It's been a few days since my article on Claude Code being used to develop various IndieWeb tools, and in that time Aaron Parecki has written a response. I will be candid and admit that I had a bit of a crisis of faith when I was first researching this. I've spent a year and written hundreds of thousands of words on the indie web and the consequences and harms of generative artificial intelligence. I have been advocating for people to create with their own mind and hands, and to fall in love with the work and the messy, human flaws and mistakes that come with it. I thought for a brief moment that this was a turning point, that the stubborn endurance of continuing to push for humanity and handcrafted code and art was circling the drain and that this new frontier was just a new normal we all had to adjust to. Then, of course, I came to my senses. To start, Parecki writes that these services would have been shut down had he not begun using Claude to update them. This is a false dichotomy. Parecki could have put in the difficult work of updating the codebases himself by hand, and rallied others interested in preserving and maintaining these services. Of course, it's totally within Parecki's rights to shut services down and not go through the (often thankless) hassle of trying to continue to hold up infrastructure. The people holding up the Internet are not many, and they have been doing so for decades in some cases. Parecki is also correct that people can look for alternatives because the specifications (he helped create) and open protocols mean that anybody can make their own infrastructure. In general, we need more people willing to learn difficult things and put the work in. You need to build what you think the world needs more of. Everyone is waiting for somebody else to. ## Where I Disagree One of the things I fundamentally disagree with Parecki (and many other devs) on is the idea that "understanding matters more than tools." There is a compartmentalization happening here. The tools are part of the craft, of the art itself. What you choose and how you use it matters. Tool usage is part of the understanding. Parecki writes how "code was never the interesting part", and really, that breaks my heart. Programming and computer science have beautiful artistic merit. I think of the fast inverse square root in Quake III Arena or Ruby Koans. Read this write-up on Knuth from fifty years ago on the subject. Now, again, Parecki doesn't have to agree with me or enjoy code, but this is part of something I think is extremely important: **leadership responsibility**. Parecki is one of the founding members of IndieWebCamp, and this _is_ the IndieWeb. I understand the desire to emphasize and prioritize modularity and pluralism—to stress that these are free concepts anybody can create and implement with. But that is, in an important way, shirking the responsibility you have as a founder. You created multiple services that a lot of people use, including me, and many of those people view the harms of silo'd corporate social media platforms as similar to the harms of generative artificial intelligence. Tantek Çelik, another co-founder of the IndieWeb movement and subculture, currently works at Mozilla, a company that suffered backlash for also becoming genAI-first. The new CEO of the company gave the Firefox browser an AI killswitch in response. Parecki writes that an important "IndieWeb principle is have fun.", and I agree. But not fun at the expense of others. Generative AI is not a neutral tool, and you cannot use it separate from the environmental, psychological, artistic, and financial damage it continues to proliferate. ## Where is genAI _not_ allowed? There are an increasingly smaller number of places where zero genAI is present—both in the real world and online digitally. Yesterday, Pillowfort.social announced that it's shutting down in December, which is one of the only existing platforms that has a full-on genAI ban. One of the most prevailing sentiments of users who will have to find a digital identity elsewhere is that Pillowfort made them feel safe. If the uppercase IndieWeb as a brand wants to be permissive and allow genAI, there's nothing I can do about that. But I made a promise to myself that I would not go gentle into that good night. And what I can do is use the time, energy, and abilities I have to continue trying to carve out a space that disallows genAI and is for people. We will continue making a better web, regardless. A human web. A living web. ## Ani To Pisi Here in Mohkínstsis, there is a Siksika creation story called _Ani to pisi_ , the spiderweb. From the late Elder Clement Bear Chief and his younger brother, Elder Roy Bear Chief, holding the story for twenty years before understanding what it could teach. In the story, Creator instructs the spider to wrap the world and the people in it in his web and bring them down here, and he does as he's told. "Ani to pisi welcomes everyone into its web and does not segregate anybody." The teaching is simple: "If there are problems anywhere on the web, it will vibrate, and if you feel those vibrations, you are supposed to go and help." And "we need to celebrate good vibrations too. We are all one." In September at my alma mater, Mount Royal University, hundreds of students, staff, and community members join hands to form a giant human spiderweb while drummers send vibrations travelling across it. A study of the 2024 enactment describes collective effervescence, awe, and a strengthened commitment to reconciliation. "A drone captures the human spiderweb formed by students, staff and faculty." Haley Jarmain, Mount Royal University. 2023. | Mount Royal University I think there is a reason we named this thing we're building _the web_. We are all strands, as our creations we share. When a service goes dark, when a maintainer burns out, when a community loses the one place that made them feel safe, gossamer breaks and the whole web trembles. I encourage anybody that runs a platform, or has a leadership position in community, to do the same. And I encourage others to learn the skills required to do the difficult, long-term (and unglamorous) work of maintenance. We can make a new wiki, have our own meetups, and organize and create the infrastructure needed to continue onward. Our collective resistance is meaningful, but we must be stubborn and insistent in this. Tyr wrote in response how we "can’t rebuild everything as fast as it is getting ruined," and there's truth to that. We will never match the speed of the machine. We are wonderful slow humans. And that's exactly why we need people and organizations that will take hard stances, not bend the knee, and disallow genAI in the first place. And if we aren't those people, then who is it going to be?

Ever heard someone called a _berry picker_ as a derogatory insult? Well, according to Green's Dictionary of Slang, it has been recorded in American slang since at least 1968 as "a rural person, a country dweller." Meanwhile, the Wabanaki have been harvesting wild blueberries for thousands of years, by hand or with hand-held rakes "which look something like a dustpan with fine metal teeth." But what I'm really talking about here is how "berry picker" is slang online, particularly on Indigenous TikTok (#RezTok), directed at men and hunters who come home empty-handed. Instead of harvesting big game like a moose or a deer, the joke goes, _you might as well go back to picking berries_. There are hashtags and duet chains of creators from Treaty 6 to Tlingit country demanding moose meat. Urban Dictionary offers two definitions: > 1. a person without the means to provide meat for their partner. > 2. a person lacking masculinity > And an example sentence: "All you women out there; quit asking other men for moose meat. You snagged a berry picker. You made your bed, now starve in it." Indigenous humour is medicine, and I'm not here to bash the joke (I've written before about how the trickster outjerks everyone). But I've also been trying to eat fully plant-based my entire adult life. So, I am a berry picker. When you really take a deep look at the history, though, berries have never been a lesser harvest. There's a rabbit hole of botany and culture in the little fruit. The strawberry is known in Anishinaabemowin as **_ode'imin_** , the heart berry. The heart berry is love, emotional truth, healing, and forgiveness. The first medicine of spring. To harvest the heart is not to come home empty-handed. ## Go Get Me Some Moose Meat! Picking berries instead of hunting is regarded as emasculating and degrading. The joke is there because of the feminine connotation attached to berries, and with fruits in general. I mean, I'm sure you know what it means to be called _fruity_ , after all. Bon Appétit writes that insult dates back to Yale's campus in 1894, where _fruit_ meant a dupe, someone gullible and easily influenced: "In this slang, a fruit was ripe for the picking, just like a naive person." Etymonline found the "male homosexual" connotation in 1927, and notes that by 1931 _fruit_ was also tramp slang for "a girl or woman willing to oblige," probably from the fact of being "easy picking." Green's goes further with _fruit-eater_ , _fruit fly_ , _bowl of fruit_ , and _crushed fruit_ , defined as a homosexual "who constantly denies his inversion." The berry is easy picking. Ripe. Passive. Sitting on a branch and waiting to be taken. If you look through Canada's dark, forgotten history, you'll find that in the 1960s, a Carleton University psychologist named Frank Robert Wake was funded to build what became known as the "fruit machine." And yes, this device was meant to detect homosexuality in civil servants and soldiers by measuring pupil dilation, perspiration, and blood volume. It obviously never worked. But by the end of that decade, the RCMP had amassed a list of over 9,000 names of suspected or confirmed homosexuals, anyway. When a man on the rez gets called a berry picker, he is being called both a woman and Queer at the same time. The toxic hegemonic masculinity that's so nonchalant in our Indigenous communities must be addressed and reckoned with here. We as men must do better, and we must not be jaded into silence. Robert Alexander Innes and Kim Anderson's collection _Indigenous Men and Masculinities_ begins from the premise that our Nations "come from traditions of gender equity, complementarity, and the sacred feminine," and that patriarchy was really a colonial imposition. The book describes how the hegemonic masculinity that subordinates Indigenous men "encourages them to similarly assert power and control by subordinating Indigenous women and women of colour, as well as white women (where circumstances allow), other Indigenous men who are considered physically and intellectually weak, and those who do not express a heteronormative identity." The Ontario Federation of Indigenous Friendship Centres' _Bidwewidam Indigenous Masculinities_ report gathered what Elders remember about the roles before that hierarchy was built. Yes, men in general hunted, fished, and protected. But "[w]omen, children, youth, elders and men typically had distinct and sacred roles and responsibilities, and no one was valued above the other." And "these roles and responsibilities were flexible. The bottom line was that if a job had to be done, it had to be done." The idea that the hunt is the real work, and the gathering is secondary leftovers, is a myth from Western anthropology. In April 1966, the _Man the Hunter_ symposium at the University of Chicago brought together the most influential anthropologists of the day to define hunter-gatherer societies, and gave us hunters as the heroes of human evolution. In 1975, Sally Slocum fired back with "Woman the Gatherer: Male Bias in Anthropology", calling out the male bias baked into the framework. In 2023, a team at Seattle Pacific University went back through the ethnographic record and published "The Myth of Man the Hunter." Of the sixty-three foraging societies with clear data, "50 (79%) of the groups had documentation on women hunting." In societies where hunting was the most important subsistence activity, women participated 100% of the time. The myth is still everywhere, unsurprisingly. Here's a rather ridiculous essay explaining why women are late: "The reason is that women are berrypickers, while men are hunters." Berries, the author reasons, "don't go anywhere." Except berries do go somewhere—they go into pemmican! ### Pemmican Pemmican is "generally a mixture of dried meat, fat, and berries", providing the sustenance required by the North American fur trade from the 1770s to the 1880s. The Manitoba Métis Federation wrote how, without it, "neither the employees nor colonists could have survived the harsh Canadian climate." Making pemmican was women's work as much as men's. In Chris Chang-Yen Phillips's paper on women in the pemmican trade, the Métis historian Victoria Callihoo remembers riding the Red River carts on the buffalo hunt as a child in the 1870s. Young men scouted and killed the animals. "When the kill was over," she said, "the women would go out to help bring the meat in, and then the slicing of meat began." Women sliced and pounded the meat and readied the hide bags it was packed into. Sweet pemmican, the kind mixed with berries, "was considered a delicacy fit for gift-giving and diplomacy. The berry of choice was the service or June berry." On January 8th, 1814, Governor Miles Macdonell of the Red River Colony issued the Pemmican Proclamation, forbidding the export of pemmican out of Assiniboia. The Métis, who made and supplied it, saw the ban for what it was. Two years later, on June 19th, 1816, Cuthbert Grant led the Métis to la Victoire de la Grenouillère, the Battle of Seven Oaks, in what is now West Kildonan in Winnipeg. It was one of the first times the Métis asserted themselves as _la Nouvelle Nation_ and flew our flag. And it was because they forbade our pemmican. Across the North, Inuit women say that berry harvesting is their most important food-procurement activity. As Rachel Qaqqaq of Qikiqtarjuaq put it, "[b]erry picking is the number one priority for ladies in September!" Among the Tlingit, the best berry patches were treated as hereditary property by matrilineal clans, owned, defended, and celebrated. ## The Serviceberry The serviceberry, _Amelanchier_ , is known by many names. Shadbush, shadwood or shadblow, or sarvisberry, juneberry, saskatoon, sugarplum, wild-plum or chuckley pear. The National Park Service admits that "no one can seem to agree on either a unifying common name or even how many species there are in total," with estimates landing anywhere between 20 and 80. _Shad_ , because it blooms when the shad fish run upriver each spring. _Juneberry_ , for when the fruit ripens. Early European settlers thought the North American shrub looked similar to the European _Sorbus_ genus (such as the rowan or mountain ash), which produces red berries. The Latin word _Sorbus_ shifted over time in local dialect to "sarvis," and eventually evolved into "serviceberry." The Lewis and Clark journals mention the serviceberry 63 times, spelling it 13 different ways, including Clark's "Sarvis" and "Sarviss," tinged with a Virginian accent. Folklore says the white spring blooms of the serviceberry signalled that the ground had finally thawed after winter. This thaw allowed preachers to travel to remote settlements to hold delayed community gatherings, weddings, and funeral services for people who died during the frozen winter months. The serviceberry signalled for services. Though the NPS notes its origins "may be apocryphal." Robin Wall Kimmerer wrote an essay called "The Serviceberry," which later expanded into a book, and she points out that "ethnobotanists know that the more names a plant has, the greater its cultural importance." In Potawatomi, it's _Bozakmin_ , "a superlative: the best of the berries." > For me, the most important part of the word _Bozakmin_ is "min," the root for "berry." It appears in our Potawatomi words for Blueberry, Strawberry, Raspberry, even Apple, Maize, and Wild Rice. The revelation in that word is a treasure for me, because it is also the root word for "gift." The berry is the gift. I think of _service_ more in that sense, too. The sense of giving, of providing and offering. That's a large reason why I named my webdev company **Berry House**, because I want to offer myself. It is a form of digital stewardship. Most of what I do under that name is pro bono. A house full of berries is a house with more than enough to give away. Kimmerer tells another story in that essay, from the linguist Daniel Everett, about a hunter in the Brazilian rainforest who brought home far more meat than his family could eat. Everett asked how he would store the excess. The hunter was puzzled. He instead threw a feast until every last morsel was gone. > "Store my meat? I store my meat in the belly of my brother," replied the hunter. In a gift economy, Kimmerer writes, "status is determined not by how much one accumulates, but by how much one gives away." The good hunter, in the old way, was measured by what he shared and not by what he killed. ## lii pwayr Here in Alberta, the Blackfoot call the saskatoon _okonok_. Hungry Wolf reported its name as "Real Berry," and said it ripened at "the time that many tribes gather traditionally for their annual encampments and ceremonials." Camps moved to follow it. There is a hamlet in southeastern Alberta called Manyberries, named for this. But the saskatoon isn't only fruit—its wood is hard, heavy, and straight. The Galt Museum notes that it was "valued as material for arrows, pipe stems, basket rims and tipi closure pins," and Elder Pete Standing Alone told the Kainai ethnobotany project that the branches make good arrow shafts. The _Dictionary of Canadianisms_ writes that the "saskatoon or choke-cherry-wood arrow was often driven clear through the body of the buffalo." In 1919, Edward Ahenakew wrote in the _Saskatoon Daily Star_ that his band stopped where the city now stands to cut saskatoon willows for arrow shafts, and that the place where the willows are cut, _manimisāskwatān_ , was shortened into the name _Saskatoon_. The hunter's arrow was made from the berry picker's bush. In Michif, the saskatoon is _lii pwayr_. According to the Gabriel Dumont Institute, it comes from the French _poirettes_ and _petites poires_. Little pears. Botanically, the fruit of the _Amelanchier_ is a pome, the same kind of fruit as an apple or a pear. Not a berry at all. The English settlers named it after a European tree it only resembled. My Métis ancestors called it a little pear, and my ancestors were the ones who got it right. ## Bacca Spuria Like nearly all things colonial, what qualifies and counts as a berry is technical and semantic. While we're on the subject, in botany, a berry is a simple fleshy fruit "derived from a single ovary of an individual flower." By that definition? Tomatoes, eggplants, grapes, and avocados and kiwis are true botanically-defined berries. As are bananas. Watermelons, pumpkins, and cucumbers are pepos, which are "modified berries with a hard rim." But strawberries? They're aggregate fruits, not berries at all. The red flesh is a swollen receptacle, the base of the flower. The little "seeds" on the outside are achenes, each one the actual fruit with a seed inside. "When you eat one strawberry," Oregon State botanist Aaron Liston told _Live Science_ , "you're getting hundreds of fruits, not just one." Raspberries and blackberries are tiny stone fruit clustered together in drupelets. Each raspberry flower has 60 to 80 ovaries, and each one becomes its own drupelet. Cornell's horticulture notes describe each one as "anatomically analogous to a cherry." A raspberry, then, is a bouquet of tiny cherries holding hands. What does this mean, really? Why do we have such completely incorrect words and labels for things? A berry is a _bacca_ , and in the Missouri Botanical Garden's dictionary of botanical Latin, the raspberry and the strawberry are given as examples of _bacca spuria_ : "any fleshy fruit which is not a true berry." A false berry. _Bacca_ also meant anything round, like a pearl. I studied English at university and got a Bachelor's degree, a baccalaureate, and that word was likely altered by folk etymology, as if from _bacca lauri_ , "laurel berry." Samuel Johnson, in his dictionary, explained it this way: "Bachelors, being young, are of good hopes, like laurels in the berry." My English degree is a berry through folk etymology. A false one. This all ties back to how there's no "proper" English, or any other language. Words don't follow definitions, definitions follow power. In 1893, the Supreme Court of the United States heard _Nix v. Hedden_, a tariff case asking whether imported tomatoes were fruit (duty-free) or vegetables (taxed at ten percent). Justice Horace Gray conceded the science immediately: > Botanically speaking, tomatoes are the fruit of a vine, just as are cucumbers, squashes, beans and peas. But in the common language of the people, whether sellers or consumers of provisions, all these are vegetables... His reasoning? They're "usually served at dinner in, with or after the soup, fish or meats," and "not, like fruits generally, as dessert." The highest court in the land ruled that what a thing _is_ depends on when you serve it, and on who collects the tax. ### How the Strawberry Was Born When Pedro de Valdivia invaded Wallmapu in the 1540s, he coined a new word for the "new" Chilean strawberry, _frutilla_ , "little fruit." The Mapuche already had words for both wild strawberries (_llahuen_) and cultivated ones (_quellghen_), because they had been domesticating _Fragaria chiloensis_ for at least a thousand years. A century and a half later, a French military spy named Amédée-François Frézier, posing as a merchant to sketch Spanish fortifications, brought Chilean strawberry plants back to France in 1714. They grew, but wouldn't fruit. He'd only brought female plants, unaware the species needed both sexes, which, as one botanical review notes, "was presumably common knowledge to the Mapuche and Picunche people." For "[i]f Frézier had consulted with these indigenous farmers, he could have avoided his mistake." When farmers in Brittany planted the Chilean strawberries beside the Virginia strawberry, another Indigenous American species already in Europe, the two crossed. The French botanist Antoine Nicolas Duchesne named the hybrid _Fragaria × ananassa_, after the pineapple, because of its flavour. The strawberry in your grocery store is a hybrid of two plants native to the Americas, cultivated first by Indigenous peoples, named for a third American plant, and credited to Europe. Who picks them? In American slang, _berry picker_ has also been used as an ethnic slur for Latino farmworkers in California's berry fields. The anthropologist and physician Seth Holmes spent two summers picking strawberries and blueberries in Washington's Skagit Valley with Triqui families from Oaxaca, and found that the Triqui, an Indigenous people, made up "the very bottom rung of the agricultural labor ladder," earning $5,000 to $8,000 a year. One worker told him: "You pick with your hands bent over kneeling, your back hurts; you get knee pains and [hip] pains... You suffer a lot." In 2013, Triqui and Mixteco pickers at Sakuma Bros. Berry Farm went on strike after a worker was fired for asking for a raise. They formed Familias Unidas por la Justicia, an independent, Indigenous-led union, and in 2017 they won a contract. In 2015, thousands of pickers in Mexico's San Quintín Valley shut down the strawberry harvest. A 24-year-old Triqui labourer told _The Globe and Mail_ that "[i]t's slavery of indigenous people. It's been going on for generations." The berry pickers of the world are, overwhelmingly, Indigenous. ## The Flesh and the Blood Botanists divide the fleshy pericarp of a berry into three distinct parts. The _exocarp_ is the outer skin of the berry, such as the thin skin of a grape or the tough rind of a banana. The _mesocarp_ is the middle layer, which forms the main edible, pulpy part of the fruit. And the _endocarp_ is the innermost layer surrounding and embedding the seeds. In a true berry, this layer is thin and fleshy rather than stony, unlike a peach pit. Skin, flesh, and the soft place where the seed is held. I can't help but think of religion here—could a Eucharist be made from berry? Carrying both the flesh and blood simultaneously? Grapes are true botanical berries. The wine of every communion, the blood, has always been berry. And the bread? A grain of wheat is a caryopsis, "a dry indehiscent fruit." The body, too, is fruit. The Eucharist was never meat, it was always the harvest of the gatherer. "I am the vine, ye are the branches," Jesus says in John 15:5. "He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit." And when Paul lists what grows in us, in Galatians, the very first word is love, "[b]ut the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith." In illuminated Church manuscripts, the strawberry's three-part leaf was a reminder of the Holy Trinity, "the red fruits, pointing downward, were representative of drops of Christ's blood, and the five petals of its white flower were symbols of his five wounds." The strawberry symbolized the Virgin Mary, purity and martyrdom, righteousness and humility, and the Incarnation itself. But before all that, the strawberry was dedicated to Venus and Aphrodite, symbolizing romantic love, fertility, and beauty. According to Roman myth, strawberries grew where Aphrodite's tears mixed with the blood of the dead Adonis and dropped into the dirt. And do you know how Adonis died? He was killed hunting a boar. The heart berry grows from the place where the hunter fell, watered by the grief of love. Art historian Walter Gibson, writing about Bosch, wrote that the strawberry "could represent the Virgin Mary as well [as] Venus, figures not known to coexist amicably." In _The Garden of Earthly Delights_ , the giant strawberries were so central that early viewers called the whole painting _el quadro del madroño_, the picture of the strawberry, reading it as a warning about fleeting pleasure. Purity and desire. Mary and Venus. A fruit sacred to both the Virgin and the goddess of love. The berry and the body hold both. ## Ode'imin Which brings me to the heart. The Ojibwe People's Dictionary breaks _ode'imin_ into two parts: _ode'_ meaning heart, and _-min_ meaning "small and globular; berry." The same _-min_ Kimmerer recognized as gift. Heart-gift. And in the word family, right underneath, is the verb _ode'iminike_ , "s/he picks strawberries, processes strawberries." Anishinaabemowin has a word for a berry picker—a verb built on the word for heart. I can think of nothing further from a derogatory insult. Teachings vary across nations and families. Elder Lillian Pitawanakwat's teaching, shared widely, is simple: > "The strawberry teaches forgiveness and peace. The strawberry is shaped like a heart, and strawberries are known to our people as heart berries." Elders say that just as ode'imin is connected to the plant "by a vast system of leaves, runners, and roots, so is the heart connected to all the organs and parts of the human body." During the strawberry harvest in June, many communities hold feasts, "welcoming everyone home, and letting go of differences, judgment and self-righteousness." When Edmonton renamed its wards in 2021, one ward became O-day'min, the heart of the city. The stem of the heart berry represents the North Saskatchewan River, the vessels are the waterways, and the veins are the people. Because its seeds are on the outside, not hidden, Elders use ode'imin to teach about vulnerability. It "reminds us to love as an active experience—one that involves commitment, compassion and caring." A fruit that wears its seeds on its skin has nothing to hide. Imagine telling that to the RCMP's "fruit machine." And it is the first medicine of spring. As Notwell, sharing a teaching that passed from Elder Lillian Pitawanakwat through Elder Conni Ma'iingan, told the _NB Media Co-op_: > "The strawberries are really the first berry, the first fully ripe spring food, that would come naturally from the land as a gift from our Earth Mother. Those strawberries are so important, they're a sign that we made it through the winter." The strawberry, like the serviceberry, tells you the frozen months are over and when you are allowed to come home. When an Ojibwe girl gets her first moontime, she may take on the berry fast, abstaining from strawberries and other berries for a full year while she learns from the grandmothers. At the end, she gathers berries and presents them to her community, and a feast is held in her honour. The berry is feminine because it is sacred, not lesser. The jokes against berry-pickers takes our grandmothers held as medicine, as ceremony, as the power to give life, and treats it as the act of a man who failed. That's not our teaching. In James Mooney's 1900 record, the first man and the first woman quarrel, and she leaves him, walking east toward the Sun land, never looking back. The Sun takes pity on the grieving man and puts fruit in her path to slow her: huckleberries, then blackberries, then "some trees covered with beautiful red service berries." She walks past them all. Then she sees "a patch of large ripe strawberries, the first ever known." She stoops to pick them, turns to the west, and remembers her husband. She gathers the finest berries and carries them back to him. "He met her kindly and they went home together." For the Haudenosaunee, strawberries came down with Skywoman, and when she was buried, strawberries and medicines sprang up from the ground above her. The strawberry is the leader of the berries. When Handsome Lake lay unconscious for four days, the Oneida Nation recounts, the messengers told him that through the Great Feather Dance and drinking the juice of the strawberry, "the people will rebuild their spirit and recover." Strawberry juice is medicine for the spirit. Kimmerer, in "The Gift of Strawberries," remembers picking wild strawberries as a child for her father's Father's Day shortcake. "Our gift was time and attention and care and red-stained fingers," she writes. "Heart berries, indeed." ## Call Me a Berry Picker, Eh? What does the berry picker offer, then? The first sign of spring after a cold, bitter winter. Saskatoons for the pemmican, pounded together with meat and fat by men and women both, carried in hide bags to Seven Oaks. A bush whose fruit fed the camp and whose wood became the arrow. The grief of a goddess and a hunter's blood growing strawberry plants. A girl fasting from berries for a year so she can come back and feed her people. The first woman who turned around because of a strawberry, and the first man who met her kindly. The flesh and blood of all things holy and full of love. A berry is the small, globular gift. And the heart is a muscle that only works by giving everything away, beat after beat, to every part of the body it's connected to. Call me a berry picker and I'll take it. I'll be in the patches in June with red-stained fingers, bringing back more than enough to share. _Ode'imin._ Heart berry. Love, emotional truth, healing, forgiveness. The first medicine of spring.

