/ideas

Projects I want to build, essays I want to write, things I want to make real.

This is my public idea backlog. Some of these will happen. Some won't. Some are half-baked. Making this public creates accountability and invites collaboration.

If you're working on something similar, let me know. If you want to build one of these together, email me at mail@brennanbrown.ca. If you think I should drop one of these ideas, tell me why.

Technology & Digital Culture

Medium Catalogue Refresh – Curating my best long-form work into a living portfolio, with notes on what each piece means to me now.
Was My Controversial Piece Botted? – Investigating the strange engagement patterns on a polarizing article, and what it says about authenticity online.
“Following” Doesn’t Work Anymore: Here’s What We Can Do Instead – Exploring the fatigue of algorithmic feeds and proposing alternative models for curating attention (APIs? RSS, human-directed discovery).
The Moral Schizophrenia of ChatGPT – Examining the ethical cognitive dissonance of AI tools (eg. their takes on veganism, current atrocities, etc.)
The X Bias of Thinking Something Is Low-Quality Because of Low View Count – How metrics distort our perception of value, creating a vicious cycle that buries genuine work.

Media & Critique

Video Games vs. Films: Why the Enshittification? – Comparing the trajectories of two entertainment industries—why one feels increasingly hostile to audiences while the other evolves (or doesn’t).
Anti-Intellectualism, and Video Essays: Stepping into the Bubble of Seriousness – How the video essay format legitimizes deep dives while sometimes becoming a performance of intellect rather than its substance.
The Art of Joybaiting – Analyzing the online trend of crafting content purely to evoke warmth or nostalgia, and its emotional commodification.

Personal & Reflective

Eulogy for Lighthouse Labs – A reflection on the end of the coding bootcamp experience I was interested in taking that is now completely gone and bankrupt.
On Being a Cusp Baby / Zillennial – Capturing the unique cultural dislocation of being between Millennial and Gen Z, and the identity that emerges in the gap.
My Health Scare with HSP – A personal account of dealing with Henoch-Schönlein Purpura, now often called IgA Vasculitis, mistaken diagnoses, and how it lead to me dropping out of high school.
Phantom Failure – Recurring dreams about failing classes during a semester taken only for student loans—exploring anxiety, self-worth, and the ghosts of past choices.
The Acquaintance’s Premature Baby, the Old Friend Who Might Be Dead – A meditation on the loose threads of relationships and the quiet, unanswered questions we carry out of love.

Society & Identity

Why You Should Still Always Mask Up, Even in 2026 – Making the case for masking as a lasting practice of care, disability justice, and collective responsibility beyond the pandemic narrative.
On Spectrums – Exploring the cultural and personal meaning of spectrums (autism, politics, sexuality, colour) as tools for understanding beyond binaries.
Getting Out of Your Wheelhouse – Arguing that to be diverse, vast, and unpredictable in your interests and output is to become anti-fragile in a specialized world.
The Mythology of Gender / Gender Optionality – Examining gender as a narrative and social technology, and what “optionality” could look like.
Consent Theatre – Critiquing the performative "yes" and institutional checkbox exercises that simulate consent culture without substance.
Gender Immigration – A metaphorical exploration of transitioning as a form of migration—between identities, communities, and legal/social territories.

Writing & Creativity

The Iceberg of Success Model – Using the iceberg metaphor to dissect the hidden work, failures, and quiet time beneath any visible creative achievement.
Expand journal entries into memoir material – Raw material written since 2011 on 750words. Time to mine it for actual essays. The ore is there. I need to refine it into something publishable.

Infrastructure & Tools

Build comprehensive IndieWeb implementation
Webmentions, microformats, POSSE, the whole suite. Not just theoretically supported—actually working.
Privacy-respecting analytics alternative
Something simpler than Plausible, more powerful than nothing. Just answer: "What are people reading?"
Markdown-first CMS for non-technical writers
Most writers don't need WordPress. They need a way to write in Markdown and publish to their site.

Community Tools

Calgary literary map?
Where writers meet, where readings happen, where bookstores are. Interactive, community-maintained.

Themes & Starters

Create more JAMstack themes for underserved use cases
Poets. Academic portfolios. Nonprofit documentation sites. Zine archives.
Build Eleventy starter with everything I always add
RSS, sitemap, semantic HTML, accessibility checks, image optimization, the works.