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Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️
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Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️

@brennan.day
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30/Métis/Queer (he/they) Calgary author. BA English (Hons.) Founder of BerryHouse.ca & fanfiction.lol Author of PRAIRIE BOYSPIRIT I write about craft, Indigenous issues, tech criticism, & culture I follow back! 🔆 brennan.day | 📝 blog.brennanbrown.ca

brennan.day
brennan.dayOct 12, 2026
I Love Sharing Cool Stuff Made By People
After cataloguing the computers I already own, I asked the fediverse to share things made with their human hands, and they delivered. On itch.io games and the free tools anyone can start creating with (Twine, Ink, Inform 7, Bitsy, Godot, GB Studio), my new digital-art habit on affordable hardware, NoAIlist and ScienceFind, and a /carless slash page. Plus Cloudflare killing Deno, Anthropic letting Claude rewrite Bun, Eltrac's Clojure Webmention receiver, the Golda fork of Hugo stripped of LLM code, ApricotBB forums, a call to invest in small Bubblers, and a tiny atlas of free things.
personal essaySocial Commentary
brennan.day
brennan.dayOct 10, 2026
What Do You Stand For? What Do You Fall For?
Workers are being forced to choose between their ethics and their livelihoods—Coinbase employees fired for refusing AI tools, professor Kim Crawley pushed out for refusing genAI in her classroom, 50 Google workers fired over Project Nimbus sit-ins, EPA dissenters purged, a Mount Sinai social worker fired over a 'Gaza Must Live' postcard. On why silence is not neutrality, why those with the least to lose should speak first, and the small acts of solidarity left to us: sign the petition, join the union, say the true thing.
personal essaySocial Commentary
brennan.day
brennan.dayOct 8, 2026
Wintering: On Hiatus, Bill C-22, and Why I Don't Block People
Why I'm putting folk.zone's social services on hiatus? 500 spam users, my embarrassing WriteFreely database blunder, and the legal weight of self-hosting in a Canada without Section 230. On Bill C-22 and Psiphon's planned exodus, slowing down to a wintering and a beginner's mind, sharpening the axe in public on Cosmic Voyage, and why I reach out instead of blocking.
personal essaySocial Commentary
brennan.day
brennan.dayOct 6, 2026
Here Is a Person: Enter the Tildeverse
The essay I promised back in May. A history of public-access Unix from Dennis Ritchie's 'fellowship' and Grex's potluck dinners to Paul Ford's drunken tilde.club and ~vilmibm's birthday gift to themself; a tour of the seven tildes I call home (including the starship I captain on cosmic.voyage); what kernel exploits and an rm -rf / taught the tildeverse about fragility; and how to move in yourself.
technicalSmall Web
brennan.day
brennan.dayOct 4, 2026
Why I Write (and Care) About the Internet, and What So Many People Get Wrong
The Internet isn't a story, but a setting—our agora and town square—where the stories worth telling are still human ones. Drawing on Nathan Jurgenson's digital dualism, Jessa Lingel's gentrification of the Internet, danah boyd's digital white flight, and Amnesty's digital landlords, I trace the enclosure of our commons and lay out my own resistance: redundant backups, Gemini capsules, pubnixes, and an enduring optimism that isn't for sale.
personal essaySocial Commentary
brennan.day
brennan.dayOct 3, 2026
Men, Don't Be Jaded Into Silence
You are a worn-out horse, not a beautiful green stone. You must do the hard, awkward and right thing anyways. On the Cornell Chi Phi lawsuit broken by the Daily Sun's two-year investigation, and how men's exhaustion is no excuse for silence. Men change what other men think is normal. Silence is a choice.
personal essaySocial Commentary
brennan.day
brennan.daySep 30, 2026
A New Design: Tradition, Rituals, and Astrology
Why I redesigned the blog—trading gruvbox for greyscale and 'Moonflower' palette and Bunny-hosted serifs—as a small ceremony to give my writing weight and gravity. On tradition and ritual as a grammar of gestures and the shared shadows of Plato's Cave. Plus, the Year of the Fire Horse—Japan's 1966 birth-rate collapse, my own Fire Rat clashing with the year, and next year's Fire Sheep as a tender, brave omen.
personal essayspirituality
brennan.day
brennan.daySep 29, 2026
I've Never Wasted My Time Writing
Why writing—and writing back—is never wasted time. From Patricia Lange's troll whispering to reparative civility, deep canvassing, Daryl Davis, Megan Phelps-Roper, and moral elevation, I defend engaging difficult people as a deliberate ethical practice rooted in curiosity, grace, and love.
personal essaySocial Commentary
brennan.day
brennan.daySep 28, 2026
Kindness as First-class Citizen in Programming
The world needs more intentional kindness. There's a manufactured backlash against empathy from Elon Musk to Gad Saad's 'suicidal empathy.' Kindness already operates as a design constraint: the IndieWeb's eleventh principle, Elm's code of conduct, Recurse Center's social rules, Ubuntu's 'I am because we are,' Audre Lorde's anger as care, and Coraline Ada Ehmke's Contributor Covenant. We must reclaim Ruby's MINASWAN culture from the Rails era, and I announce LearnWebDev.fyi, my restoration of Flatiron's retired Learn.co curriculum with 1,672 free lessons.
personal essaySocial Commentary
brennan.day
brennan.daySep 26, 2026
man.
man is not a certain breed of anonymous, nihilistic blogger who mistakes callousness for wisdom and detachment for depth. man is different. man is better.
culturesatire
brennan.day
brennan.daySep 25, 2026
A Love Letter to the Super Dimension Fortress
I've finally became an ARPA member of SDF, a non-profit public-access UNIX system running continuously since 1987. I give a history from Ted Uhlemann's 300-baud Apple IIe BBS to today's NetBSD network of DEC Alphas and Opterons; a tour of the shell, gopher, and gemini services; how to join, plus two hands-on bonuses: writing a flat-file Perl CGI guestbook and making a site Dillo-compatible.
technicaltutorial
brennan.day
brennan.daySep 23, 2026
Static Site Generators for Beginners
Written for a 32-bit Café thread asking where to even begin with static-site generators. I go over the free resources I'd learn first (and why hand-rolled HTML beats an SSG for your very first site), a plain-language glossary of the jargon docs never define, a brief history from HSC and Movable Type to Jekyll, why git gets recommended everywhere, my own beginner starters, and tiny alternatives like barf, bashblog, and kiki.
technicaltutorial