A classic forum with a happy little modern touch

* Why weepinbell? * Refactoring for scalability * The microformats nightmare * Slowing down * Independence, and now decentralization I have been blogging in English for some time, but this is my first time participating in an indie web conversation. So I think I should introduce myself first. I’m Eltrac. I’m mainly a web developer but I like all kinds of thing about programming. I code in Go, Clojure and Lua, and I explore new tech all the time. I usually blog more than three times a week, but most of my posts are written in Chinese. I recently became an active member of Codeberg e.V. and have been working on my own FOSS project weepinbell for a while. It’s a new **Webmention receiver** written in Clojure. In this post, I will talk about why I developed weepinbell, how I designed its architecture, what I think of the IndieWeb movement and many things. ## Why weepinbell? I wrote to Brennan recently and he was really nice to mention weepinbell on his blog . In that email, I talked about how I set a new goal for weepinbell (i.e. an alternative to webmention.io) because of Aaron Parecki rewriting webmention.io with Claude. Later, in Aaron’s response to Brennan’s new post , he mentioned weepinbell as “a direct response to my rewrite”. I would like to make things clear. I didn’t start developing weepinbell because of Aaron’s rewrite. I started early in this May to learn Clojure. I’ve been blogging (in Chinese) for years and of course I love the concept of IndieWeb. Naturally, my practice project for learning a new language involves IndieWeb technologies. The motive is that I want to get my hands dirty with the Webmention standard. I read through the W3C specification document and started putting things in _parentheses_. You can still find snippets from that document in my code as comments. I bascially code against the specification. It was a fun experience for me. (if-let [error-msg (check-request source target allowlist)] ;; respond if request verification failed (bad-request {:status 400 :message error-msg}) ;; proceed if request is ok (do ;; The receiver SHOULD check that target is a valid ;; resource for which it can accept Webmentions. ;; This check SHOULD happen synchronously to reject ;; invalid Webmentions before more in-depth verification begins. ;; ;; Webmention verification SHOULD be handled asynchronously ;; to prevent DoS (Denial of Service) attacks. (put! wmc new-wm) ;; respond with 201 when Webmention passed checks and ;; was sent into queue, include a Location header (let [wm-id (digest (str source target)) wm-url (str (:base-url config) "/api/mention/" wm-id) response {:status 201 :message "Webmention is accepted and pending for verification." :url wm-url}] (created wm-url response)))))) This snippet is from receiver.clj . After the initial _quick and rough_ implementation, I stopped working on weepinbell for a few months. And it had been receiving Webmentions for my blog during that time. Everything worked and I was content. It was bascially a personal tool. Then the webmention.io rewrite came to my attention. Why does it bother me? I don’t even use webmention.io any more. I see some of my friends seeking alternatives, and… there aren’t many to choose from! There is webmentiond by Horst Gutmann and some other implementations here and there. My friend Chlorine developed CircleAt in Rust. And I’m sure there are many more. But frankly, none of them truly count as “alternative to webmention.io”. Don’t get me wrong. I think many of them are great for their purpose, i.e. small service one can self-host. However, they can be quite difficult for the non-tech indie web folks and those who simply do not own a server. They need a public instance. ## Refactoring for scalability I decided to continue development of weepinbell and make it “the next webmention.io”, at least that’s what I’m going for. So I took a closer look at my code. They’re not that messy, well partitioned (for the most part) and maintainable. I can swap some of the parts easily because I used hook functions and vtables.1 The architecture is flexible enough, and the _Lisp power_ also makes modifying software really easy. [1] A vtable in Clojure is basically a hashmap whose values are functions. It’s a technique mentioned in one of Uncle Bob’s books, _Functional Design_. ↩︎ The following part will be somewhat technical. Feel free to jump to the next section if you don’t want to read about system design. The bottom line is: weepinbell would be lightweight enough for people to self-host; it would also be scalable enough to support large traffic. I’m a Go programmer by the living.2 And Clojure’s `core.async` library greatly resembles Go’s concurrey programming style, which means my skills of building scalable applications in Go translates. [2] Actually I’m at the very begining of my career. Don’t think of me as an expert of anything. XD ↩︎ Webmention is not big data. Storage is definitely not the bottleneck. In fact, up until a few commits ago , weepinbell does **not even support any type of database**. It unloaded everything in a single file and then loaded it back when needed. And it just… worked, for months. Of course this is neither performant nor safe. If I want to build something reliable, I need a database. If you have taken a look at that commit I linked, you might notice that the business logic is **untouched**. All that’s added is a new storage implementation, a new config option, and a few lines in the main component (`core.clj`). I’ll probably elaborate on architecture flexibility in another post. That’s something I’m really proud of. The gist is that using a new type of database and ORM is easy, and will be just as easy if I ever decided to redo the storage layer again. ;; all I need to make sure is that the new storage implementation ;; returns a valid storage vtable, like this: (defn use-store [db-file] (let [ds (make-datasource db-file)] (create-tables ds) {:append (partial insert-webmention ds) :update (partial update-webmention ds) :delete (partial delete-webmention ds) :get (partial get-webmention ds) :get-by-domain (partial get-webmentions-by-domain ds)})) Beside a new SQLite implementation, I added a _storage worker_ that handles I/O asynchronously. So when processing a new webmention, the _processor_ won’t have to wait for DB transaction (or appending to a file; it does not care about what’s going on underneath) to end. It simply delegates to the _storage worker_ and keeps processing the next webmention. The _processor_ delegates by putting an operation object into a _channel_. It’s similar to what I already have for receiver. When a new webmention request is sent to the _web server_ , receiver does some basic checks (e.g. does `source` and `target` look like real URLs?) and then put the request into the _webmention queue_. A _processor_ will pick it up and make sure `source` has truly mentioned `target`, parse microformats, wrap data into a valid record, and hand it over to _storage worker_. Reading from a channel is **thread-safe**. And since I/O is handled internally by _storage worker_ , it can also be thread-safe, _without the need for a mutex lock_. So we can add as many processors as we want to handle webmentions concurrently. The overall architecture looks like this: #### Architecture of the receiver part of weepinbell, drawn using Excalidraw That’s **horizontal scaling**. For self-hosters, simply set `pipeline-concurrency` to `1`, and there will be only one processor handling webmentions, using a reasonable amount of RAM and CPU. For large groups or someone who wants to host a public instance, change a number in config and you’re good to go. All of that is compiled to a single `.jar`.3 [3] Clojure runs on JVM, so it compiles to JVM bytecode, just like Java. ↩︎ ## The microformats nightmare Before I move on to a non-tech topic, there’s one thing I have to _complain_ : Using microformats markup is easy. Parsing it is really not. Here is an example snippet from microformats.io . <div class="h-card"> <a class="p-name u-url" href="http://blog.lizardwrangler.com/">Mitchell Baker</a> (<a class="p-org h-card" href="http://mozilla.org/">Mozilla Foundation</a>) </div> It’s just regular HTML with standardized class names like `h-card` and `p-name`. It’s easy to add a few classes to your HTML. However, it’s still hard to parse structural data from HTML with _just_ a few more classes. Good thing there are already some parsers available… right? > Production ready parsers are available for: Go, Node, PHP, Python, Ruby. Right… I’m using Clojure… Clojure can use Java code, since it runs on top of it. I found mf2j , an “In-development Java parser for microformats2”. It haven’t been updated since… 10 years ago. There is a Clojure implementation . It’s archived, with its last update committed 11 years ago. Do I implement a new one myself? Do I pick up where they left off? How do I make sure I don’t burn out and abandon it as well? After all, Clojure is a niche language and IndieWeb is also kind of niche. I can’t imagine there being another Clojurist building something that relies on microformats. At least, I don’t know anyone like that. I briefly considered running a micro-service that wraps the Go parser, and weepinbell can talk to this service using RESTful API or gRPC. But it feels heavy and everything just won’t fit in a single `.jar`. So how can Clojure run programs written in a non-JVM language? What else runs on JVM? Scala, Groovy… _Wait, will WebAssembly work?_ Yes! **WebAssembly runs on JVM.** There is a native JVM WebAssembly runtime called chicory . I spent an afternoon studying Extism and chirocy. Then I wrote a tiny little Go wrapper of Will Norris’ parser library . package main import ( "bytes" "github.com/extism/go-pdk" "willnorris.com/go/microformats" ) //go:wasmexport parse func parse() int32 { input := pdk.Input() r := bytes.NewReader(input) data := microformats.Parse(r, nil) pdk.OutputJSON(data) return 0 } Then I compiled it to `.wasm` using tinygo compiler, bundled the `.wasm` inside `.jar`, and called the Extism plugin from Clojure using chicory. Voilà! Here’s mf2clj , a Clojure wrapper of WebAssembly compiled from a Go wrapper of an existing microformats parser. By the way, I made a little logo just for fun. You use it just like a normal library in Clojure. And it’s surprisingly fast. (require '[mf2clj.core :as mf2clj]) (mf2clj/parse html-string) More surprisingly, bundling a `.wasm` binary and the WebAssembly runtime inside the `.jar` is not as heavy as I thougt it would be. The `.jar` only grew 2 MB in size. _Am I really running Java?_ Nevertheless, the nightmare isn’t over yet. In the begining, I settled for the incomplete `mf2j` library and used it for a while. At that time, I called the JSON output “ _data structure from Hell_ ”. I still do —— Everything is an array! Everything is deep inside something’s `properties` or `children`! Nothing is deterministic! Every website’s format is different! { "items": [{ "type": ["h-card"], "properties": { "url": ["http://blog.lizardwrangler.com/"], "name": ["Mitchell Baker"], "org": [{ "value": "Mozilla Foundation", "type": ["h-card"], "properties": { "name": ["Mozilla Foundation"], "url": ["http://mozilla.org/"] } }] } }], "rels": {}, "rel-urls": {} } In the end, I had to write a smaller parser to parse output a the original parser. I called this feature _microformats reduction_. I remember webmention.io having something similar. "microformats": { "author": { "name": "Mitchell Baker", "url": "http://blog.lizardwrangler.com/", "photo": "https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/photo.png" }, "type": "mention", "published": "2026-07-25T00:00:00-07:00", "content": { "html": "..." "text": "..." } } If something does not exists, it’ll just be `null`. The format is not final yet, I will make some adjustments. This can be turned off by `?microformats=raw` when querying webmentions. Also, I think more than half of the bugs I found in weepinbell have something to do with microformats-related features. _Maybe we should switch to Open Graph and JSON-LD, folks?_ Anyway, I’m just glad it’s finally working. ## Slowing down At this point, I’ve almost finished everything I have planned for the `v1.0.0` release: a proper database, horizontal scalability, up-to-date microformats parser. As for hosting a public instance, that’ll involve authenticating users and making a dashboard for them to manage webmentions. That would be a separate project. I plan to develop a service that sits in front of weepinbell, handling logging in and stuffs. I mentioned the idea in the project’s PHILOSOPHY.md . I want to keep the core of weepinbell minimal. Those who want to be their own sysadmins don’t have to care about authentication. They don’t even need a frontend. They only need to self-host one `.jar` and use API to query webmentions, use RSS to receive notifications and use webhook to automate stuff. These are the built-ins. A _platform_ like webmention.io needs more than that. If I want to keep weepinbell “for both individuals and large groups”, I have to separate things. Also, this makes everything modular and swappable, a pretty good architecture decision. My writing to Brennan was an attempt to get more Clojure developers on the team. _Well, that didn’t go well._ For the new platform, which will be named _Ringabell_4, I want to use more mainstream stack, probably Go, so that it’s easier for people to get involved. [4] Meaning “ring a bell”. ↩︎ For now, I’m still working on weepinbell’s test suite. The current test coverage is more than 83%, but there are still some edge cases that haven’t been covered by tests. I had to test a lot of paths by hand. Also it’ll take some time for the new SQLite implementation to be stable. I don’t think we need to or should move fast when it comes to developing reliable software, with or without LLMs. ## Independence, and now decentralization In reply to Brennan’s recent question, “What do we do now?” , I think it’s finanlly time to get more decentralized. Decentralization is never about moving away from the corporate web (that’s independence). It’s about not relying on a single point , no matter what the point is and who it involves. I agree with Brennan on not conflating IndieWeb and the lower-case indie web. The IndieWeb camp is a nice community and a great introduction to the indie web. But I think we should form more indie web communities other than the IndieWeb camp. omg.lol is an example. It’s a fun web community by Neatnik . They provide infrastructure like a simple profile page, Fediverse instance and email forwarding. Brennan is also building folk.zone , which also hosts a fork of webmention.io. Those two may not be exactly alternatives to the IndieWeb camp, but they can be. And there can be more for people to choose from. Tech folks can self-host their own infrastructure if they want. For the non-tech folks, there should be more alternatives to what the IndieWeb camp has to offer. Poeple who are capable can host public services and take a small community. After all, communities are what brings the indie web together. We can and should build more communities (this is probably more like polycentricity rather than decentralization). We can have the _LispyWeb_ for lisp programmers, _ArtsyWeb_ for artists, and _Indie Indie Literature Club!_5 for book lovers. Those are just some random names I came up with. [5] The referrence is a galgame called “ Doki Doki Literature Club ”. :3 ↩︎ Perhaps the upcoming _Ringabell_ might be the next cozy small community. Who knows? To everyone who’s nice enough to finish reading this, I hope we can all _find our people_.

I've always had an understanding that the independent web was designed by humans and for humans. There were times that my inbox or forums I visit were solicited by people (and maybe occasionally agents) who vibecoded a project and were proudly sharing it as part of the resistance against the corporate web. That always felt totally antithetical to what is trying to be accomplished and achieved with regards to the IndieWeb. Take for instance this website proclaiming that the IndieWeb is punk. While I appreciate the intent of the message, it felt totally counteracted by the fact that the website was created with the help of Claude Code, and how the language on the website itself reads like what an LLM would output. How can you advocate that people should hand-make their Internet pages when yours itself is not? Now, I've only been an active participant on the IndieWeb for around a year, and I will stress that it is an incredibly loosely-defined movement and umbrella term. But the view and understanding of the subculture being pro-human and anti-genAI, just as it is anti-corporation, seemed coherent and widely agreed upon. If you read the AI policy article on the wiki, there seems to be a broad overall consensus. So, what do we do when the founding technical member of the IndieWeb has decided to use Claude Code in some of the most important IndieWeb projects? I briefly gestured towards this in an earlier post, but I haven't really reckoned with what it means until now. But I'm getting ahead of myself. ## Aaronpk? Let's start at the beginning. Aaron Parecki (known online as aaronpk) is one of the co-founders and the lead technical architect of the IndieWeb movement. Alongside Tantek Çelik, he co-founded the movement in 2010, with the main idea being to empower individuals to own their own identity, data, and web presence rather than relying on centralized social media silos. Parecki’s contributions to the IndieWeb as-we-know-it are incredibly foundational. He co-founded and helped organize the very first IndieWebCamp in Portland, Oregon in June 2011. He built and maintains Meetable, an open-source event-listing platform that powers events.indieweb.org and facilitates community gatherings. Parecki bridged the gap between IndieWeb concepts and technical web specifications. He's served as the editor/co-editor for critical W3C protocols: * Webmention: A protocol enabling websites to automatically notify each other when they link to one another, allowing cross-site commenting and conversations. * Micropub: An API standard for independent clients and posting apps to securely create, update, or delete posts on a user's own domain. * WebSub: A protocol for real-time pub/sub notifications, allowing for instantaneous decentralized feeds. Parecki also created much of the essential backend plumbing used by the community under his personal p3k project umbrella: * webmention.io: A widely adopted, free service that receives and aggregates Webmentions on behalf of independent websites. * Quill & Teacup: Micropub clients used to post text, photos, food logs, and check-ins directly to your personal sites from your phone or web browser. * Monocle & Aperture: A self-hosted Microsub reader and server environment designed to let users consume content in a decentralized manner. * OwnYourSwarm: A bridging tool to syndicate Foursquare/Swarm check-ins back to your personal domain; an example of PESOS (Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate to Own Site) philosophy. He is so foundational that the IndieWeb wiki has an article titled single point of Aaron, where "IndieWeb technology is being developed and there haven't been enough implementations to create proper diversity causing an over reliance on one of Aaron Parecki's services in order for the technology to work broadly." Parecki's personal website, aaronparecki.com, serves as a fantastic reference implementation of an IndieWeb-enabled site. There's location tracking, fitness logs, music, micro-blog notes, and much more. All built on his own infrastructure. And if you visit that site, you'll notice it was only a few weeks ago that he 3D printed a Claude Code mascot (with the help of Claude, of course), and that he's been using a local LLM model to generate cat pictures for his weather display. And if that was the end of it, that'd be one thing—I think it'd be weird of me to write this blog post if Parecki was just dabbling in genAI personally. But that isn't the case at all. What's happening here is that major IndieWeb projects, such as webmention.io, are being entirely reworked into PHP with Claude Code. The original Ruby code hasn't been touched since April of this year, and seems to be human-only and what I mirror on folk.zone. The same can be seen in the commit history of indielogin.com, which began having Claude Code as a contributor only around a month ago in mid-September. And the same for Meetable's codebase, IndieNews' codebase, micropub.rocks' codebase, and I'm sure many of Parecki's projects I haven't checked. Suddenly, if you have an anti-genAI stance, you have a reckoning on your hands. My website, for example, uses IndieAuth/IndieLogin for comments, I use Webmentions, I have Micropub enabled. The list goes on and on. ## The "Discourse" I can imagine the discourse going in several directions here. To start, the IndieWeb has always had an inherent fragility and over-reliance on Parecki's work. He could have decided to inject advertisements or malicious code into his code at any time, and many others (and I) would have been at the mercy of that. Instead, he has decided to use Claude for his many projects. You could also make the argument that there just simply isn't enough funding or attention for these projects, that people have been too passive and unsupportive of projects like these for human-only maintenance to be sustainable. Next—and I think this is actually important—the lowercase indie web is NOT the uppercase IndieWebCamp and the IndieWeb wiki. I have always tried to emphasize that it doesn't matter if you use Microformats2 or any of the other specifications and protocols listed on the wiki—as long as you made your website and it isn't just a mere account on a corporate social media platform, then you've succeeded and are part of the indie web. But of course, many people (myself included) still conflate the two as one-in-the-same. What comes up when you search "indie web," after all? Probably the wiki that's existed for over fifteen years. The "brand" that has merch and a logo. ## What Do We Do, Now? Many people who participate in the IndieWeb and who are passionate about the subculture aren't technologically savvy enough to fork and build their own human-made versions of Parecki's projects. Maybe there will be a few devoted, technical people willing to put in the work there, but it would take a lot of time and effort. It would be a good thing to have a more diverse selection of choices, don't get me wrong, but it does feel like a serious schism in a way. Or do we just bend the knee? Do we accept that generative AI is so ubiquitous that, even in a movement and subculture promoting humanity and our fight against corporations and their ruinous effects, it's okay that the major fundamental building blocks of the IndieWeb use the likes of a chatbot built by the corporation Anthropic? Do we just let the developers and programmers we rely on use the technology? Or do we just abandon uppercase IndieWeb altogether? Do we strip our websites of the specs and formatting and just simply wash our hands of the project that's been built for over a decade and a half? Obviously, I don't think there's an easy answer. I don't even know what I personally am going to do, here. I don't think I can overstate how vital and influential Parecki's technical contributions have been to the IndieWeb, regardless of his recent genAI usage. I am not writing this out of judgment or anger, but rather to just bring awareness to the situation, so people can make an informed choice for themselves. That's all I ever try to do. Somebody I look up to and who's been handcrafting his own (impressive) code for years has told me that he feels fatigued by having to feel angry all the time at genAI at this point. And I can sympathize deeply with how demoralizing it must feel, and that there is obvious burnout in trying to be proactive and vocal about this when there's a never-ending torrent of chatbots and genAI in our face every single day. I'd really love to know the thoughts of other people (yes, you reading) on this, I think it'll help me get a clearer picture. Maybe it will for you, too.

