Long Web?: Digital preservation, link rot, and building for the Internet decades from now.
• Free Speech and the IndieWeb: Not all harm is equal, and where we draw the lines in the sand for what's acceptable.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors

Now, I have to admit the site has a certain questionable aesthetic, but the checklist is valuable nonetheless. I've always tried to make sure my web development follows good practices and good hygiene, but there were plenty of things I've never really heard of or come across before.

It's a big list. Foundations, SEO, accessibility, security, well-known URIs, "agent readiness" (bleh), performance, privacy, resilience, internationalisation. There's around 140 items to check off, each with a one-line justification for why it matters and a Required / Recommended / Optional / Avoid tag.

Being the maximalist I am (in other words, I enjoy implementing functionality to my site as a means of procrastinating writing) I decided to go through, one-by-one, and see what I would need to change or add to my site.

A Deliberate Skip

Before anything else, I skipped the entire "Agent Readiness" category. I'm not going to add a llms.txt to my codebase, or per-page markdown endpoints. It's quite a cruel joke that the generative AI gets simple, readable markdown while the rest of us are stuck with far more complex HTML, isn't it? Instead of figuring out a way to get web browsers to display Markdown directly, we've duct-taped a solution for robots.

Anyways, that's enough ranting about that for now. In addition, as I've already written about, I have no AI-crawler-specific robots.txt rules. The game of cat-and-mouse writing elaborate blockades is something I'm not interested in. The only winning move is not to play. That said, I did actually add some fun honeypots that you can find if you try to visit high-risk application paths, default CMS/root paths, secrets & configuration file locations, or API & discovery endpoints. Maybe I'll make another post for that if there's interest.

Agent readiness, as a category, assumes you want agents reading your site efficiently. Unlike search engine optimization (which is usually snake oil itself), optimization for LLMs just makes your content easier to steal, and doesn't help getting more humans to your website.

A Silly Bug

When you go over an audit like this, it makes you re-examine things you've written ages ago. In the case of my site.webmanifest, it made me realize it had empty name and short_name fields:

{"name":"","short_name":"","icons":[{"src":"/android-chrome-192x192.png", ...

Any Android user who tried to "Add to Home Screen" would've gotten a shortcut with no label. Even worse, the icon paths were root-relative (/android-chrome-192x192.png) when the actual files live at /assets/images/favicon/android-chrome-192x192.png. The manifest has been silently erroring and pointing at 404s since whenever I first generated it with some online favicon tool and never looked at the output again. I fixed both:

{
  "name": "brennan.day",
  "short_name": "brennan.day",
  "start_url": "/",
  "scope": "/",
  "icons": [
    {"src": "/assets/images/favicon/android-chrome-192x192.png", "sizes": "192x192", "type": "image/png"},
    {"src": "/assets/images/favicon/android-chrome-512x512.png", "sizes": "512x512", "type": "image/png"}
  ],
  "theme_color": "#fbf1c7",
  "background_color": "#fbf1c7",
  "display": "standalone"
}

In addition, the <meta name="theme-color"> was embarrassingly set to #65312fff. I have no idea when I wrote out this typo—8-digit hex values do actually have utility, with the extra two digits adding alpha channel for transparency, but that wasn't what was happening here. Anyways, I split the hex into a light/dark pair instead, matching my site's palette:

<meta name="theme-color" content="#fbf1c7" media="(prefers-color-scheme: light)">
<meta name="theme-color" content="#282828" media="(prefers-color-scheme: dark)">

Security Headers, or: What I'd Been Putting Off

A lot of work went into security headers. My netlify.toml initially had X-Frame-Options, which is an outdated X-XSS-Protection header that I removed, as it does nothing in any current browser, and the spec says to avoid using it.

I had no Content Security Policy, no HSTS, and nothing about cross-origin isolation.

Writing a CSP for a site that embeds webring widgets and uses KaTeX, Mermaid, and has an IndieAuth comment flow took a bit of work:

Content-Security-Policy = default-src 'self';
  script-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline' 'wasm-unsafe-eval'
    https://cloud.umami.is https://neatstats.net https://cdn.jsdelivr.net
    https://webring.fun https://silly.possiblyaxolotl.com
    https://bubbles.town https://status.lol;
  style-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline' https://cdn.jsdelivr.net
    https://silly.possiblyaxolotl.com;
  img-src 'self' data: https:;
  font-src 'self' data: https://cdn.jsdelivr.net;
  connect-src 'self' https://cloud.umami.is https://*.supabase.co
    https://webring.fun https://neatstats.net https://bubbles.town;
  frame-src https://www.youtube.com;
  object-src 'none'; base-uri 'self';
  form-action 'self' https://indieauth.com https://buttondown.com
    https://*.supabase.co;
  frame-ancestors 'none'; upgrade-insecure-requests;
  report-to default;

I'm not going to pretend that's a strict CSP. It still has 'unsafe-inline' for both scripts and styles, because my site has inline <style> blocks for critical CSS (which is a debateable practice) and quite a few one-off inline <script> tags (theme toggle, scroll progress, the IndieAuth PKCE flow) scattered across templates.

Doing this properly would mean having nonces or hashes on every single script, which frankly isn't a refactor I'm interested in. What I have now still improves security if there was something like a XSS bug, by locking down which domains can be a script/style/connect/frame source at all.

For Strict-Transport-Security and Permissions-Policy, there was nothing complicated to add:

Strict-Transport-Security = "max-age=63072000; includeSubDomains"
Permissions-Policy = "camera=(), microphone=(), geolocation=(), payment=(), usb=(), interest-cohort=()"

Cross-Origin-Embedder-Policy made me stop and think, the spec's default recommendation is require-corp, which blocks any cross-origin resource that doesn't explicitly opt in with its own Cross-Origin-Resource-Policy header. For instance, my website hotlinks loads badge images from aaronparecki.com, indieweb.org, and mirrors.creativecommons.org, none of which I control. require-corp would've broken these images. I used credentialless instead, isolating the page the same way but only strips credentials from cross-origin requests rather than blocking them.

I also wrote a Reporting-Endpoints header pointing at a tiny new Netlify Function that logs whatever the browser sends it:

// netlify/functions/csp-report.js
exports.handler = async (event) => {
  if (event.httpMethod !== "POST") return { statusCode: 405, body: "" };
  console.warn("[reporting-api] " + (event.body || "").slice(0, 4000));
  return { statusCode: 204, body: "" };
};

This isn't an actual observability pipeline, as it only console.warn into logs through Netlify's log drains. But if my CSP is breaking something for a visitor, I'll be able to find out.

The CSP Learning Curve

Of course, implementing a CSP wasn't as simple as copying the spec's recommendations. My initial CSP broke several things on my site:

• The webring widgets from webring.fun and silly.possiblyaxolotl.com stopped loading
• The bubbles.town upvote button failed to load
• The status.lol widget was blocked
• NeatStats analytics stopped working

The issue was that these third-party services make API calls to their own domains for data, and I hadn't included those domains in my connect-src directive. Additionally, some services load their own CSS files that I hadn't whitelisted in style-src.

I had to iteratively add missing domains:

script-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline' 'wasm-unsafe-eval'
  https://cloud.umami.is https://neatstats.net https://cdn.jsdelivr.net
  https://webring.fun https://silly.possiblyaxolotl.com
  https://bubbles.town https://status.lol;
style-src 'self' 'unsafe-inline' https://cdn.jsdelivr.net
  https://silly.possiblyaxolotl.com;
connect-src 'self' https://cloud.umami.is https://*.supabase.co
  https://webring.fun https://neatstats.net https://bubbles.town;
form-action 'self' https://indieauth.com https://buttondown.com
  https://*.supabase.co;

The lesson here is that CSPs require knowing exactly which domains your third-party services use—not just for loading their scripts, but also for any API calls they make in the background. Browser console errors were invaluable for debugging this.

After implementing my initial CSP, I noticed my Umami metrics suddenly dropped to near-zero. It turned out that Umami had changed their API gateway domains, moving from just cloud.umami.is to also using gateway.umami.is, eu.umami.is, and various api-gateway.*.umami.dev endpoints. This is a known issue that breaks tracking for sites with strict CSPs. I had to add all these new gateway domains to my connect-src directive to restore analytics functionality.

I also had to update my service worker to skip cross-origin requests entirely. The service worker was trying to handle requests to external domains (webring scripts, badge images, etc.) but couldn't properly cache them due to CORS restrictions, which was causing "undefined" response errors. By adding a check to only handle same-origin requests, the service worker now focuses on my own content while letting external resources load normally.

Terrible, Terrible Cookies

The checklist's Privacy category flags cookie consent as Required. But guess what? My website has zero cookies, hurray! Umami, my analytics, is documented as cookie-free and I already say so in my privacy policy, and nothing else on my website creates cookies either.

Not every item deserves a "yes" just because the checklist says Required. Read the justification, check if it applies to your site.

Beyond this, there are better alternatives to cookies you can use. For saving user preferences and settings, use localStorage:

// Set it
localStorage.setItem('theme', 'dark');

// Get it
const theme = localStorage.getItem('theme'); // 'dark'

// Remove it
localStorage.removeItem('theme');

Local storage also has a 10MB storage limit vs. 4KB limit for cookies. The catch is data persists forever unless cleared.

sessionStorage works exactly like localStorage, but automatically clears the data when the user closes the browser tab.

sessionStorage.setItem('formStep', '3');

For large, complex data (e.g., offline images, large cached JSON), you can use localForage (a library that yes, rhymes). Native IndexedDB is powerful but complicated (uses callbacks, cursors, and databases). localForage is a tiny library that gives you a localStorage-style API but stores data in IndexedDB behind the scenes.

// Include the library, then:
localforage.setItem('shoppingCart', { items: 200, total: '$500' });
localforage.getItem('shoppingCart').then((cart) => console.log(cart));

This handles binary data (blobs/files) and holds over 50MB, and uses Promises (async) so it doesn't freeze your webpage.

A Useful Service Worker

My old service worker cached /assets/css/style.css, a file that hasn't existed since I split my CSS into multiple files, so it was actually caching nothing. I rewrote it so a failed navigation falls back to a real offline page instead of the browser's own "no internet" screen, and images load cache-first instead of network-first:

if (event.request.mode === 'navigate') {
  event.respondWith(
    fetch(event.request).catch(() =>
      caches.match(event.request).then(response => response || caches.match(OFFLINE_URL))
    )
  );
  return;
}

I also added a check to skip cross-origin requests entirely, which was causing CORS-related errors. The service worker now only handles same-origin requests, letting external resources (webring scripts, badge images, etc.) load normally:

// Skip cross-origin requests to avoid CORS issues
if (!event.request.url.startsWith(self.location.origin)) {
  return;
}

Finally Fixing the Annoying Flash

While testing all these changes, I finally dealt with the flashing on page load—elements in the main content and sidebar would resize visibly on page loads, regardless if it was your first visit or not.

This was because I was using the deferring technique media="print" onload="this.media='all'". This is a known pattern for loading CSS asynchronously to improve performance, but it has the annoying downside of causing flashes of Unstyled Content and layout shifts when the deferred CSS finally loads and applies.

I just removed the deferred loading and let CSS load normally. The tradeoff is slightly slower initial render, but no more flashing. Sometimes the performance optimization causes the problem it's supposed to solve.

Other Small Fixes (Rapid Fire Round!)

There were a handful of things that were quick, once I knew to look for them:

text-wrap: balance / text-wrap: pretty on headings and body copy, so the browser handles orphaned last-line words nicely.

h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {
  text-wrap: balance;
}

p, li, dd, figcaption {
  text-wrap: pretty;
}

scrollbar-gutter: stable so pages that scroll (nearly every post) and pages that don't aren't shifting width against each other.

html {
  scrollbar-gutter: stable;
}

scroll-margin-top / scroll-padding-top on headings and anchor targets, so jumping to #comments or a table-of-contents link doesn't land the heading directly underneath my sticky header (something that's been bothering me forever).

html {
  scroll-padding-top: 5rem;
}

h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6,
:target,
[id] {
  scroll-margin-top: 5rem;
}

A @view-transition block with navigation: auto, so Chrome (for now) animates between page loads. Unsupported browsers just navigate normally, but it's a one-line opt-in.

@view-transition {
  navigation: auto;
}

Forced colours mode support, for people running accessibility options, like Windows High Contrast. My rainbow nav underline and scroll-progress bar are pure decoration with no border to fall back on, so this snippet allows them to remain:

@media (forced-colors: active) {
  .site-header::after,
  nav.site-nav a::after {
    background: CanvasText;
    forced-color-adjust: none;
  }

  button, .hero-btn, input[type="submit"] {
    border: 1px solid ButtonText;
  }
}

:user-valid / :user-invalid on form fields, real-time validation styling in CSS instead of JS class-toggling, and it only triggers after you've interacted with the field, so a required-but-empty input doesn't pop up before you've typed anything.

input:user-invalid, textarea:user-invalid {
  border-color: var(--link-hover);
}

input:user-valid, textarea:user-valid {
  border-color: var(--nav-green);
}

A container query on the sidebar modules, this way the badge grid responds to the module's rendered width instead of just the viewport.

.sidebar .module {
  container-type: inline-size;
  container-name: sidebar-module;
}

@container sidebar-module (max-width: 220px) {
  .badges-grid {
    grid-template-columns: repeat(auto-fill, minmax(70px, 1fr));
  }
}

contain: layout paint on post cards and sidebar modules, telling the browser those subtrees can't affect anything outside themselves.

a.post-card {
  contain: layout paint style;
}

Speculation Rules for same-origin prefetching, skipping honeypot paths and anything marked rel="nofollow":

<script type="speculationrules">
{
  "prefetch": [{
    "source": "document",
    "where": { "and": [
      { "href_matches": "/*" },
      { "not": { "href_matches": "/honeypot/*" } },
      { "not": { "selector_matches": "[rel~=\"nofollow\"]" } }
    ]},
    "eagerness": "moderate"
  }]
}
</script>

Visible breadcrumbs on posts and pages, matching the BreadcrumbList JSON-LD I already wrote but never rendered on the site:

<nav class="breadcrumbs" aria-label="Breadcrumb">
  <ol>
    <li><a href="/">Home</a></li>
    <li aria-current="page">Advanced Webweaving: Auditing Against Specification.Website</li>
  </ol>
</nav>

inputmode, enterkeyhint, and autocomplete on the comment sign-in, newsletter, contact, and guestbook forms, so the correct mobile keyboard shows up:

<input type="url" name="me" inputmode="url" enterkeyhint="go" autocomplete="url" required>
<input type="email" name="email" inputmode="email" enterkeyhint="send" autocomplete="email" required>

A /500.html page and a /maintenance.html page, the latter being a documented, one-line redirect flip in netlify.toml for if ever I need to put the site into maintenance mode. (Some future unforseeable disaster.):

# Commented out until I actually need it
# [[redirects]]
#   from = "/*"
#   to = "/maintenance.html"
#   status = 503
#   force = true

IndexNow, a protocol I'd never heard of before this audit. Bing, Yandex, and a couple others let you push a "changes made" ping instead of waiting for a crawl. Generate a key, and drop it at the site root, and then I added a post-deploy hook next to the WebSub ping I already had:

curl -s -X POST "https://api.indexnow.org/indexnow" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8" \
  -d "{\"host\": \"brennan.day\", \"key\": \"...\", \"urlList\": [...]}"

A webfinger endpoint at /.well-known/webfinger, which is how the Fediverse resolves acct:brennan@brennan.day-style identifiers to profile links. Mine is a static file instead of query-aware endpoint, since I only have the one identity to resolve (mine):

{
  "subject": "acct:brennan@brennan.day",
  "links": [
    { "rel": "self", "type": "application/activity+json", "href": "https://social.lol/@brennan" }
  ]
}

A /.well-known/traffic-advice file, which is Chrome-specific and tells its private prefetch proxy whether it's allowed to send prefetch traffic to my origin:

[{ "user_agent": "prefetch-proxy", "google_prefetch_proxy_eap": { "fraction": 1.0 } }]

Adding a Syndication module (sy:updatePeriod, sy:updateFrequency) in my RSS feed, so feed readers with the ability can now display how frequently my blog is updated:

<rss version="2.0" xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/">
  <channel>
    <sy:updatePeriod>daily</sy:updatePeriod>
    <sy:updateFrequency>1</sy:updateFrequency>
  </channel>
</rss>

Redirect-By: Netlify, a header that states which system issued a redirect, in case I'm debugging a redirect chain:

[[headers]]
  for = "/*.html"
  [headers.values]
    No-Vary-Search = '''params=("utm_source" "utm_medium" "utm_campaign" "fbclid" "gclid")'''

[[headers]]
  for = "/*"
  [headers.values]
    Redirect-By = "Netlify"

[[headers]]
  for = "/assets/*"
  [headers.values]
    Cross-Origin-Resource-Policy = "cross-origin"

A few more additions:

• No-Vary-Search on HTML responses, listing out the usual tracking parameters (utm_source, fbclid, gclid, etc.) so a cache treats /post/ and /post/?utm_source=mastodon as the same page instead of two (I try my best to avoid any tracking params, but other sites don't).
• Cross-Origin-Resource-Policy: cross-origin on my asset headers, so nothing about the other origin isolation changes stops someone else from embedding my own images.
• Core Web Vitals as a category is just reviewing what real users experience, which I did with PageSpeed Insights. The current assessment is Passed: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) 1.8 s, Interaction to Next Paint (INP) 68 ms, Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) 0. Other metrics: First Contentful Paint (FCP) 1.6 s, Time to First Byte (TTFB) 1.6 s. These were taken from the latest 28-day Chrome UX Report for mobile.

Things Still Unaddressed

There were also several other things I didn't get to from the long, detailed 140-item checklist:

• DNS CAA records and DNSSEC are controlled by CDN, and not in this repo, so I'll need to review those.
• Trusted Types would require auditing every innerHTML-style sink across my templates and the third-party widgets I don't control.
• SRI on the webring/reaction-button scripts isn't happening until they're pinned to a version instead of @main. Subresource Integrity on a moving target just means the hash breaks the next time I push a commit. I did add it to my pinned Mermaid script, where it made sense.
• Actual uptime monitoring means picking and paying for a third-party service, which I don't think is necessary for my site.
• Strict CSP with nonces/hashes would require refactoring all my inline scripts and styles to use proper CSP mechanisms, which is more work than I'm willing to invest right now.

The Actual Point

This is the part where I say none of this was really about the checklist. Don't get me wrong, checklists are good for finding the things you've stopped seeing because you've been looking at the same code every day for months. Fixing the broken web manifest, the theme-colour meta tag doing nothing, and the breadcrumb schema I wasn't actually using.

But the value wasn't in checking every box, it was about learning what my site was lacking due to my ignorance, and making meaningful changes to improve the experience for my readers and visitors.

If you run your own site through the checklist, I'm curious what it turns up for you! (And please let me know if any of these changes actually ended up breaking something.)

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors

I mean, we've all been there, right? Finding ourselves embodied in a fictional hypothetical, with our emotions getting worked up as though it was actually happening.

Some people do this much more than others. For instance, like me. It's probably rather embarrassing for me to confess, but I've never been one to shy away from being candid on this blog.

Ever since I was a child and had nowhere physical to escape when my parents were arguing about money at three in the morning, or when I was getting scolded for drawing a variety of colours on the walls—the only place I could retreat was my own mind. I'd imagine alternative realities made of pillowforts for shelter and refuge. Where I could hide, and where things would be quiet and calm.

As I got older, these daydreams became more elaborate and specific instead of subsiding. They became primarily about other people and how I'd interact with them. During my walks home from school, I would find myself constructing hypothetical futures where I had repaired relationships I ruined, or finally said all the sentimental heartfelt things to someone I was too shy to say in reality. During restless nights of insomnia, I would craft the environments and the textures and the visuals—I'd imagine myself crashing events or hosting my own, inviting dozens of people only to care about one particular person attending à la The Great Gatsby.

I'm standing in the ramshackled doorway of a liminal apartment, walls the colour of dried sage. There's a girl I liked and never told, she has anonymous brunette bangs, and she's sitting at a lopsided kitchen table with a water ring left by somebody's glass. Of course I'd write her half of the dialogue. And then, I'd run the same three minutes over and over, changing the line that made her laugh, or frown. Until the cinematography and stagework all snapped into place.

Or maybe I'd construct a bookstore to host a reading when I get published. Folding chairs squeaking against linoleum as people shifted their weight, a friend from years back turns up unannounced in the last row. I'd deliver the same sentences of the introduction over and over, adjusting the joke, adjusting the pause. All long after I'd stopped consciously choosing to think about any of it at all.

