a history of memes, from Dawkins' The Selfish Gene in 1976, through Advice Dog and the death of shared internet monoculture, to Metal Gear Rising's Monsoon delivering the most honest account of cultural transmission I've encountered.
blog.brennanbrown.ca/memes-metal-...
Hardin's "tragedy of the commons" was always a myth. Elinor Ostrom spent a career proving it. The Blackfoot had already been living the refutation for centuries
on digital stewardship, the wood wide web, and planting seeds in a garden you'll never see 🌱
blog.brennanbrown.ca/good-standar...
15 hours across Saskatchewan with my brother, watching grain elevators, compass points in the flat dark.
About prairie masculinity, carrying too much education into the passenger seat, and a midnight motel clerk who broke the rules for me.
blog.brennanbrown.ca/grain-elevat...
I shoplifted Ginsberg and Neruda from Chapters as a teenager. I snuck off school grounds to write in a back alley instead of eating lunch. I kept going because my notebook demanded another line.
blog.brennanbrown.ca/poetry-saved...
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/
Just caught a stream of my first-ever boss @fivetail.bsky.social playing Featherbent for Homestuck day!! I did some of the soundtrack for this visual novel back when I was still in high school. They're such a funny duo w/ @veggiebltail.bsky.social on stream!! Go watch sometime and sub!! <3
I turn thirty years old tomorrow.
Across cultures and centuries that never spoke to each other—Judaism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Zoroastrianism—all somehow point to 30 the same way. It was so bizarre to me that I had to write about it.
brennan.day/30-finding-m...
selfie time!
#Selfie, #Indigenous, #Métis, #Writer, #WritingCommunity, #IndigenousWriter, #BeadworkJewelry, #FediSelfie, #NewPost, #Photography
In around a half hour from this post, Artemis II reaches its furthest distance from Earth, with its closest approach to the Moon.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-j1...
For my entire lifetime, no human being had photographed the complete Earth from space. That changed on April 2nd.
On Sagan, the Blue Marble, Gaza, the Golden Record, and why this new image is lit by the Moon instead of the Sun.
blog.brennanbrown.ca/thats-home-t...
a quarter of the entire internet runs through cloudflare. one man's mood determines who gets to stay online.
i needed DDoS protection and i could not use cloudflare in good conscience. so i spent time actually looking for alternatives. i found something far better.
brennan.day/the-internet...
Yesterday's April Fools prank went up and... some people thought I actually sold out. So today I wrote a post-mortem.
On prank etiquette (you should always be the fool yourself), the satire literacy crisis, and the connection to to Balanced Literacy.
blog.brennanbrown.ca/the-fools-au...
HUGE NEWS: my personal site is being acquired by BuzzFeed. My code is now closed and owned by Meta. All visitor data (retroactively) has been sold to Palantir. Future writing will be sponsored by OpenAI. There's a crypto miner running in your browser as you read this.
brennan.day/great-news-b...
Looksmaxxing. Redpilled. Sigma. Mogging. Goyslop. Gooning.
Memes from image boards became cultural foundation for Generation Alpha.
Rich, powerful men astroturf’d harmful online culture for nearly twenty years.
blog.brennanbrown.ca/incels-won-t...
Japan calls them hikikomori.
China calls it lying flat.
South Korea calls it the N-po generation.
In the West: NEETs, hermits, basement dwellers.
Across cultures we keep inventing names for people withdrawing from social life.
What if some of them are actually fine?
medium.com/p/5e8d397e1f60
the word and the world are not two things. they're one indivisible event.
grammar, glamour, grimoire. heka. 言霊. the Word. cultures across five millennia, on separate continents, in languages with no common root, arrived at the same claim.
blog.brennanbrown.ca/storytelling...
What does it mean to be taken seriously as a writer on the internet… without sanding down the parts of yourself that make the work alive?
My site has a chubby custom cursor. Rainbows. A guestbook. Weird, joyful things I added because I could.
Am I serious?
blog.brennanbrown.ca/being-taken-...
What happens in your brain when you read a story?
Your visual cortex fires as if you're witnessing real events. The prefrontal cortex goes quiet.
There's also the Libet gap, Gazzaniga's interpreter, choice blindness, and myths about story I debunk.
blog.brennanbrown.ca/storytelling...
I've been a huge fan for years
In January 2026, the United Nations formally declared the dawn of an era of global water bankruptcy.
Not a water crisis. Bankruptcy. Defined by insolvency and irreversibility.
I spent time researching what that actually looks like country by country:
🔗 water.brennan.day
wrote something about what it actually means to build a better internet, and what we owe each other in doing so
it's a response to some great discussion that came out of my last piece, and an attempt to be clearer about what I'm actually after.
blog.brennanbrown.ca/building-the...
a tutorial about downgrading to macOS Catalina
but it's also about planned obsolescence, 62 million tonnes of e-waste, and Tim Cook handing a gold plaque to Donald Trump and calling himself apolitical
work close to the metal. high-level tools have opinions.
blog.brennanbrown.ca/downgrading-...
I now unconsciously scan every piece of art I see for AI tells before I've even experienced it.
This is a terrible way to live.
Also: 500k people watched the IndieWeb revival video. A handful built a site. We have a door problem.
blog.brennanbrown.ca/trust-and-fa...
There's a repo called open-slopware tracking FOSS projects that have let genAI into their codebases. The well is much deeper than you think.
This moment rhymes with free software absolutism, BDFL politics, and old arguments that we never finished.
blog.brennanbrown.ca/massive-soft...
I've written 120 blog posts in the past 140 days and I still can't bring myself to take a break.
So I wrote a piece about what that's actually been. The patterns I didn't notice until I looked back. The ideas I keep circling. What I think I'm trying to say.
blog.brennanbrown.ca/constellatio...
understimulation as creative necessity. the default mode network. heidegger's boredom revealing time. cree mamahtowisowin and plains dream epistemologies as dispatch rather than symptom. my SSRI-thinned hypnagogic membrane. the kimchi metaphor
blog.brennanbrown.ca/fermenting-b...
my nostalgia is hypercapitalist and i can't do anything about it
kraft dinner. mcdonalds plaplace gamecube kiosks. msn messenger door sounds. limewire malware. omegle. liveleak. pawning the computer to make rent.
blog.brennanbrown.ca/childhood-hy...
