Skip to content
Standard Reader
Log in
Tag

Personal Essay

Articles and publications tagged Personal Essay across the Atmosphere.

251articles8publications
brennan.day
brennan.daySep 21, 2026
LLMs Democratize Extraction and Scale Malice
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 crawlers is no longer enough, the two competing realities of AI 2027, and the tools and organizing we actually have: ai.robots.txt, Glaze and Nightshade, tech-worker unions, and the CARE and OCAP principles of Indigenous data governance.
personal essaySocial Commentary
APEX PREY
APEX PREYSep 20, 2026
marshal flow state
My first time working WEC and feeling less like a prey animal on post.
personal essaymotorsport
taco 'bout it
taco 'bout itSep 20, 2026
my mom’s angry playlist has two songs and no skips
The Bitch Is Back. You Oughta Know. apparently i inherited a very specific approach to emotional regulation.
musicpersonal essay
brennan.day
brennan.daySep 18, 2026
'Would You Like to Reload a Previous Save?' (➤Yes / No)
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.
personal essaySocial Commentary
brennan.day
brennan.daySep 16, 2026
Proper English is a Myth: There's No 'Correct' Way to Write
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.
personal essaySocial Commentary
brennan.day
brennan.daySep 15, 2026
I, CEO: How Medium.com went from being anti-AI to pro-AI
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.
personal essaySocial Commentary
brennan.day
brennan.daySep 14, 2026
There is so much to love and celebrate. Reclaim joy. Be open. Forgive.
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.
personal essaySocial Commentary
brennan.day
brennan.daySep 13, 2026
It's Christlike to Love Immigrants and Transfolk
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.
personal essaySocial Commentary
brennan.day
brennan.daySep 11, 2026
A Quarter of a Century Later
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.
personal essaySocial Commentary
brennan.day
brennan.daySep 7, 2026
Tending the Garden I Have: A Current State of Affairs
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.
personal essayblogging
brennan.day
brennan.daySep 5, 2026
Love is for the ones who love the work.
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.
personal essaywriting
taco 'bout it
taco 'bout itSep 3, 2026
the movie you loved at 20 gets a vote forever
in 2009, (500) Days of Summer felt precision-engineered for being 20. revisiting it now means seeing both the movie and the person who first loved it.
(500) Days of Summer2009
brennan.day
brennan.daySep 3, 2026
I Want to be Unremarkable
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.
personal essaySocial Commentary
brennan.day
brennan.daySep 2, 2026
Normalized Fascism in Open Source: $12 Million Given to DHH
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.
personal essaySocial Commentary
brennan.day
brennan.daySep 1, 2026
100 Questions for Webmasters
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.
memeIndieWeb
brennan.day
brennan.dayAug 31, 2026
SAD MACHINE
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.
personal essaySocial Commentary
brennan.day
brennan.dayAug 30, 2026
A Few Small Things
Reflecting on the mental fatigue of posting every day during Blaugust, I share a few small things that cheered me up: a new keyword filter on Bubbles.town, Jan Miksovsky's Origami Projector, and the ongoing, hand-made goodness of the independent web.
personal essaySocial Commentary
brennan.day
brennan.dayAug 30, 2026
A Few Small Things
Reflecting on the mental fatigue of posting every day during Blaugust, I share a few small things that cheered me up: a new keyword filter on Bubbles.town, Jan Miksovsky's Origami Projector, and the ongoing, hand-made goodness of the independent web.
personal essaySocial Commentary
brennan.day
brennan.dayAug 29, 2026
Creating an Open-source Blogging Studies Syllabus
Announcing a new open-source, asynchronous Blogging Studies syllabus that blends writing craft and independent web publishing, built on Codeberg. I trace the decline of free MOOCs, outline my curriculum's anti-capitalist and community-driven pedagogy, and invite contributors and learners to help shape it.
personal essayblogging
Fudge's Field Notes
Fudge's Field Notes Aug 28, 2026
The Little Dreams Inside My Head
a personal think-peice on what I want to do in life
personal essayshower thoughts
Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️
Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️Aug 28, 2026
Notice: Bandwidth Exceeded
After exceeding my free Netlify bandwidth for the first time and wiring up a homelab to run this site, I reflect on how my life has narrowed around writing and code, the friendships that did not survive that focus, and the loneliness of a devotion without a clean resolution.
personal essaySocial Commentary
brennan.day
brennan.dayAug 27, 2026
Being a Toolshed of Optimism
Reflecting on a reader's description of me as 'nice' and the responsibility of having an audience, I commit to becoming a 'toolshed of hope and stubborn optimism' in my writing. Drawing on solutions journalism, restorative narrative, and thinkers like Rebecca Solnit, Mariame Kaba, Joanna Macy, adrienne maree brown, and Christiana Figueres, I explore how hope is a discipline and how to tether anger and grief to concrete, actionable repair.
personal essaySocial Commentary
Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️
Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️Aug 26, 2026
Bubbles.town: Four Months Later
After four months of using Bubbles.town, I share my long-term review of the IndieWeb aggregator. The good: discovering diverse blogs across niche topics. The issues: glacial pace of content changes, popularity contest dynamics, categorization problems, and sparse community participation. Overall, Bubbles is a valuable tool among many for web discovery, but not without its problems.
personal essayIndieWeb
Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️
Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️Aug 25, 2026
A 450-year History of Blogging
A four century etymological journey from wooden ship logs and logboards to the modern web log, tracing how the word 'blog' emerged from centuries of record-keeping, computing, and online publishing. On Peter Merholz's coinage of 'blog,' Jorn Barger's 'weblog,' Justin Hall's online diary, the rise of Blogger and Medium, and the state of the blogosphere in 2026.
personal essayblogging