Not Recognized

Clinical psychologist Eli Somer coined "maladaptive daydreaming" in 2002, after years spent researching trauma and dissociation at the University of Haifa, when he noticed a pattern in his patients that didn't fit existing diagnostic categories—people describing daydreams so vivid and immersive they were replacing human interaction rather than accompanying it. His original definition is daydreaming that's intensive and vivid enough to functionally substitute for real relationships, and interferes with school, work, or interpersonal life.

James Thurber's Walter Mitty narrates his way through hydroplane crashes and courtroom dramas to survive a forgettable errand-run of a day, a comparison used to explain maladaptive daydreaming to people who've never experienced it.

It's been two decades and maladaptive daydreaming itself exists in administrative limbo. There's a growing body of peer-reviewed research, an open-access 16-item screening scale with clinical cutoff scores, and an international research consortium. But it still isn't recognized by the DSM or ICD as a standalone disorder.

Somer's term found its an audience online, as the description spread through dedicated forums and support communities run by people who'd spent years assuming living in their own heads was rare, or shameful, or entirely their own invention. An anthropological account of these communities writes about members who pace for hours during a daydream, and those who need a specific song to drop back into the version of themselves that only exists inside a fantasy, and those who talk about the pull of it in language usually reserved for addiction.

The Internet did for this what it's done for a dozen other private, idiosyncratic-feeling experiences: turned it into a shared vocabulary.

Studies out of Hungary found that people who screen as maladaptive daydreamers report significantly more childhood traumatic experiences than typical daydreamers, and that there's a relationship with dissociation—and with identity confusion and a felt lack of control. But other researchers note that trauma isn't a necessary or sufficient cause on its own. Maladaptive daydreaming shows up more often as one risk factor among several, alongside social anxiety and attentional difficulties overlapping symptomatically with ADHD, and what the literature calls "pathological absorption," an elevated capacity to get lost inside an internal world at the cost of the external one.

Paracosms

That absorption trait is what separates maladaptive daydreaming from regular daydreaming. A long-running Oregon study on children who build sustained imaginary worlds called "paracosms," complete with their own geography and internal rules—found those kids test no differently from their peers on almost every measure, except unsurprisingly, they consistently score higher on storytelling creativity. Nothing to worry about, in other words. The difference between a paracosm and maladaptive daydreaming isn't about the intensity of imagnation, but whether the world you built stays a place you visit or becomes the place you live.

I like to think that there have been benefits to this coping mechanism. As though I've been keeping my mind's eye sharp through constant usage. I'm capable of juggling numerous things in my head at a time because I'm always living there. When I sit down to write, there's a dozen points I already have and I (usually) manage not to lose them.

In another way, it feels as though I've inadvertently created a schism within myself. The daydreamer version of me is a completely different mode of existence compared to how I act when I'm pulled out of my mind and into the real world, when I'm actually talking to others. I'm far more pragmatic and unsentimental, I acknowledge my shortcomings and flaws rather than cerebral orchestrate a non-existent future where I mend and repair everything those flaws deteriorate. I'll often find myself going to sleep yearning with paragraphs I'd want to message someone with, only to wake up and not feel that want at all.

The Escape

Escapism into fictional stories is certainly not unique to maladaptive daydreamers. It is near a default mode of existence for people. We love media, we love good stories on film, or television, or in books about others who have never existed, but are written well by others. And people are so moved by their experiences about the stories of others that they create their own fanwork, and fandom. It is an incredible, gratifying experience, and that's exactly why I began the transformative works archive fanfiction.lol. Fandom spaces get studied as coping mechanisms for stress and loneliness, operating through narrative transportation—where attention and emotion are so fully absorbed by a story that the reader feels carried inside it. Fanfiction is as a place where people work through identity and feeling inside a world they already trust.

But my daydreams are different—there is no separation, no understanding that the story eventually ends. I am, in a way, stuck in the thoughts in perpetuity. And the most interesting thing I've realized over the years is that this hasn't just been a shield and coping mechanism, but that I've come to enjoy it. When I'm able to totally forget my body and physical surroundings and the imaginative world I've conjured is so strong that everything else is forgotten, it's as enjoyable as any restful sleep can be.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors

I know what you're thinking, how it's rather sacrilege to try to pinpoint and explain the beginning of spirituality—I know that it is far easier to explain things in retrospect—but it's an interesting rabbit hole nonetheless.

We begin with Friedrich Max Müller, a European comparative philologist born in 1823 who is now most well-known for pioneering and founding the academic science of religion, what we now call Religious Studies.

Müller's theory of naturism, or physical religion, posited that early religion began with humanity's direct sensory perception of the physical environment and natural forces. He argued that awe-inspiring phenomena—the sun, the sky, the weather and storms, dawn and dusk—inspired awe, terror, and an intuition of the Infinite. Early humans personified the forces as divine agents, shaping language and myth.

Lightning and thunder, for instance, are rather terrifying. And yet they also cause deep marvel, surprise, and reverence. And so, we personified the phenomenon, creating a deity who controls when it thunders as an attempt to better understand these chaotic, random forces. Surely if it happens often, then the God is angry.

"Regarding mythology, others see it in a picture of great forms and forces of nature, particularly the sun, the moon, and stars, the changes of day and night, the succession of the seasons… all these reflections by vivid imaginations."

Sacred rituals and sacrifice grew out of a desire to control the unpredictable and survive, such as giving offerings or performances for better crop harvests.

There's "Pluto's Gate", a mythical gate to hell, which was found to be a real place in Turkey. CO2 concentrations in the grotto below the temple still reach up to 91 percent, lethal vapours causing the suffocation of animals, and by some accounts, causing visions and prophecies in pilgrims who slept nearby, in what one archaeologist called an oracle-of-Delphi effect.

I would be remiss without adding that Müller carries problematic baggage, with his translations and academic frameworks serving a Western colonial and missionary agenda, often aimed at diminishing indigenous spiritual confidence, particularly with his work in India.

In Ancient Egypt

Whatever Müller got wrong—and surely he got plenty wrong—I appreciate his instinct to look for religion in the natural world. Ancient Egypt is a particular interest of mine, with the amount of environmental danger people endured and survived. For in the Nile Valley, there's the Nile Crocodile, the Nile hippopotamus, scorpions, and the Egyptian cobra. These were some of the deadliest animals in the world.

And you can see how the religion of Ancient Egypt attempted to reckon with these mortal terrors. The cobra, the Wadjet, symbolised protection of royalty. Pharaohs wore her rearing form on their crowns as the uraeus, and it was said to spit fire at any enemy who came near.

Hippos were associated with both death and fertility, the goddess Taweret was part hippo, part crocodile, part lioness, who guarded women through childbirth.

Crocodiles, born on land and living in water, protected the dead, ferrying them to the afterlife, skilled in navigating both planes. This was Sobek, and Egyptians mummified crocodile eggs and fetuses to bury alongside their dead to enlist his help crossing.

Scorpions would be prayed to for healing from illnesses. Serket was the goddess of both venom and its cure, whose name means "she who causes the throat to breathe," referring to the paralysis a sting brought on.

Livestock was associated with the fertility of the land, embodied in the cow goddess Hathor, prayed to for good farming seasons. Hathor was also love, joy, music, motherhood, and the sky, with more temples built to her than to any other Egyptian goddess.

And the Scarab Beetle was connected to the Sun, with Khepri, the aspect of Ra who rolled the morning sun into being the way a dung beetle rolls its ball across the sand. Egyptians watched young beetles emerge from those dung balls as if from nothing. A God born from what looked like dead matter, over and over.

The black lands of Egypt were fertile, and tombs were built on this precious land alongside crops, with the Sekhet-Hetep, the Field of Peace being one of the Egyptian heavens. The farmers imagined the afterlife similar to their own lives, meaning they would, tragically, continue their labour forever. Egyptians buried shabti figures with their dead, small magical servants meant to answer the call to work in their place.

Meanwhile, the Netherworld is the red lands—a place where you can get easily lost, suffering from drought, thirst, and the scorching heat of the Sun.

The Evolution

There was a process to this—a gradual evolution of understanding the animal's role, sacredness, and identity.

For example, jackals^[1] in Ancient Egypt were grave robbers and scavengers, and the earliest Egyptian civilization struggled to block them from entering tombs—this was an existential threat, as preserved bodies were vehicles to the afterlife.

So, to start, there was Zoolatry, Anubis in full animal form originally, and there were attempts to placate the power of the animal, bribing the power of the Jackal by satisfying the God, making the animal less threatening.

Over time, technology advanced and made protecting tombs easier, and the anthropomorphic, humanlike Anubis that we know now developed as the Egyptians conquered and controlled the jackals (and, in turn, their fears), understanding the God as now being cooperative. Anubis predates Osiris as lord of the dead, and got demoted to embalmer and gatekeeper once Osiris rose in prominence.

Some would argue the evolution didn't stop there—as nowadays Anubis is known to some as being an adorable anime girl now protecting their website from DDoS attacks. The wheel of time continues to turn.

I'm aware that, in writing something like this, I'm playing the role of the anthropologist which I've criticized in the past. Which is to say, I'm compartmentalizing and acting as though the beliefs and thoughts of others can be easily understood, simply because they're geographically and temporally distant.

The wheel of time doesn't change the gods—it changes the people telling their stories. My evolutionary arc is another layer of interpretation, surely.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors

"Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" ^[1]

But what does it actually mean to pursue happiness? It means to chase, to run after. You are free to try to reach, but you are not promised the destination of happiness itself.

And, sure, I could explain that the idea of the founding fathers was to have citizens living a life of civic virtue, moral self-improvement, and personal freedom to work (or own property) without unfair government blocks, rather than just seeking short-term personal pleasure.

But I think you'd agree with me—that sounds more like a noble contentment rather than happiness, doesn't it? Hm.

The 50/10/40 Split

All I want now is happiness for you and me
What I used to be will pass away and then you’ll see.
—Elliott Smith, "Happiness"

As you may already be aware, our capacity for happiness is already regarded as known. The most widely cited framework for happiness is from psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky (UC Riverside) and colleagues Kennon Sheldon and David Schkade, who proposed a "sustainable happiness model" in a 2005 paper, later popularized in her 2008 book The How of Happiness.

The review of evidence by Lyubomirsky et al. (including a 1996 study by Lykken and Tellegen which compared the well-being levels of identical and non-identical twins raised together or apart) led to what's known as the 50/10/40 split.

To start, there's a 50% set point. Essentially half of a person's long-term happiness level is genetically determined. Identical twins' well-being levels correlated around 50%, versus only 2-8% for non-identical twins, suggesting a strong heritable component to baseline happiness.

And how much is due to circumstance? Things like income, health, marital status, where you live—in other words, the things external to you that you can't control?

10%.

That's it. The remaining 40% is determined by intentional activity, what Lyubomirsky calls "happiness strategies". We can't alter our genetic set points, and there are many circumstances in our life well beyond our control, but our will and choices we make can meaningfully increase and sustain happiness.

Now, it's clear that this is a radical oversimplification of many factors, and it's been decades since this research has been published. In a 2021 revisiting paper, Sheldon and Lyubomirsky write that the pie chart aspect of the model was flawed, and that they agree with many critiques while noting they were speculative and not dogmatic in the original.

But there is still something to it—I think there's a placebo aspect to will. I don't know if our belief in how much control we have actually changes how much control we have, but I do know it at least makes us, in fact, believe we have control.

If the 40% is real, it may be real only as a story—a story about intention, effort, and choice.

The Curious Case of Unstory and Brennan

In truth, I bring all this up because there's an anonymous blogger who's been on my mind, Unstory, who you may have seen on Bubbles or elsewhere.

There have been quite a few stories in the blogosphere recently about fighting against doomerism, in the realm of politics and the struggle and fight against doom. I've always thought that our capacity of imagination for a better future is one of the most vital things we can cultivate. This is what Indigenous Futurism is; the post-apocolyptic Biskaabiiyang.

And then there's Unstory.

There are many labels I would give Unstory after reading his blog posts: pessimist, cynic, misanthrope. But he rejects all labels except "peasant," which I can't help but respect. He understands a peasant as simply needing "food, sleep, maybe silence, not solidarity. [The] Peasant is not a member. Not an identity. Not a political faction." He appreciates the peasants who write online that are working class, those who are the "no-name cashier, waitress, cleaner, janitor, watchman, food delivery guy" and I completely agree that I would love to read more blogs by people like that.

In many ways, Unstory and I have similar ethos. He writes in short, unsentimental bursts, usually under a couple hundred words, blog posts that get to the point. We both appreciate the literal, the thing rather than the thing being merely talked about. We're both against tone policing, we would agree that the romance of nature is often completely detached from its reality. We would also agree that the Internet is over-engineered and bloated, and he even came up with a rather smart, simple idea for "leaf" files which I enjoy. The platonic ideal of the lazy minimal source of peasant articles.

In other ways, though, we are diametrically opposed. He has a disdain for the exact kind of writing I do. And I've found Unstory's recent posts to be hostile, and critical-yet-passive. His latest post, as of writing, is angrily complaining about the IndieWeb traditions of carnivals and other writing challenges without actually naming anybody in particular. And I can't help but wonder why? Compared to the earlier posts on the blog, these more recent ones feel hollow, aggressive for the sake of being aggressive, aimed at fellow writers rather than massive corporate entities and bullshit systems that would be justified with such ire.

Part of what makes those recent posts feel hollow is the language. I dislike ableist words (dumb, stupid, idiot, and the like) because insulting someone’s intellect has eugenic roots. Unstory certainly doesn’t need those words to be cutting, his best lines are sharper without them.

But maybe what bothers me the most is how it feels like Unstory is maintaining a label and identity, and performing a particular mood and opinion. Something predictable at this point.

Anyways, to bring this back to my original point, about happiness, Unstory wrote to me how "willpower as biological illusion, like free will. System can't be changed from inside. Too abstract for an article. Maybe it stays as smoke."

And I think that's where we differ the most, to surrender to the physical mechanics and electrochemical certainties of our material world, and to believe there is absolutely no autonomy, as a result.

I admit that these are most likely handy illusions, but I have lived such a joyous, interesting life because of these pseudo-choices I've made. Unstory replied that "handy illusions are still illusions. You can't do whatever you want. That's your illusion. You do what environment, and time demand. Organism moves or does not. The story comes after."

And what of people? Unstory says "Good people? There is no such thing ;/ Nature does not know "good". Something exists or not. You romanticized people and society."

Is this wise zen, or bleak nihilism? It's hard to tell. To be honest, despite how crude and crass Unstory often is on his blog, and despite how much I disagree with him, I can't help but find wisdom in his writing. And he tells me, "[y]ou can't learn anything from me. Your organism does not need my body for anything. And if it needs it, you will kill me and eat. It knows what to do."

Unstory’s determinism is that he writes. He replies. He maintains a blog. He "points at corpses" and refuses labels. If nobody chooses anything, then even the refusal to decorate a lie is not a choice. Yet, it is a performance, and a performance implies an audience, and an audience implies that the story matters.

Am I happier than Unstory? It's a ridiculous question, and I'm almost certain Unstory would reject it. While we have two radically different, opposing worldviews, I certainly don't think mine is better or superior. That's why I wrote "The Curious Case of Unstory and Brennan" in the header. By that, I don't think we balance each other out, or that the world needs both our worldviews, or anything like that. People are just people. I just think we're both weird, and we would make a fantastic buddy-cop film if we co-starred in it.

I am humanist, social, romantic, attached to identity, seeing people as good, treating questions as meaningful, and treating free will as a useful illusion. Unstory is anti-humanist, anti-identity, deterministic, seeing categories as traps, rejecting moral language, and refusing to offer wisdom or salvation.

Of course, by writing this I am doing exactly what he refused to do. I am turning him into a type, with particular labels. I did indeed want a clean portrait for my story of Unstory. And in his first reply, he refused, telling me that my “questions try to turn [him] into a type…” He will not wear labels, and his answers are evasive not out of dishonesty but out of a principled resistance to being pinned down or figured out.

I failed in getting a proper interview out of Unstory, and I joyously surrendered. The more we exchanged, the more the diptych developed. Cynicism vs. love, the stripped body vs. the embellished story, the impossibility of change vs. the glorious illusion of it.

You see, Unstory’s logic remains unassailable on its own terms, but Brennan’s joy remains unconquered. Two people staring at the same abyss—one seeing only the abyss, the other seeing a wonderful illusion and shouting “Hurrah!” into the void. Our exchange gains a strange beauty from the double vision—and it just keeps looking.

I'd like to share a quote from one of my favourite writers to end this on.

“In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

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I've come to realize that my fundamental difference with absolutists is that I believe giving everyone a seat at the table, including those who would erode the rights of everyone else sitting (if given the opportunity) only permits free speech in the short-term. I believe taking extraordinary measures with extraordinary circumstances is necessary to allow everyone else to maintain their freedom of speech indefinitely.

John Rawls, and his notion of reasonable pluralism, is a society built on real disagreement, but that doesn't owe a seat to every disagreement, only to the ones that accept that other people are allowed to exist and be wrong. A reasonable doctrine would never use power to erase the doctrines sitting beside it. The unreasonable ones are the ones that would. The accommodation a free society extends isn't unconditional tolerance dressed up as principle, and the unreasonable doctrines are the ones that would resort to "the oppressive use of state power" to erase the rest. No amount of politeness in the meantime changes what they're asking for a seat to eventually do.

Beyond this, I've written before about how I'm limited by Canadian law as to what I'm allowed to host on my transformative works archive fanfiction.lol, and I certainly don't agree with that whatsoever.

Anyways, while there were quite a few responses to my post on free speech within the IndieWeb that seemed to miss the main point I was trying to drive home, there was one anonymous comment in particular that I found myself agreeing with:

I'm not understanding how [Brennan]'s opinions became so important to some.

Now this, I can sympathize with. If I wanted prestige or clout I would be doing everything I could to get a job at an institutional publication with name recognition. Instead, I write here, wholly independent and on my own. My opinion is certainly not important. Beyond this, I am not a good person, and I am often foolish as well. The scant bylines I have are from chance, mostly.

Now, that doesn't mean I just write whatever-the-fuck, I have standards. Why? Because no matter what, words have weight—and I try my best to be mindful of what I write and speak into the world. As I've written before, humanity has long thought the act of writing is magic. To write something out doesn't merely communicate it symbolically, but manifests the actual thing into the reader's mind. That is no small thing.

Many of us (myself included) lose the reason why we're writing or speaking in the first place. We become engrossed in the granular fine points of a conversation and then are surprised we're buried to the head in quicksand.

What Does ALL Dialogue Need?

I try to centre myself on what Paulo Freire, Brazilian educator and philosopher, thought about dialogue:

“If I do not love the world, if I do not love life, if I do not love people, I cannot enter into dialogue.”

This is easy to nod along to in the abstract, but it's wrenchingly difficult to practice when the person across from you is irritating, wrong, or hostile. And that is when the principle matters most—and it's also when most of us, myself included, fail.

And, from his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, chapter 3:

Dialogue cannot exist, however, in the absence of a profound love for the world and for people. The naming of the world, which is an act of creation and re-creation, is not possible if it is not infused with love. Love is at the same time the foundation of dialogue and dialogue itself.

I think if you ask people what their core values are, you'd hear the same answers often: trust, growth, unity, safety, family. And how distant these values become in the screenvoid of cyberspace. As though there is an amnesia somewhere between the keyboard and our fingers.

Of course, I don't think this is true for everyone. An excellent counterexample is the creator of omg.lol, Adam Newbold, who has been consistent with his principles and efforts any time I've spoken to him, no matter what the consequence of that may be. He's been the one to push me to stop using Cloudflare and several other important issues.

The world is in dire need of more people like Adam—of people willing to be vocal and urge our friends to do better, and to believe they can do better. Adam never comes from a place of being critical or morality, they always centre compassion and inherently believe I (and others) are capable of showing more mindful compassion ourselves.

And, I think similar to Chris Ulmer, Adam is not a saint. It does not take an extraordinary amount of courage or love to stay convicted with your principles and believe in the other people in your life similarly. Anybody could do what he does, and I try my best to do the same for others in my own life.

I'll give an example of this—it would probably be better if I didn't mention specifics, but I have mentioned previously that I personally really dislike vagueblogging. An Internet friend of mine, Rina, wrote a blog post about how she wouldn't stop saying a certain slur and presumed that Americans of the United States were uniquely offended by the word, and noted how ubiquitous the word is where she's from. A different culture and a non-native understanding of English aren't excuses, but they do complicate things.

