Brennan's Weblog 🌈

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 everything that would be erased: 500,000 words, hard-won relationships, the album that got me through a specific winter. A meditation on the future self who would trade almost anything for one more ordinary day. The door is already halfway closed.

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 of policing dialects from AAVE to Jamaican Patois, and why blogging should be about meaning, not mechanics.

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. What happens when one man's changing mind becomes a platform's policy, and why I'm still staying.

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 an act of resistance against systems built on scarcity and fear. People are inherently good, and there is always room for grace.

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 the Christlike call to love immigrants and trans people, and why compassion cannot be rationed by politics.

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 the cruelty and the kindness of that day and its aftermath.

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 Yggdrasil, I2P, and Hyphanet.

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 embed—in minutes. Notes on accidental DDoS, opaque infrastructure, and a plea for caching and rate limiting.

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 to IndieLogin—plus what I left alone.

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, and the dead plants I need to admit aren't growing—including a shelved radio show, a dormant newsletter, and an unstarted school.

Taking the final line of Joseph Fasano's poem 'For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper' as a starting point, I argue that loving the verb of creation matters more than daydreaming the noun. There's a wide chasm between writing discipline and the seduction of genAI shortcuts. The only way forward is to start doing the work—badly, bravely, and now.

A meditation on the contradiction of writing publicly while wanting to remain unremarkable, drawing on Daoist uselessness, Epicurean lathe biōsas, state legibility, and Deleuzian imperceptibility—and why the only peaceful path is to keep writing and surrender to shared oblivion.

Open source has become a safe harbor for far-right politics, from David Heinemeier Hansson's white-nationalist rhetoric and the Omarchy Foundation's $12 million in patron funding to so-called apolitical projects that treat marginalized contributors as political, and why a united boycott of complicit tech companies is our only way forward.

A hundred-question chain meme making the rounds about how and why we make websites. I answer my way through questions on workflow, editors, CSS confidence, webrings, Neocities and Nekoweb, domain names, accessibility, genAI ethics, Gruvbox, and everything else about being a webmaster.

Debian's recent vote to permit genAI contributions, alongside the questions raised by the IndieWeb is Punk manifesto, leads me to reflect on the harm-reduction case, the deskilling of creators, the NFT-like grift of genAI output, and the Potemkin village of an industry that has yet to find profitability.