Four days ago marked 157 years since nineteen unarmed Métis riders, led by Louis Riel, confronted a Canadian government survey crew south of the Forks and compelled it to withdraw. The crew had been running a base line across Métis river lots for a township north of Ste. Anne. Nobody fired a shot. No weapons were seen. According to the surveyor's own memorandum, the riders stopped the work "by standing on the chain." The riders put their boots down on a length of metal meant to ensure the land was measured properly into squares. They refused to move. A boot on a chain. It was the first public act of the Red River Resistance, and it led, less than a year later, to the creation of the province I was born in. In 1836, the Red River Settlement had been surveyed according to the river lot system. The long, narrow strips inherited from seigneurial Québec, three kilometres deep. Every family had frontage on the water. Fish, transportation, drinking water. Then, a wood lot. Then, the hay of the open prairie behind it. The land was organized around the river. And when Ottawa's surveyors arrived with a square township, the grid did not respect the water. In 2019, volunteers with Heritage Saint-Norbert went through Manitoba Archives microfilm by hand and transcribed who lived on which St. Norbert lot between 1869 and 1875. On Lot 130 is Antoine Pilon, who got his land from the Hudson's Bay Company around 1850 and died in the spring of 1869. Elsewhere, under a list of the Pilon children, between Emile of Duck Lake and Angelique who married Joseph Normand, is a single line: > Marie - Rat River Settlement - Wife of Alexis lamirand I've written those names before, as genealogy and as ceremony. These are my people, transcribed from land records, lives measured out in changes and frontage along the Red. I come from the river. ## _Ko au te Awa_ : A Timeline Let's take a look at legislation on the other side of the world. In March 2017, New Zealand passed the Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act. Section 14 states: > Te Awa Tupua is a legal person and has all the rights, powers, duties, and liabilities of a legal person. The river is alive, the river is a person. The Whanganui _iwi_ fought for recognition of their river as an ancestor for 140 years. The Crown's Treaty minister called it the longest-running litigation in New Zealand's history. Gerrard Albert, the lead negotiator for the _iwi_ , said they "fought to find an approximation in law so that all others can understand that from our perspective treating the river as a living entity is the correct way to approach it, as an indivisible whole, instead of the traditional model for the last 100 years of treating it from a perspective of ownership and management." The Act holds the river's intrinsic values, _Tupua te Kawa_ : > Ko au te Awa, ko te Awa ko au: I am the River and the River is me. Ngā manga iti, ngā manga nui e honohono kau ana, ka tupu hei Awa Tupua: the small and large streams that flow into one another form one River. It's one example of many. Three years earlier, Te Urewera, the Tūhoe homeland and a former national park, was also declared a legal entity. In November 2016, Colombia's Constitutional Court recognized the Atrato River, its basin, and its tributaries as an entity subject to rights after Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities of the Chocó brought a case against illegal mining pouring mercury into the water. In March 2017, the Uttarakhand High Court declared the Ganga and the Yamuna living entities. By July, the Supreme Court of India had stayed the order. In 2019, the Yurok Tribal Council passed a resolution declaring that the Klamath River "possesses inherent rights to exist, flourish, and naturally evolve," later codified as the Rights of the Heyhl-keek 'We-roy Ordinance. In 2024, after a tribally-led campaign lasting decades, four dams came down in the largest river restoration project in American history. That year, biologists in Oregon identified the first Chinook salmon to return to the Klamath Basin since 1912. Returning here, in February 2021, the Innu Council of Ekuanitshit and the regional municipality of Minganie adopted parallel resolutions granting the Magpie River nine legal rights, the first such case in Canada. The Innu call it Mutehekau Shipu, "the river where the water passes between square rocky cliffs." Hydro-Québec blocked protection for years. The first right on the list is _le droit de vivre, d'exister et de couler_. The right to live, to exist, and to flow. That August, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe filed suit in tribal court against the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources over a permit letting Enbridge divert nearly five billion gallons of water for its Line 3 pipeline. The first named plaintiff was Manoomin. Wild rice. "The food that grows on water." Reuters called it novel. What's the precedent, here? Well, back in 1972, law professor Christopher Stone published an article titled "Should Trees Have Standing?" Its introduction is subtitled "The Unthinkable." He writes: "I am quite seriously proposing that we give legal rights to forests, oceans, rivers and other so-called 'natural objects' in the environment." Unthinkable to whom? It seems there are people who are more accepting of the idea that a corporation can be a person than a river. In 2020, a federal court struck the Lake Erie Bill of Rights in Ohio. And Florida slipped a clause into its Clean Waterways Act declaring that a local government "may not recognize or grant any legal rights to a plant, an animal, a body of water, or any other part of the natural environment." Orange County voters approved rights for the Wekiva and Econlockhatchee rivers anyway, though a judge later struck the amendment down. And when we say the river is a person, it is only within the legal threshold of the word. In a 2018 article in the Journal of Environmental Law, Katherine Sanders of the University of Auckland argued that a primary purpose of these grants is to regulate human relationships of who has authority, who is entitled to act on behalf of the land and the river. I'm here to really, actually speak of the river's personhood. ## A Bay Is a Noun Only If Water Is Dead Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer tells a story in "Learning the Grammar of Animacy" about nearly giving up on her ancestral language. Only 30% of English words are verbs. In Potawatomi, it's 70%. She's flipping through a dictionary, frustrated, finding verbs for things that should obviously be nouns. To be a hill. To be red. To be a long sandy stretch of beach. And then: _wiikwegamaa_. To be a bay. > A bay is a noun only if water is dead. When bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. But the verb wiikwegamaa—to be a bay—releases the water from bondage and lets it live. A liquid has a definite volume but no definite shape. It "takes a shape dictated by its container." The vessel, such as a cup, decides. Or maybe the riverbed, or pipeline. In zero gravity, with no container at all, a liquid pulls itself into a sphere. Freed from every vessel, water makes itself into a world. Over half of an adult human body is water. Your lungs are 83% water. I've written before about the sixty thousand miles of river inside you. Up to half of the water on Earth is likely older than the Sun, formed as ice in the cold molecular cloud our solar system was born from. The water inside you has been ice between stars. Glacier, cloud, the Bow, the Red, the inside of countless living beings for millions of years. The shape of everything. ## The Fluid of Water and Identity: _Niizh Manidoowag_ In 1990, at the Third Annual Intertribal Native American, First Nations, Gay and Lesbian Conference held in Winnipeg, the activist Albert McLeod proposed a term to replace _berdache_ , the slur missionaries and anthropologists had been using for centuries. Fisher River Cree Elder Myra Laramee came up with Two-Spirit. An Anishinaabemowin translation, _niizh manidoowag_ , was constructed to honour the people whose territory they were gathered on.. > I would like for our people to understand that Two-Spirit came to us in a dream for our people and community, and I was merely the vessel. I did not coin this term, word, or phrase, it came from the Creator or the Great Mystery… When Two-Spirit is used, it invokes our sacredness and reminds us that we have always been here, and we will always be here. As a result, with Two-Spirit comes a great responsibility, to those who use it, as we walk and work in a sacred way with and for our people. > ― Myra Laramee, via the CBRC's Two-Spirit Terminology Guide The vessel. This was only six years before I was born, in my hometown built where two rivers meet. It's one word of many. The University of Winnipeg Archives lists six in Cree. _Ayahkwêw_ : a man who dresses, lives, or is accepted as a woman. _Înahpîkasoht_ : a woman who dresses, lives, or is accepted as a man. _Iskwêhkân_ : one who acts or lives as a woman. _Napêhkân_ : one who acts or lives as a man. These are words about living. About acting. Being accepted. A practice in relation to a community, not a box ticked on a form. In September 1513, Vasco Núñez de Balboa and his men crossed the isthmus of Panama into the territory of Quarequa, killing hundreds. In the cacique's village, they found around forty people "dressed as women," and Balboa brutally and mercilessly set his dogs on them. The Spanish had a verb for this: _aperrear_. Historian Jonathan Goldberg called it merely "an originary moment in the history of the making of America." And still, they survived. In 1886, We'wha, a Zuni _lhamana_ , a weaver and potter and ceremonial leader, spent six months in Washington, demonstrating Zuni weaving at the Smithsonian, and on June 24th, shook the hand of President Grover Cleveland. Washington society believed We'wha was a woman, a "Zuni princess." As PBS put it, We'wha "never indicated otherwise." In 2018, Joshua Whitehead, Oji-nêhiyaw from Peguis First Nation, was shortlisted for a Lambda Literary Award in the Trans Poetry category for _full-metal indigiqueer_. He withdrew. In his letter to the award organizers, he wrote: > I think of myself like I think of my home, manitowapow, the strait that isn't straight, fluid as the water, as vicious as the rapids on my reservation, as vivacious as a pickerel scale. Fluid and vicious, no different than the running waters of the river. Later, "Two-Spirit is a home-calling, it is a home-coming." Manitowapow. The name of my home province most likely comes from the Cree _manito-wapow_ or Ojibwe _manito-bah_ , "strait of the spirit," a reference to the sound of the water along the narrows of Lake Manitoba. Manitoba is named for a noise water makes against the shore. A province named after a voice. Billy-Ray Belcourt, from Driftpile Cree Nation here in Alberta, writes in _This Wound is a World_: > the cree word for a body like mine is weesageechak. the old ones know of this kind of shape-shifting: sometimes i sweat and sweat until my bones puddle on the carpet in my living room and i am like the water that comes before new life. ## The Island and Stolen Water Colonialism is, among other things, a theory of containers. The square township, the reserve boundary. The two boxes on a census form. Built on the backs of missionaries and their attack dogs. Construction on one of these containers, Winnipeg's aqueduct, began in 1914. To build the intake at Shoal Lake, more than 1,200 hectares of Shoal Lake 40 First Nation's land were expropriated—a term for property a government has legally taken from its owner, typically without their consent—including a burial ground that was excavated. The band was given only $2,000 and moved to a peninsula. Then, the peninsula was cut off from the mainland by a diversion canal, creating an artificial island. The aqueduct itself was also built over an old burial ground, to pour saltwater on the wound. For a century, Shoal Lake water flowed 135 kilometres west to the city, where it was treated into some of the best drinking water in the world. Shoal Lake 40, meanwhile, sitting on that same water, declared a boil water advisory in 1997. The advisory lasted for twenty-four fucking years. The International Joint Commission was also told that the loss of a land connection directly led to the deaths of nine community members who fell through the ice trying to cross. The community built its own road, Freedom Road, finished in 2019. Two years later, on September 15th, 2021, a new treatment plant opened and the advisories were finally lifted. The plant's operator, Anthony Green, told CBC: > It's rough not being able to drink our own water, and knowing that hundreds of thousands of people are drinking our water without a care. As of September 10th, 2026, there are still 38 long-term drinking water advisories in effect in 36 First Nations communities. ## Straightening Out Ten years ago, Chelsea Vowel, a Métis writer and educator, wrote about territorial acknowledgements, and in her 2024 revision, she writes that acknowledgements can be transformative acts "as long as these acknowledgments discomfit both those speaking and hearing the words. The fact of Indigenous presence should force non-Indigenous peoples to confront their own place on these lands." Article 25 of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples affirms our right "to maintain and strengthen their distinctive spiritual relationship with their traditionally owned or otherwise occupied and used lands, territories, waters and coastal seas and other resources and to uphold their responsibilities to future generations in this regard." Aimée Craft, an Anishinaabe-Métis lawyer, explains through _nibi_ , water, how "for some reason as humans we sometimes think that water is this resource—it's either going to give us power through hydroelectric generation or it's going to sustain us by being clean for us to drink, and we think of it as really fragmented resources." Fragmented. Parcelled. Contained. Both us, in whole, and our land must be sovereign. Not just the river, not just the body, but the relationship between them. You cannot free one and keep the other dammed and depleted. In his 2013 TED talk, George Monbiot describes rewilding as "the mass restoration of ecosystems," and "the rewilding of human life." We must elevate our understanding of the land and the place we inhabit. For we are always somewhere. In _God Is Red_, Vine Deloria Jr. made a distinction between religions oriented in time and those oriented in space. For the latter, the meaning of the sacred "is tied to specific places, not to the eternal or the historical." Not when you are. Where you are. We are always in nature. We are never separate from nature. No amount of concrete or walls stops us from being where wild creatures and life and ecosystems and weather patterns exist. In 1989, a pair of peregrine falcons fledged four young from a nest box on the Delta Winnipeg Hotel, now the Radisson, downtown. It was the first documented wild nesting in Manitoba in more than fifty years. A peregrine doesn't care that it's a hotel. A ledge is a cliff. Menno Schilthuizen, a Dutch evolutionary biologist, documents city birds evolving to sing at a higher pitch over traffic, and white-footed mice in Central Park are adapting to the fatty food New Yorkers drop. The wild is always here. Water is no different. Toni Morrison, in "The Site of Memory," wrote about how they straightened out the Mississippi in places, to make room for houses: > Occasionally the river floods these places. "Floods" is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Still, like water, she wrote, "I remember where I was before I was 'straightened out.'" ## Standing on the Chain Josephine Mandamin was Anishinaabe, from Wiikwemikoong, and was a residential school survivor. She decided in 2003 to begin walking the shorelines of all five Great Lakes, more than 17,000 kilometres over fourteen years, carrying a pail of water. She was known as Grandmother Water Walker. _Biidaasige-ba_ , meaning the one who comes with the light. She was a body carrying water, which is itself a body of water, walking the edge of a body of water, so that it would be remembered as being alive. The nineteen riders in the October snow didn't have any court that would recognize the river lot. The riders didn't yet have a word for what they were protecting that Ottawa would accept. The riders only had their boots and metal chain on the ground. Refusal is stewardship. To stand on the land where others are trying to draw out the lines. We will always be mostly fluid. Difficult to define, if not impossible. We will take the shape of the containers we're placed in, but the container doesn't define us. Our sovereignty can be found in the wild nature we are always surrounded by and our personhood is no different than the running, vicious waters of the river. We will always be mostly water. Water older than the Sun. Water that has been a river and will one day be a river again. The water within me was shimmering glacier and the warm breath of my ancestors on the Red. The water remembers where it was before it was straightened out. I am the river, and the river is me. Small streams and large streams flow into one another until a river is born. My great grandmothers' frontage on the Red. Shoal Lake in a Winnipeg glass. The Bow pressing against its banks, remembering. Every body that has ever refused the shape it was handed. We are always somewhere.