And I responded directly, with how the word is actually rather hurtful in all the English-speaking world, and that it is particularly hurtful when aimed towards those with disabilities.

Less than a day later, she wrote another post admitting she was wrong and apologized:

"first, i need to say thank you to the people that showed me kindness, even if i probably didn’t deserve it, namely brennan and vigil. this is how you make someone think things through"

What is Permitted? (The World is a Cruel Place)

Connecting this back to BlueDwarf, SpaceGhost does actually have rules against name-calling and threats, which I think is a good idea for a public forum—but does this not inhibit people's ability to speak freely? It does, and I think that's okay. The Internet is full of ad hominem and name-calling. Not every space needs to be a free-for-all; the question is whether the boundaries are drawn in service of love or in service of comfort.

If love is the foundation of dialogue, what do we do with people who refuse to reciprocate? If I extend grace and someone uses it to trample others, am I complicit? The small-web spaces I inhabit have to answer this daily, and their answers vary wildly.

Anyways, the next day, Rina made an update to her site that was clearly a joke about North Korea and was subsequently banned from 32-bit Café because the joke was regarded as racist—which it obviously isn't, at least in my opinion.

Abolitionist organizer Mariame Kaba spent decades arguing for a hard distinction between punishment and accountability. Punishment asks who broke the rule, and what do they deserve? Accountability asks what happened, what does repair require, and how do we make it less likely to happen again? Kaba's point was not that harm doesn't matter—it's that exile doesn't produce the safety it promises, only the look of it.

It's certainly none of my business how an external platform decides to moderate and who they decide to ban, and for what reason—but I am allowed to write my thoughts about it on my blog.

Maybe this was simply the straw that broke the camel's back, but as I mentioned in my previous post, there are so few of us that care about the small web. And, far more important, we are too quick to disregard those that rub us the wrong way.

What do we do with this, past believing it? I don't think reverence for your own words arrives as a mood before you sit down to write. It needs to be built into the process, the way you'd handle anything that could wound someone if you're careless. Read the sentence back as though a stranger wrote it to you on your worst day. Ask what you're conjuring, not just what you're arguing. What is the gap between what you meant and what the words alone will carry once you're gone and can't explain? Treat the space between drafting and publishing as a place where you're still allowed to change your mind about what you're about to summon into the world.

I will continue to extend grace and benevolence, and try to explain where others only respond with contempt and scolding, or blocking and banning. This is not toxic positivity, but it certainly is a stubborn optimism. An undying belief in believing in the better of people and the power of words.

The world is a cruel place, and therefore I will not be.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

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Humans have been watching hissing, drifting orbs of light appear out of thunderstorms since before we had the words to record them, and every culture used similar vocabulary: spirits.

In Japan, it's called hitodama, translating to "human souls," the glowing balls thought to be spirits of the dead, untethered from their bodies and wandering. In English countrysides, the same lights were will-o'-the-wisps, mischievous fairies leading travelers off the safe path and into the bog. In the Australian Outback, they're Min Min lights, fuzzy orbs that follow you at night.

In Argentina and Chile, the Mapuche call them Anchimayen, the souls of the dead, mischievous spirit creatures appearing as small glowing lights in the Andes. In 17th-century Devon, England, a fireball tore through a church during a service, the Widecombe fireball, and was understood by villagers as either the Devil, or God's judgment on a congregation caught sinning at prayer. A century after that, the occultist Aleister Crowley described a "dazzling globe of electric fire" appearing in the cottage where he was staying, which he claimed shocked his hand slightly before it exploded.

Scientifically, ball lightning^[1] is described as a hissing, glowing sphere. It can be red, orange, yellow, or blue. Sometimes trailing the smell of sulphur, appearing during or just after a thunderstorm, drifting through the air or hovering close to the ground, and vanishes after only a few seconds, sometimes with a pop or an explosive crack.

Even now, there is still no single accepted physical explanation for it. Plasma models treat it as a self-contained, temporarily stable bubble of ionized gas. Other theories explain it as silicon combustion, microwave-trapped fields, or maybe even quantum effects. None of them account for the full range of credible sightings on their own, including the reports of ball lightning passing straight through closed windows without breaking the glass.

But the sky has so many mysterious, barely-witnessed phenomena. There's a constant pulse and surge of electricity.

Of magic.

Perhaps I'm a romantic, and the naming conventions for these phenomena are why I'm so captivated by them. Between the troposphere and stratosphere, there are blue jets, which can have upward superbolts beyond conventional cloud-to-air discharges.

But higher than that—in the mesosphere and ionosphere? There are whimsical electrical-breakdown phenomena. There are the tendrils of sprites. There are elves, and there are also trolls and pixies, ghosts and gnomes. Let me explain.

Blue Jets

Blue jets are luminous electrical ejections shooting upward from the tops of active thunderstorms into the stratosphere, reaching heights of 80 kilometres (50 miles). Unlike standard lightning, they streak upward in narrow, cone-shaped beams at speeds near 100 kilometres per second, lasting for less than a fraction of a second.

The first video recording of any of these transient luminous events (TLEs) was footage from a space shuttle mission in 1989, and it wasn't until February 2019 that scientists finally watched a blue jet from start-to-finish. An international team using ASIM—a bank of cameras and sensors the European Space Agency bolted to the outside of the International Space Station in 2018—recorded a jet erupting from a storm near the island of Nauru in the Pacific.

Danish physicist Torsten Neubert described the ignition point as a "blue bang," a ten-microsecond flash near the top of the cloud shooting skyward for less than a second, climbing 52 kilometers before it burned out. The mechanisms of the blue jet were only published for the first time in Nature in 2021. Scientists divide jets into three types: blue jets, blue starters (which don't make it as far), and gigantic jets, an even rarer version that can travel all the way to the ionosphere itself.

Red Sprites (and their tendrils)

Red sprites are large-scale electrical discharges that flash reddish-orange in the upper atmosphere at altitudes of 50 to 90 km (31 to 56 mi) above major thunderstorms. Often resembling giant jellyfish or carrots. Only lasting a few milliseconds, triggered by powerful positive cloud-to-ground lightning strikes.

The "tendrils" the sprites have refer to the glowing, hanging filaments of red sprites—large-scale electrical discharges flashing high above massive thunderstorms. The microphysics of how their fine, jellyfish-like tendrils are structured and propagate remains an active area of atmospheric research.

The word "sprite" has origins in 1300 CE as a variant of spirit, by way of the Old French esprit and the Latin spiritus, meaning breath or soul. For centuries it was a catch-all term for elves, fairies, ghosts, and apparitions of nearly any kind, without much taxonomic care.

When 20th-century atmospheric physicists needed a word for a phenomenon that flickered into existence for a few thousandths of a second and then was gone, leaving behind no trace (and almost no chance of confirmation), they were named sprites (air spirits) specifically for their elusive nature, a scientific christening from folklore.

The ELVES

Above the red sprites are the ELVES (a backronym for Emissions of Light and Very Low Frequency perturbations due to Electromagnetic Pulse Sources). They're massive, rapidly expanding ring-shaped glows. They occur about 100 km above thunderstorms in the ionosphere, spanning up to 400 km wide and also lasting less than a single millisecond.

Elves were only identified in 1990, discovered by the Mesoscale Lightning Experiment, and their doughnut-shaped glow is the visible signature of an electromagnetic pulse slamming into the bottom of the ionosphere and briefly heating and ionizing it into light. The elves expand outward at close to the speed of light, gone before you could possibly see.

Trolls, Pixies, Ghosts, and Gnomes

Scientists studying the upper atmosphere kept finding smaller, weirder, harder-to-catch TLPs. A cryptid taxonomy was thus created above our heads. Trolls, pixies, ghosts, and gnomes. And man, it's hard to find writing xpecifically about these.

A TROLL (short for Transient Red Optical Luminous Lineament) forms in the immediate aftermath of a sprite, appearing as a red spot with a faint tail, sometimes finishing with a thin red streak trailing back down toward the storm. An afterimage of an afterimage.

Pixies are, fittingly, the tiniest of the family. Unusual, sharp points of white light that flare over a thunderstorm and vanish in around sixteen milliseconds. Unlike sprites and jets, pixies don't appear to be tied to any specific lightning strike. They seem random, and aren't really understood. For years after they were first noticed, sightings stayed sparse and largely anecdotal; it wasn't until space-based instruments came online in the 2000s, like the ISUAL satellite launched in 2004, that researchers had a reliable vantage point.

Gnomes are similar to pixies. Small, brief spikes of light that shoot upward from the anvil-shaped top of a large thunderhead, lasting only a few microseconds, a fraction of the time it takes a hummingbird's wing to beat once. Unlike trolls, neither pixies nor gnomes were ever given a scientific backronym.

GHOSTS (Green emissions from excited Oxygen in Sprite Top) are the newest TLP, and the least understood. A faint green glow that flickers into being after a red sprite forms, directly above it, and disappears again within milliseconds. Ghosts weren't documented at all until 2019 (article in Russian), and even now they only seem to trail about one in every hundred sprites.

Researchers using an instrument called GRASSP (the Granada Sprite Spectrograph and Polarimeter) have spent years aiming their equipment at the precise altitude where a ghost is likely to appear, a task one investigator has compared to a mix of luck and expertise, because there is no way to predict exactly when or where the green will show up. The leading hypothesis is that ghosts share a mechanism with the aurora borealis: the same excitation of oxygen atoms that paints the sky green over the poles tucked into the wake of a sprite.

A green flash of light, rarely born from a grander red one, invisible from the ground, discovered only within living memory. An active scientific mystery using language we borrow from folklore.

Thomas Ashcraft, who photographed ghosts in 2015, notes that "there are no articles in scientific journals regarding this phenomenon."

The Magic of Science

Scientists spent the twentieth century discovering an entire second sky above the one we already knew, and named it after sprites, elves, trolls, ghosts, gnomes, pixies. These names weren't handed down by any official naming body in bureaucracy, as you might be able to tell; they were given by the researchers and enthusiasts who witnessed the phenomena in a scientific context.

The mystery always comes first, and you need language for it immediately. The oldest words we have for flickerings at the edge of visibility and that defy explanation are folklore. When 20th-century physicists needed language for something ephemeral, luminous, and barely provable, new words were not conjured up, no. They reached back into the reservoir that produced will-o'-the-wisps and hitodama and the Anchimayen. Naming the unexplained after spirits isn't a failure of scientific rigour, it is what science has always done.

We need to respect nature, and the glory we barely get to witness. The solar irradiance and electrodynamic tethers, the magnetotellurics of our atmosphere and our planet's magnetic field. Naming things in nature after such whimsical things is a way to do that—to elevate the natural to supernatural while still being explainable, still being tangible and of-this-world.

Often, materialist skeptics deny themselves the joy and mirth that comes with the things that cannot be proven or knowable in empirical science. But it's a false dichotomy, and to be a scientist one must have curiosity and an openness to anything.

Richard Feynman used to tell a story about an artist friend who held up a flower and told him that science ruined it, that pulling a thing apart to understand its mechanism eliminated beauty. Feynman disagreed completely. He could see the same flower his friend saw, he said, and then he could also see further into it: the cells, the pigments evolved so an insect could see them, the still-unanswered question of whether that insect experiences anything like aesthetic pleasure at all. Understanding didn't subtract from the flower's beauty for him. It only ever added to it. More mystery the closer he looked, not less.

Philosopher Helen De Cruz has written on awe and wonder as parts of scientific practice—the same feeling a religious person might call numinous, she argues, shows up constantly in the working lives of professional scientists, and it's one of the emotions motivating people to keep pushing past the boundary of what's currently understood. And researcher Michael Cuzzolino studied scientists' own accounts of their work, and found awe is woven into the process, present in the day-to-day work of not-knowing and slowly, partially knowing.

Kristjánsson points out that before the Enlightenment, the idea that scientific inquiry could be self‑transcending, and even ecstatic, was part of the Western intellectual tradition. It was only in the 18th century that awe started being treated as a threat to the new ideal of the rational, controlled, autonomous self. Enlightenment thinkers were wrestling with the sublime. Edmund Burke, as Ryan explains, rooted the sublime in terror and self‑preservation, opposing it to rational composure, and Kant treated it as a test that reason could ultimately pass, only by retreating to a higher moral ground. Wonder was domesticated into something smaller and more manageable, while awe remained suspect. This false dichotomy between cool reason and ecstatic experience is only a few centuries old, and we are not bound to it.

I want to note that everything I've written about is only in the domain of atmospheric electricity, there are hundreds of different specializations in science, thousands of different parts of our universe to explore, from the impossible small cellular world, to the even smaller atomic and chemical, to the impossibly vast and wondrous heavenly bodies. That's what they are, aren't they? Heavenly. The mere fact they exist is transcendental; the magic is already within our world.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

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Centuries before that, the over-talker Polonius in Shakespeare's Hamlet ironically exclaims that "brevity is the soul of wit".

This is not a new idea, and it is a good idea, isn't it? I thought about this phrase when I stumbled upon Rakhim Davletkaliyev's comic #19: Blogging vs. blog setups. It's a great illustration of how, very often, the more complicated something is—and also the more you discuss something—the less you are actually doing the thing.

I love writing, but does every blog post need to be 2,000 words? No, I don't think so.

I can think of another quote that is even more relevant. Blaise Pascal, in his work Lettres provinciales (Letter XVI) from 1657 wrote "Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte" which translates to "I have made this [letter] longer only because I did not have the time to make it shorter."

It is easy to find yourself in complexity and elaboration. It takes less effort to explain things if you have an unlimited amount of time and space. I'm sure I don't need to tell you how LLM chatbots will almost always output far more paragraphs than needed.

Do you remember minimalism—I can't help but wonder what happened? Minimalism shifted from a popular lifestyle and design trend into something people seem to be actively moving away from. After peaking in the 2010s with the white walls, capsule wardrobes, and sparse rooms, the movement seemed to face major cultural and economic fatigue. By the early 2020s, designers themselves started publicly turning on it. Minimalist interiors were increasingly described as stiff and museum-like, and the COVID-19 pandemic pushed a lot of people to want their homes to feel personal and lived-in. There's a case to be made that maximalism isn't just a swing of the pendulum but a direct cultural backlash to minimalism's aesthetic and political baggage—the whole "less is more" doctrine has always had a certain chilliness to it, an implied judgment about what counts as an acceptable amount of stuff to own. There's also a generational note in all this, too, as people who grew up watching millennials curate their white walls and gray furniture are now openly mocking that palette as depressing and corporate. And I think there's something real in the argument that the "less is more" mandate was less about restraint than about a very specific and often expensive kind of taste. Garage sales would have done the trick for most people just as well as an expensive home overhaul.

There was a lot wrong with the aesthetic-as-a-movement, certainly, but the core principles seem to be something to follow rather than to avoid. Has everyone given up attempting restraint and—exhausted with the effort required simply to live—regressed back to over-consumption and carelessness with their attention?

If you take a look at my website you can see I am not at all a minimalist in my design philosophy. If anything, I'm a maximalist. I love to think of every possible thing I could add to my site that would make sense to, and then I add it.

Similarly, I will write about any subject on this blog. The topics are so ridiculously wide-ranging that no single reader could possibly be interested in every single thing I post.

But I do live a simple life that doesn't reflect my design philosophy, and I often think to myself how I can simplify further. What fat is there to trim—and what weight can be shed to lift the aircraft higher?

The Problem with Screens

Many people—if not everyone—wants to cut back on unhealthy or unproductive screen time. There is an entire industry created for blocking apps and dumbphones and distraction-free devices.

But one of the most important things you can do for yourself is use what you have, instead of just floundering back into consumption with a clever façade.

There is a wonderful growing trend of writer decks, which can be understood as devices dedicated to the act of writing and nothing else. I love seeing the DIY homebrew solutions out there, but most people who look into this seem to end up buying expensive dedicated devices, or install the (now unmaintained) WriteDeckOS.

The Solution? Rip out the desktop environment!

But I think the true solution here is both far more simple while also covering more than just writing. One of the easiest things you could do to both set up a writing machine and get closer towards digital minimalism is to remove your desktop environment entirely. Instead, you would be using a TTY/headless/command-line interface only.

There are many GNU/Linux-based operating systems that ship with this, most of which are designed for use as a server but can work perfectly fine here. Debian's netinst image is a good starting point: during setup you just skip the desktop environment screen entirely and select only "SSH server" and "standard system utilities," and from then on you're dropped straight into a login prompt with no GUI ever installed in the first place, here's a walkthrough of the whole process.

Ubuntu Server does the same thing, though its installer assumes a fair bit more disk space and RAM than Debian's does. And Arch Linux installs almost nothing by default, there's no "opt out of the desktop" step because there was never a desktop to begin with, you just add whatever you need afterward.

To really strip down to the studs, Alpine Linux is what you're looking for. A full disk install comes in around 130MB, against 500MB-plus for a minimal Ubuntu Server install, as it swaps out the usual GNU toolchain for musl libc and BusyBox.

The point is that, if you're using the terminal, then you still have access to many things, but lack access to what most people would typically find fun or distracting.

Terminal Applications

There's a lot you can do just through the terminal. To start, ranger handles file management with vim-style navigation and a three-pane view that previews whatever you've got selected.

For browsing the actual web, Lynx is the oldest web browser still being maintained, going back to 1992, and w3m is the newer and capable of showing inline images in terminals that support it. And Bombadillo is a combined Gopher, Gemini, and Finger client with vim-inspired keybindings.

For reading markdown properly, glow or mdcat will render with syntax highlighting. VisiData is for spreadsheets in the terminal, opening CSVs, TSVs, JSON, and even Excel files. epy reads EPUBs, FB2s, and MOBIs.

Email can be accessed with Alpine—the University of Washington's actively-maintained successor to Pine (not to be confused with the distro) or NeoMutt if you want something more configurable and scriptable.

For IRC, WeeChat is the scriptable, feature-heavy option and Irssi is the lightweight classic. Catgirl is a newer option with plenty of extensibility.

For music, cmus is a small standalone console player, or you can run MPD as a background daemon with ncmpcpp as the ncurses frontend, which allows music to keep playing after you close the client.

Newsboat is a great RSS reader. And for the weather, you don't even need to install anything, just run curl wttr.in and it prints a little ASCII forecast straight into your terminal.

And then you can use tmux to have multiple panes and persistent sessions you can detach from and reattach to later. A shell like fish gives you sane syntax highlighting and autosuggestions without any configuration, and Starship is a prompt that can show you git status, language versions, and battery life.

If you're someone that's never used the terminal before, then that's quite the learning curve and I'd recommend starting with a desktop environment and using these programs through a terminal emulator (like kitty, etc.) that way.

And even if you are someone that's used the terminal before, going terminal-only could be quite the challenge, I know it's going to be for me, but that's kind of the fun part. Not to mention that this set up makes the Tildeverse a first-class citizen, and would also greatly encourage my usage of the platforms I'm already on there.

The Actual Writing Part

Yes, this is in fact yet another elaborate blogging workflow post. Tricked you! Jokes aside, all of the quality-of-life and functionality you can get out of a terminal-only computer is still secondary to the writing itself, if that's what you intend to use this for.

Now, for me personally, I don't really struggle with distractions when writing blog posts like this. I do my first draft on 750words.com and then finish my editing in Sublime Text, using the terminal to push to GitLab which then automatically publishes to Netlify.

But I do want to start working on more longform work, a novel or memoir or something that can't be done in a single day, or week. Perhaps that would scratch the itch?. And I've always struggled with that kind of thing far more, so I think figuring out a way to have a far more limited device is the right answer.

There are plenty of tutorials out there that would explain how to use Vim or Emacs for this kind of set up, but sadly I am not a user of either. Instead, my set up uses the simple text editor Micro and the full-fledged terminal word processor WordGrinder.

Micro is what I use for everything that isn't longform prose. Config files, scripts, notes. It's kind of a spiritual successor to Nano, using the keybindings that you already know, Ctrl+S to save, Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V to copy and paste, rather than a modal system. It has mouse support, syntax highlighting for over a hundred languages, and a Lua plugin system.

For the prose, though, I use WordGrinder, which its own author describes as being designed to get the hell out of your way and let you write. It isn't a text editor and it also isn't trying to be Word. There's no WYSIWYG, no font selection, barely any styling at all. Rather, it's a character-cell word processor that handles words: paragraph styles, a running word count, HTML and Markdown import and export, and a menu you can pull up with Esc.

