Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️

Hi 👋 I'm Brennan. I've been writing poetry for 15 years and blogging for a decade. 270+ articles and counting! Here's what I write about: 📝 The craft of writing itself 🪶 Indigenous issues 🎨 Culture + Philosophy 💻 Tech criticism 🌿 Whatever I'm obsessed with brennan.day/start-here/

🎂 HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO THE SYSADMIN THAT PUTS THE "SERVE" IN SERVER, https:// girlonthemoon.xyz/ !! @katproto.girlonthemoon.xyz has been such a great friend on my journey through the IndieWeb. She has been a major inspiration to me, and is also just a ridiculously talented webmaster.

I asked the fediverse to share things made with their human hands, and they delivered. On free game development tools anyone can start creating with (Twine, Ink, Inform 7, Bitsy, Godot, GB Studio), NoAIlist and ScienceFind, and a /carless slash page. brennan.day/i-love-shari...

Workers are being forced to choose between their ethics and their livelihoods. Employees fired for refusing AI tools, professors pushed out for refusing genAI in classrooms, workers fired over sit-ins, a social worker fired over a postcard. Silence is not neutrality. brennan.day/what-do-you-...

~ What is a tilde? If you asked me, I'd tell you that a tilde at the end of a sentence it means a playful, flirty tone. But Paul Ford came up with a different answer: The "~" is a little like the "@" on Twitter—a shortcut that says: "Here is a person." brennan.day/here-is-a-pe...

I have been thinking about the recent news of the Cornell Chi Phi lawsuit, and what we as men must do in response. The answer isn't easy. brennan.day/men-dont-be-...

I did an overhaul of the design of my website, and I wrote about the surprising connection to what we believe in, and the Chinese Lunar Year. brennan.day/a-new-design...

I have to be honest, I view trolls as people before anything else. A lot of the advice you'll get is to not interact with them online, and that you're wasting you're time. But I've never felt like I've wasted time if I'm writing, regardless of who I'm writing to. brennan.day/i-ve-never-w...

Kindness can, and should, be an intentional design constraint in programming languages and their communities. Ruby was started with the philosophy of creating a joyful experience for programmers, and MINASWAN must be reclaimed. brennan.day/kindness-as-...

In 1987, a teenager plugged a 300-baud modem into a phone line his mother had given him for his birthday, and started a BBS for anime fans. It's still running today. A non-profit, member-funded UNIX community with thousands of users. It's called SDF. brennan.day/a-love-lette...

Are you somebody that's always wanted to get into blogging with static-site generators but found the tutorials unhelpful and overly complicated? I wrote a free, 4,000-word guide just for you! brennan.day/static-site-...

Our data is under attack, and apparently, our entire future is also at stake to boot. What once required corporate infrastructure now only requires iLands spam agents, scrapers, and agent swarms. brennan.day/llms-democra...

There's an Internet you don't know about. On why you'd want to blog on a protocol with no JavaScript, no CSS, and no AI slop; and where to host a capsule. brennan.day/creating-a-b...

As an English major, I have to say: there's no such thing as proper, standard English. It's always been a myth. There's no universal correct way to spell or objective grammar and mechanics. Don't try to police others about that kind of thing. brennan.day/proper-engli...

There's an overwhelming joy I feel being alive. I'm so grateful for the unpaid volunteers maintaining important projects. Reclaiming joy is an act of resistance against systems built on scarcity and fear. People are inherently good, and there is always room for grace. brennan.day/there-is-so-...

stopomarchy.neocities.org

It's been 25 years since the September 11, and I reflect on being five years old and watching the attacks. There's an urgent need to not forget the cruelty and the kindness of that day and its aftermath. brennan.day/a-quarter-of...

With news of even more tech companies deciding to fund DHH and Omarchy, I decided to take a look again at alternative (and perhaps better) visions of the Internet which already exist. We are not as bound to complicit systems as the systems would like you to think. brennan.day/oldnets-and-...

I've always been a fan of showing my work and pulling the curtain back to show how things are behind-the-scenes. So, I've decided to take stock and audit the current state of the many projects and sites I've began over the past year. Take a look. brennan.day/tending-the-...