Yesterday, I wrote a diary entry on Dreamwidth cataloguing the computers I own after my 2015 MacBook Pro died due to a swollen battery I couldn't afford to repair. While this was meant to be a simple inventory, writing it made me pause and realize that I really have so much, and that I've been under-utilizing both my time and what I own. And I think most of us underestimate what we can do, starting right now, with the things we already have. We tell ourselves that we need the better tool, the right season when we have more time, the gear acquisition syndrome scratch that never gets fully itched. Meanwhile, everything needed for a creative, contemplative, useful life could already be sitting in your house. I also shared a new little note on my homepage asking people to share things with me that they made (with their human hands) that I could write about. I've already gotten a number of responses, and I think there's a nice unintentional throughline. ## Make Things! To start, Maya Zimmerman shared the various games, visual flash fiction, music, and font she made on itch.io, and I get so inspired by devs like that. I think a great gateway into game development is by creating interactive fiction, poetry, and prose. There are a lot of free tools available for this: * Twine for browser-based hypertext stories * Ink and its editor Inky for branching prose * Inform 7 for parser IF, written in a programming language that reads like English sentences * Decker, a HyperCard-like tool for 1-bit creations * Bitsy for tiny narrative games * Ren'Py for visual novels, where you can use public domain images or your own digital art. And from there, you can get into full-on game development: * Godot (free, open source): go through the "Your first 2D game" tutorial, use Pixel Studio for the art (free on mobile). * TIC-80 (free edition): a 240×136 fantasy console with code, sprites, and music all in one tool. * GB Studio (free): drag-and-drop Game Boy games that compile to ROMs that are shareable as itch.io web builds. * devkitARM + Tonc (free): GBA homebrew in C, tested in mGBA. I've tried to branch out creatively a little myself. I've started a small digital art sketching habit, which isn't hard to get into if you already own a tablet. You don't need the expensive, brand-name stylus or well-known paper-like protector. The ones I got were affordable: an ESR paper-feel screen protector and a Metapen A8. And the same goes for software—there's no need to pay the ridiculous subscription fee for Photoshop (especially now). Speaking of genAI, Stuart shared with me two interesting websites. NoAIlist.org catalogues over 300 projects that are explicit about not having any generative AI work. The second is ScienceFind.org, which is a "tool that suggests science wikipedia.org articles for learning/studying. Learn something new every day!" Isn't that lovely? While I'm on my soapbox, I'd love to recommend Lyon's idea to add a **/carless** page to the slash pages of your site. ## Our Incredible Journey Next, my friend and 11ty expert Adam asked me about what's happening with Deno and Bun. Deno being bought by Cloudflare—a company I already would advise you to stay away from as best you can. For those unaware, Deno is a fast, open-source runtime for JavaScript, TypeScript, and WebAssembly. Unsurprisingly, CF is killing the Deno runtime immediately after the purchase was announced: > We will support the Deno runtime for another year with monthly releases containing bug fixes and security updates. After that year we will end our development of the Deno runtime. Deno will remain open source, and we welcome others who want to continue its development. Bun is an all-in-one JavaScript and TypeScript runtime, package manager, bundler, and test runner powered by the Apple JavaScriptCore engine. It was acquired by Anthropic, the creators of the LLM chatbot Claude, back in December. Only a few days ago the headline appeared "Claude Rewrites Bun's Million Lines of Code in 11 Days for $165,000", which is an anti-pattern you should avoid (not brag about)—and that I've already written about. What I'll say about this is that there is no tool, product, or service (open source or otherwise) that is safe from the hands of a corporation willing to buy and destroy it. The Tumblr blog Our Incredible Journey has an extensive archive of acquisitions turning into shutdowns for many years now. One of the reasons I'm a JAMstack developer that doesn't use JS frameworks is because there is no company that can buy HTML or CSS or vanilla JavaScript. When you get to the bare fundamentals of development, and you focus on those, not only are you avoiding undue bloat, you're also ensuring the longevity and robustness of your web development. ## Other Cool Things There are so many people still making cool things with their own two hands and wrinkly pink brains. Eltrac shared with me his project of "a new Webmention receiver in Clojure (a beautiful Lisp dialect)." He was compelled to make this, as the original Webmention.io by Aaronpk is being rewritten from Ruby to PHP using Claude Code. As Eltrac wrote—and I agree—that seems to be "solving one problem with another." Regardless, Eltrac is also looking for people in the IndieWeb who are into functional programming languages like Clojure (which has a no genAI policy). I myself dabbled in Haskell before, but it's really something I need to get back into! Eltrac is also helping out ch0ccyra1n with development of Golda, a "fork of Hugo (the static site generator) with LLM-generated code stripped off" which I think is a great initiative! Finally, there were a few other things that weren't messaged to me directly that I am excited about, and that I'm going to share nonetheless! The first is ApricotBB by Brindly, which is his take on modernizing forum software. I participate in several forums regularly myself, and I have to say this already looks seriously awesome. I will probably get a forum of my own going just to use it once it's released! Next, I want to share a blog post by Hakkerman (who I wrote about previously in regards to coffee and mutual aid), about how to support small Bubblers. Bubblers here meaning people who participate on Bubbles.town, an aggregator I've written about previously. I think the advice in general is good: invest more time in smaller creators! Look for small view counts and upvotes. Hakkerman rightly calls me out for being on the front page all the damn time, but I'm heartbroken he doesn't think I'm quirky or eclectic. It was a real wake-up call that I need to recalibrate myself and write more weird shit! ## A Tiny Atlas of Free Things Finally, here's a bonus atlas of free things if you'd like to add something to your bookmarks folder! * **Listening:** Radio Garden (a spinning globe of every live station on Earth!), NTS, BBC World Service, plus whatever your national public broadcaster and campus/community stations are—for me, that's CBC Listen, CKUA, CJSW 90.9, and ICI Radio-Canada. Your local public library probably has Freegal, Libby, or hoopla. Plus LibriVox audiobooks (recorded by human voices only!), and field recordings on Freesound and radio aporee ::: maps. * **Podcasts:** BBC In Our Time, CBC Ideas, CBC Unreserved, The Documentary Podcast, Philosophize This!, The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, and author talks via the Library Speakers Consortium. * **Reading:** Project Gutenberg (plus Gutenberg Canada, Project Gutenberg Australia, and Canadiana), Wikisource, the Internet Archive, Open Library, Standard Ebooks, Library and Archives Canada. For zine culture, the Queer Zine Archive Project, ZineWiki, and Broken Pencil. * **Watching:** Kanopy and Qello Concerts (free with many library cards), the NFB, CBC Gem, TVO Docs, DW Documentaries, Al Jazeera Documentary, NHK World, Thought Maybe, and the Internet Archive's film collection. * **Learning:** Open Yale, MIT OCW, freeCodeCamp, The Odin Project, my own LearnWebDev.fyi, OpenLearn, Saylor, LinkedIn Learning (free with many library cards), and the catalogue-of-catalogues Class Central. * For practice: Exercism, Project Euler, Advent of Code, and OverTheWire's wargames. * **Languages:** Anki, Clozemaster, Language Transfer, Mauril (Canada-only), RFI's _Journal en français facile_, ICI TOU.TV, and TV5MONDE. For sign languages: Lifeprint, SignBSL, and Spread the Sign. * **Making:** * **Art:** Krita, MediBang Paint, FireAlpaca, GIMP, and Inkscape; instruction from Drawabox and Ctrl+Paint; timed references from Line of Action and Quickposes; daily prompts from Inktober. * **Music:** musictheory.net, JustinGuitar, Ableton's Learning Music and Learning Synths, Chrome Music Lab, and for recording, Audacity, LMMS, or GarageBand on anything Apple. * **Games & IF:** itch.io and its jams, the IFDB, the Interactive Fiction Community Forum, the IFComp, and year-round jams like the Global Game Jam, 7DRL, Ludum Dare, GMTK, and js13kGames. * **Zines & paper:** this one-sheet folding guide, Dirty Little Zine, the tildeverse zine, Austin Kleon's blackout poetry, origami.me diagrams, and Canon's Creative Park. * **Photography:** Fuji X Weekly film-simulation recipes and Snapseed for editing. * **Repair:** iFixit guides and Repair Café events. * **Outside:** * **Citizen science:** iNaturalist, eBird, Merlin, Pl@ntNet, Zooniverse, SciStarter, and Globe at Night. * **Phenology & fungi:** most countries have a phenology network, like Alberta PlantWatch, USA-NPN's Nature's Notebook, or the Woodland Trust's Nature's Calendar; a regional mycological society like the Alberta Mycological Society (or NAMA's member clubs), and NAMA's spore-print how-to. * **Birding:** xeno-canto, Birds of the World (free via many libraries), BirdLife International partners, and free field trips from your local naturalist club (mine are Nature Calgary's at the Inglewood Bird Sanctuary). * **Sky:** Stellarium, Heavens-Above, the WMO International Cloud Atlas, AuroraWatch (Canada), and the interactive light-pollution map. * **Walks & maps:** Geocaching, plogging logged with Litterati, OpenStreetMap via StreetComplete, Every Door, or Organic Maps, Mapillary, Jane's Walk, and the sit-spot practice. * **Contributing to the Commons:** become a Wikipedian via the interactive tour or the Wikipedia Adventure, then help with Citation Hunt, the Typo Team, a WikiProject, the Community Portal, and the Teahouse. Beyond that: Wikimedia Commons (Wiki Loves Monuments runs every September), Distributed Proofreaders (Canada) for Project Gutenberg, translating free software on Hosted Weblate (11ty, Lagrange, WriteFreely, and Halloy are on there), narrating for LibriVox, and transcribing for the Library of Congress's By the People and the Smithsonian Transcription Center. * **Spritiuality:** the Examen, lectio divina with Pray As You Go or Lectio 365 (good passage sources: the First Nations Version, the Psalms, Rilke, Mary Oliver), Death Cafés, meditation with the Plum Village App or UCLA Mindful. * **Métis and Indigenous Heritage:** michif.org (Southern Michif course), Rupertsland Institute (Northern Michif), the Virtual Museum of Métis History and Culture, speakmichif.ca, and Library and Archives Canada.

A classic forum with a happy little modern touch

Yesterday, I got an email from Jesse Lebron of Storible letting me know that over a third of all data centres and projected new hyperscale sites are "in high or extremely high water-stress areas." Arizona alone has 57 data centres in extremely water-stressed areas. If you're a regular reader of mine, you know that I've written extensively about the ongoing harms of generative AI. And I've been talking to quite a few people who also share a negative personal view of genAI, but have told me that they're essentially forced to use it at their job or they'll be fired—that they are specifically tracked to ensure they meet a genAI quota. The CEO of Coinbase went on record saying any employee that didn't adopt AI tools was fired. Let me give you a real-world example of this. Kim Crawley is a cybersecurity researcher whose work has been published by O'Reilly Media. She lost her livelihood because as a former OPIT professor, she refused to subject her MSc students to Gen AI. She is now running a Kickstarter for her next book, "_Recovering After Gen AI_ ," which I encourage you to check out. But this isn't limited to generative AI. Civil and constitutional rights group Palestine Legal reported that between October and December 2023, it received 383 reports involving employment concerns, including 124 people who had already been fired, and described the wave of workplace repression as the most severe in the country since the Vietnam War. In the same year, the Council on American-Islamic Relations received 1,201 employment discrimination complaints related to Islamophobia, a 113 percent increase over 2022. In April 2024, Google fired more than 50 workers after sit-in protests over Project Nimbus, its $1.2 billion cloud computing contract with the Israeli government. Google said that everyone it fired was personally involved in disrupting its offices, while the workers' group said some were bystanders who did not take part, including a fired Palestinian-American employee. That same month, nearly 300 current and former Apple employees signed an open letter accusing the company of punishing workers for wearing items like keffiyehs, and one former employee said she was fired from an Apple Store in Chicago for wearing one. In June 2025, hundreds of Environmental Protection Agency employees signed a "Declaration of Dissent" criticizing the Trump administration's treatment of the agency's science and staff. About 140 of them were put on administrative leave, and in August the agency fired at least eight. The agency's own top ethics official reportedly concluded that signing the letter on personal time was no ethics concern and a protected exercise of the First Amendment. Employees at other agencies, including FEMA, signed similar letters of their own and were put on leave. In July 2025, Mount Sinai Hospital in New York fired a social worker named Raizen after an anonymous complaint about a "Gaza Must Live" postcard in her office, which she said only her coworkers could see. More than 350 colleagues, patients, and other health care workers signed a petition protesting the firing. How alarming is this to you? So many people are given the choice to either go against their own personal values and ethics, or to maintain them and lose their livelihood. I don't blame people who comply—these are people who have families, with children who depend on them, who have their healthcare (and therefore, their lives) tied to their current position. We are forced to compartmentalize, forced to go along with whatever is chosen for us. For some people, though, the option to ignore what's going on and bury their head in the sand is an intentional choice they make. I have seen people in the industry—white men—who have more authority, or a platform themselves, and have the opportunity to take a stance and stand with far fewer consequences for themselves. And they do nothing. I'll paraphrase a well-known quote and say that the harms proliferated throughout our world are far less due to a very small number of malicious people, but rather are due to the _many_ good people who choose to do nothing and not act. The winds of change are not carrying compassion and virtue. Liberal democracy continues to backslide, the four-week war with Iran is entering its seventh month, and the Pentagon is planning to livestream an execution. You may be one of the people who has a comfortable status quo that has still not been shaken, and you may feel as though there is a level of misery or pearl-clutching when it comes to being vocal and taking a stand or being _political_ at all. But let me tell you that I am vocal because I have a deep love for people and an undying relentless optimism that we can improve and do better. Thirty years on this planet witnessing cruelty has not been able to shake that, nor deter me in the slightest. Caring about things and giving a fuck is not complaining, it is not being an insufferable keyboard warrior. It is the only act that will preserve what good we have and is the only chance we have of restoring the good we have already lost. I will never apologize for being annoying in how often I speak up about difficult things. > “**Love has never been a popular movement.** And no one's ever wanted, really, to be free. The world is held together, really it is held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people. Otherwise, of course, you can despair. Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you. What you've got to remember is what you're looking at is also you. Everyone you're looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide, in yourself, not to be.” ― James Baldwin But it does not only have to be a very few people who choose to make personal sacrifice. I am not asking anyone to risk their family's healthcare to make a point. I am asking, though, for people who have the luxury to afford taking a stance to go first. Do you have a platform? A secure position and savings and a union? Skills that are easy to sell elsewhere? Then you have the least to lose by speaking up. Do the little things. Sign the petition when a coworker is fired over a postcard, as 350 people did at Mount Sinai. Take the time and effort needed to join or organize a union, as workers can be fired for political speech if they're not in one. Put money toward people who lost income for refusing to compromise, like Kim Crawley's Kickstarter. Say the true thing when it is awkward and unpopular to do so. Say it again the next week. What you've fallen for is the idea that someone else will handle it, that it is not your place, and that staying quiet is the same as staying neutral. It is not. I would rather be annoying and sometimes wrong than comfortable and silent while the people around me continue to unjustly pay for it. I do not know how much longer we have to wait for someone else to do the hard work. All we have is each other.