Document Management

Now, how do you get your files off the machine? Well, there are two easy ways: git or rsync. If you're syncing with git, a cron entry that commits and pushes on a schedule looks something like:

*/30 * * * * cd /path/to/manuscript && git add -A && git commit -m "autosave $(date)" && git push

drop that in with crontab -e and every 30 minutes, whatever you've written gets committed and pushed. If you'd rather not clutter your git history with a commit every half hour, rsync does the same job without version control:

*/30 * * * * rsync -avz /path/to/manuscript/ user@remote:/path/to/backup/

Either way, the whole point is that you stop thinking about it. People have been doing this for decades, for backups of everything, from Drupal sites to novels-in-progress, and once it's running, the only thing left for you to do is actually write.

This ties in well to my previous post about using 11ty and URLminder to keep yourself accountable with your word counts. Now, URLminder does require a public URL to track which rules out anything private, but I've come up with a rather simple solution for this. The workaround is obscurity. Deploy the rendered .txt manuscript to Netlify under a subdomain that's a long random string rather than a chosen name, eg. x7q2m9vb4k1p.netlify.app.

If you don't use a custom domain, and also don't link it anywhere, then the only two places that URL string exists are the Beeminder goal configuration and the Netlify dashboard. Your manuscript stays functionally private while still satisfying the Odometer-type goal that needs to read a publicly fetchable page.

Conclusion

So which is it—brevity or elaboration? It doesn't mean they have to be in opposition. I often find myself writing about things like Polonius and a Navy acronym and then somehow end up with a shopping list of console programs for reading your email. The KISS principle and Pascal's apology for a long letter are both about cutting what exists because you didn't take the time to be concise. A 2,000 word blog post is bloated if the idea inside it could have fit in 200. But sometimes an idea does need 2,000 words.

Novels, thick books, and the afternoons spent reading them are slow and enjoyable. Good, longform work is meant to be inhabited, not skimmed for the takeaway. We are actually in dire need of longform writing, read and written with intention. The problem is writing and building (or living) past the point where you were saying anything, just because it was easier than stopping. Trim what doesn't need to be there. Keep what does, no matter how long that turns out to be.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

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• Private vs. social eating challenges
• The social importance of shared meals
• Being firm and confident in your dietary choices
• Practical strategies for restaurants, family dinners, office potlucks, and travel
• How to maintain your values while staying connected to community

You can read the full post on The Sprout.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

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But, regrettably, I had to rescind one of my recommendations. Let me explain.

As I mentioned in the post itself, BlueDwarf's "rule enforcement is informal, and I admit I've stumbled upon some... peculiar opinions and takes during my time on the platform, so take that as you will." This was a nice way of saying you can find fringe, conspiratorial or right-wing beliefs and rhetoric on the site.

At first, I really didn't like the idea of disavowing a small indie platform simply because it allows bad takes or opinions I personally strongly disagree with. I believe the price for community and connection we pay is inconvenience, annoyance, and weirdos.

There are such a small amount of people who give a fuck about the small web and independent infrastructure—let alone those who are actually building and maintaining it—that surely it would be far less productive to splinter ourselves. The creator of BlueDwarf in particular runs the Cheapskate's Guide, which is an excellent resource for low-end, affordable, accessible hardware and software and how I found BlueDwarf in the first place.

I am always going to have a big-tent mindset, and know that the only way we can enact meaningful sustainable change is by working with people we don't like and disagree with.

And that's where I stood, and where I assumed things would be set. But then I messaged SpaceGhost, the sysadmin and owner of BlueDwarf, to see where exactly he draws the line in the sand. And at first, I was hopeful we had a mutual understanding of what's important and worth fighting for, and what isn't. Of what harm is worth tolerating, and what harm isn't.

But that, sadly, ended up not being the case.

But before I get into BlueDwarf, I want to assert something important—not all harm is the same. I still don't believe that, as-is, BlueDwarf is a harmful or dangerous website. Rather, the owner's beliefs and how he told me his personal view and how he would act in specific, hypothetical situations is why I can't recommend it.

Degrees of Harm

I want to make note that I think it's unproductive to put everything into a single bucket of "harmful," as there is a wide range of degrees of how harmful a community's approach to free speech is.

X has Creator Revenue Sharing, which means paying users earn a cut of ad revenue based on impressions from other paying users. This means that people often post rage-inducing, upsetting content specifically because that's what will attract the most response and engagement—and thus make them the most amount of money. Ragebaiting is a profitable business model. The same thing applies to any other corporate social media platform, whatever content causes people to stay on the longest is the best, regardless of how exploitative or harmful it is. TikTok similarly has a trend of creators doing the same thing for the same reason.

This is just one of many reasons to leave corporate social media, but at this point most people know what they're going to get—it's awful to normalize such terrible behaviour and practices, but until enough people leave these platforms or better safeguards are put into place, it's just how it is right now. With platforms as large as this, no amount of guardrails will stop harm. Meta is inflicting lifelong trauma on its content moderators in Kenya as a consequence.

Arguments can be made about the harm being done by smaller platforms, like Bluesky, which took crypto VC money and has known moderation problems, but I personally think these issues are of a lesser degree of harm than what's happening on Facebook or X and staying there as an active user.

Cloudflare

Cloudflare is run by a free speech absolutist Matthew Prince, who often thinks that Cloudflare should not control who gets to be online and who doesn't. They hosted the Neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer, as well as 8chan and KiwiFarms until the Christchurch Shooting and #dropkiwifarms campaign. And every time it was at the whim of the CEO who decided those sites in particular were too harmful for him to abide by his absolutism. I've written more about why I'm choosing not to use Cloudflare here.

Substack

But if we're looking at most harm per capita, as in, the most amount of harm a platform is doing relative to its size, I think Substack is easily the worst offender. I've written about the platform before but I don't think I went far enough. It's been known since 2023 that the platform has a literal Nazi problem. I do not mean "Nazi" as in generic hateful bigoted rhetoric—I mean newsletters that had swastikas all over them. CEO Chris Best declined to answer specific "would you or won't you" removal scenarios, stating that the company avoids getting drawn into hypothetical moderation judgments, even though this isn't hypothetical at all.

Even now, years later, Substack is more than permissive about having harmful people on their platform, so long as its profitable. Andrew Tate, charged with sex trafficking and rape, had his newsletter ranked #1 on Substack and as of writing, the platform also allows the owner of Kiwi Farms to have his newsletter on the platform as well.

I want to make the argument for Substack's harm for a number of reasons. To start, it is typically extremely difficult to make an income online with hate speech, and Substack is giving these people a paycheque.

Second, Substack is culturally known as being a place where people write longform thinkpieces. They brand themselves as the place where you can "publish world-class reporting, essays, reviews, and fiction". This is not at all the same kind of reputation Facebook or X has. Even now, after years of complacency with Nazism, reputable progressives still use the platform—and thus continue to put money in Substack's pockets.

If you're on Substack yourself and want alternatives, or know someone else who is, https://leavesubstack.com is a great list of alternatives and other resources to help make that happen.

Lines in Sand

I didn't mean to write so much about Substack or Cloudflare, but it is emblematic of how people look the other way about harms being done by platforms they're on because they're on them, or their favourite creator is on it.

Everyone draws the line in the sand at different places—and some people get really upset at others for where they decide to draw that line. If you aren't aware that Substack has been complacent with Nazis, then it would be unfair to chastise you for continuing to use the platform. If you are aware and continue to use it, though, then that's supporting the platform—or at least being complicit yourself.

I'm someone who tries my best to maintain my ire at systems and companies and those in power, rather than towards individuals. Ridiculing and finger-pointing at specific people will not negate any harm, it just is a way for you to personally feel morally superior and unproductively channel your (justified) negative feelings.

Cognitive Dissonance

I love people, and have made peace with cognitive dissonance. Let me give you an example. I find meat eating and the continued slaughter and suffering of animals far more reprehensible than something like generative AI—as meat-eating causes far more harm and far, far more environmental harm.

It's far easier for people to avoid (and ridicule) genAI than it is to avoid eating meat. Again, this is not about moral superiority or whataboutisms, it's the opposite really. People do not change their minds or behaviours after being aggressively scolded.

You meet people where they are, you offer them compassion and benevolence and alternatives. You channel your fury towards those in charge and those who are propagating the normalization of harms. But this, too, does not mean complicity yourself. It's okay to walk away from people and relationships. Be content with losing everything except your principles..

BlueDwarf in Comparison

Let's steer this back towards BlueDwarf, which I'd like to now look at relative to other platforms.

BlueDwarf is a tiny site with >200 active users in the past year, most of which post about old hardware and homelabbing, and occasionally about surveillance capitalism, or US politics, or indeed vaccine skepticism. It is not a CDN that 25% of the entire Internet relies on, like Cloudflare is. Nor is it actively providing a revenue source for Neo-Nazis, like Substack is.

I think an argument can be made that, because of its size, me sharing the platform with my own audience could allow a new influx of more level-headed, scientifically-literate progressives who change the subculture to something less harmful.

Anyway, let me finally get to my correspondence with SpaceGhost, with all of that pretext out of the way. I asked point blank if the firm stance on absolute free speech would continue if there were a sudden influx of Nazis on the site, making it a Nazi bar. This is how they responded:

I have not been tested by Nazis and only been tested by a handful of racists. My suspicion is the reason for the lack of posts by Nazis. etc. is that a social media site that does not allow name calling or threats is inherently uninteresting to them. A bit of evidence that seems to back that up is that Blue Dwarf has been online for over 4 years, and so far has not been over run.

And I do certainly think there is a point to be made that a platform being up-and-running for four years without this problem does demonstrate that we can put our faith in people. SpaceGhost continued, sharing an anecdote from a particular user who was rather intense about their religion when they first joined:

[M]ost of us seem to enjoy her presence and her posts and do our best to encourage her contributions and find good in them. I say that as a person who is done with organized religion and in no way contemplating becoming a Muslim. 😃 Maybe I am being naive, but I would like to believe that in time the same could happen with anyone. I have noticed that the most initially troubling Blue Dwarf users seem to settle down and just enjoy Blue Dwarf with the rest of us. Often they become our most prolific and enthusiastic contributors.

As SpaceGhost later clarified, the user in question didn't stop posting about the Quran—she continues to do so just as much as initially. What changed was the community's attitude toward her. Through conversation and getting to know each other, the community learned she was a decent person, and she learned the same about them. The hostility and accusations stopped, and she no longer felt the need to defend herself. This wasn't simply because a member of a minority group was allowed to speak, but because Blue Dwarf is a free speech platform where everyone can post on any topic regardless of their group's power status. Learning about and getting to know others we're initially distrustful of is, in SpaceGhost's view, a "beautiful outcome of true free speech for everyone."

I am idealistic and optimistic enough to accept that. This is a very small platform that has successfully ensured a lack of hate speech over the years not by infringing on free speech, but rather by the cultural norms and communal effort.

But it did not stop there. I specifically asked what SpaceGhost would do "if someone came onto BD who was respectful and followed the rules and also consistently posted articles that were pro Neo-Nazi, anti-Black, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, and they got a bunch of their equally respectful friends to join as well, would that be realizing the ideal of BD for you?" SpaceGhost replied:

[A]lthough I find racists and Nazis distasteful, anyone who follows the rules is allowed to post on any topic they wish. I would like to think that my personal integrity would prevent me from removing even posts from people I find the most reprehensible.

And continued further, by adding:

I am very aware of Cloudlfare[sic] choosing to break its own rules to stop providing DDoS protection for The Daily Stormer, 8Chan, and Kiwi Farms. My feeling is that was a bad decision by Mr. Prince ... I am also aware of 8Chan's and Kiwi Farm's lawsuit with the British government, and I hope they win.

This is where I draw the line. This is where SpaceGhost prioritizes free speech over preventing the harm and hatred websites like these have metastasized, festered, and sprawled across the Internet for years.

I believe there are many things to stay firm on, regardless of the cost, but this is not one of them. I do not believe SpaceGhost is acting in bad faith here, I do believe they sincerely think they're providing a net positive to the world and that free speech absolutism is indeed worth the consequence of harm that results from it:

One thing I have learned about people is that there are some bad ones, and nothing I can do or say will change that. Just because I recognize that even they have rights does not mean I support what they say or do. I support their rights because I want other people who disagree with me to support my rights--not that I necessarily believe that they will, but I do my best not to be hypocritical. And, we have laws to protect innocent people from the actions of others.

This is a place where I believe it's okay to be hypocritical, because oh my God, we are hypocritical so often. It is truly unavoidable.

Marginalized people need people to stand up for them, not for the people willing to debase and insult them. I cannot be complicit with cruelty or hatred simply because someone has a right to express cruelty and hatred.

Conclusion

A lot has changed over the past decade, and corporate social media now blatantly allows awful, harmful takes in a way that you could only get away with on truth.social or Gab or whatever the fuck years ago. You do not need a tiny, independent platform to say whatever you want, now. A vaccine skeptic is the U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services. You are no longer anti-authority when the authority agrees with you. You are no longer the little guy fighting in counterculture against the big man in power. You're all on the same team, now.

On January 7th, 2025, Mark Zuckerberg posted a five-minute video called "More Speech and Fewer Mistakes." In it, Meta ended its third-party fact-checking program in the US, replacing it with X-style Community Notes, and framed the whole shift as a return to free expression after what Zuckerberg called a "cultural tipping point" brought on by the 2024 election. In the same breath, Meta rewrote its Hateful Conduct policy to expressly permit describing LGBTQ+ people as "mentally ill" or "abnormal" and calling for their exclusion from professions and public life, loosened its rules around immigration status, and swapped proactive enforcement for waiting on user reports. Days later, the company donated a million dollars to the incoming president's inauguration, added a Trump ally to its board, and handed its global policy shop to a Republican former Bush staffer.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate spent six months on either side of the change combing through eight million Facebook comments aimed at elected officials, and found abusive comments tripled, from 24,000 to 78,000, with violent threats and hate quadrupling and harassment doubling. The ADL tracked the Facebook pages of Jewish members of Congress and found toxic comments jumped more than thirteenfold after February 4, 2025. GLAAD, UltraViolet, and All Out surveyed over 7,000 people across 86 countries and found 92 percent worried about the rise in harmful content, and 77 percent now feeling less safe simply existing openly on Meta's platforms. Even Meta's own first integrity report after the change admitted that violent and graphic content, plus bullying and harassment, both ticked upward.

That's what "more speech" bought. A starker ratio of who gets to speak without fear, and who barely gets to speak at all. Not more voices in the room.

Walking back through BlueDwarf and Substack and Cloudflare and X and Meta, the question needing to be asked is "are you protecting someone's right to speak against power, or are you protecting someone's right to hurt the powerless without consequence, and calling it the same thing?" Free speech absolutism is not for people with the least of it, but for the platforms and personalities who already have more than enough. Free speech is in abundance for hateful people, now. Free speech is not in abundance for journalists, for people in Iran or Palestine, or those getting actively suppressed by their government, not hate.

As it currently exists, I don't think BlueDwarf should be taken down, but I can't in good conscience recommend it to people. I'll change my mind about recommending BD if SpaceGhost ever decides that "I won't stop them" and "I will protect the people they're aimed at" don't actually have to be in opposition. Until then, I'll keep pointing people toward the platforms and services that build their walls to keep the vulnerable safe inside, not to keep accountability out.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors

The reasons he lists for discontinuing the service make a lot of sense, but it still makes me sad. Not because of the service I'm losing, but because EchoFeed was one of the first IndieWeb projects I came across after joining omg.lol, and it has always worked effortlessly for me. There are many services that claim to have functionality to crosspost to Mastodon, but they only actually integrate with mastodon.social specifically.

I am thankful Robb maintained this project for as long as he did, and he's been a great presence on the IndieWeb overall, and will continue to be.

This also was yet another reminder of the ephemeral nature of things—how much I take for granted even as I try to be so aware of how finite and fragile everything is.

Why Do I Blog?

This finite fragility is a primary motivator for why I blog. Michael Hartley has written recently about how he's making his blog more resilient and musing about what happens to our blogs after we die. These too are not new topics for me, as I have posed the question of how do we prepare for the long web, and have had a /death page on my blog since I began it.

I want to leave a mark—maybe the way our ancestors did when they pressed their hands on cave walls with ochre and their blood. And I also want to do good with this absurd one-in-a-trillion existence I've been gifted. How strange it is to be anything at all.

I feel as though I've already written a lot about the origins of this blog already, and about how I've been interested in blogging for twenty years ever since Mr. Rehak, my fifth and sixth grade teacher, first introduced our class to Blogspot. How he’d try to engage our young, meagre class in political and philosophical discussions.

Despite this though, I can't help myself but to write another post to participate on Robert Birming's AuguStory, where he asks bloggers to answer the questions "how you got into it, where it's taken you, why you're still at it."

I don't think there's an academic field called "blogging studies" but there are quite a few interesting papers and scholarly articles examining the hobby. It's been used as an intervention for adolescents and young adults with depression or anxiety, and that it leads to better mental health outcomes by giving people an avenue for social support and improving memory by writing things down. Now, of course these studies should be taken with a grain of salt, and are also often paywalled (oh, how I miss my academic credentials to log in) but I think many consistent bloggers would tell you, anecdotally, that it does provide them a net positive.

I think Mr. Rehak understood something which can feel revolutionary—giving his class of children the tools needed to share their thoughts with a global audience. The simple, radical act of believing that what we had to say mattered.

Nobody Cares! 😦

One of my earliest blog posts over ten years ago was about shouting into the void, anticipating the fact that my work would not be seen or regarded by many, and how I would continue regardless.

Maybe you’ll listen to me, or maybe I’m echoing into an empty cave, it doesn’t really matter. It never did.

I know of a blogger that cares deeply about metrics—wanting to be on the front page of Bubbles.town and getting upset about seeing the same recurring bloggers there instead, over and over.

This could describe many bloggers—many artists in general. We work hard on something and it deserves recognition, right?

No, I think it's much deeper than that. We want to be seen so we can be understood, and we want to be understood so we can be cared for properly.

And we want to be cared for because we want to be loved. It is always love, I think, in the end. One way or another.

It is demoralizing when you put hours (or days/weeks) into something only to get nothing back in return. As though you are an unrequited lover of the universe. And if your main driving motivator is the outcome you sincerely and justly deserve, the answer is often going to be cruel misery. But?

Nobody Cares! 😃

But you can invert the entire thing and find comfort and freedom, I swear.

The times I feel most ashamed—when I feel I've really fucked up—what gives me solace is knowing how little people actually care. Nobody is me, except me. What feels like a total disaster to me is just a minor note of interest or brief emotion to someone else. Thank goodness. Everyone else has the luxury to continue on with their own life and the burden of their own suffering and problems.

Sure, if you're unlucky enough you'll have somebody become obsessed with you—snark subculture is built on that. Or if you're lucky enough you'll have somebody become infatuated with you. Both of these edge cases, though, have far more to do with the other person than you. People hate and fall in love with all sorts of people; it is a luck of the draw.

We cannot control anyone, we cannot will the visitor count to go up, we cannot coerce anybody into giving a fuck about us. And yet we all deserve to be heard, and seen, and loved, nonetheless.

What does any of that have to do with blogging? Well, surprisingly a lot. I'm able to write day after day and share my thoughts with the world far more because of my apathy than my passion. I love writing, but I am uncaring to what happens to it, or the response, far more intensely. If that could possibly make any sense.

I can write about anything, I can truly say what I mean, with absolutely no need to mask or pretend. And even in the event I do get backlash in response, so what? It's a blog, for God's sake. People move on. "Kim, there's people that are dying.".

The contradictory nature and cognitive dissonance is on full display. I want to contribute good to the world and leave a positive legacy, but I am also unbothered if I fail in doing this—but not unbothered enough to simply give up completely.

One of my core values is to think lightly of myself and deeply of the world. I do not take myself seriously, I do not think I'm smart or an authority on any particular thing. I have a phobia towards prestige or power. I am just a yapper that loves to yap.

I think all of this is to say I'm weird. It's weird to be self-aware and content with such opposing thoughts, I think. But it's very useful.

I let go, and the only thing that remains is my compulsion to write.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors

Because social media is not inherently bad—it only starts becoming bad when multi-billion dollar businesses are created around using people as products and extracting as much information and value as possible out of every single one of them.

Now, I'm also a bit of a maximalist—that's one of the reasons I kept my corporate social media accounts for so long. I love being everywhere, trying out everything, and having a big-tent mindset.

