Cultural Criticism · Standard Reader

brennan.dayApr 29, 2026

Video Games that Secretly Teach Mathematics

A love letter to the mathematics hiding inside video games, and a protest against the expression 'I'm just not a math person'. From parallel universes in Super Mario 64 to the technical exegetes mapping Animal Crossing, The Sims 2, Pokémon, and Paper Mario. Then Balatro and the IEEE 754 double-precision ceiling, tetration, Knuth's up-arrows, Conway chained arrows, Graham's number, TREE(3). A history of notation catching up to the infinite.

personal essayvideo games

brennan.dayApr 27, 2026

Floating Up: An Interview with the creator of Bubbles.town, Benjamin Behnke

An interview with Benjamin Behnke, the creator of Bubbles.town, a community-driven aggregator for independent personal blogs. After controversy on Mastodon and 32-bit Café over his use of Anthropic's Claude to categorize blogs and bypass robots.txt signals, Ben responds about the mistake, the removal of the AI classification pipeline, a locally-trained Naive Bayes replacement, and stricter robots.txt enforcement. A reflection on software harm reduction, forgiveness, my Grandma Bubbles, and the fragile labours of love making the IndieWeb.

IndieWebInterview

brennan.dayApr 26, 2026

Deeds, Not Words: The Myth of Polite Revolution

A refusal of the sanitized story that rights were won by asking nicely. The suffragettes bombed Westminster Abbey. The Deacons for Defense guarded MLK. Mandela was on the U.S. terror list until 2008. On the radical flank effect, the state's monopoly on legitimate violence, and the 46 people who have died in ICE detention while we are told to keep our resistance polite.

Social CommentaryCultural Criticism

brennan.dayApr 25, 2026

The IndieWeb is Wonderfully Dionysian

A personal plea from me to you to write your own comments. On the genAI plague of LinkedIn, Meta ads, and Medium, and the human warmth of the IndieWeb. From deviantART's old comment culture to Seneca's letters and the Vindolanda tablets, through Nietzsche's Apollonian/Dionysian divide, the Renaissance of Real in A/W 2026/27 fashion, and Charli XCX's Brat. A call to write the messy, human, from-the-heart comment only you can write.

IndieWebCultural Criticism

brennan.dayApr 24, 2026

Being a Citizen Journalist

From Drudge to Salam Pax to Darnella Frazier and Zhang Zhan. The world needs citizen journalists. There has been a hollowing of Postmedia's local press, the radicalization pipelines mainstream coverage fails to trace, Andrew Callaghan's compromised platform, and what I owe under the SPJ Code of Ethics as an independent writer with a blog.

Social CommentaryCultural Criticism

brennan.dayApr 23, 2026

Follow-up: An Interview with Frances Widdowson

After publishing my piece on Frances Widdowson this morning, she reached out to comment. What followed was an hour of argument, bad faith, and one remarkable final message.

Social CommentaryCultural Criticism

brennan.dayApr 22, 2026

Frances Widdowson Dedicates Her Life to Denying Residential Indian School Survivors, Then Calls Herself the Victim

Ex-Mount Royal University professor and author of 'Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth About Residential Schools)' believes she is persecuted by grieving Indigenous communities and woke leftist academic institutions. She has raised over $50,000 for her cause.

Social CommentaryCultural Criticism

brennan.dayApr 21, 2026

Right-wing Conservatives Cannot Make Good Art

Why does reactionary, conservative art in modernity fail? A look at God's Not Dead, the Daily Wire's $100 million entertainment collapse, and how resentment produces derivative, hollow work that cannot generate any cultural magnetism.

Cultural CriticismPolitics

brennan.dayApr 8, 2026

How has a lack of ownership changed art?

On the subscription economy, Walter Benjamin's aura, Pokémon scalpers, the rot of physical media, and the person at the photocopier making what the streaming model cannot touch.

Social CommentaryDigital Culture

brennan.dayMar 30, 2026

Incels Won the Culture War

Looksmaxxing. Redpilled. Sigma. Mogging. Cope. Seethe. Malding. Goyslop. Gooning. Memes from image boards became cultural foundation for Generation Alpha. How rich, powerful men have coordinated a harmful online culture for nearly twenty years.