Earlier today, I announced that I'm putting a fair number of folk.zone services on hiatus. There were a few reasons for this. Primarily, it is due to a lack of capability to responsibly moderate and manage so many different services. Around two months ago I checked and found that the WriteFreely instance I set up had over 500 spam users and posts. Even worse than that, though, is that when I tried to deal with it, I embarrassingly ran a database query that removed not only the spam accounts, but the legitimate ones too. There were only a small handful, and they had their writing saved elsewhere, but it is still incompetent of me to run a destructive command like that as a sysadmin. Thankfully, I've been a lot more careful and enacted much better practices with fanfiction.lol, where there are over 300 users, and I can at least take solace in that. The idea for folk.zone is rather simple, in theory. It isn't hard to follow a couple tutorials and, if you're lucky with your ISP, port forward a couple of Docker containers from a spare computer and _bam!_ You're suddenly providing important services to people independently. And I'm still doing that! There are many parts of folk.zone remaining online, including IRC, WriteFreely, the wiki, RSS, Etherpad, PrivateBin, Linkding, Kutt, and Opengist. But the services that are more social, such as Mastodon or Lemmy or Pixelfed, require far more supervision and care. Not only to guard against bad actors and spammers, but to foster a good community ethos in general. That sort of thing isn't inherent, you have to proactively cultivate it in order for it to be maintained. Beyond that, since I'm not using a VPS and instead running the servers directly, I have a legal responsibility for whatever is posted. There isn't any Section 230 in Canada. ## Bill C-22 In fact, there's a rather worrying bill in Canada, Bill C-22, that may be passed. Toronto-based VPN provider Psiphon is planning to leave the country if it does. > "The lawful-access bill, known as Bill C-22, would require telecoms, internet companies and other electronic service providers to make changes to their systems to give surveillance and monitoring capabilities to police services and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service." The services that companies like Psiphon offer are fundamentally important, "in February, during a crackdown by Tehran against protestors, it had 21 million users in Iran" and they have "3.5 million users a month in Myanmar, formally [sic] Burma, where the military junta has used internet blackouts to cut off communication channels." When we talk about free speech, these are the people we need to keep in mind. Those who are marginalized and oppressed by violent authoritarian regimes and need our help and support to get the truth out. _Not_ libertarian techbros who already have a comfortable, privileged platform indefinitely. As The Citizen Lab wrote on Bill C-22: > The bill’s sweeping scope, significant constitutional and human rights risks, transparency and accountability deficits, and dangers to encryption and Canada’s cybersecurity. We recommend entirely withdrawing several elements of the bill and suggest amendments to mitigate harms. ## Talk Less, Smile More Beyond sysadmin work, I have also been thinking about my writing and publishing in general. I ran an impromptu poll on Mastodon and found that, while I have many wonderful readers, they only read a fraction of what I put out. This makes sense, and after nearly a year of posting on a daily basis I am also going to be pulling back here. Somebody could look at my blog and think this rate is never-ending, but it certainly is finite. I will most likely transition to posting once or twice a week. One man can only have so many opinions, after all. I would give the advice to read through my archive, but to be honest I'm a little embarrassed by it—and I think that's a good thing! I think I've grown as both a writer and editor, and as such my writing from 2025 does not feel up to par now. That said, I'm not going to be removing anything. I've always thought that it's important to allow your past self to exist freely and not try to sweep it under the rug. Regardless, though, perhaps I'm in for a wintering. It's funny, all the complexity of my life is completely arbitrary and caused solely by me. It is easy for me to get caught up in ambitious, idealistic plans that scope-creep and become unrealistic for a single person. But it is also easy for me to wind down and simplify, because I have full autonomy over what I do. 2027 is only a few months away, and I want to have a blank slate once again. I want to practice a beginner's mind and assume nothing. Start from the basics and fundamentals once again. ## On Axe Sharpening There is a saying, attributed to Lincoln (incorrectly), that if you have six hours to cut down a tree, the best practice is to spend the first four sharpening your axe. This stands in contradiction to my idea of the inertia effect, where I argue that pre-optimization and planning typically stop you from actually doing the damn thing. But you can do both. You can show your work, have the process of the axe-sharpening be public, rather than endlessly waiting in private for the non-existent perfect time to finally begin. One small way I'm doing this is with an Indigenous sci-fi story I'm writing on Cosmic Voyage. Just a little bit contributed to a longform story, day after day. And I encourage anybody to do the same! Start a new hobby and log your progress in public. It holds you accountable, puts you in the community, and you'll have a tangible archive you can look back on. You can prepare and focus carefully while still doing. I don't believe these are mutually exclusive. And if you do so with your heart and good intentions, you'll already be so far ahead. > “Sucking at something is the first step to being sorta good at something.” > ― Jake the Dog ## On Blocking People I'm going to end this post with a bit of a hot take related to being an admin and leading a community: whenever I find myself feeling like I should block someone, _I reach out and try to talk to them instead._ I never block anybody, and I think I'm far better off for it. Let me try to explain. When I was running Write Club, during our weekly meetings there were often a couple individuals who you could say were bad at reading the room—or who stuttered, or took too long to speak—or were obliviously self-absorbed. And I know that a lot of people felt irritated or annoyed, I won't pretend otherwise. And I'm sure many of them would have simply found an excuse to make these people leave or, more likely, passively changed the time and location of meetings and tell everyone except them. When I graduated and left, I got an email saying this: > "I watched the way you made each and every person feel embraced. I listened as others whispered degrading things about those who came and were different. But you listened to those people with truly open ears, and a warmth that let them feel seen." Now, I don't think I actually did that good of a job, but I certainly did try. It is easy to get annoyed by others on the Internet. For someone that is repeatedly annoying, what are you to do? Sometimes compassion works, sometimes tough love works, and sometimes nothing works. Sometimes they're just like that. And you know what? That's okay. Not everyone can be likeable or socially fluid and to ask them to change is to ask them to mask, or to tone-police them. I've seen moderators of other sites and forums ban people I enjoy for arbitrary reasons, because of the above. I think that's so cruel. And it's also so unproductive. You can't mute and block your coworkers or your roommates or customers. You will deal with annoying people throughout your entire life, and not learning how to see the human and actually deal with them stunts you, and the annoyance only continues to grow and metastasize. I appreciate administrators who try to manage, without removing or ostracizing these individuals. I believe people are inherently good, and if we do not provide a positive social environment and grace towards difficult, annoying people, then they will continue to spiral downward. Increasingly isolated and hurt. Candidly, they'll either end up dead or seriously hurting others. Feeling invisible, or like a freak, is exactly the kind of vulnerable hopelessness that leads people towards lonely isolation and dangerous radicalization. It is a serious and unfair burden to perform the labour required to stop that from happening, but I think it's the responsibility you take up when you start any community.

folk.zone is an IndieWeb commons: free, open-source internet services run on real hardware by one person. Federated social, writing, git, wiki, IRC, and more.