So I already have a fair share of communities I'm already in. Of course I'm active on Mastodon and Bluesky. And there's omg.lol, of course. And also forums I browse often like 32-bit Café and Melonland. Then there's the tildeverse, which is extremely fun and a great way to get more comfortable and familiar with terminal. And the IndieWeb Wiki has many frequently occurring Homebrew Website Club meetups which I need to attend more often.

But in the past couple weeks, I've stumbled upon and discovered even more niche websites that I thought I'd share. I don't think a few would be properly defined as "social media" platforms, but they're online digital communities of people nonetheless!

And because of my big-tent mindset, I'm certainly not afraid to share these places openly and have new people join—if a platform is interested on hiding away from people and practicing gatekeeping, then I'm certainly not interested in it. (All of these platforms are also genAI-free, as far as I can tell.)

I also want to note that I've only discovered these platforms myself recently, so I still am green and don't know that much about them. If any of my readers are users, please share!

With all that out of the way, let me begin my list.

1. Special Fish

special.fish describes itself as a "community word processor with light social features," which is a description I adore. It has a stark brutalist web design which I also really dig. It's been running since February 2, 2020.

Built and maintained by a solo working artist based in St. Johns, Oregon, special fish is funded directly by its users instead of ads or investment. This means there is an upfront payment required to make an account. The directory page lists a suggested $40/year contribution, with paying members effectively subsidizing users who can't.

The main content area of the platform is called the Garden, where user pages sit, loosely linked together. There are journal entries, poem drafts, food logs, and open questions posted to the whole community. There's also a bulletin where you can share open calls, events, projects, or a new website. Every Sunday morning, there's a collaborative writing room.

According to the about page, "communities" were originally just called "places" in the site's early design. (and there's an easter-egg DJ feature built into the platform?) Registration requires users to be 18 or older, and the terms page states the site could shut down at any point if it becomes too costly to run, that backups are made only "occasionally." New accounts go through the join page.

2. Ctrl + Shift + 3

ctrlshift3.com describes itself as "a calm, chronological, text-first community platform" built by a single developer, Billy Wilcosky. It's minimalist in its design, as you'd expect.

There are no likes, follows, or other vanity counts. Instead, there's just a shared Feed in chronological order, with an optional "Wave" view that surfaces posts with more comments while still favoring newer content and adding light randomization.

Private, invite-only groups are called "Clicks", and users can privately subscribe ("Sub") to each other without visible follower counts. Comments are flat rather than nested, and related posts can be manually linked together as "connected thoughts." You can add posts that are either plain text, timed polls (1–30 days), or a 40×40 pixel-art grid. There's also a site-wide Polling Place for community-level questions, and an experimental feature called Direct Connect that offers ephemeral, browser-to-browser chat over WebRTC, with no history saved once the session ends.

Participation is tracked through a system called "Bits," which awards a symbol for each post, comment, or daily login, with different symbols and colours at milestone counts (10th, 50th, 100th, 10,000th). The platform has a released iOS app (with acknowledged bugs pending an update) and was recently featured on Product Hunt.

One feature I absolutely love is the sound design, which is credited to Romain Raynal, and the ASCII art engine is credited to Yikuan Sun.

3. web1.0 Hosting

If you're looking for an alternative to Neocities and Nekoweb that's specifically designed to have you design websites that work on old computers and cell phones, then web1.0hosting.net is what you're looking for. It's a free static-hosting provider based in Helsinki, Finland, explicitly built around accessibility from old and low-powered devices. You might know them from their sister site, the ELPiS zine.

web1.0 hosting gives you functionality that you can't really find anywhere else. All sites work as HTTP-only, accessible through IP-only (no DNS), and they have a dedicated WAP gateway for old mobile phones.

The free tier includes 100MB of space and a third-level domain on .w10.site, .w0.am, .narod.ws, or .oldcities.org; registered "community" users (via the platform's Discord/Telegram/forum) get 500MB, with more available by donation through the asdc donation page.

There's a browser-based file uploader, and they also have a built-in no-code site builder called HamsterCMS, designed for users without coding experience. Server Side Includes (SSI) let users reuse headers and footers across static pages. There's also a webmail client, web chat, forum, and an IRC channel at irc.retronode.org:6667, channel #webdev, plus a dedicated search engine for hosted and old-web sites.

Hosted sites are also mirrored onto Yggdrasil, a decentralized, encrypted peer-to-peer mesh network, accessible via .ygg addresses.

I know I'm listing out a lot of features, but that's because there's so many! I think this platform is criminally underrated.

4. Pillowfort

One of the better-known platforms, pillowfort.social launched in open beta in 2017, founded by Julia Baritz and headquartered in Austin, Texas. It was positioned from the start as a fandom-oriented alternative to Tumblr, and it grew fast in 2018 after Tumblr's adult-content ban pushed creators to look elsewhere. The site passed 20,000 users in its first two and a half years, and had surpassed 100,000 users by October 2020. Fanlore frames Pillowfort as having tried to fill the same post-Tumblr community-space role that Dreamwidth also attracted, without what some users felt was Dreamwidth's tendency to split fandom into smaller, more siloed spaces.

The platform is independently and user-funded, with no venture capital or outside investment, and there are two ways to join. A one-time $5 fee for instant access, or a free rolling waitlist (it's really quick!). Pillowfort maintains an explicit anti-AI stance, stating it does not allow AI-generated text or images anywhere on the platform.

Other features include per-post visibility control (public, followers-only, or private), user-created communities kept separate from personal blogs, threaded comments, NSFW tagging with filtering, and mutual blocking, where a block prevents both users from seeing or contacting each other. A mobile app is also available directly from the site.

Note on Blue Dwarf

This post originally included a recommendation for Blue Dwarf, but after further conversation with the platform owner about their moderation philosophy and where they draw the line, I have decided to rescind that recommendation. You can read more about my reasoning in "Free Speech and the IndieWeb".

Go Forth and Socialize! (And Support!)

As I wrote about recently, discovering all of these different platforms has made me realize I need to focus more on cultivating and engaging with the already-existing communities online rather than continuously attempt to make my own. No need to reinvent the wheel.

If you're like me, then you're looking for somewhere to hang out and be chronically online that is made by good people and full of good people. I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir if I explain why companies like Meta or X Corp. are not places worth your time or attention.

And regardless of whether you're interested in signing up, I would ask you to consider contributing or supporting these platforms regardless, because the only way the Independent web flourishes is both with users, yes, but also with monetary funding as well. Buy these indie devs a coffee, why don't you?

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors

Death Cab for Cutie's Transatlanticism, Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, The Mountain Goats' The Sunset Tree, Joni Mitchell's Blue, Frank Ocean's Blonde, and Bright Eyes' I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning. If you've pegged me for a Tumblr-era /mu/core Millennial hipster, then you're more than correct. More recently, I've been listening to Little Simz Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, Phoebe Bridgers' Punisher, and Lizzy McAlpine's Older (and Wiser) the same way.

One of these albums that's had a profound influence on me and my life has been Sufjan Stevens' 7th LP, Carrie and Lowell, released back in 2015. I remember listening to the record on repeat each day after my pre-calc classes in summer school in grade 13.

This album is the harsh salt of reckoning in the wound and the balm and salve of catharsis, it is immeasurable grief, and yet it is also impossible forgiveness. It is the record I return to when I'm feeling at my lowest—not because it pulls me out of it, but because it provides me an honest, clear mirror.

For those unaware, the album is named after Stevens' late mother, Carrie, and his stepfather, Lowell Brams. Carrie suffered from schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and severe substance abuse, and she abandoned Sufjan and his siblings multiple times when he was very young.

In earlier albums, Stevens wrote about his mother in anger and resentment. On the 2003 Michigan album, Stevens confessed how ashamed he was of her on "Romulus." On the 2005 Illinois album, the song "The Seer's Tower" laments "oh, how she betrayed us!"

In his later years, Stevens partially reconnected with Carrie, though their relationship remained distant and complicated. Stevens spent a few summers with her and his stepfather in Oregon during his childhood, where a lot of the inspiration for the album came from.

The two had brief contact later in life, but Carrie died due to stomach cancer in 2012, which began the creation of the album. In this, we can view the record as an intimate documentary of grief, processing profound sorrow, childhood absence, and mortality.

Throughout the album, Stevens grapples with how he never had the ability to reconcile properly while Carrie was alive. Her death not only causes him to have a crisis of faith, but also causes him to question whether he should be alive at all. In the track "The Only Thing" Stevens lists out the many different ways he considered ending his life:

The only thing that keeps me from driving this car
Half-light, jack knife into the canyon at night.

and:

The only thing that keeps me from cutting my arm
Cross hatch, warm bath, Holiday Inn after dark

In an interview about this album, Stevens confesses he felt connected to his mother after she died by replicating her self-destructive behaviour:

In lieu of her death, I felt a desire to be with her, so I felt like abusing drugs and alcohol and fucking around a lot and becoming reckless and hazardous was my way of being intimate with her.

The only thing keeping Stevens alive ends up being his faith, and the incomprehensible grace of God. I resonate deeply with this, discussing the temptation of suicide similarly presented in works like BoJack Horseman, or my book review of Yiyun Li's Things in Nature Merely Grow.

This is what I mean when I say the album holds up a clear, honest mirror. Stevens is writing during the darkest time of his life, during a time of immense grief that cannot be channelled into something survivable. And yet, even still, he manages to find a reason, the signs and wonders are enough for him to maintain and continue. I cannot think of anything more important to hear when you're at that point.

The most haunting and heartbreaking song on the album is "Fourth of July," and it has been reworked and re-released more times than almost anything else in all of Stevens' catalogue. There's the PPD Remix as the B-side to the "Exploding Whale" 7" that same year, the woozy 900X Remix (James McAlister's handiwork) on 2017's The Greatest Gift mixtape, a live rendition captured November 9, 2015 in North Charleston and released as part of Carrie & Lowell Live, the April Base Version recorded back in 2014 at Justin Vernon's Eau Claire studio and sat on for eight years before finally surfacing in 2022. The sparser DUMBO Version, cut the same year at Stevens' old Brooklyn studio with just voice, guitar, and a few piano notes standing in for the album take's ghostly synths. And finally Version 4, the thirteen-minute, cinematic outtake unearthed for 2025's 10th Anniversary Edition.

The core mantra in the track, between the sweet nicknames exchanged by Stevens and Carrie is "we're all going to die" as the songwriter grapples with mortality. It is no surprise to see how this has bled into my own personal philosophy, for indeed we all must die.

In many ways, I think Stevens is just as haunted by his own record as I am. He released a live version of the album two years later, alongside the mixtape The Greatest Gift, containing demos, cut tracks, and remixes. Reading his NPR interview about the album a decade later, he has an acceptance of grief, saying the process of "grieving is eternal and you never really get over it. It just moves around within you and transforms you, but it never goes away."

Stevens goes even further, saying that the album was "the first time [he] realized that not everything can be sublimated into art, that some things just remain unsolvable, or insoluble" and views Carrie and Lowell as "evidence of creative and artistic failure from [his] vantage point." Hm.

My Original 2015 Review

Now, I want to do something I haven't done before—back in high school, I attempted to start a music review blog with a fellow music-loving friend of mine. We actually did manage to write a handful of reviews before abandoning the project. One of the records I wrote about was, in fact, Carrie and Lowell. I haven't read the piece since I published it over ten years ago, and I'm curious what has changed and what has stayed the same, reader, in this time capsule of mine:

CARRIE AND LOWELL: REVISITED. VALENTINE, SPURN MY SORROW. (Posted June 19, 2015)

Sufjan Stevens is a sad man who has—reportedly—whispered praise to his banjos at his concerts.

In celebrating the month since our first post, I decided to take a second glace [sic] at the first album that my fellow music reviewer decided to review, one that she didn't actually like. Which was odd since Carrie and Lowell is widely considered one of Sufjan's best record [sic] so far. (Or maybe taking a purposefully controversial stance is intelligent for clickbait? I don't actually know, I'm not an expert in audience dick-sucking.)

At first, I mostly agreed with her review. But I confess that was mainly because I didn't try to figure out Sufjan. I didn't attempt to read into the lyrics, or realize that the album wasn't just a portrait of experiemental nhilistic [sic] elder photography^[1]. But then I did, and then I cried. I sincerely cried, reading up on Genius everything that I plainly missed.^[2]

Ephinany [sic] can be brutal, like a sudden stomach ulcer or a crowded broken elevator. Our eurekras [sic] shroud themselves, they sometimes tease the edges of our minds.

Something hit home hard for me within this album, and that's the actual reason I decided to write this review.

The Strongest Clan

It is the sentimentalist in me, I cannot help but feel that the synecdoche of family within art. It is the most powerful way to represent our humanity. More often than not, we cannot relate to the nuclear family, for most of us there is no feeling of empathy when we view parent and child in merry discussion at the dinner-table. This is not, in spite of popular belief, what family is.

What then, is family? Family is where we find solace and cathatrisis [sic], it's the perseverance of those we are forced to love and choose to hate. Family is those who are close enough to us to shape us as people. Family is a mother, bipolar and schizophrenic, and suffering from drug addiction and substance abuse.

When I was three, three maybe four,
She left us at that video store.
Be my rest, be my fantasy.

It is difficult to come anywhere close to imagining how Sufjan actually feels, here; to have your pre-determined caretaker abandon you at such a young age. To have a parent that is so irrepairably [sic] difficult, that's a burden.

Fireworks and Forests

And yet, in this album is not anger. In this album is not bitterness or betrayal. Instead we hear pleas of forgiveness and attempts at understanding.

The climax of this record is Fourth of July, where Stevens has a discussion with his passed mother. It's where my player revolves to every time I attempt to listen to the album in full.

There's the seemingly blunt mantra, depicting how Carrie retells Sufjan that he needs to learn about the fleeting and fragile nature of the world by comparing it to the massive devistation [sic] of Tillamook, as well as the ephemeral beauty of the fireworks on Independence Day. In addition to this, it is difficult to say the last line doesn't sound like the bleeding pessimism of a defeated woman:

Tell me what did you learn from the Tillamook burn?
Or the Fourth of July?
We're all gonna die.

But, ultimately, this isn't what gets you. You don't feel a chill down your spine at the futile hopelessness of Carrie's lament. You instead bawl hard at the contrast, at how heartwarming she is when speaking to him.

My little hawk, why do you cry?

The maudlin is so powerful—how deep the corny pet-names will carve into you. You cannot help but buy into the image of a deathbed filled with a broken past dressed in a pure white dress and smiling.

Verdict

This, to me, is the most spectacular thing about Carrie and Lowell. Sufjan somehow takes in such a horrific aspect of his life, and delicately lays out its most beautiful aspects and then appreciates them.

Having terrible parents is perhaps one of the most stress-inducing and heartbreaking situations someone can be placed into. It can sometimes feel as though loving them is a choice and hating them isn't, but the opposite is true.

For such a situation, Stevens goes on throughout this album searching for the remedy. His answer is to forgive and love them, regardless.

This is the ephinany [sic] that comes through, since you wouldn't be around if it weren't for them, would you?

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

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I love trying to solve the existential problem that is our (read: humanity's) relationship with technology. I love contributing to the digital commons and using my web development skills to give back and try to create things that are useful to others. I love asking the question "what do we owe each other?" and then attempting the impossible task of building the infrastructure necessary for the answer. And, of course, I love writing.

But love can only take you so far, can't it?

I've attempted to scratch this itch by being a hospice cook for four years, and then by running a creative writing collective for three years. I've tried by sharing my poetry with the world, and by being an academic.

More recently, I've tried to scratch the itch by starting an online public access radio show, or a digital garden, or an inclusive transformative works archive, or an IndieWeb Commons for everyone.

And don't get me wrong, I am very glad I am attempting to do so much. There is a great joy to throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. But much more importantly, I've learned so much and built meaningful connections and relationships with others in the process.

And even as I write this, trying to figure out my next iteration and recalibration, I am an organiser for the upcoming Web Writers' Collective, which I think will answer my desire for a new IndieWeb publication. But I am not leading this initiative—which I admit I am a bit relieved by after running Write Club. I would love the ability to support, amplify, and centre others instead of myself for once.

But the itch still needs scratching. The kiln still needs pottery to burn. The forge still needs iron to fire.

Something I learned recently which is helpful is that 1) I love computers and 2) I love being a sysadmin self-hosting projects with my homelab set up with simple port forwarding.

Often times, I don't even think about it. I effortlessly wander into a new curiosity and inadvertently pour hours of time into something, and the result is a blog post or small project I'm happy with. For instance, right now I've been experimenting with creating a new blog theme, mostly due to finding new typefaces and falling in love with them. Nearly all of them are old style, like Young Serif or Instrument Serif.

But when I go prototyping the theme, I realize it kind of looks like what people consider the "genAI aesthetic". And I'm not sure if this should be demotivating. Is this an example of genAI imitating good principles, or normalizing bad ones? Sometimes, I feel like I'm in a hall of ouroboros-shaped mirrors.

Anyways, switching gears, I am going to try to map out where my intuition is leading me right now. To start, I'm happy that my little 11ty digital garden was at least a wonderful proof-of-concept that it's easy to track word count via Beeminder with some 11ty scripts. But do I need to track word count? No, not really. I've been writing and writing and writing rather effortlessly, so it isn't tracking-as-a-discipline-tool.

I've also found myself continuing to be more appreciative of smaller blogging platforms, like Pika and Pagecord. I really love the robustness of Pagecord's capability of publishing blog posts—something I praised in my recent blog post on phoneblogging. But again, this isn't something I actually need to work on or implement. My blogging workflow is already settled and works well.

I think this is largely why I have radically started over so often in my life. Once I get to a place where I've built everything I need, then what?

I mean, sure, I have been slowly working on compiling certain blog posts into my next book, and also I could definitely collect poems I've written in the past few years into another chapbook, but I don't have the fire in my gut to do so the way I did during my undergrad. I could go and apply for my Masters and return to academia, but I don't have a need to—and it would be detrimental to this blog and my productivity, I think.

I do not want a fifth foundation myth, a fifth thing-I-started. To scratch the itch doesn't simply mean to build more. No, the obvious and expected answer is rarely the correct one. The best writing is inevitable, but not predictable, and I think life works similarly.

I ask myself what I want to do, and also what I can offer to the world. I do not think building another blogging platform or community is the answer. I do know I definitely want to advocate for already-existing platforms and communities that I've been deeply enjoying—some of the more recent ones have been Special.Fish and Ctrl+Shift+3 and Pillowfort and BlueDwarf. See? So much exists already.

Five Patterns I've Noticed

Back in March, I wrote two retrospectives: Constellation of Living Stars, looking back at 120 posts and 250,000 words of writing, and Building brennan.day Part Two, a tour of everything I'd shipped on Brennan.day. It's been four months since then, and so why not take another retrospective look?

On the writing side, I've published 113 more posts since that March post, totalling 267,572 words, more than what I had written in the entirety of the blog's existence up to that point. My blog as a whole now sits at 246 posts and 545,077 words.

What have I've done since then?

Well, to start, I've found a love for interviews. I was interviewed for Over/Under, People and Blogs, and the Wonders of Web Weaving podcast. I interviewed Bix Frankonis about self-erasure, Benjamin Behnke of Bubbles.town about AI and forgiveness, and Frances Widdowson, a residential school denier who messaged me after I wrote about her.

I've started a monthly French series. Et Maintenant, Quelque Chose de Complètement Différent, Brenjour, C'est Moi, Quebec French and Michif, and L'IndieWeb en français québécois. Written entirely in French, about language insecurity, code-switching, and translating IndieWeb jargon.

March's "deep time" throughline was about scale and proportion. Since, I've become direct and imperative about mortality. You Must, You Must, You Must reframes memento mori from fate to obligation, Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze and Earning My Keep both wrestle with what's owed given how little time there is, and A Thousand Cranes makes the daily writing itself the answer. Death is a deadline.

I love writing technical post-mortems. Such as the backlash to fanfiction.lol taught me about cross-pollination, then about the promises I couldn't keep once Canadian obscenity law and tag-wrangling reality hit. folk.zone got announced and then almost immediately paused so I could rip Cloudflare out of my stack on principle. When I build, hit a wall, and the wall becomes the post. Similarly, I wrote my first Mea Culpa about my article on PKMs, the response of which recently hit the front page of Hacker News.

I've been getting into Blogging Studies (if you could call it that) "Compulsion" researches history's most obsessive writers, "Blog Recollection" audits my own archive, Every Commit a Sentence rebuilds git conventions around blog work, and Shake Off the Dust diagnoses the rut.