What do we lose when we stop doing the work? How do we become good at *anything* if we merely delegate it to AI and machines? The answer, argued by poets, is the love of the work itself. brennan.day/love-is-for-...

@jimmitchell.org the people really want to know, Jim.

Shopify, Stripe, Dell Technologies, Block, Cloudflare, Dropbox, Coinbase, OpenClaw, and TapTap. All companies that have given millions of dollars to a project run by a far-right white nationalist. Why are we okay with this? brennan.day/normalized-f...

For my last post of Blaugust, I decided to take it easy and... write a 4,700 post! :D That's 31 posts for 31 days, writing 54,000 words in total this month. Happy #WorldBlogDay ! brennan.day/100-question... #webdev #indieweb #smallweb #writing #interview

Debian just voted that disclosure of AI use is encouraged, but not required. No corporation (with the exception of Nvidia) has found profitability with AI so far. 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing. Who gains from any of this, exactly? brennan.day/sad-machine/

Free online courses are in a sharp decline over the past several years. And so, I'm announcing a new open-source, asynchronous Blogging Studies syllabus that blends writing craft and independent web publishing. I invite contributors and learners to help shape it! brennan.day/creating-an-...

Hope is not an emotion, it is a necessary political strategy for our survival. I discuss about how I will continue to provide hope and optimism as a citizen journalist in my independent publication. brennan.day/being-a-tool...

Do you blog? From wooden ship logs and logboards to the modern web log, I trace how the word 'blog' emerged from centuries of record-keeping, computing, and online publishing. brennan.day/a-450-year-h...

I just wrote a guide to becoming a "rogue scholar" and how to turn your independent personal site into academic scholarship. How? Issue numbering, ISSN metadata, publication info, citation meta tags, Dublin Core, ORCID integration, and more. brennan.day/a-guide-to-b...

I've found myself the target of satire. And honestly? I want to see more of it. And I don't want any punches pulled. The Trickster is one of the most important figures in Indigenous storytelling. brennan.day/outjerked-by...

I'm reclaiming the title of 'webmaster' as the multidisciplinary creator who designs, develops, writes, and advocates for their own corner of the web and will save the world. And you can join in. brennan.day/webmaster-a-...

Do you know about the Website Specification's 140-item checklist? It covers foundations, a11y, security, performance, privacy, and resilience. I audited my own website, and wrote about CSP debugging, CORS issues, many small improvements, and what I didn't fix. brennan.day/advanced-web...

I tried to interview an anonymous blogger. It didn't really work out. brennan.day/suspect-happ...

I've completely overhauled my IndieWeb 11ty Starter to make it simpler and more accessible for people getting into JAMstack and the IndieWeb. It now uses Eleventy 3.x with a modular config structure, chota.css instead of Tailwind, and Pagefind for fast, serverless search.

Awe and wonder as parts of scientific practice. Scientists spent the twentieth century discovering an entire second sky above the one we already knew, and named it after folklore. Sprites, elves, trolls, ghosts, gnomes, pixies. brennan.day/our-skies-co...

Do you enjoy concise writing that gets straight to the point, or longform writing that wanders? And, if you're a writer, do you use a writer deck? brennan.day/i-would-have...

Frameworks and scripting (not to mention AI) can make us forget that at the end of the day, the Internet really is just HTML. Happy HTML Day 2026! brennan.day/html-day-2026/

What do you think counts as acceptable speech online? Would you be willing to defend the right to anybody's free speech? brennan.day/free-speech-...

Are you someone that cares deeply about the metrics you receive when you post? If so, why? brennan.day/what-remains...

The Internet is full of interesting platforms that serve as alternatives to corporate social media. It's really cool what indie devs are doing (without genAI) to build digital community. brennan.day/five-interes...

I'm looking for my next adventure, any ideas? I do not want a foundation myth, a fifth thing-I-started. To scratch the itch doesn't mean building more. No, the obvious answer is rarely the correct one. Good writing is inevitable, not predictable, and life works similarly. brennan.day/the-itch/

Right now, there are over 115 million channels on YouTube. But if I had to pick just one out of all of them? My answer comes easy and without hesitation. brennan.day/sbsk-is-the-...