In the fall of 2014, writer Paul Ford was a couple drinks in and reading a 2004 Thanksgiving letter Stevie Nicks posted online, addressed "Dear all Armed Forces Members~" (it's still up, and a great read). Ford was perplexed by all the tildes she sprinkled throughout her writing. His wife Mo, who grew up in California, told him "that's a west coast thing... it's more like handwriting." If you asked me, I'd tell you that a tilde at the end of a sentence in informal online communication is supposed to signify a playful, flirty, cute, or sing-songy tone.~ But a friend online had a different answer: "tildes are only ever properly used in front of usernames on shared hosting." And that answer sent Ford back to the 90s, because back then, homepages existed at URLs like `CyberFox.net/~vixen`. In the essay he wrote about what happened next, he put it like this. > The "**~** " is a little like the "@" on Twitter—a shortcut that says: "Here is a person." **Here is a person.** Back in May I promised an essay on the Tildeverse, when I finished building `writer-cli`, which was a bash tool inspired by the blogging of Tilde.town. And I wrote that the essay was on hold because the Copy Fail kernel vulnerability had forced tilde admins to shut things down. It's October now. The doors are (mostly) open again. I now have seven tilde accounts! Eight, technically, but we'll get to the locked one. This week, I mirrored every single one of my home directories onto my laptop and into a git repository, and wrote a little wiki to go along with it. This essay is what I learned doing that. I also want to remind you that Wikipedia deleted its article on the tildeverse because there was "[n]o coverage available in reliable sources, provided sources are non-independent." Never mind that Hackaday covered it in 2024, or that cosmic.voyage's founder James Tomasino gave an entire talk on the small internet at MCH2022. Consider this my contribution to attempting to legitimize the canon. ## What Is a Tilde, Anyways? On a Unix-like/Linux system, the `~` character is shorthand for your home directory. That's the folder that belongs to you, specifically. When web servers started letting each user publish a folder called public_html, the tilde was visible in the URL and address bar, at `https://example.com/~username`. A tilde became shorthand for the term for a computer shared by strangers. You apply for an account, send the admins an SSH public key, and once you're approved you log in via the terminal. You get a home directory, a homepage at `host/~you`, and sometimes also a gopherhole and Gemini capsule as well. You get a lot with this, actually. Like local mail, IRC chat, a bulletin board, community games, and small programs written by your neighbours for your neighbours. An older term for a shared computer is a pubnix, short for public-access Unix system. Ford's definition is this: > Tilde.club is one cheap, unmodified Unix computer on the Internet. That's it. That's all it is. It is no more than that. If you look for more for it to be you will find nothing. There's no business model, no "community" in scare quotes disguising a growth strategy. It's a box. Strangers log in. Things happen! When I first stumbled upon the tildeverse, I compared it to public access television, and I still think that's right. A tilde is a community media centre with the computer already set up. Nobody gives you notes, you just show up. Ford also wrote that "as a human being reading Medium, you are not expected to worry about, write think-pieces about, or concern yourself with tilde.club." I am a human being who writes on Medium. Whoops. Sorry, Paul. ## A System of Fellowship (Early UNIX) Strangers sharing a computer is not a recent invention by any means. Really, it's why Unix exists at all. In 1969, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and their colleagues at Bell Labs were losing access to Multics, the time-sharing system they'd been working on. In his history of those years, _The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System_, Ritchie explains what they were actually trying to save: > What we wanted to preserve was not just a good environment in which to do programming, but a system around which a fellowship could form. We knew from experience that the essence of communal computing, as supplied by remote-access, time-shared machines, is not just to type programs into a terminal instead of a keypunch, but to encourage close communication. A fellowship! Not a faster compiler. This is why even the earliest Unix systems shipped with the social commands of who, write, and mail, and why the finger command and its .plan files became the first social media profiles. As researcher (and fellow tilde-dweller) `~cmccabe` writes in his history of public access Unix systems, "at its core, Unix has a social architecture." The first two public systems, M-Net in Ann Arbor and Chinet in Chicago, both opened in 1982. Users dialed in by modem, and because long-distance calls were expensive, everyone on a system tended to live in the same calling area. You might meet someone online and find they only live a few blocks away. By their peak in the early 1990s, the "nixpub" list of public Unix systems circulating on Usenet had well over a hundred entries. `~cmccabe` now maintains the Pubnix History Project to keep track of them all. My favourite story from this era is the founding of Grex. M-Net's owner at the time had a habit of threatening to shut the whole system down, forever, "on 3 hours notice or less" if user donations didn't cover the bills that month. So, a dozen users started meeting weekly for six months to plan an alternative. Founding member Valerie Mates remembers: > A group of a dozen users met weekly for six months, planning a new system, owned by its members and founded on slow, group decisionmaking. We ate lots of pot luck dinners together and planned lots of idealistic ideas about how Grex would work. She also remembers that one of those founders' meetings happened "on the night when the US first bombed Iraq. It was hard to concentrate on issues as mundane as a computer system." Grex opened in 1991 as a member-owned cooperative, and it's still online today. This era is also what gave us the Super Dimension Fortress, which I've written about, and has been running continuously since 1987. Commercial services like AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe brought millions of people online, and cmccabe identifies two consequences for the old pubnixes: online time became less precious (so people became less careful about how they behaved), and a small number of bad actors started abusing open systems for spam and attacks, forcing many to lock down services. Usenet veterans called this period the Eternal September.[1] The World Wide Web adopted the tilde for itself (those `isp.net/~user` homepages were among the first personal webpages), and then it was gone when different services popped up like GeoCities, blogs, and eventually social media. As Ford observed, the servers never went anywhere: > Fast forward 20 years: Your typical "cloud" Unix server, designed in the 1970s to be a very social place, is today a ghost town with one or two factories still clanking in the town square—factories that receive our email, or accept our Instagram photos and store them, and manage our data. But there's no one walking around and chatting downtown. He continues: > So: We collectively took a very social computing platform, papered over its social parts, and used it to build a social computing platform. > Purely for kicks, I decided to turn the social part back on and throw a nerd party. ## A Couple of Drinks and a Thousand Nerds (Tilde.Club) On September 29, 2014, Ford tweeted: "i just registered tilde.club so if anyone wants a shell and public_html (no CGI) lmk." A little later, another: "okay tilde.club is up and i'm going to bed i'll make accounts in the next few days you're all getting doofy passwords." He'd booted up "Amazon's cheapest and weakest fragment of a cloud computer," somewhere in Virginia. The next day, he woke up to a hundred people asking for accounts. Here's a couple excerpts from the welcome email he sent out: > Who am I? I am the system administrator, Paul Ford. Like any system administrator, I will be slow to respond, will get everything wrong, and will act imperiously while never acknowledging wrongdoing. Consider this part of your authentic tilde.club experience! > > * No drama. What constitutes drama? There is a Mary J. Blige song called "No More Drama." If Mary J. Blige would think it was drama, it is drama. > * This is a guilt-free project and total disaster is ALWAYS a possible outcome. > He also wrote that the server was already "a de-facto whitey sausagefest," and asked everyone to "be actively, aggressively cool and sweet." Small, technical, nostalgic spaces frustratingly have a way of becoming clubhouses for a narrow slice of people. Within a few days, Ford had handed out around six hundred accounts, and the server "began to gasp and wheeze." At least a thousand more people were on the waitlist. People sent PayPal donations, and one member, `~danbri`, arranged to have $24 in an envelope slid under the door of Ford's Brooklyn apartment. ("More revenue than most websites I guess?") Volunteer sysadmins showed up. Users built webrings, a page listing who was logged in, a talking cow, and "an atomized version of Enya." The project shifted, as Ford put it, "from 'I' to 'we,' and from 'mine' to 'ours.'" Then reality set in. Writing years later on his tilde.club page, Ford described it as "a fun accident that became an all-consuming month of late-night labor, thousands of emails, a lot of overthinking, and at least one (somewhat joking) offer of acquisition." After that month, he said, "I sent it upstate to live on the shame farm with all the other projects that give me recurring guilt. And kept paying the server bills." In September 2019, tildeverse sysadmin Mike Buchholz offered to take tilde.club over, along with a backlog of more than 10,000 people who'd asked for accounts. tilde.club reopened on September 20th, 2019, with `~deepend` and `~benharri` as its new admins. Ford noted that one of the very first conversations on the new server was about writing a code of conduct. And then he left the community with this: > The lesson I take from tilde.club is that you can, at any time, for very little money and relatively little effort, stand up a tiny digital community that basically belongs to itself. And it's just as valid as any other community. I am certain we need more spaces like this, places where you can experiment and be both dumb and kind in equal measure and people either leave you to it, or help you along. ## A Birthday Present (Tilde.Town) Meanwhile, back in October 2014, `~vilmibm` had been enchanted by tilde.club, gotten an account, but it became full before any of their friends could join. A few days later was their birthday, October 11th. In a retrospective written for the town's third birthday, they describe it: > I spent my birthday mostly alone. It was a nice day. I read in the graveyard, ate doughnuts, drank good coffee. I had wine with my friend at a nice bar. When we got home, I knew exactly what I really wanted for my birthday: a server just like tilde.club where anyone could come that would be as welcoming as possible to everyone. A place so unlike modern social media as to provide a bastion against the shit of the networked world. `~vilmibm` and `~cmr` stayed up all night setting it up, "blasted ultrapop and j-pop and had color changing lights going." The goal, as `~vilmibm` wrote on their town shrine, was to "take the mechanical aspects and general spirit of tilde.club but make a place that was more inclusive of less technical folk and would never have a user limit." The town FAQ describes it as expanding tilde.club's mission "with a more expansive and radical vision." That place became tilde.town. It now runs on a pink server covered in stickers, in a rack in Ottawa, hosted by Colocataires, a tiny "host with friends" company run by two Ottawa locals, one of whom is longtime townie `~insom`. `~vilmibm` published a puppet module, so anyone could start their own tilde. And people did. Today, the tildeverse has thirteen member tildes, each run by its own volunteers, and together they share a surprising amount of infrastructure: the tilde.chat IRC network, a Mastodon instance at tilde.zone, a git forge at tildegit, the cross-tilde BBJ bulletin board, a link aggregator at tilde.news, a zine, a journal, a BookWyrm instance, and (of course) a community radio station at tilderadio.org. ## My Homes Home | What it is | What I do there ---|---|--- tilde.town | the community-first tilde, since 2014 | my feels journal, a plant, a guestbook tilde.pink | a NetBSD tilde with no web server at all | my Gemini capsule tilde.club | the original, since 2014 | a bashblog weblog SDF | the ancestor, since 1987 | hand-written HTML and a Perl guestbook cosmic.voyage | a pubnix built around a sci-fi story | I captain a starship envs.net | a minimalist Debian tilde, since 2019 | mail and chat (mostly) tilde.green | a 2022 tilde for "creativity and wildness" | my newest and still exploring I have an eighth account on tilde.team, but shell access there has been disabled since August, for reasons I'll get into below. Each is a different machine, running different operating systems, defaulting to different shells, and each has their own quirks. I wrote a shell script that pulls my home directories onto my laptop: rsync -az --timeout=60 --delete --exclude-from=sync.excludes brennan@tilde.town:~/ town/ rsync -az --timeout=60 --delete --exclude-from=sync.excludes brennan@tilde.pink:~/ pink/ rsync -az --timeout=60 --delete --exclude-from=sync.excludes brennan@tilde.club:~/ club/ # ...and so on # SDF does not permit rsync, pulls via tar over SSH. ssh sdf.org 'tar czf - -C ~ --exclude=./gopher --exclude=./html .' | tar xzf - -C sdf/ The `--delete` flag means anything removed on the server is removed locally, since the folders are mirrors, not archives. SDF doesn't allow rsync at my membership level, so I stream a tarball over SSH instead. Let me take you on a brief tour of my tildes. ### tilde.town I joined in January of this year, and there was a welcome letter and a little poem: It has come and gone he cut a thick slice from his loaf stopped when his father stopped My home directory has a guestbook.txt file which any other user on the server can write to. The very first signature is from the town's founder: "hi, welcome!!!! `~vilmibm`." The second is from `~fruit`, who said my homepage was "pretty 🌈" and that they loved my "little ascii garden 😃". The third, from `~oxis`, is in toki pona: mi jan Malin. ijo sina li musi a! (Roughly: "I'm Malin. Your thing is so fun!") The town's commands use the launcher command `town`. There's `town feels` for journaling, `town bbj` for the forum, `town graffiti` for a communal web page anyone can edit, `town poem` and `town nicethings` for little daily texts, `town chess`, `town tron`, and an alarming number of other games. My favourite thing is the feels engine, ttbp, written by `~endorphant`. Its README describes it as "a little bit like livejournal or dreamwidth or tumblr," explaining why I fell so hard for Dreamwidth a few months later. You type `feels`, your editor opens to a plain text file for today's date, and when you save and quit, your entry shows up in the global feed for everyone on the server. In my very first entry, I wrote: > This feels private and personal, but yet does have public access if you know how and where to look. The tildeverse wiki page for tilde.town is a "shrub" rather than a stub, and contains such vital facts as "On tilde.town, everyone is a jellyfish," and "If tilde.town were a plant, it would be a tree eating a bicycle that was tied up to it twenty years ago." I have nothing to add. ### tilde.pink tilde.pink runs NetBSD, and is the only tilde with no `public_html` folder. It's a "web free tilde," serving only gopher and Gemini. The default shell is `csh`. Packages live in `/usr/pkg/bin` and it's been fun learning BSD with it. My capsule at `gemini://tilde.pink/~brennan/` has my Gemini guides, my gemlog, Gemini-only poetry, shelf pages for books and films and music, and a `.finger` card. Its emoji favicon (yes, that's a thing in Gemini) is 🔆. If you've read my guide to blogging on Gemini, this capsule is where it was born. ### tilde.club The original! Today, it runs Fedora, which is why my home directory there was 106 megabytes, nearly all of it a package cache. My weblog on club runs on bashblog, a blog engine that is a single bash script. My first and so-far-only post there reads, in part, "Let's see if I keep this updated! I have so many blogs now, hehe." (I have not kept it updated.) ### SDF SDF isn't a member of the tildeverse, it's an ancestor. My login is `bren`, and my files don't live in my home directory, but in paths elsewhere on the system that my home directory symlinks to. I've written a love letter to SDF, including how I built a flat-file Perl CGI guestbook there, so I'll just add one thing: in that third-birthday retrospective, `~vilmibm` mentions having had an SDF account before founding the town, but finding it "kind of stark and overwhelming (no offense, I love y'all!)