Reading this back, the itch looks less like a hunger for a new project and more like a hunger to narrate myself in real time, through whatever form is closest at hand. A build log, an interview, a second language, a eulogy, a diagnosis of my own habits. That really isn't an answer, but it is an interesting observation.

Animikii, Niiwin, and Mukurtu

I noticed something while reading about Animikii. They're a Victoria-based, Indigenous-owned tech company that's been building things like Niiwin, a data-sovereignty platform, as well as the digital infrastructure behind the Witness Blanket archive. They're building the infrastructure necessary to answer the question: How do we give what we owe each other? And this is why I've been looking at Indigenous data work.

OCAP(r), which stands for Ownership, Control, Access, and Possession. A framework the First Nations Information Governance Centre formalized in 1998, meaning a Nation owns its own data collectively, deciding who accesses it and how. Mukurtu is a free, open-source CMS built on Drupal and designed so communities can attach cultural protocols to archival material with specific permissions.

FirstVoices is an open-source platform, Django and React under the hood, that's helped digitize reel-to-reel tapes of elders that had been sitting in basements. And the Gabriel Dumont Institute has Michif To Go and Northern Michif To Go, dictionary apps with audio pronunciation banked from Michif experts like Norman Fleury and Vince Ahenakew.

These are important initiatives, and I definitely want to share them, but even these do not spark that passion and desire—and most importantly, compulsion—within me.

Yesterweb

There's a page on the IndieWeb wiki and Melonland Wiki about Yesterweb, a community that I sadly didn't get a chance to join. It started in February 2021 as a small retro-web and hobbyist chat, the community expanded fast after an anti-web3 campaign later that same year.

Organizers experienced severe fatigue trying to match community standards with volunteer capacities, they were building a social and philosophical apparatus around web nostalgia. A place people could share their manifestos. It grew fast and then buckled under the weight of the moderation and ideology work its own founders had designed for it, and it shut down on May 1st, 2023.

At least, that's the typical story. It's actually quite a rabbit hole and this write-up is a good place to start. And I'm sure some of my readers have a much better understanding of the community.

I bring this up for a couple reasons. Everything we make, especially online, is finite, fragile, and mortal. Everything we will ever create are just sandcastles that'll be eroded by the tides.

Beyond this though, it is a little demoralizing to see a good thing collapse under its own weight, isn't it? The road to hell is always paved with good intentions. It's so hard to organize something important and meaningful without skepticism and in-fighting, or milkshake ducking. Sometimes it seems like the only alternative is to build something small enough that nobody gives enough of a fuck about to actively dismantle.

Conclusion?

None of this helps me compass more towards an answer, though it does help me know what isn't the answer. I suppose I just keep blogging, especially for this month. Maybe something will present itself, conjured by the act of writing and thinking out loud.

All I know is I want to get my hands dirty. I want to apply overwhelming force. I want to keep moving forward.

If you have an idea, drop it down in the comments, or in my guestbook, or email me.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors

But if I had to choose a single channel that I would deem the most important and meaningful? I have an answer instantly and without hesitation: Special Books for Special Kids.

Why? Good question. If you aren't already aware, the premise of the channel is rather simple: Special Books by Special Kids (SBSK) is a non-profit dedicated to creating long-form interview videos to share the stories of neurodiverse individuals and people living with disabilities, with the mission of creating "a more inclusive world."

Chris Ulmer and his wife Alyssa Porter have devoted their lives to interviewing a wide range of diverse people with mental and physical disabilities and differences. His channel allows those who are often marginalized by society—and those who go ignored, unseen, and uncared for—to have a voice and a platform. Ulmer sits with the interviewee, and often their family as well, and listens compassionately to their story and what they want to share and offer the world.

Origins

Chris Ulmer studied media effects/communications at Penn State and earned a master's in special education from the University of the Cumberlands in Kentucky while student teaching, then moved to Jacksonville, Florida, where he'd been offered a free special-ed degree in exchange for coaching soccer. He began teaching students ages 7–10 with autism, agenesis of the corpus callosum, and traumatic brain injury.

Ulmer taught the same group of seven students for three years, and in that third year, around 2015, he and the students' families decided to collaborate on a book. Each student would get a chapter describing life from their own perspective. The goal was for the students to become self-advocates and storytellers.

The proposal was turned down 50 times. No publisher wanted it. Rather than give up, though, Ulmer started filming short interviews with his students on his phone and posting them to a new Facebook page, initially just to let the local community see the students' progress.

In December 2015, Ulmer got a call from an ABC News producer, and a segment on his classroom's morning routine aired on ABC World News, becoming one of the most-viewed videos of that year with hundreds of millions of views in a week. The SBSK Facebook page jumped from a few thousand followers to 150,000 within days.

That flood of attention brought emails from disabled people around the world asking to be interviewed too—which is how SBSK expanded beyond Ulmer's own classroom.

In the decade since, SBSK has grown to a large channel, with over 3 million subscribers. While Ulmer is in front of the camera most often, the channel is equally carried by Alyssa Porter, Ulmer's wife and SBSK's co-director/executive director, who handles the organization's business and operations side while Ulmer conducts the interviews.

In March 2019, YouTube disabled comments on dozens of SBSK videos as part of a platform-wide policy meant to reduce predatory behaviour in comment sections. This was detrimental for SBSK, whose entire model runs on two-way connection comments facilitate. Ulmer pushed back publicly, arguing that the comments are the mechanism through which strangers told an isolated kid with a rare diagnosis that they weren't alone, or told a family they weren't the only ones going through this. Thankfully, this decision was reversed, but it took two entire years.

SBSK's Impact

Lucas Hanson is a young writer with Myotubular Myopathy who keeps a personal blog, Handsome Boy Writes, and wrote a first-person post titled "What it's like to be on SBSK" shortly after his interview aired in May 2023. A teacher from his elementary school connected his family with SBSK, and he writes that "Chris and his partner stayed for a long time and the interview went really well," and that Ulmer "asked very open-ended questions."

Nathan and Bennett Falcone are brothers with mandibuloacral dysplasia (a form of progeria) from the Philadelphia area, profiled at length in The Philadelphia Citizen's feature on Ulmer. Their SBSK interview indirectly led to a meet-and-greet with the Philadelphia Eagles during the team's Super Bowl LII run, an example of how visibility from the channel has changed people's lives.

Kayne Finley, a Kentucky/Florida teen with an inoperable DIPG brain tumor, became one of the channel's best-known recurring subjects through a seven-episode arc before his passing in November 2017. His own words from his SBSK interview are preserved on his family's foundation site, Cannonballs.org, including his line "Just PRAY. I don't have anything that I want because I can do that when I'm better. I just want to get better." His obituary credits SBSK with spreading his story. Ulmer later returned to interview Kayne's family about grief two years after his passing.

If you're interested in learning about more interviewees, then I can't recommend watching the videos on SBSK's channel more. They do far more justice to the people being interviewed than I ever could in my writing here.

...But Chris Ulmer is Not a Saint

One of the most important things Ulmer has stated publicly is this: he is not a saint. He rejects the idea that the work he does is extraordinary, what he does anybody can do. And I completely agree.

Calling him a saint for treating disabled people with dignity only reinforces the idea that basic respect is unusual or heroic, rather than something every person deserves and every person is easily capable of giving.

Ulmer breaks his approach down into three simple, universal beliefs:

1. Radical equality: “Every person on earth is my equal. I am better than no one and no one is better than me.” This applies to children who deserve equal respect as people, and adults whose behaviour is often shaped by unseen trauma.

2. Unconditional positive regard: Every person deserves respect, kindness, patience, and non-judgmental communication, regardless of how they look, speak, or act—as long as they aren’t harming others.

3. All communication is valid: A nonverbal child’s smile carries the same weight as a deep verbal conversation. Meaning isn’t dependent on conventional expression.

The practical outcome, he says, is learning to be fully present. Putting down your phone, stopping the mental rehearsal of what you’ll say next, and just being there and listening.

The world doesn’t become kinder through a few extraordinary saints, it becomes kinder when ordinary people choose to treat everyone they meet with humanity.

Ulmer's work is not the work of a heroic saviour. He is not attempting to flatten and compress the lives and stories of the disabled for the nondisabled to feel good about. No, the past decade of SBSK demonstrates a sincere effort towards listening and platforming. Towards equity, accessibility, and inclusion. Ulmer and Porter are doing incredibly important work, but it is work anybody can do who is unafraid to give their compassion and love to the world unconditionally.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors

In some webweaving circles, you'll see websites created that only work properly on a desktop screen. Sometimes this is due to coding difficulties—I've been there many times myself, media queries in CSS can be a difficult beast to tame! But other times, this is an intentional design choice, which I've seen on certain NeoCities sites, for example.

In conjunction with this, in the circles I'm in there's an understanding that the computer (laptop, desktop) is a better user experience compared to a tablet or smartphone. I literally just wrote a post about my adoration for the personal computer, so I'm contributing to the problem.

And it is a problem, because globally, around 2 billion people access the internet exclusively via their smartphones, representing half of mobile internet users. In 2019, World Advertising Research Center predicted that number to be 3.7 billion people, and it will most likely continue to increase. In the United States, 16% of adults (tens of millions of people) are smartphone-only internet users who lack home broadband.

I believe this is an existential problem for the IndieWeb currently. If people are designing their personal sites to be desktop-only, then they are alienating billions of people who only have a phone to access—and most are living in developing nations and the global south.

The Real Problem with Phoneblogging

But, luckily, this problem is solved by being more mindful that responsive design actually is important, learning how to implement it, and realizing that this is not something you can shrug off simply because you have a personal negative view of smartphones—whether due to your own problematic screentime or usage, or whatever.

This isn't the actual problem I want to write about, though. What I want to figure out is how someone can start a blog, or join the IndieWeb from their phone themselves.

This is a puzzling UX use case to solve—or at the very least, has been one that has been almost completely neglected.

When it comes to taking notes and coming up with a draft for a blog post, then your phone is a fantastic tool. There are numerous note-taking apps for both Android and iOS to choose from, many of which would sync automatically to your desktop—ah, but there's the rub!

Cross-platform options like Obsidian, Simplenote, and Google Keep will sync notes across an Android or iOS phone and desktop. If you're inside Apple's walled garden, Bear gives you Markdown-native notes synced via iCloud, and Drafts is built around capturing text fast (and being expensive) and routing it wherever it needs to go next—though neither of those two has an Android counterpart.

When it comes to microblogging a thought that's less than a thousand characters, phones are also excellent for that. Whether you're on BlueSky or Threads or using one of the multiple well-designed Mastodon apps like Ivory, Ice Cubes, or Mona on iOS, or Tusky on Android. This isn't the issue I'm trying to tackle.

No, I'm talking about full-fledged longform blogging. Rarely, if ever, do you find a comfortable user experience for the writing part. You're either constantly switching to symbols within the on-screen keyboard if you're writing in Markdown, or you're trying to press impossibly small buttons for rich-text formatting.

There are workarounds for the limitations of an on-screen keyboard. You could dictate your writing by speaking, or if you can afford a bluetooth keyboard (or one that can connect via your phone's charging port) then that too would vastly improve the experience.

And don't get me wrong, there are mobile apps that exist, though they're by and large siloed solutions tied to a single platform:

• WordPress: the official app (also on Google Play for Android) lets you write, edit, and publish from your phone.
• Ghost: Ghost has an official Android app Update: Ghost's Android app was discontinued. There's only unofficial ones. Thanks to Sérgio for pointing this out. but no iOS app. Apple users are stuck with unofficial community builds like Ghost Publisher.
• Medium: also on Android is fine for reading, and can do serious longform writing.
• Tumblr: also on Android is still going, still chaotic, and a good blogging platform underneath all the fandom noise, in my opinion.

Even Google's Blogger has an Android app. A cursory search on the iOS app store also showed me solutions like Git Blog App, which lets you commit directly to a Git-based static site from your phone.

I also want to shout-out here to Pagecord, an independent blogging platform that is focused on giving people as many ways as possible to post. They have post-by-email, an Obsidian plugin, an iA Writer solution, scripts, Shortcuts, or "anything that can make an HTTP request. 🔌"

But writing is only one part of blogging. If you blog like me, you'll have dozens of tabs open at the same time—looking things up, adding sources, sharing links—and this only takes a couple key strokes or mouse movements on desktop, but is an infuriating slog on a mobile device switching back and forth constantly. And if you're on a low-end device, there's a good chance of a crash or losing work when RAM automatically tries to free itself up.

What Others Have to Say

I decided to pose the question to my friends on Mastodon to see real-life examples of phoneblogging and was very happy with the diversity of results. Of course, this is purely anecdotal, but it does give a good insight into this.

1. No Phoneblogging

To start, some people do not partake in blogging on their phone whatsoever:

Nah, writing on a laptop only. I need the commitment of sitting down, taking time out to do it, even if it's a short note. I might make a note on a phone occasionally.

I use a static site generator, so it would be hard to publish on a phone anyway, but for me that's a plus.

— Paternoster @paternoster@mas.to

Low vision keeps me from interacting with my phone much. If I use it for anything related to blogging, it is most likely going to be for a photo.

— Emma @emma

Absolutely no, desktop only.

Fedi/bsky posts yes, chats yes, blog posts require a lot of concentration to write, and also I'm just not using an OSK [onscreen keyboard] for that.

— Alice @alice@mk.nyaa.place

2. Partial Phoneblogging

Then there's a group of people who use their phone for drafts and note-taking, but then transition to finishing the blog post on their desktop:

It depends when the idea hits me. If I'm out and about, I'll sketch or maybe even finish the post in the Notes app on my iPhone. I won't post from my iPhone though, I'll copy and paste when I get to my Mac (unless I'm really away, like a vacation). If I'm at my Mac, I'll probably just start writing directly in the blog editor.

— James Huff @macmanx

Not really. For a while I used the WordPress app occasionally, but I always had to go back and clean things up from the website afterward.

Add that my phone typing has gotten worse over time (or maybe the onscreen keyboards have), while my physical keyboarding has gotten better. (That kinda surprised me—after how many decades of typing, suddenly I'm touch-typing more reliably? How? And it's not like I stopped typing on phones either, so why has that changed?)

I guess the closest I get to blogging from my phone now is when I write a social media post (or thread) that I later fix up or expand, or when I jot down notes that I build on later. I'd much rather connect a tablet to a smallish keyboard than deal with the tiny screen and tinier touch-points if I'm going to write anything longer than, say, this.

— Kelson @kelson@notes.kvibber.com

I'll sometimes build outlines with it using the app Journelly. I never finish them there though. The outline typically gets imported into the app I use on my computer to finalize things.

(And to be clear when I say build I mean create and write. It's not AI but typically a bulleted list of notes I make myself in the approximate order I'll want them in the end result)

— Brandon @mbjones

I don't publish from my phone, but I occasionally like to thought dump on the go. My workflow includes a folder of MD files so I just pop open Obsidian with a template for the date and title, and write in a bullet-point list format. It's easier for future me to edit and reorganize my thought process when it's small chunks. I also prefer to write in simple sentences, since I'm not great at typing longform when I can't catch most of it.

Sometimes, if I have enough privacy (which isn't often) I do voice-to-text, again for drafts, not final versions.

— Hatch @binomech

Wouldn't call myself a blogger (relevant to your last blog post haha) so feel free to discard this reply, but the few times I've written something that wasn't (fan)fiction, it depended on where I was, what I was doing, and how long I expected the piece to be.

I think my Design Philosophy piece was written mostly in Ellipsus on my phone, but I don't really remember: https://www.mrnnki.com/writing.php?id=6

I expected it to be longer than it ended up being.

My Name Is Mrnnki was definitely written on my phone: https://www.mrnnki.com/writing.php?id=12

I was at a brew barn listening to some music and thinking about online identities.

Bluesky Sucks was written on my computer, directly in HTML: https://www.mrnnki.com/writing.php?id=13

I was at home and already working on something for my website, determined to rewrite my old Tumblr post into something a bit more accurate.

Direct publishing to my website from my phone is not something I'd ever do, hah. I'd have to make the admin panel for it myself, and keeping that secure wouldn't be fun

— Mrnnki @mrnnki@problemeowtic.net

3. Full Phoneblogging

To my surprise, there are quite a few people who do, in fact, use their phone to blog! And I love their solutions to this:

I do, I have a micropub endpoint for my static site and make use of it a lot. On mobile, I usually only fix typos, add a sentence or two, upload images. For the bulk writing I prefer my laptop, but I'll often prepare drafts on my laptop and then publish later from mobile via micropub. The existing clients could use some love though. I hope it becomes more popular, it's such an underrated protocol IMHO!

— Ruben @kedara

I've set up a Micropub endpoint for my own blog! Funnily enough I haven't ever used it. Silly me.

I do. I write the majority of my notes from a dedicated page that's kinda like a social media post UI (screenshot attached). I occasionally write longer, standard posts from my phone too, but that's rare and usually shorter posts, like the Linkception post from last night—that was written on my phone.

Most often I use my phone for notes or adding drafts when I have an idea.

— Kev Quirk @kev@fosstodon.org

Oh, I used to! In 2021 I wrote a blog post about updating my Hugo blog from my phone. After that I moved to a git CI/CD setup with Indiekit to update my blog from my phone... but it was too janky and unreliable; I ended up strongly preferring to just wait until I was at my computer to post.

— Jessica Smith @jayeless

Absolutely. With the help of #Obsidian. For my Notes I have there a simple creation workflow, with templates and the help of the plugin #Templater. My Posts and their drafts are created on my laptop, but synced to Obsidian to write on wherever I am. With this my phone is just one computer I can use to write.

— Kristof Zerbe @kiko@indieweb.social

I do it quite a lot, because I'm mostly in bed and getting the laptop out is a hassle. Funnily enough what gave me the confidence that I could do it without a large editing surface and tooling is that I once built a blogging platform to which you can post directly from the terminal as an exercise when I had to learn Rails for work.

— Anna Miriamsdochter @venite@mastodon.nl

I'd say 90% of my blogging is done on the phone. From photo shooting, editing, writing, to publishing, everything happens on the phone.

Same percentage of reading on the same device. If the site doesn't work on mobile, I'll probably get it via RSS, or not at all.

— maique @maique@social.lol

I do. I optimised the wiki for just that. I have an "edit this page" link and a "add to this page" link. Since adding new pages needs a way to type their name before I can edit it, there's a form that provides this, containing the date. When adding to a page that has a name that starts with a date, the addition also starts with a date. When saving a page, links to it are automatically added from the front page and from hashtag pages so no extra edits are required.

— Alex Schroeder @alex@social.alexschroeder.ch

I absolutely love Alex's solution, and the coolest part is that he made it himself! Please check out his project Oddmu

Results

First, I want to take a moment to appreciate these responses. I only sent out this question yesterday, and I received so many responses from writers I admire. I am so grateful for this community, and it is one of the reasons I am such an advocate for the IndieWeb in the first place. I'm sure there will be more replies by the time I post this.

Second, people are creative and resilient, surprise surprise. People find ways to phoneblog despite the limitations and constraints.

But these solutions do, for the most part, require technical know-how that most people don't have. I'd love for there to be more accessible, simple ways to blog from your phone while maintaining the IndieWeb ethos.

The mobile web is exactly where corporate media platforms thrive. Years and billions of dollars of research have gone into making Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter and co. as addictive as possible, regardless of the detrimental social consequences that has caused in its wake.

I don't like writing about a problem where I have no proposed solution, but I think awareness is a good first step. The IndieWeb must make mobile-first a priority, not something to scoff at. We must find sustainable, accessible ways to make phoneblogging fun!

Coda

During my research for this post, I found an even more astonishing fact. 3.4 billion people still don't have access to the Internet at all. Nearly half the world remains offline. It is completely incorrect to assume the Internet connects us all. We still have so much work to do.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

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Will I participate? Well, every month has been Blaugust for me since November 2025, as I've written at least 23 posts every month since then. Although I haven't yet had a month where I've successfully blogged every single day, so maybe I will.

What I want to talk about, though, is not blogging. At the start of the month, Dan Q. wrote a great blog post called You don't have to blog like me, listing out all the things you don't need to do in order to be a blogger. I sincerely appreciate this post, as I think if you take a look at my own blog you might feel as though quite a few things that Dan lists are in fact requirements.

But I want to go a step further, though, and tell you that you don't need to blog at all.

If you're on the IndieWeb and you are a webweaver, and you have your own site on NeoCities or make your own static site generator, or use one of the many other tools available, your website does not need a blog. Your website is fully complete with just a couple pages, or shrines, or web rings, or web cliques. Even then, none of those are necessary either.

