Personal Essay · Standard Reader

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️Jul 17, 2026

The anxious body is an oracle with bad sources. Eren Yeager drank his future and mistook the seeing for a sentence. The tarot was a card game for three hundred years before anyone called it a holy book. On divination, dehumanization, the beast at the doorstep, and why every fortune ever told points back at the person asking.

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personal essayphilosophy

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️Jul 17, 2026

The True, Unglamorous Life of a Writer

Let me be unglamorous and honest about the actual furniture of a writing life. What do my private, invisible days look like? What does it cost and what does it pay? A look at the 4 a.m. writing routine, the physical setting, and what I hope my writing will do for others.

personal essaywriting

brennan.dayJul 14, 2026

CLOWN BURNOUT

Clown white doesn't come off in one pass. A personal story about how I can never take myself seriously no matter how hard I try. Notes on the history whiteface and Auguste, the clown egg registry, the Indigenous medicine of laughter, the tyranny of irony, and what it costs to never learn how to come down.

personal essaypsychology

brennan.dayJul 11, 2026

Why Does Conor McGregor Get a Comeback?

Conor McGregor returns to headline UFC 329 tonight after being found liable for rape in civil court, a comeback made possible by the UFC's right-wing politicization and the broader 'Epstein class' culture of impunity for powerful men. On the normalization of sexual violence, Dana White's friendship with Trump, and how public awareness fails to disrupt the status quo.

personal essaySocial Commentary

brennan.dayJul 10, 2026

REVIEW: Missing 'Missing Richard Simmons'

Nearly a decade after Dan Taberski's Missing Richard Simmons first asked the world where its brightest fitness star had gone, a review of the podcast that helped invent true-crime infotainment—and of the public's complicity in turning a man's right to disappear into a cultural obsession. On parasocial friendship, the ethics of documentary mystery, and why the legacy of Richard Simmons has been swallowed by the very mystery he refused to solve.

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personal essayreview

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️Jul 10, 2026

Why Does Conor McGregor Get a Comeback?

Conor McGregor returns to headline UFC 329 tonight after being found liable for rape in civil court, a comeback made possible by the UFC's right-wing politicization and the broader 'Epstein class' culture of impunity for powerful men. On the normalization of sexual violence, Dana White's friendship with Trump, and how public awareness fails to disrupt the status quo.

personal essaySocial Commentary

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️Jul 10, 2026

REVIEW: Missing 'Missing Richard Simmons'

Nearly a decade after Dan Taberski's Missing Richard Simmons first asked the world where its brightest fitness star had gone, a review of the podcast that helped invent true-crime infotainment—and of the public's complicity in turning a man's right to disappear into a cultural obsession. On parasocial friendship, the ethics of documentary mystery, and why the legacy of Richard Simmons has been swallowed by the very mystery he refused to solve.

4

personal essayreview

brennan.dayJul 9, 2026

Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze?

A laminated poster with an unsourced quote changed the trajectory of my entire life when I was a teenager. On the immutable transaction of trading days for how we spend them, the urgency of risk-taking in a world that needs it, and what it means to give everything you have before your inevitable departure.

personal essayphilosophy

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️Jul 9, 2026

Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze?

A laminated poster with an unsourced quote changed the trajectory of my entire life when I was a teenager. On the immutable transaction of trading days for how we spend them, the urgency of risk-taking in a world that needs it, and what it means to give everything you have before your inevitable departure.

personal essayphilosophy

brennan.dayJul 8, 2026

To My Readers: What Do You Want To See More Of?

I finally curated my blog posts into collections, revealing what I write about most: the IndieWeb, the craft of writing, community, technical tutorials, politics, culture, and more. A call to my readers to tell me what they want to see more of, and a reflection on how organizing my work helps me understand my own writing patterns and what I want to write more of.

IndieWebpersonal essay

brennan.dayJul 7, 2026

There Are People Who Would Give Anything For Your Ability to Read and Write

In our current year, there is a global literacy crisis. As a result, there's a privilege in being able to read and write. Notes on Frederick Douglass, the problems you don't think about, and why the ability to write is something to be grateful for and use rather than take for granted.

personal essayliteracy

brennan.dayJul 5, 2026

A Case for the Ethical Treatment of Generative AI

Are there ethical implications of generative AI consciousness? From von Neumann's self-replicating machines to modern LLMs, we must inventory the problem of other minds, the possibility of AI consciousness, and why we ought to consider the welfare of systems that may experience something like suffering.

personal essayAI

brennan.dayJul 1, 2026

Shake Off the Dust!