Cultural CriticismDigital Culture

brennan.dayMar 28, 2026

Being a 21st Century Schizoid Man

My personal exploration of schizoid personality disorder and neurodivergence. From King Crimson's prophetic song to global youth withdrawal phenomena, I examine what it means to live with a rich interior life and limited social needs, challenging pathologizing frameworks and questioning whether 'poor outcomes' are about the condition or the metrics.

personal essayMental Health

brennan.dayMar 25, 2026

STORYTELLING Part One: The Neurology of Narrative

How do our brains physically process stories? The neurology of narrative transportation, brain synchrony between storytellers and listeners, biocultural theory, and Indigenous storytelling traditions that collapse Western narrative structures.

personal essayCreative Writing

brennan.dayMar 15, 2026

CHILDHOOD: Hypercapitalist Nostalgia & Unsupervised Internet Access

My nostalgia is hypercapitalist. My nostalgia is the worst of the unregulated Internet. I cannot decouple my fondest memories from the corporations and the loss of innocence that produced them, and I'm not sure there's anything wrong with that.

personal essayCultural Criticism

brennan.dayMar 14, 2026

A More Perfect Morality: The Progressive Failure of Ethics

Liberal democracies selectively apply universal human rights, and there is a progressive failure to extend moral consideration to: Palestinians, Congolese, Rohingyans, Uyghurs, trans people, women, Black communities, Indigenous Peoples, the chronically ill, mentally ill, poor, sex workers, the disabled, the houseless, children, elderly, Jewish people, immigrants, gender/sexual/romantic minorities, incarcerated people, Romani and Dalits, and animals. True universal rights require principled solidarity beyond tribal boundaries.

PhilosophyPersonal Essay

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️Mar 5, 2026

The Big Arch Distraction (while the World is Burning)

A CEO took a comically small bite of a burger. The internet erupted. Meanwhile, the US is bombing Iran, Trump is drafting executive orders to seize control of the midterms, and civil unrest is reaching a boiling point. We need to talk about what we're choosing to look at.

cultural criticismpolitics

brennan.dayMar 5, 2026

The Big Arch Distraction (while the World is Burning)

A CEO took a comically small bite of a burger. The internet erupted. Meanwhile, the US is bombing Iran, Trump is drafting executive orders to seize control of the midterms, and civil unrest is reaching a boiling point. We need to talk about what we're choosing to look at.

cultural criticismpolitics

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️Jan 23, 2026

More Than One Way: On Ritual, Morality, and the Darkness Beyond Knowing

What is the meaning of life? Is there more than one correct answer? I've decided to take a rather long-winded exploration of how different cultures approach the sacred, the dead, and the transcendent, suggesting that multiple paths can lead to the same fundamental truths.

philosophyAnthropology

brennan.dayJan 23, 2026

More Than One Way: On Ritual, Morality, and the Darkness Beyond Knowing

What is the meaning of life? Is there more than one correct answer? I've decided to take a rather long-winded exploration of how different cultures approach the sacred, the dead, and the transcendent, suggesting that multiple paths can lead to the same fundamental truths.

philosophyAnthropology

brennan.dayJan 20, 2026

How You Can Support Indie Creators—and You Need To

Beyond tipping culture, there are meaningful ways to support independent creators that don't involve money. Here are eight of the best.

Creator EconomyDigital Culture

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️Jan 19, 2026

The Pandemic Never Ended. We Only Pretend it Did

Six years into COVID-19, the world has moved on while the virus continues to disable millions. An examination of the ongoing pandemic, long COVID, and our collective failure to prevent a mass disabling event.

Chronic IllnessMedical Ethics

brennan.dayJan 19, 2026

The Pandemic Never Ended. We Only Pretend it Did

Six years into COVID-19, the world has moved on while the virus continues to disable millions. An examination of the ongoing pandemic, long COVID, and our collective failure to prevent a mass disabling event.

Chronic IllnessMedical Ethics

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️Jan 12, 2026

Greenland Belongs to the Inuit

The Greenland debate keeps asking whether the U.S. could take it, or whether Denmark should keep it. The missing question is: What do the Greenlanders want? They’ve already answered: 'We don’t want to be Americans. We don’t want to be Danes. We want to be Greenlanders.' This is about Indigenous sovereignty and the quiet billionaire scramble for Greenland’s resources.

Indigenous Writingpersonal essay

brennan.dayJan 12, 2026

Greenland Belongs to the Inuit

The Greenland debate keeps asking whether the U.S. could take it, or whether Denmark should keep it. The missing question is: What do the Greenlanders want? They’ve already answered: 'We don’t want to be Americans. We don’t want to be Danes. We want to be Greenlanders.' This is about Indigenous sovereignty and the quiet billionaire scramble for Greenland’s resources.

Indigenous Writingpersonal essay

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️Jan 5, 2026

REVIEW: How do we reckon? On Yiyun Li's 'Things in Nature Merely Grow'

CONTENT WARNING: Suicide | A matter-of-fact memoir about the endurance of loss, where Li considers grief to be regarded as having an end-point, as though there could be a finite amount felt when both of your only children choose death instead of life.

Mental HealthCultural Criticism