If you're an artist, share your drawings instead of writing. Put your music on Faircamp, or put your photography on PixelFed, or put your video on PeerTube. None of it needs to be words.

And if you're instead a lurker, if you're somebody that reads the blogs of others and often feel a pressuring heat on the back of your neck because you haven't started your own—I'm here to tell you right now that it's okay if you never do. It doesn't make you any lesser, and it isn't a failing.

I blog because I enjoy writing to an absurd degree—and while I have written often about the benefits of writing (private or public), there are plenty of other things you can be doing with your time instead that might be better for you, like meditation, running, spending quality time with the people you love, gardening, prayer, or going to your public library.

The Poisonous Gamification of Blogging

As I wrote about in my previous post on linking better, the act of blogging has existed as long as the public Web 1.0 has. But during the early 00's, when Internet usage skyrocketed, so did the appeal—and money—that could be made by blogging. As an unsurprising result, the practice got commodified and exploited. Instead of blogging to share your life or hobbies, it became about stuff like domain authority and backlinks and search-engine optimization and longtail keywords. Anything that would make a site more profitable and earn more revenue through annoying, intrusive ads or seeing the blog as nothing more than a funnel tool to get people towards buying the actual (expensive) product being sold.

Blog Ads launched in 2002 as one of the first blog-specific ad networks, with Google's AdSense following inside the year, and Google bought Pyra Labs, the company behind Blogger, that same February. Blogging became a business line. By the end of the decade, Demand Media, the poster child of the content farm era, was cranking out thousands of pieces of content a day, most of it hollow and engineered to catch a specific search query. It took Google's 2011 Panda update, which was aimed towards eliminating low-quality keyword-stuffed content, to even start correcting course.

I know this quite well because I've been interested in blogging long enough to watch the results on the first page of searching about it become more and more exploitative and extractive over the years.

Perhaps thankfully, writing moved to the wayside as video became the de facto medium, and the Internet as a whole has transitioned to vlogging—which then again transformed into the shortform video content of reels and the like.

The first vlog is credited to Adam Kontras, who posted a video alongside a blog entry back in January 2000, though the form stayed a curiosity until YouTube launched in 2005 and grew to 100 million video views a day within about a year. Lonelygirl15's webcam monologues racked up hundreds of thousands of subscribers in 2006, one of the format's first breakout hits. The ideal medium for monetization kept becoming more attention-grabbing and more compressed over the following decade. TikTok then grew out of ByteDance's Douyin, launched in China in 2016, before merging with Musical.ly and going global in 2018, and Instagram Reels followed in August 2020, launched as an answer to TikTok's runaway growth.

Web Logging

What the IndieWeb provides for us is a return to original meaning of the word—the act of logging life and thoughts on the web. Weblogging. Blogging.

This is the most important thing Dan wrote in his post: "The Internet is ours. It belongs to the humans." Which is exactly why you don't need to blog, you just need to be a person on the Internet. That alone is enough.

But of course, a human web comes with all the beautiful flaws humans carry. The subculture and the social groupings, and the conflicts, and the loud voices and the vocal minority. And it is easy to get bogged down in the trees and forget the vast, wonderful forest. To find yourself focusing on the day-to-day specs and bureaucracy and disagreements—this too, is what Dan is writing about.

So, I hope regardless of how you interact and create the human web (or how you don't), you remember that this is a time where the Internet still exists, where we can visit each other's websites and online creations and words from across the world without restriction, and communicate with each other near instantly. These capabilities didn't exist for the first 300,000 years of humanity. And truth be told, we don't know how much longer they're going to, either. Restrictions and Internet Fragmentation are already happening as things shift from a single global network into walled gardens, driven by national data rules, localized content blocking, and diverging technical standards.

It's impossible to know what the future holds, and I'll fight tooth and nail to preserve and grow this beautiful global digital mess of humanity, warts and all. But regardless, I'm so glad we were able to connect right now, right here, in the small way a writer and reader do. For what were the chances of that happening? What were the chances of us encountrying each other at all?

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

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Even before we got our own computer, before I was even in Kindergarten, my Mom would take me to the West Kildonan Library in Winnipeg where I'd play games on PBSkids.org, barely understanding what was going on.

But when I pause and meditate on the computer, I realize I never had a positive association with it, despite how much I've used it. My parents would tell me I was spending too much time on it (I was), and of course the misery spread by corporate social media has made any digital screen malicious in nature.

It took until this year, when I started making friends with people like Melo and many others on the IndieWeb who share unabashed love for the computer that I realized, "oh, I should also love the computer and all that it's capable of and all that it's given me!"

The shift from guilt to gratitude has made me want to understand what a computer actually is and not just what it does.

A 1970s article in Scientific American measured the energy efficiency of locomotion for various animals. The condor won as the most efficient, while humans ranked poorly in the middle. However, when a human used a bicycle, their efficiency blew past the condor and every other animal on Earth. Steve Jobs used this metaphor to famously call the personal computer a "bicycle for the mind."

I think we (or at least I) take for granted how much you can do with a computer, how much it is capable of. Now, what's exactly defined as a computer is incredibly broad—the phone in your pocket is one, absolutely, and maybe also your refrigerator or lightbulbs and sprinklers if you've opted for Smart Devices and the Internet of Things.

What I'm talking about is a specific kind of computer: the desktop tower. It is truly amazing, totally modular with every part replaceable. I can't help but think about the similarities it has to a public library, in that if it were made today rather than being a legacy machine grandfathered into today's personal computing devices, it would have never been allowed to be successful.

Portrait of a Core Duo

Abstract discussion about technology only gets you so far. To understand the miracle of computation, you should look at the CPU. So let’s pick a chip no one would call miraculous anymore.

To drive home how amazing computers are, I am going to be going over how a CPU is made. But not a state of the art CPU, no. I'm going to be writing about the Core Duo, codenamed Yonah, meaning "dove."

It's a processor that might be sitting in a laptop from 2008 in your closet with a film of dust and dried-up thermal paste, the Intel sticker still clinging to the palm rest. That chip was released in 2006. Yet, inside the metal is a reality staggeringly complex, layered with inhuman precision.

It begins with sand. The silicon of the processor begins as ordinary quartzite, purified into metallurgical-grade silicon, then refined again to 99.999999999% purity. You would find one foreign atom among billions. This hyper-purified silicon is then grown into perfect crystal, an unbroken lattice of atoms stretched into a cylindrical ingot. Diamond saws slice this into wafers thinner than a human hair, polished to a mirror finish, and any remaining surface irregularity is measured in angstroms (tenths of a billionth of a meter).

On that wafer, human beings work through machines of incomprehensible precision and paint a city. Projecting stenciled patterns of a processor’s design with ultraviolet light through lenses costing millions of dollars. This is done dozens of times, interspersed with chemical baths, plasma etches, and metal depositions. Silicon is doped with boron or phosphorus atoms shot into the lattice like cannonballs to change its electrical character, in regions only a few dozen atoms wide.

The result is a labyrinth of 151 million transistors, small enough that over 100 of them could stretch across the width of a human red blood cell. During every single second, a transistor in the chip switches over a billion times, channeling electrons along copper interconnects that would span 50 miles if laid end-to-end. All sealed inside a package the size of a postage stamp.

The 2GHz clock means it ticks two billion times per second. At each tick, a wave of state ripples through those 151 million gates, completing a tiny fragment of a computation that, when fused with billions of others, resolves into a program like a word processor or web browser. The program is built on an operating system virtualizing memory, scheduling threads, managing hardware interrupts, and maintains the illusion that this single machine runs hundreds of tasks at once. In reality it’s doing one thing at a time and swapping contexts endlessly.

For example, when you press a key, a keycap descends a few millimeters, bridging a contact that sends a scan code to a microcontroller. This queues an interrupt, triggering a driver, an input system, an application loop, a font rasterizer, a GPU shader, a pixel voltage, and a photon emission from a liquid crystal display. All faster than the mechanical sound of the keypress reaching your ears.

The Core Duo will run for years, executing trillions of instructions without an error despite thermal expansion, flipping memory bits (error-corrected in memory silently), voltage fluctuations, and physical wear. Billions of moving electrons never making a mistake.

This processor was the culmination of sixty years of exponential progress since the invention of the transistor, housing more computational power than the entire planet possessed in 1960. The machinery and intellect required to design and assemble that processor is thanks to the concentrated effort of tens of thousands of the most brilliant minds across centuries of accumulated physics, chemistry, materials science, solid-state theory, Boolean algebra, and computer engineering.

And despite all that, we treat it like a disposable commodity. A billion tiny lightning storms per second. All of this to write “Hello, world!”, or play a song, or load a webpage that itself crossed the globe through fiber optic strands, routers, and servers, materializing on your screen within a few seconds. And we become irritated if a program takes three seconds to open instead of one. We toss the laptop into e-waste dumpsters when the battery dies.

We’ve so thoroughly normalized the miraculous that we’ve lost the capacity to be shocked by it. The Intel Core Duo cost around $240 for the chip at launch. Today, you can buy a used Core Duo laptop for the price of a pizza.

I think about all of that, and how little we actually think of these machines. So here's my scattered, still-incomplete attempt at everything you can do with a computer. Nothing that costs money. Just the machine and what's freely available. Since the hardware is a miracle, I think we should honour it by using it, creatively and freely.

Without Internet

To start with offline capabilities, you can install a terabyte drive (or several) and fill them thousands of albums, films, TV shows, and books. You can also write endlessly, with plain text files of a million words only a few megabytes each.

Beyond that, there is an enormous world of free, open-source software that does not require expensive or recent hardware to run. LibreOffice instead of Microsoft Word, GIMP and Krita instead of Adobe Photoshop, Inkscape instead of Illustrator, Blender for 3D modelling and animation, Audacity and Ardour for audio, Kdenlive for video editing, OBS Studio for recording and streaming, LMMS for making music.

You can download any of a dozen free SDKs, compilers, or IDEs like GCC, Python, or VSCodium and contribute real code back to these open-source projects.

You can try out dozens of different variants of GNU/Linux and BSD. There's Debian's stability, Arch's minimalism, NixOS's reproducibility, or OpenBSD's security. And if you're patient and a little unhinged, write your own operating system kernel from scratch.

You can emulate old game consoles and computers. You can run Stockfish locally and play chess against an engine stronger than any human ever. You can typeset a book in LaTeX. You can model in Blender or FreeCAD and hand the file to a friend with a 3D printer. You can generate your own PGP keypair. You can run simulations, plot fractals, and solve differential equations with Octave or Sage. You can take an old laptop and turn it into a local home server that backs up your family's photographs.

You can carry the internet in your pocket with Kiwix containing the whole of Wikipedia, Wiktionary, and Project Gutenberg inside a single file, usable on a boat in the middle of nowhere. You can improve your memory with Anki, an open-source spaced-repetition flashcard program quizzing you based on how close you are to forgetting.

You can draw a typeface in FontForge, or build a game in Godot, a 2D and 3D engine with no royalties. You can use Tesseract on a box of scanned family letters and turn handwriting into searchable text. You can use ffmpeg for audio, video, any container format really, and it'll convert, compress, or stitch.

You can create a VeraCrypt container or a KeePassXC vault for anything you want to keep encrypted, local. Or, you can pick up a $30 RTL-SDR dongle and suddenly you're using the electromagnetic spectrum, listening to air traffic, amateur radio, the ISS passing overhead, even the hydrogen line hissing in from deep space, no internet required.

With Internet

And then you plug in the ethernet cable, and the list gets exponentially longer. There are so many learning resources and beautiful pieces of art and culture you can find. Wikipedia alone is one of civilization's greatest achievements—free, collaboratively built, and you don't need an account to read or edit.

The Internet Archive holds millions of scanned books, recordings, and obsolete software. The Wayback Machine has decades of the Internet that no longer exists. Project Gutenberg and Wikisource hold tens of thousands of public-domain texts. arXiv puts out primary research literature in physics, math, and computer science with no journal paywall.

If you'd rather listen than read, LibriVox's volunteer readers have been putting public-domain books into audio since 2005. Standard Ebooks takes rough Gutenberg transcriptions and turns them into properly-formatted editions for e-readers. IMSLP does the same for sheet music, with three-quarters of a million public-domain scores.

MIT OpenCourseWare and Khan Academy teach material ranging from grade school to university-level. freeCodeCamp and the Odin Project teach programming skills for free. PeerTube proves federated video hosting. Lichess is a free, ad-free, fully open-source chess server, no account required to play. OpenStreetMap is our world map built and maintained by volunteers, and you can add your own neighbourhood's sidewalks and trails to it. Zooniverse lets you help classify galaxies or transcribe old ship logs for real research, and Folding@home will happily take your computer's spare cycles and put them toward modelling proteins for disease research.

SDF is a public-access Unix system that's been running as a members' club since 1987 with shell accounts, email, Gopher, and now a Mastodon instance too. The Tildeverse carries that same spirit forward today, a loose federation of "pubnixes" like tilde.club and tilde.town where anyone can get a free shell account and share a server with strangers making art, hosting Gopher holes, and just poking around Unix together.

And down at the smaller end of things, Gemini and Gopher are protocols available if you want an alternative Internet altogether.

The Decline

I find it almost unbearably sad, then, that the desktop computer is slowly becoming an enthusiast’s relic. Smartphones and tablets do more each year, yes, but they also fence you in, strip away the file system, the tinkerability, the ownership.

The share of adults online who use a laptop or desktop computer dropped from 72% in early 2020 to 61% by the third quarter of 2024. Globally, desktops now account for around 45% of web traffic, a share that only continues to shrink as phones continue to replace usage.

That said, worldwide shipments of traditional PCs actually ticked up slightly in 2025, to about 274 million units, so people are still buying towers and laptops—but how people spend their day is not in doubt. Smartphones are amazing in their own way, but they severely limit what you're capable of doing. We now walk around with supercomputers in our pockets, magnitudes more powerful than the Core Duo, and we use them to doomscroll, or watch dancing cats.

All of this was built on the shoulders of giants. Maxwell, Boltzmann, Shockley, Turing, von Neumann, Hopper. People who understood the universe is a puzzle box of physical laws that could be engineered into computation. Every line of assembly code is Ada Lovelace’s vision that a machine could manipulate symbols and not just numbers.

We’ve outsourced wonder to science fiction and think of the present as mundane, when in fact it’s a daily explosion of the impossible.

We need to stop and stare in awe at the metal and silicon, and feel the weight of what it represents. Your computer is a monument to human ingenuity. It is the envy of civilizations. And yet it sits forgotten in storage, cosmic significance invisible. It’s the concentrated miracle of a billion minds, etched in sand, pulsing with light, waiting for you to notice.

I think all of this is why you should take the time and effort to become a system admin and webmaster. Is it technical, and often dry and mechanical? Yes, absolutely. But you gain the capability to understand this wonderful, impossibly complex machine and wield it for purposes of good. Of building things you love. Of truly connecting with others.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

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Also? RAM and GPUs are becoming unaffordable, with memory prices climbing as much as 89% in a single year as AI data centers eat up the world's DRAM supply. Microsoft and Sony have been raising console prices in lockstep, the Series X now costs $799.99, a $300 jump from its 2020 launch price, not long after Sony hiked PS5 prices of its own back in April. Microsoft is also closing even more of its game studios, that's 3,200 jobs and four studios gone in the latest round alone. Sony, meanwhile, announced the phase out of physical game discs by January 2028, with the PS6 being a digital-only machine, and Sony is also stepping back from porting its single-player exclusives to PC. Even Valve's new Steam Machine—over a thousand dollars for the base model—isn't a good deal at all. Would've been perfect five years ago.

Myself? I am a terrible gamer. I don't think I've ever actually completed a traditional game. The only games I do have over 100 hours in are Stardew Valley, Rimworld, Cities Skylines, Civilization III, and Balatro. Why does this make me terrible? Well, I hoard and collect like a magpie—my Steam library has over 350 games, most of which I haven't touched. (To be fair, a lot were purchased during the golden age of Humble Bundle when the lowest minimum purchase was $0.01).

Funnily enough, I've always been passionate about video games as a form of art. Back when Flash games still existed, I stumbled upon the Art Games genre on Newgrounds and was captivated. These simple games rendered such emotion in a young Brennan, and had a profound impact on how I interface with art in general. I remember playing Braid eighteen years ago when it was first released, dumbfounded at the beauty of the ending. More recently, playing Slay the Princess and Disco Elysium with my ex was probably one of the best experiences I've ever had in my life, bar none.

Agency, restriction, failure, and repetition can carry meaning no static medium can replicate. A poem describes grief; a game makes you embody a failure state. The throughline from those five-minute Flash experiments to Braid's time-rewind mechanic doubling as its central metaphor, to Slay the Princess asking you, again and again, to choose who you're going to be. Art games are often made on a shoestring budget and only need one good idea.

And because I've never really been interested in AAA games, I'm biased, but there are so many wonderful indie games on places like itch.io which are far less expensive and have much lower hardware requirements, and you're directly supporting game developers rather than these massive corporate companies that care about quarterly earnings far more than making enjoyable games. The itch.io ecosystem is a solo dev's three-hour narrative game, a couple's weekend game jam project, a game built in a week for a theme and never touched again.

I've found myself getting into the growing retro handheld scene in the past few years. While I have a beefy gaming PC that can run any number of video games, I find that for gaming, function follows form. I'd much rather play emulated titles on a handheld 3-inch Android screen with controls than the massive screen of my desktop or laptop.

Not to mention my gaming PC is upstairs in the summer heat while I spend the vast majority of my time in the basement, and I am also using it as my homelab server for folk.zone.

Anyways, the Retroid Pocket Nova was just released last month, and it looks amazing—a 4:3 aspect ratio screen that's also OLED 120Hz? You really couldn't ask for a better experience for retro emulation.

But, even at a fraction of the cost of home consoles by Sony or Microsoft, a new handheld like the Nova is still outside of my budget. All technology is expensive now, and the shipping costs to Canada certainly don't help.

But! A couple years ago I did splurge and get myself a Retroid Pocket 2S. It's a small, boxy thing—barely 200 grams—with a UNISOC Tiger T610 chip clocked up to 2GHz, paired with a Mali-G52 GPU that wasn't setting benchmarks back when it launched in 2023. The 3.5-inch IPS touchscreen runs at a 4:3 aspect ratio and a 640×480 resolution, which most people see as its biggest flaw. But really, retro systems were designed for that screen, weren't they? No letterboxing or stretching out. There's also hall-effect joysticks, dual USB-C and micro HDMI ports on the top, and it's running Android 11.

Even a device like this that's a few years old with a weaker chipset still has the capacity to emulate so many games. There's already quite a few I want to sink my teeth into.

To start, there's the time travel of Chrono Trigger, Vagrant Story's clipped and liturgical dialogue, Xenogears' ambition, the found family of Persona 3 Portable. There's Skies of Arcadia, Silent Hill's fog, Streets of Rage 2's synth-drenched brawling, Gunstar Heroes throwing bullets like confetti, Crazy Taxi's radio-blasting, sun-bleached nonsense. Even Mother 3, which is still only fan-translated almost two decades later, might be the one I'm most looking forward to playing.

There are so many games to play. I'd certainly love to hear from my audience if you have any other suggestions! I would also love to hear about resources for homebrews and ROMhacks since I'm definitely out of practice finding stuff like that.

While it originally started as a term for guitarists, gear acquisition syndrome permeates all hobbies now. Everything is commodified, everything is FOMO'd. Start where you are, use what you have, do what you can. Especially if it's fun!

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors

Coyote isn't the first to reach for the natural world to describe how we read and write online. A decade earlier, Mike Caulfield described two competing modes of the web as the garden and the stream: the garden being the integrative, revisitable web of cross-linked ideas, the stream being the one-way, chronological rush of social media that vanishes the moment it passes you by. A few years after that, Tom Critchlow proposed a third mode to sit alongside them, the campfire—the smaller, cozier gathering of blogs-in-conversation, somewhere between the private and the broadcast. Coyote's bioindicator is in that lineage, not only describing the kind of space the web is, but what its current condition might be telling us about the region around it.

While I disagree with certain criticisms about the site, I do agree it’s important to figure out how to cultivate and sustain a healthy, thriving culture and community for the IndieWeb.

And this system is a web. And a web becomes stronger and more durable the more interlinking threads and strands there are. In other words, when we link to each other in a way that meaningfully synthesizes, the web gets stronger and the ecosystem of the blogosphere improves. This is a solution that Coyote has written about previously:

Linking out to other blogs is the oldest way of making the blogosphere traversable. Not just blogrolls, button walls, and bookmarks, but link-rich text in the posts themselves as well, surfacing in feed readers and presenting long-time readers with new pathways to explore. If readers are not experiencing the blogs they follow as themselves a gateway to more blogs, then that's an indicator of a lack of link culture.

