| indieweb | 1,793 words
TAGS: personal essay, Social Commentary, Media Criticism, IndieWeb, Digital Culture, Small Web, decentralization, community, activism, optimism
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...
| culture | 1,199 words
TAGS: personal essay, Social Commentary, feminism, masculinity, misogyny, sexual violence, consent, bystander intervention, activism, Social Justice
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...
| religion | 1,499 words
TAGS: personal essay, spirituality, religion, philosophy, Buddhism, astrology, tradition, ritual, web design, IndieWeb
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...
| writing-craft | 1,496 words
TAGS: personal essay, Social Commentary, writing, blogging, Digital Culture, community, empathy, dialogue, philosophy, ethics
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...
| community | 1,805 words
TAGS: personal essay, Social Commentary, kindness, empathy, ruby, programming, open source, IndieWeb, Digital Culture, activism, web development
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...
| lyric-essays | 802 words
TAGS: culture, satire, blogging, Digital Culture, IndieWeb, nihilism, personal
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.
| history, technical-tutorials | 2,233 words
TAGS: technical, tutorial, Small Web, IndieWeb, Digital Culture, web history, retrocomputing, unix, SDF, perl, CGI
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...
| indieweb, technical-tutorials | 4,373 words
TAGS: technical, tutorial, Static Site Generators, web development, web history, IndieWeb, Small Web, Digital Culture, eleventy, git
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...
| ai, indieweb | 1,381 words
TAGS: personal essay, Social Commentary, AI, generative AI, IndieWeb, Digital Culture, data sovereignty, activism, privacy
Responding to Coyote's essay on data ownership, I look at how genAI has democratized the kind of extraction that once required corporate infrastructure--iLands spam agents, scrapers, and agent swarms--why my apathy-and-ignorance approach to AI...
| technical-tutorials, indieweb | 2,282 words
TAGS: technical, Small Web, IndieWeb, Digital Culture, decentralization, gemini, gopher, blogging, tutorial
Creating your own corner of Geminispace: why you'd want to blog on a protocol with no JavaScript, no CSS, and no AI slop; where to host a capsule (SmolPub, the Tildeverse, flounder, Gemcities); how the community's gemlog conventions work; and the...
| lyric-essays | 984 words
TAGS: personal essay, Social Commentary, philosophy, memory, nostalgia, childhood, mental health, mindfulness, mortality
Revisiting my maladaptive daydream of waking up at twelve years old with all my present knowledge intact, I weigh the seductive fantasy of correcting every regret--being a better brother to Byron, buying Bitcoin with birthday money--against...
| writing-craft | 1,271 words
TAGS: personal essay, Social Commentary, Linguistics, writing, blogging, grammar, language
Responding to a blog post urging people to 'please learn how to write,' I pull rank with my English degree to argue there's no such thing as proper English. Looking at the 18th-century grammarians who invented 'correctness,' the linguistic racism...
| ai | 1,956 words
TAGS: personal essay, Social Commentary, AI, generative AI, Medium, Digital Culture, criticism, technology, publishing
Medium.com went from a defiant anti-AI holdout--blocking GPTBot, rejecting a multimillion-dollar training deal, banning AI writing from monetization--to launching an AI licensing standard and its own AI writing app under CEO Tony Stubblebine....
| community | 1,307 words
TAGS: personal essay, Social Commentary, optimism, joy, open source, resistance, philosophy, small web, IndieWeb
Taking stock of myself and the world, I reflect on the overwhelming joy of being alive on this Pale Blue Dot--from the billions keeping civilization running to the unpaid volunteers maintaining curl and OpenSSL--and argue that reclaiming joy is...
| religion | 1,882 words
TAGS: personal essay, Social Commentary, Christianity, religion, theology, Social Justice, LGBTQ, trans rights, immigration, faith
Responding to readers who invoke Christianity to defend exclusion, I argue that the Gospels consistently welcome lepers, foreigners, sinners, and gender-nonconforming people while reserving the strongest warnings for the wealthy and powerful. On...
| history | 811 words
TAGS: personal essay, Social Commentary, history, memory, 9/11, September 11, terrorism, grief, culture, media
On the twenty-fifth anniversary of September 11, I reflect on being five years old and watching the attacks from a green shag carpet in Winnipeg, the cultural aftershocks that still echo through media and memory, and the urgent need to not forget...
| indieweb, technical-tutorials | 4,517 words
TAGS: technical, Small Web, IndieWeb, Digital Culture, decentralization, gemini, gopher, terminal, retrocomputing
Reacting to the Omarchy and DigitalOcean news, I set out a curated low-spec, text-first alternative to the modern web: Gemini, Gopher, Spartan, Lynx-friendly sites, terminal readers, public Unix communities, and peer-to-peer networks like...
| personal-favourites | 807 words
TAGS: technical, security, Digital Security, neocities, IndieWeb, web development, small web, infrastructure
How a bug in my own CI/CD accidentally uncovered a novel vulnerability in NeoCities: ScreenJesus, the undocumented screenshot bot behind thumbnail previews, has no rate limits and will happily visit thousands of your pages--and anything they...
| technical-tutorials | 1,744 words
TAGS: eleventy, seo, accessibility, performance, web development, technical, tutorial
Yet another technical audit of brennan.day, this time using the Safi Studio Scanner, covering fixes for duplicate <h1> headings, meta descriptions, image dimensions, JSON-LD organization data, render-blocking scripts, and a switch from IndieAuth...
| 2,035 words
TAGS: personal essay, blogging, IndieWeb, digital garden, projects, self-reflection, small web, community
Taking stock of my digital garden before the first frost: an honest audit of everything I'm tending online, from Brennan.day and fanfiction.lol to my 565-day writing streak, plus the projects I've neglected, the intentional prunes I'm happy with...