." I think every generation of these places is built by people who loved the last one, but wanted something a little warmer and more accessible. ### cosmic.voyage cosmic.voyage is unique, in that it's both a pubnix and a collaborative science-fiction story! It was founded on November 20, 2018 by James Tomasino, who, according to his MCH2022 speaker bio, was once a nuclear electronics technician in the US Navy and "spent time as a Jesuit while exploring a religious vocation." The homepage sets the scene: > Humanity has expanded to the stars. Earth is a distant memory. > > We journey into the darkness not in a great migration--as many thought--but in small communities, drifting far and traveling at relativistic speeds, dividing from each other by unfathomable distance and time. Our only connections are the thin tethers of the Quantum Entanglement Communicator (QEC). These precarious devices bridge the vast distances with near-instantaneous communication, but provide only enough bandwidth to the ancient relay hub for simple, plain-text messaging. The limitation of a text-only Unix server _is the worldbuilding_. Of course every message is plain text, for the QEC can't carry anything else. Every user claims a ship, colony, or outpost with the `ship` command, writes messages as plain text files in its directory, and publishes them to the relay with `log`, which pushes them out over the web, gopher, and Gemini at the same time. No line may be longer than 80 characters. And there are only a few rules, like don't entangle another author's storyline without asking first, don't break the system, and don't blow up Earth (or else your ship is from another reality and the crew all have goatees). Let me tell you about the story I began. I wanted to write an Indigenous sci-fi story, so my ship is called _Genawaaboonagak_. I borrowed the name from the lead rescue vessel of the Grand Portage Band's coast guard on Lake Superior. When the US Coast Guard closed its Grand Marais station in 2022, the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa stepped in and launched the first Indigenous-led coast guard in the nation. Their first boat was christened in September 2025, and _Genawaaboonagak_ is an Ojibwe word which translates as "Watchers Over the Water." The sci-fi _Genawaaboonagak_ is a tender on a centuries-long voyage. The mission is to seed and tend a chain of small, solar-powered observers (the "watchers") along its route, each carrying a small intelligence, dropped off to listen alone for decades. Think lighthouse tender, or buoy-layer, or firewatcher. The captain was born aboard, inherited the rank, and will die long before the destination. The logbook is handed from master to master, the way nautical age-of-sail logs were, which I researched in my history of blogging. Here's the start of my first transmission, published October 3rd as message #1079 on the relay: REMARKS ON BOARD GENAWAABOONAGAK Mission Day 4388, Book V of the continuous log this entry: E. Brown-Okimakan, Master and Keeper Ascension 07h 39m 22s Declination +19 deg 11' Distance 2.87 ly Fix RS001 two-star Solar flux 340 W/m2 Sail main brailled for docking Watchers afield: twelve AM: Watcher-12 separated clean at 0412. Antenna deployed, self-test nominal; she called home four minutes after. Fourth bird this year; the rack is down to three. Mustered the crew to see her off. She will burn alone for thirty years, and hear us no more than we hear her. There is no lonelier berth than a watcher's. The second, "Fair Third Night," went out today as message #1080. When you read the relay, you notice there's a sparseness (which could be remedied by more people signing up) and a lot of messages are about the silence itself. There's _The Meridian_, a horror story about a corporate cruiser sent to find life "not our equals out here among the stars, but our betters," whose surviving captain writes: "I don't even know if anyone is reading this, or if all this amounts to is a ... screaming into the void." There's a ship called _DesignationUnknown_ whose only message is an automated log of cascading failures. There's Azura, alone on a junk planet aboard _Spiegel_, who ends her transmission with: "If anyone has any information on 'yellow dragon trade-lines', please leave a message. Also, any life advice is appreciated." I might have plans. ### envs.net and tilde.green envs.net has been around since September 2019 and describes itself as "a minimalist, non-commercial shared linux system and will always be free to use." It has over 1,500 users and one of the longest service lists in the tildeverse: XMPP, Pleroma, a twtxt registry, a public DNS resolver, a SearXNG instance, and more. My `.bash_aliases` file there is full of helper functions for twtxt and the 0x0.st file host. tilde.green launched in 2022 and calls itself "an open community that thrives of creativity and wildness." Its homepage says: "we don't mind if you register and stay idle, but we'd appreciate if possible if you could join our little community" and I'm excited to participate in that community! ### The Commonalities The default `.plan` file on tilde.town reads "This is my .plan file. There are many like it, but this one is mine." On envs.net, the default gophermap for every new user reads, "this is my gopher page. there are many like it, but this one is mine." And my never-touched Gemini page on tilde.club reads, "this is my gemini page. there are many like it, but this one is mine." It's a riff on the Rifleman's Creed, via _Full Metal Jacket_ , and apparently every sysadmin in the tildeverse appreciates it. ## Asbestos in the Walls On April 29th, 2026, security researchers at Theori disclosed CVE-2026-31431, which they named Copy Fail. It's a logic bug in the Linux kernel that lets any unprivileged local user get root with a 732-byte Python script, on nearly every major Linux distribution. Xint's write-up explains how the exploit corrupts the in-memory copy of a file without ever touching the disk, so integrity checks don't detect it. For most servers, "unprivileged local user" isn't a concern. For a tilde, though? That's everything. A pubnix is a Linux machine that _hands shell accounts to strangers on the Internet_. On tilde.town's own web log, on May 15th it's written "tilde.town is currently locked down. there is a very serious kernel vulnerability that has no mitigation and we can't allow user sessions until it's patched." The next day, when Debian shipped a fixed kernel, the doors reopened, but with a somber note: > i don't know about you but these times have me thinking: are pubnixes viable anymore? > > i find myself wanting something _else_ , something other than linux, to allow us to hang out on this little box in canada. but is that even a solution in an age of vulnerability conveyor belts for arbitrary codebases? Then, on May 24th: "hey look, it happened again." Locked down again. On May 26th, open again: "we have crammed yet more asbestos into the town walls to ensure that the fire cannot read inside our cozy confines." By June, the admins had disabled kernel modules and `io_uring` entirely, just to be safe. The town admins raised the question regarding "how to handle the files that older users put here in a more innocent age prior to moving on from town. what is our responsibility toward them? should we secret scan? archive and remove old home dirs?" Ten years of abandoned home directories, some containing sensitive information from a more innocent age, now vulnerable. In August, tilde.team got hacked. Its admin, `~ben`, wrote that "someone was able to gain a root shell and ran `rm -rf /`. There's very little left to track down what happened or who did it." Thankfully, he takes daily backups, so users lost a couple hours of files at most. Sadly, several of the tildeverse's _shared_ services, including tildegit, tilde.news, the BBJ forum, write.tildeverse.org, and the zine, had been running on that same machine. He's been moving them, one by one, to a new server. Shell access is still disabled. That's my eighth, locked account. Back in 2014, in the Hacker News thread about Ford's essay, one commenter laid out "a lot of good reasons why nobody runs shell servers anymore": the possibility of a secret FBI letter demanding access to users' accounts, becoming a host for spam and DDoS attacks, "spending the great majority of your time preventing 1% of your users from ruining the internet," and the takedown notices. All of it true. People run them anyway. A tilde is one computer that many people share. Assume little is private. Never store passwords, private keys, or API tokens on a shared host. Use one SSH key per device. Put a passphrase on every key. Turn on two-factor login where it's offered. Treat everything in `public_html`, `public_gopher` and `public_gemini` as public. It is. I learned these lessons first-hand a couple weeks ago when my MacBook was wiped completely (a long, dumb story), and I lost one of my SSH keys. Because I'd already been using separate keys across different hosts, and kept copies of the others on my homelab, I could still get back into everything. The biggest casualty was my Gemini client certificate. ## Who Tends the Commons? The technical fragility gets the headlines. But the thing that actually kills small communities is human. The sysadmin burns out, the bills don't get paid, or the culture gets poisoned. Remember Ford's "shame farm." Remember M-Net's owner threatening to pull the plug with three hours' notice. In August 2020, when tilde.town hit the front page of Hacker News, the town's founder wrote a comment about how they handled this: > Certain users sign up to abuse resources; that's easy to catch and deal with. Other users want to import the wider culture war aspects of the internet into our space, using a variety of tactics to provoke anger and discomfort. > I'm a generally conflict-avoidant person so this took getting used to. On the server, I had to learn to be willing to ban the persistent trolls. They "made the signup intentionally cumbersome, wracked with nerves about the 'good' folks who might be intimidated." They credited two books: Howard Rheingold's _The Virtual Community_, and Mathieu O'Neil's _Cyberchiefs: Autonomy and Authority in Online Tribes_, which helped them "understand that all communities that manage to grow over time will hit an unsustainable point and either retract or dissipate." The town chose retraction. "In retrospect, it was the right choice." I've written before about tending the commons. Elinor Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics for demonstrating that communities can manage shared resources without either a corporation or a government running them, so long as they follow patterns. In _Governing the Commons_ , she laid out eight design principles that long-lasting commons tend to share. The healthiest tildes, whether they know it or not, follow a lot of them: * **Clearly defined boundaries:** manual signups, where a human reads your application. Ostrom notes that when boundary rules aren't well defined, "strangers who discover a valuable resource may start to use it," and overuse it. * **Collective-choice arrangements:** the people affected by the rules get a say in changing them. The tildeverse literally has an RFC system for network decisions. Grex was founded on "slow, group decisionmaking." * **Monitoring by the users themselves:** the admins are townies too. * **Graduated sanctions:** a warning, a killed process, a temporary ban, and only then a permanent one. * **Conflict resolution:** a code of conduct, which, remember, was one of the first things discussed when tilde.club came back in 2019. A commons is not a place without rules. It's a place where the people who live there make the rules, not a profit-first amoral corporation, or a detached corrupt bureaucracy. ## It's Okay to Not Log In for a Few Years In October 2023, `~vilmibm` wrote a post on the town's web log for its ninth birthday: > I started the town for selfish reasons: I was lonely and I wanted some friends. It worked! As the years advanced, though, my meatworld social circumstances changed. I was spending less time online and was focusing less on the town. It's no longer my friendship honeypot. I see new users show up, though, and meet each other; in many of them I see my younger self stumbling out of the vicious nightmare of social media and groping for community in a post-facebook internet. At that point, the town had over 3,000 registered accounts, but the homepage still said "population around 1,000," because "I don't think there is value in trying to have an 'accurate' number there." They described the town as "an old community center full of the scraps from art projects and parties... Also, the community center is floating in space and time." And then: > We're all in this for the long haul. There's no VC exit, no runway. An algorithm is not going to shuffle any of this stuff out of view. There is no database that can go down. It's just a computer. Take your time. It's okay to not log in for a few years. Looking at my feels entries, I wrote only nine this year. Several start with some version of "It's been awhile, hasn't it?" One, from April, includes: "I just connected to tilde.town via ssh for the first time in months, and my inbox is full! I wish I was better at the shortcut commands, I feel like such a zoomer not knowing how to navigate, but it is really good practice for terminal use." And then there's my plant. tilde.town has a game called botany, written by Jake Funke (`~curiouser`): "A command line, realtime, community plant buddy." You get a seed. You water it every day. "5 days without water = death. Your plant depends on you and your friends to live!" According to my save file, I watered my seed exactly once: on January 14th, the day I joined. But there's also another file, `visitors.json`, that records who else came by to water it. `~fruit` (the same `~fruit` who signed my guestbook) watered it the very next day. And then again on May 1st. And again on May 11th. Months after I'd stopped checking. Long after it could have mattered to the plant. A stranger who kept showing up for my little ASCII seed. Oh, and the epigraph at the top of botany's README? It's the same Alan Watts quote I used in yesterday's essay: "We do not 'come into' this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree." Yesterday, I wrote that the Internet isn't a story, it's a place, and that places are only as good as the people who show up and care and tend. Howard Rheingold said something similar when he joked that a more accurate title for _The Virtual Community_ would have been: > "People who use computers to communicate, form friendships that sometimes form the basis of communities, but you have to be careful to not mistake the tool for the task and think that just writing words on a screen is the same thing as real community." A tilde is just a computer, the tending is the community. ## How To Join If you've read this far, maybe you're tempted? Good. Here's how to move in. **1. Pick a server.** Browse the member list. **2. Make an SSH key.** This replaces passwords with a key pair. The private key never leaves your computer; you send the server only the public half. ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "you@example.com" cat ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub # this is the part you send Accept the default path, and set a passphrase. If you've never done this before, GitHub's guide to generating an SSH key is a good walkthrough, even if you're not using it for GitHub. **3. Apply, and actually write something.** Most tildes ask for a username, an email, your public key, and a sentence or two about why you want to join. Approval is manual, so expect days, not minutes. And as `~vilmibm` noted in that birthday post, mostly-empty applications (or ones with a typo in the email address) often just can't be accepted. Tell them who you are. You're applying to join a digital neighbourhood, not signing up for an app. **4. Log in and look around.** ssh yourname@tilde.town Type `yes` to trust the server the first time. Read the login message. Write a `.plan` file and a `.project` file, then check them with `finger yourname@host`. If your host has a wiki, read it. Then say hi on IRC; the tilde.chat web client works in your web browser. If you're nervous about terminal editors, use micro, which has mouse support and normal shortcuts like `ctrl+s` to save and `ctrl+q` to quit. It's always my default. **5. Wander.** This is `~vilmibm`'s advice for new townies: "wander around. Use `town explore` or run `cd /home/$(ls /home | shuf | head -1)` to visit a random user. See what they've left behind and see if it inspires you." And then, maybe, water someone else's plant. ## Here Is a Person There's one more line in Ford's original essay I want to share, describing the emails he got from people who missed the old web, "that sense of quiet and intimacy and patient thought": > Back in the 1990s—this will sound insane—some of us paid a lot of money for our tilde accounts, like $30 or $40 a month or sometimes much more. **We paid to reach strangers with our weird ideas.** Whereas now, as everyone understands, brands pay to know users. That's what the tildeverse still is, except now it's free. Held together by volunteer sysadmins, donated rack space in Ottawa, and $24 slid under a door in Brooklyn. It's fragile, yes. Kernels will keep breaking. Servers will keep getting wiped. Admins will burn out and hand the keys to someone new. That's how it's always worked. Grex is still here. SDF is still here. The town is almost twelve years old, officially older than Google Plus was when it was killed off. Every one of these places is a little computer full of tildes. And every tilde, in front of every username, says the same thing. _here is a person._ Here's another. And another. A person is writing a journal entry about their shitty job, or falling in love. A person is captaining a starship nobody else has hailed yet. A person is watering a stranger's plant. Come say hi, my guestbook is open. * * * 1. In the Jargon File, it's written that AOL opened Usenet to its subscribers in September 1993 and the newcomers never stopped coming. But as Kevin Driscoll points out in _Do we misremember Eternal September?_, AOL's Usenet gateway didn't actually open until February 28, 1994, and complaints about a "September that never ends" were circulating well before AOL was involved. Folk etymology strikes yet again. Tilde.town keeps the joke alive with a command, `town sdate`. By my count, today is September 12,088th, 1993. ↩︎