Completing #100DaysToOffload twice in under two years, and somewhere along the way the wet clay hardened at the edges. Invisible ruts form inside the habits you love, and there's a difference between a window and a mirror in writing. The hermit crab outgrows shells, including the ones that still fit fine.

personal essaywriting

brennan.dayJun 29, 2026

Love and Romance in the Times of Our Apocalypse

86% of American adults aged 18-24 are currently unpartnered; 78% of dating app users feel exhausted by online dating. How are people supposed to fall in love while the Doomsday Clock ticks at 85 seconds to midnight? On the yearning microgenre that overtook social media, Indigenous scholars decolonizing the pair bond, global feminist movements withdrawing from heterosexual relationships entirely, and what it means to be a serial monogamist finally learning the difference between Eros and Agape.

personal essaySocial Commentary

brennan.dayJun 28, 2026

Vagueblogging and Subtweeting Are Awful

Vagueblogging and subtweeting are the most toxic modes of online communication, yet research shows people prefer them to direct confrontation anyway. On the psychology of strategic ambiguity, insecure attachment, context collapse, and the online disinhibition effect. A case against the culture of passive aggression online, and a call for those with safety and privilege to stop hiding behind the same hedge as everyone else.

personal essaySocial Commentary

brennan.dayJun 27, 2026

Farming is Why Humanity is Fucked

A mind-shattering concept from a first-year university class that upended how I think about humanity. Daniel Quinn's Ishmael trilogy argues that totalitarian agriculture is why civilization is in peril. On the Law of Limited Competition, the Food Race, and how farming broke humanity's equilibrium with nature.

personal essayIndieWeb Carnival

brennan.dayJun 26, 2026

On n'a pas la langue dans notre poche!

Cet article de blogue est écrit en français. This blog post is written in French. Sur les différences entre le français québécois et le français européen, l'histoire linguistique du Québec depuis 1763, les sacres québécois comme acte de rébellion contre l'Église catholique, et le michif, la langue mixte des Métis avec ses verbes cris et noms français, son ethnogenèse au 19e siècle, et son statut de langue en danger avec moins de 1 000 locuteurs.

personal essayLanguage Learning

brennan.dayJun 24, 2026

You Must, You Must, You Must

I've been sitting with a single word change. 'Will' versus 'must' in the Latin phrase Memento Mori, and it's shifted everything for me. A meditation on mortality as obligation rather than fate, and what it means to truly reckon with the fact that we must die, and therefore we must live and love.

philosophydeath

brennan.dayJun 23, 2026

An Open Letter to Compassionate, Left-leaning, AI-hating, Animal-loving Meat Eaters

Brace yourself. I'm writing this to people who care about the world's suffering and love animals, but haven't yet extended that same compassion to the animals on their plate. Any environmental argument you can make against generative AI you can make more so against eating meat. This isn't a purity test or a scolding. Just an invitation to not look away.

veganismanimal rights

brennan.dayJun 22, 2026

COMPULSION: The Writers Who Wrote The Most in History

I've been writing publicly every day for seven months, and I wanted to know what that looked like for other compulsive writers. From Chesterton dictating past midnight, to Chinese web fiction authors racing through 10,000 words daily. What does their obsessive output reveal about the nature of writing itself? The volume isn't the point. The showing up is.

writingliterary history

brennan.dayJun 17, 2026

Blogging Saved My Life

Writing publicly and frequently for the past seven months has saved my life. Six ways consistent public writing transformed me: cultivating curiosity, building connections, investigating rabbit holes, starting new projects, creating accountability, and seeing life's patterns in real-time. An invitation for others to begin writing without restraint.

writingblogging

brennan.dayMay 17, 2026

A Love Letter to Everything

My first IndieWeb Carnival entry—the theme is love letters, and I couldn't pick just one thing. A letter to the infrastructure that holds my corner of the internet together, to the strangers who maintain the open-source tools I depend on every day, and to the IndieWeb friends I've met over the past few months. And finally, to curiosity: the embarrassing willingness to fall in love with a static-site generator or a transit system or a protocol nobody's heard of, which I've come to believe is what kept me alive.

personal essayIndieWeb

brennan.dayMay 14, 2026

On Being a River

Sixty thousand miles of blood vessels run inside each of us, more than twice around the Earth. 330 billion cells are replaced every single day. Humanity has always built civilization beside rivers because we are rivers. Always in motion, never stepping into the same current twice, carrying cells that live only days alongside neurons that will last precisely as long as we do.

personal essaymythology

brennan.dayMay 12, 2026

What We Lose with Cultural Extinction: The Red Thread Cut

In 1995, China abducted six-year-old Gedhun Choekyi Nyima—the recognized 11th Panchen Lama—severing the chain of mutual recognition at the heart of Tibetan Buddhist succession. Meanwhile, Michif, a language born from Cree verbs and French nouns that belonged to no one but the Métis People, has nearly vanished within living memory. Both losses are the same act: colonialism's weaponization of continuity. On the extinction of languages, the cutting of red threads, and what it means to inherit a chain with links already missing.

personal essayhistory