This touches on something important, and what I mean by meaningful synthesis. I know quite a few bloggers who do linkdumps—the act of sharing various links you’ve encountered over the past week. Sometimes, it's just the links themselves, other times there is at least a sentence or two by the collector with their own thoughts.

A blogger I read, Unstory, wrote briefly about writing that serves the writer, rather than the reader, and I think linkdumps are an example of this kind of writing (though they were talking more about post length, a little ironic since all I do is write long jeremiads like this).

What we need is "link-rich text in the posts themselves," to weave the thoughts of others with your own thoughts, and further enmesh the ideas from multiple people. Honestly, this doesn't need to be complex, it can be as simple as giving a shout-out or acknowledgements, as Melo did in her most recent blog post.

Really, I think writing longform posts that incorporate the works of others also does more benefit for the writer than a linkdump does as well. There are concepts from personal knowledge management about how there should be no orphan notes—notes that lack links to any other notes.

“The decision where to place what in the file can involve a great deal of randomness as long as I add references linking the other options” (Luhmann, 1987, p. 143, quoted in Schmidt, 58)
—from Richard Griffith's Writing Slowly

Notes with no links are just a pile; a rough linked note beats a perfect orphan.

Similarly, Bob Doto wrote about how Matuschak's vocabulary relates to Luhmann's original method. The link itself carries meaning, and how it's embedded in a sentence explains why the two notes relate. Andy Matuschak also writes about how notes should be densely linked.

While these concepts are designed for personal knowledge management systems, it's clear how important they are for the public, personal sites of everyone.

On Metablogging

Another issue Coyote brings up is how Bubbles.town's userbase will disproportionately upvote posts about Bubbles itself, in other words, metablogging.

If we want to avoid the banal fields of metablogging, a great way to do that is by reading the work of others, as well as books and news and scholarly articles, or even watching films, or visiting museums or listening to music—the more exposure we have to art and good work is an important part to this. If you want to be interesting, surround yourself with interesting ideas.

It doesn't even need to be explicit pieces of culture—anything in the world has merit to write about if you have enough curiosity and imagination. Nicholson Baker wrote the novel The Mezzanine which never leaves a single escalator ride back to the office, spending its pages on shoelaces, milk cartons, and paper straws and somehow making all of it riveting. Georges Perec wrote An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, sitting in a café window for three days just to record the buses and pigeons and passersby of one ordinary square. And my favourite example is James Ward's blog, I Like Boring Things. Stationery, beige carpet, and the number of pens a shop sells in a day are all worth writing about if you're willing to actually look at them.

The other important part is confidence. Confidence to write is what Robert Birming, a popular Bear blogger, posts about often, to the ire of Scholarch—and the complaint is chiefly because Birming encourages people to blog when they don't have anything specific to blog about.

I agree that can be irritating, even though I myself am no better, and write often about the craft of writing itself. But I do try to incorporate the concepts of others and offer depth and variety.

The confidence should be realigned towards "your voice and thoughts and opinions on things is worth sharing" rather than "just write about how you have nothing to write about."

But confidence in isolation just causes more disconnected voices shouting past each other. This is where interlinking comes in. Synthesizing the writing of others means combining multiple sources to create a stronger, vibrant version of the idea than that exists within each individual source by itself. This term sounds academic because I admittedly am borrowing it from academia (which itself could be argued as being a bastardized version of Hegelian dialectics).

I detest the gatekeeping elitism within academia, and I believe a powerful vehicle to counteract this is to liberate and democratize concepts like this for everyone to use. You certainly do not need years of expensive education to have a voice.

Justin's Links

No one proved that earlier than Justin Hall. Justin's Links from the Underground is one of the earliest personal websites, launched in 1994 by Hall. While early websites like his were dismissed as amateur, they were among the first flowering of democratic digital literature. The Internet has shown us anyone could share anything with anyone. Free and without restraint.

Justin chronicled his life, relationship, struggles, all long before the term "blog" existed. In an interview, he said that "[t]he best use of our technology enhances our humanity. It lets us shape our narrative and share our story and connect us.". This is the IndieWeb's transformative power, isn't it? The ability to create spaces where traditional barriers to literary production fall away.

We are makers of digital literature. Sacredness wrapped in HTML. Ceremony in the act of blogging. For some people, each post is both therapy and proof of existence. A seed planted in soil, which might one day grow into something more.

I am a child of the Internet's Wild West, and I witnessed the revolution of who gets to create and whose voice is heard. I was born on the cusp between Millennial and Generation Z—too young for LiveJournal, too old for TikTok.

When I was younger, I watched sites and communities rise and fall like Atlantis, always standing at the shore, words caught in my throat, believing I had nothing worth saying. But a throat full of unspoken words is still thread—coiled and waiting and needing only a hand willing to cast it on.

This is what I mean when I say we need interlinkers. A single strand is not fabric. Threads on their own fray. A single thread will snap under its own tension, as it was never built to hold a shape by itself. Textiles and fabric only happen when countless single threads agree to hold each other up—warp crossing weft, over and under.

Every link out is a stitch. We are hands pulling a needle back through, binding one piece of the pattern to the next.

The web needs more hands on the loom. Every link I've shared in this post is purling a blog into being. And I am so thankful for other bloggers providing thread. I'm trying to cast it on. I would rather help make something whole and a little uneven, dropped stitches and all, than leave my length of yarn perfectly coiled up, admired only for a colour it never got the chance to become.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors

C'est pas juste une affaire de fierté culturelle, dans le fond. Avoir des vrais termes en français, ça baisse la barrière à l'entrée pour le monde francophone qui est pas nécessairement techno, ça fait en sorte que l'IndieWeb a pas l'air d'un anglophone club de plus. Ça challenge ce réflexe-là, souvent ben inconscient, où l'anglais devient la langue par défaut dès qu'on parle à la technologie.

C'est quoi qui existe déjà?

Bon, en ce moment, le wiki de l'IndieWeb a effectivement une section en français, mais c'est pas mal maigre, pis ça sonne plus français de France que joual. Main_Page-fr, Getting_Started-fr, webmention-fr, projects-fr, pis une page sur les normes de contribution au wiki, wikify-fr.

Les traducteurs n'ont surtout pas traduit grand-chose. POSSE reste POSSE, silo reste silo, webmention reste webmention, pis y'expliquent le concept autour du terme anglais au lieu d'en inventer un en français. Le IndieWeb « officiel » en français, dans le fond, c'est juste le IndieWeb anglais avec du tissu conjonctif en français.

Dans le même genre, Vincent Breton, un blogueur IndieWeb/fédivers français de France, a écrit un billet sur comment y'a monté son « site citoyen » IndieWeb, pis lui aussi laisse POSSE, webmentions pis « fédivers » tout croche non-traduits en plein milieu de phrases françaises.

Une affaire intéressante: Radio-Canada a vraiment couvert le fédivers en français! L'article met de l'avant Evan Prodromou, un des co-créateurs d'ActivityPub, qui reste à Montréal. Y'a aussi un article régional plus récent, le topo de Culture Montérégie sur le fédivers, qui nomme des instances spécifiquement québécoises comme Qlub.

Côté auto-hébergement/DIY, jevalide.ca c'est un blogue/podcast québécois (qui s'appelle Aires Communes) qui écrit de façon décontractée en français sur l'auto-hébergement pis le fédivers.

Dans l'ensemble, j'ai eu de la misère à trouver un glossaire ou un lexique dédié qui traduit la terminologie de l'IndieWeb spécifiquement (POSSE, silos, webmentions, microformats, h-cards, backfeed, etc.) en français, québécois ou autre. Mais ça se peut ben que ce soit juste mes limites pis mon français pas fort!

La tradition néologique du Québec

Dans mon dernier post, j'ai touché rapidement à la différence entre le français québécois pis le français de France. Le Québec (via l'OQLF) a une habitude institutionnelle assez rare de créer des néologismes technos au lieu d'emprunter l'anglais tel quel. Ben des mots sont restés pognés, même en France, comme courriel, pourriel, clavardage, baladodiffusion, hameçonnage, infonuagique, mot-clic. Voici de la lecture supplémentaire, pis plus de contexte dans cet article-là du magazine Circuit pis ce profil de L'actualité sur la terminologue derrière plusieurs de ces mots-là.

Même la France a fini par adopter courriel au lieu de leur propre mél. Cool, hein!

Les termes qu'on a déjà

« blogue » a déjà toute une famille de mots québécois. Y'a carnet Web, cybercarnet, carnetier/carnetière comme alternatives à blogueur. Voir la fiche du GDT pour blogue francophone pis blogueur, blogueuse.

« Silo » c'est un mot contesté en français québécois, mais dans un sens plus jargon-de-bureau (travailler en silo = travailler isolé, sans partage d'info), pis des commentateurs linguistiques le pointent du doigt comme un anglicisme pas nécessaire, avec cloisonné, en vase clos, compartimenté comme alternatives « correctes » (plus par ici, pis par là). Le « silo » de l'IndieWeb (Facebook, Twitter, plateformes fermées) pis le « silo » du français corporatif québécois (départements isolés) c'est la même métaphore dans le fond—un décrit l'emprisonnement-par-plateforme, l'autre décrit l'isolement-des-collègues.

« Fédivers » c'est déjà un néologisme bien établi pis ben utilisé au Québec/en français (fédération + univers), y'a une définition quasi-Wiktionnaire pis la fiche de Note Praxis, en plus de l'article de Radio-Canada plus haut.

« Auto-hébergement » pour self-hosting, c'est réglé, pis c'est de même que les auto-hébergeurs québécois en parlent (voir jevalide.ca plus haut).

Et permalink, syndication, microblog, c'est permalien, syndication, microblogue/microblogage, tous déjà naturalisés.

Mes idées pour des nouveaux termes en français

• POSSE (Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) ça pourrait être PSSA (Publier sur Son Site, Syndiquer Ailleurs).
• Webmention, ça pourrait ressembler à « rétrolien » (backlink/trackback), vu que ce mot-là existe déjà pis c'est proche dans l'esprit.
• Walled garden / silo—jardin clos, ça existe déjà dans la critique techno en français

Y'a des termes que j'admets qui se traduiraient probablement pas, comme Microformats, h-card, h-entry, pis IndieAuth. C'est essentiellement des noms propres/noms de specs.

Honnêtement, c'est clairement pas mal en dehors de mes capacités vu que chu un francophone ben novice. J'écris ça surtout dans l'espoir de lancer la discussion là-dessus! J'aimerais ben ça entendre d'autres francophones pis leur opinion là-dessus.

Pis, encore plus important, j'aimerais ça entendre d'autres écrivain·e·s non-anglophones pis comment y'a composent avec des termes anglais qui ont pas de traduction précise ou officielle, que ce soit à propos de l'IndieWeb ou n'importe quoi d'autre.

Êtes-vous corrects avec les mots empruntés, ou vous pensez qu'y'a du mérite à inventer des termes dans votre langue maternelle? La linguistique pis le fait de m'exprimer publiquement dans une autre langue, c'est encore nouveau pour moi, faque j'aimerais ben ça savoir.

About Brennan Kenneth Brown

Queer Métis writer, cultural critic, and web developer based in Mohkínstsis (Calgary), Treaty 7 territory. Author of nine books and counting, the founder of Fireweed Writing School and Berry House Studio, and of Write Club at Mount Royal University. His work has been cited in Le Monde and other publications.

Enjoy this content? Support my work and help me create more:

Patreon | Ko-fi | GitHub Sponsors

I used to have a goal named /github which would track my commits across all my repositories on GitHub. But GitHub's API changed, and so now you can only track the commits of one repository at a time. Beyond this, most of my active and maintained projects are now on other platforms like GitLab and Source.tube due to my grievances with GitHub.

(An aside: I deleted most of my corporate social media, but I maintain a GitHub for my professional career, which is currently non-existent, lol.)

Anyways, I decided to use this as a good excuse to build an experiment that's been on my mind for awhile: a dedicated, low-friction place to dump my day-to-day small stuff which doesn't really belong on Brennan.day. Quotes, bookmarks, half-formed notes, a diary line, a code snippet worth remembering. I want to create a commonplace book, wiki-linked digital garden which I have a reason to work on every day.

I have been collecting (hoarding) domains like a magpie, and I decided to use https://brennan.click for this project.

The /urlminder.txt Feed (tracking word count)

I realized I could kill two birds with one stone with this project. I used to use the wonderful online Markdown editor Draft to track the amount of words I wrote per day on Beeminder on my goal /writing. They sadly shut down and I never found a good alternative.

I actually tried creating my own, a Swift MacBook app called Bearminder, which uses the Bear API to send word count to Beeminder. But I found it too cumbersome and I am not a good Swift dev.

But, I realized this project was the perfect opportunity for me to actually finally use URLminder, which lets Beeminder count the words in any publicly accessible URL. It's typically meant for Google Docs, and raw HTML will inflates your word count with every markup tag, but it is accurate with plain-text.

I decided to create an Eleventy function in .11ty.js template format to define a route that isn't backed by a markdown file at all, just a render function returning plain text:

export const data = {
  permalink: "urlminder.txt",
  eleventyExcludeFromCollections: true,
};

export function render(data) {
  const notes = (data.collections.notesPublished || []).slice().sort(
    (a, b) => a.date - b.date
  );

  return notes
    .map((note) => {
      const raw = fs.readFileSync(note.inputPath, "utf8");
      const { content } = matter(raw);
      const dateStr = note.date.toISOString().split("T")[0];
      return `## ${note.data.title} (${dateStr})\n\n${content.trim()}\n`;
    })
    .join("\n");
}

It reads every published note's raw markdown straight off disk (stripping frontmatter with gray-matter) rather than the rendered HTML, concatenates them in date order, and serves the result at https://brennan.click/urlminder.txt, which is the URL I pointed my Beeminder goal at.

URLminder-backed goals are Odometer type, meaning the count can only go up. Since notesPublished filters out type: stub entries, and stubs by definition have no content, the feed only grows as I actually write things!

templateFormats: ["md", "njk", "11ty.js", "txt"] in .eleventy.js is what makes Eleventy recognize .11ty.js and serve the output with a .txt extension in the first place.

The Napkin Spec

These were the ideas I wanted to implement with the project:

• Flat namespace of notes, one markdown file per entry, filename = slug = title.
• [[double-bracket]] wiki-links that resolve automatically (and never break, as missing targets will generate stub pages rather than a dead link.)
• Backlinks on every page, automatically generated.
• Transclusion: Hover-to-preview excerpts on outgoing links, and hover-to-reveal footnotes, both with CSS and not JavaScript
• Brutalist design: one column, no breakpoints, Modern Font Stacks for type, Gruvbox for colour as you've come to expect.
• A dedicated /urlminder.txt route that dumps the plain-text markdown source of every published note, so Beeminder's URLminder can count words written and drive an Odometer goal.
• AGPL-3.0-or-later for the code, CC BY-SA for the writing like all my other projects.

Architecture

src/
  notes/          # everything published, flat, one file per entry
  inbox/          # daily freewrite dump, excluded from the build
  _data/          # symbols.js (symbol taxonomy)
  _includes/      # layouts, partials
  assets/css/     # design system
  urlminder.11ty.js

The project has one flat src/notes/ directory, rather than category subfolders. Wiki-links need to resolve to exactly one file by slug, so category lives in a type frontmatter field instead of a folder path:

---
title:              # optional, overrides the filename-derived title
type: note          # note | quote | bookmark | diary | snippet | stub
symbol: ●           # single Unicode character
date: 2026-07-24
tags: [gruvbox, css]
source_url:         # for quote / bookmark entries
---

type doubles as an 11ty collection, so I loop over type_note, type_quote, etc. on the homepage without any extra bookkeeping.

Wiki-Links

The whole point of a digital garden is low-friction cross-referencing, and I decided to use @photogabble/eleventy-plugin-interlinker for this. This plugin means that if you write [[science]] anywhere in a note, and it resolves to the URL https://brennan.click/science/, whether or not notes/science.md exists yet.

The plugin exposes a resolvingFns map, so you can override how a resolved (or unresolved) link renders. I use it for two things:

1. Rendering a distinct style for broken links, and, for links that do resolve
2. Attaching a build-time excerpt of the target note for the hover preview (more on that below):

eleventyConfig.addPlugin(EleventyInterlinkerPlugin, {
  defaultLayout: "layouts/stub.njk",
  deadLinkReport: "json",
  resolvingFns: new Map([
    [
      "default",
      async (link) => {
        const title = link.title || link.name;
        if (!link.exists || !link.page) {
          return `<span class="wikilink-wrapper"><a class="wikilink wikilink--broken" href="https://brennan.day/${slugify(link.name)}/">${title}</a></span>`;
        }
        const excerpt = excerptFromFile(link.page.inputPath);
        const preview = excerpt
          ? `<span class="wikilink-preview" aria-hidden="true">${excerpt}</span>`
          : "";
        return `<span class="wikilink-wrapper"><a class="wikilink" href="${link.href}">${title}</a>${preview}</span>`;
      },
    ],
  ]),
});

If I have a note that has [[a link]] to a page that doesn't exist, deadLinkReport: "json" writes it to .dead-links.json after building. Then, a script slugifies each broken link name, and creates a minimal type: stub file for any that doesn't already exist in src/notes/:

const slugs = new Set(Object.keys(raw).map(extractSlug).filter(Boolean));

for (const slug of slugs) {
  const filePath = path.join(notesDir, `${slug}.md`);
  if (fs.existsSync(filePath)) continue;
  fs.writeFileSync(filePath, `---\ntype: stub\nsymbol:\ndate: ${today}\n---\n`, "utf8");
}

Since a fresh build's link doesn't resolve until the stub file exists on disk, the npm run build script has to run Eleventy twice, generating stubs in between:

"build": "eleventy && npm run stubs && eleventy"

First pass builds the site and writes .dead-links.json. The stub script turns that report into real (if empty) files. Second pass builds again, and now every wikilink resolves to something. No dead links! Stubs are also then flagged as content debt to be filled in later.

Backlink Generation

Backlinks come from the interlinker plugin as a backlinks template variable. Forward links (what a note itself links out to) are obtained by regex-matching the plugin's own wikilink CSS class back out of the rendered HTML, as the plugin doesn't expose that list directly:

eleventyConfig.addFilter("forwardLinks", (content) => {
  const matches = [
    ...(content || "").matchAll(/<a class="wikilink[^"]*" href="([^"]+)">([^<]*)<\/a>/g),
  ];
  return matches.map(([, href, text]) => ({ url: href, title: text }));
});

Both lists render at the bottom of layouts/note.njk as a "Links to" / "Linked from" pair.

CSS-only Transclusion and Footnotes

I wanted hovering over a wiki-link to reveal a snippet of the page it points to, the kind of transclusion preview Obsidian popularized, but without any client-side JavaScript for what's supposed to be a minimal, brutalist site.

AetherAnne, another IndieWeb netizen I deeply admire, wrote up a tutorial for displaying footnotes without JS, using the CSS next-sibling combinator: putting the reveal content in a hidden sibling element right after the trigger, then flipping its display on :hover. I was able to use this solution for transclusion:

.wikilink-wrapper {
  position: relative;
  display: inline-block;
}

.wikilink-preview {
  display: none;
  position: absolute;
  bottom: 100%;
  left: 0;
  max-width: 30ch;
  padding: 0.5rem 0.75rem;
  background: var(--panel);
  border: 1px solid var(--border);
}

.wikilink-wrapper:hover .wikilink-preview,
.wikilink-wrapper:focus-within .wikilink-preview {
  display: block;
}

:focus-within alongside :hover means keyboard users tabbing through links also get the preview, not just mouse users.

The preview text itself is generated at build time, not scraped from the DOM. Each resolved wikilink reads its target file straight off disk, strips markdown syntax and wikilinks down to plain words, and takes the first forty:

function excerptFromFile(inputPath, wordLimit = 40) {
  const raw = fs.readFileSync(inputPath, "utf8");
  const { content } = matter(raw);
  const plain = toPlainText(
    content
      .replace(/^#{1,6}\s+/gm, "")
      .replace(/[*_`]/g, "")
      .replace(/\[\[([^\]|]+)(\|([^\]]+))?\]\]/g, (_, name, __, alias) => alias || name)
  );
  const words = plain.split(/\s+/).filter(Boolean);
  return words.slice(0, wordLimit).join(" ") + (words.length > wordLimit ? "…" : "");
}