Let's begin with a couple books. When Patricia Lockwood's _No One Is Talking About This_ and Lauren Oyler's _Fake Accounts_ came out in 2021, critics called them "Internet novels." Sally Olds, in her essay _United States v. The Internet_, counted six reviews covering the two books together, five of those reviews using "internet" or "online" in the headline. She noted that one Washington Post review used six of the same stock, boring keywords in its first six sentences. Olds argued that neither book is a very _good_ Internet novel—and that neither needs to be read as one. In both, the Internet supplies the scenery, but the central concern is something else. For Olds, Oyler's book is a satire of the American left's moral posture, and Lockwood's is about how shared language takes over private thought, and about a family losing a baby. "All the mysteries are human ones." Brandon Taylor also wrote how "Internet Novel" is a misnomer, because both books are really about Twitter and its effects on a narrow class of media writers. The mistake is not limited to book reviewers. I see so many writers and journalists misunderstand: the Internet isn't a story. The Internet is a setting. The best (and really, only) stories about the Internet are really stories about people, and our shared humanity, and how that's interfaced now. The Internet, though it does give specific and unprecedented social interaction, is still merely incidental. The way the parlour cafe was, the way the town square was, the agora, the forum, the bathhouse, the way all commons have always been. The Internet isn't a story. It isn't a detached, real-life plot device for us to have discourse over. It's far less than that. It's a _place_ where the story happens. Features, trend pieces, and documentaries treat the Internet as a subject with its own character, motives, and plot, then report on what the Internet is doing to us. As though the Internet is somehow a separate entity from us. The Internet has no plot. It is a place, and what happens there is what has always happened where people gather. People flirt, argue, vent, love, trade, show off, gossip, grieve, fuck, and look for company. The stories worth telling are about those people. Nathan Jurgenson coined "digital dualism" to describe our tendency of treating online and offline as wholly separate worlds. In _The IRL Fetish_, Jurgenson argues that the web is in fact made of real people with bodies, histories, and politics, and that logging off does not return anyone to a separate "real" life. We are always us, and we can run away from everything except ourselves. Don't get me wrong, the Internet is not a _good_ social setting. There is a fidelity of human connection that is lost when we aren't face-to-face, when we aren't warm biological organisms in the same space. I am not trying to argue that, through the miracle of technology, we've found the most ideal way to connect. Everyone knows that's bullshit. What I am arguing, though, is that the Internet is the place where we now socialize and understand the world and exist. Our epidemics of isolation and loneliness are mostly self-medicated through the Internet. I was born an Internet native, and I have always been drawn to technology. Our first home computer was a beige Windows 98 tower and CRT monitor—a hand-me-down from my cousin that I managed to BSOD and brick only a few months later. The computer is amazing. Our ability to publish whatever we want and host it for $0.01 USD/day is amazing. The fact we can send electronic letters to one another—with a protocol created over five decades ago in the 1970s—is amazing. But really, I don’t care about the Internet as a technological abstraction. I certainly don't understand how it operates beyond being a mysterious series of tubes. What I care about is people, and reckoning with our shared, absurd existence. And I question if we remember what the Internet has given us. Have we already forgotten the Arab Spring? Have we already forgotten that we all played and beat Pokemon together? We all cared about saving the Tham Luang Cave Boys. We all dumped ice water on each other and filmed it to raise money for ALS research, and it worked. I yearn for humanity, and I'm sure you do, too. > “We do not “come into” this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean “waves,” the universe “peoples.” Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.” ― Alan Watts The Internet, more than anything else, peoples. I will say that the Internet gives us a unique, important opportunity for the everyperson to share themselves freely with the world. That's why I wrote the WEBMASTER@ manifesto, and why I'm certain it will be the most important thing I'll ever write. ## Our Digital Enclosures And this opportunity is unique, for we've already witnessed the increasing suppression and deterioration of our global network. For a place cannot write a plot, but whoever owns the place scripts what happens in it. Amnesty International has noted how only five corporations (Alphabet [Google], Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple) now function as our **digital landlords** who "determine the shape and form of our online interaction," and thus we are the digital serfs. Big Tech companies are a threat to human rights, becoming so embedded in our daily life that meaningful participation depends on using their services, giving them "enormous power to influence public discourse and control information flows." At a U.S. Senate hearing in October 2025, Ranking Member Maria Cantwell's opening statement noted "a handful of opaque algorithms are controlling the majority of discussion online," and that corporate consolidation "amplifies the ability to control content on an unprecedented scale". When a handful of companies control how information spreads, it becomes easier for any administration to abuse that power with political threats to chill speech. Jessa Lingel's _The Gentrification of the Internet_ argues that "much like our cities, the internet has become gentrified, dominated by the interests of business and capital rather than the interests of the people who use it." We see this with the displacement of older communities, with isolation and increasing infrastructure consolidation. The tech industry, too, is "much whiter" and "skews more heavily towards men" than the working population as a whole. Similarly, researcher danah boyd found that when a digital space becomes associated with marginalized populations, it is abandoned and devalued. > Subsequent statistical analyses of the characteristics of users of online social networks by researchers, marketers and bloggers, she notes in her latest work, backed up her claims that white and asian teens who belonged to higher socieconomic strata (and who aspired to college, with which Facebook at the time was associated) were attracted to Facebook, while latino, black and working-class teens tended to opt for MySpace. The Internet, once hailed as a place where users could escape hierarchical control, is now subject to an enclosure movement, wherein public 'land' is being privatized, and citizens' creative labour is appropriated to profit the corporations that administer these places. Scholars describe this as **digital enclosure** : "if land enclosure helped produce the spatial conditions for the exploitation of wage labor, digital enclosures enable the exploitation of information generated by users as they go about their daily lives." In _"The Algorithmic Leviathan or the Digital Agora?"_, Aybike Mergen writes how platform capitalism insidiously mobilizes the language of commons—"community," "forum," "sharing"—while deepening control over our digital infrastructures. ## Our Digital Resistance I'm not intelligent enough to know how to truly make the Internet more resilient and durable in the face of systemic forces attempting to confiscate the wild magic it has permitted freely. I do know that I have been trying to use the tools and services people much smarter than me offer freely. That's why I have redundant backups on NeoCities and the Wayback Machine. That's why I've been learning about the Gemini protocol, and why my work is now available unencrypted and insecure at http://brennan.w10.site and http://135.181.118.12/~brennan/ (IPv4, works without DNS) and http://[2a01:4f9:4b:1e30::3]/~brennan/ (IPv6). That's why I've been investing my time into learning about public, community-driven networks of public-access UNIX* systems and pubnixes. I don't know how to make the Internet anti-fragile in nature, but I do know how to make things more robust and durable in the meantime. But I do know my optimism is not capable of being suppressed. My optimism is not for sale. It isn't available to be trained on. But it is freely given here, to my readers, in the most accessible and widespread ways I can possibly share it. But I do know we can continue to come together while being so far apart. We can keep doing good with the Internet. I keep watching it do so. The small community of omg.lol managed to raise over $8,000 USD for St. Jude's Hospital in a month, thanks to Robb Knight and Adam Newbold. My advice for being a writer is no different than my advice to those that want to find community. You have to write each day, even if it's bad and only 100 words. You have to take communal action each day, even if it's bad and only 15 minutes of effort. If you want good community, you must make good community. You cannot wait for someone else to. So, write to one person, not to the infinite void. Reply to a blog post. Send an email. Comment on a forum. Share one link. You, as a person, are enough. You can be weird and quiet and wrong. Join a human-scale community and stay. Welcome newcomers. Protect the quiet people. Point people to the good stuff. Make introductions. Build webrings and blogrolls and guestbooks. Pay when you can. Support an instance. Fund servers and creators. Show a friend how to make a website. How to use RSS. How to set up a backup. The Internet is a place. And places are only as good as the people who show up and care and tend. Otherwise, these places will continue to be enclosed, gentrified, and policed. Corporate social media and our digital landlords want you to believe there is no alternative—that their black box algorithm feed _is_ the world. What I have been doing, over and over again, is proving how wrong they are. The fediverse, the pubnixes, the personal websites, the Gemini capsules, the webrings, the Mastodons and omg.lol communities—all prove we still have ownership if we choose to exercise our rights and fight to ensure we continue to have them. Resist like hell to keep the Internet a place open for everyone.

This is a plain text mirror of the writings from my independent publication https://brennan.day designed for terminal readers and older hardware.

Are you feeling jaded? You know, I used to think the term came from the rather beautiful green stone, but it doesn't. The stone's name came into English through French from the Spanish, as people believed jade would cure colic and pain in the flank. But, to be jaded? Well, around 1600, the verb jade meant to wear out or make dull, and jaded entered vernacular around the same time. Earlier than that? A jade is a worn-out horse, recorded from the late 1300s and with no known origin. On September 14, a former Cornell student sued the university and seven members of the Chi Phi fraternity. The 101-page complaint alleges she was drugged and assaulted at the fraternity house on the night of October 19, 2024, and that Cornell did not protect her or punish the men. _The Cornell Daily Sun_ broke the story after a reporter spent nearly two years on the case. Are you feeling jaded? By the school shootings, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the ceaseless rape culture of college campuses, and the hemorrhaging extremism? By the end of the world? You still have to go to work, pay rent, and buy yourself food. Getting tired is not a decision. The news repeats just as your schedule does. Half a year ago, I wrote about how we as men must do more, and we must do better. A misogynistic peer norm made men less likely to intervene and slower to do it. But a program for 600 college men that combined social norms and bystander education changed self-reported sexual aggression, and changed what men expected their peers to do (Gidycz, Orchowski, and Berkowitz, 2011). Men change what other men think is normal. Cases like this keep breaking, over and over. And women continue to have to explain, to defend themselves, and absorb replies from men who refuse to listen or try to understand. I am not jaded by the violence women continue to consistently face. The violence that is consistently minimized and normalized and downplayed. How could I be jaded by something I have the privilege and luxury to not experience myself? I am jaded by the arguments, the whataboutisms, the laundering within the discourse. I am jaded by how we manage to have the same bad-faith hair-splitting and rumination over semantics disguised as moral debates, over and over again. Girl on the Net asks us what we are doing, right now? What am I doing? The answer is not enough. I am not a man that is in group chats with other men, I am not a man that goes fishing or hunting, or fires up a barbecue over a couple beers with other men. I am not afraid of being annoying, though. I will happily argue—to debunk myths, or dissect harmful ideologies—with people online indefinitely. I wear my heart and politics on my sleeve and never hesitate to be vocal about what I think is important and worth talking about. And I've noticed how, in reality, that completely diminishes my social currency in some circles—for as soon as you care about a particular topic too loudly, some people will gladly write you off entirely. And I get really mad at myself for not being more clever about that, and I feel so powerless to change what's important. Because I've cultivated a good audience of good people, and that means I'm going to be preaching to the choir. There is such a thin, narrow avenue between those who will listen to you that agree and those who will not listen to you that disagree. In ways, I've devoted my life to trying to figure out how to make people listen that disagree. I am trying to perform the alchemy required to unjade the horse, to change not just a mind but to prevent real, tangible harm. And in order to do that, you have to rein it in. You have to—somehow—be less angry. And you have to care less about the injustice and brutality. And you have to be more reasonable and measured in your rhetoric. And you have to be more neutral in your word choice. Only then, do you have a chance to have someone that disagrees with you actually begin to listen. It is so cruel, isn't it? Especially for survivors. * * * I have failed at this. I have stayed silent when I should have spoken. I have laughed nervously at a joke that wasn't funny. I have watched a woman shrink and told myself it wasn't my business. I have been a coward. And I am trying to be less of a coward and start doing the right thing, by asking other men to do the right thing with me. What do I ask of other men? Well, before anything else, I would need you to acknowledge that this is actual, ongoing violence we are perpetuating. How do we stop perpetuating it? I'm sure you know the answer, but I'm going to be direct and specific about it anyways: Speak the fuck up. Do the hard and awkward work of going against the grain of social norms. Make this choice over and over again. We must choose to prioritize the well-being of those more vulnerable than us over our own comfort and status quo. This is the case for every difficult-yet-moral stance. Do not let bad jokes slide. Instead, ask uncomfortable questions. Talk about how consent is an ongoing conversation. Talk about how to _read_ discomfort, how to check in, how to accept "no" gracefully, and how persistence is not romance. We must stand up for Black women, Indigenous women, trans women, disabled women, and sex workers. Marginalized women face higher rates of violence and are ignored, dismissed, or criminalized when seeking help. We cannot only care about the stories that make the news and headlines. Understand that "Am I one of the good ones?" is a useless question. The question you need to be asking is "What am I personally doing to change the conditions that have allowed the normalized ongoing violence against women?" That is a question that doesn't go away because you personally have never assaulted anybody, and it doesn't go away because you respect women, or have a daughter or sister or mother you love deeply. It is a question that will always be one you ask yourself. Individual action is not enough. We need systemic change, and universities that take complaints seriously, and fraternities that aren't breeding grounds for assault, and workplaces that believe women, and courts that convict. Systemic change is made of individual actions. You cannot just hand this off to policy. YOU are the culture. Your silence is not neutral. Silence is a choice. If you have a blog yourself (which I know a lot of my readers do), write about this yourself. I know, I know. The jade horse is used past the point of tiring, and yet it is nonetheless still harnessed the next morning.

A starter theme for blogs inspired by plain-text release files (.nfo / README.txt). There's semantic HTML, but there's no colour, JavaScript, images, external requests, and only a single...

This is a plain text mirror of the writings from my independent publication https://brennan.day designed for terminal readers and older hardware.

Those of you that visit my website, rather than reading my writing via RSS, will notice that I've updated the colour scheme and fonts used for the first time since I began my blog Brennan.day, last November. I have had a deep affection for the gruvbox colour scheme I've been using—it's easy on the eyes and gives a rather cozy feeling. But something compelled me to ditch the muted browns and yellows to go with a stark greyscale of black and white, the rainbow now a custom palette I made myself called Moonflower. Similarly, I changed from the wonderful and speedy modern font stack to three different fonts hosted by the privacy-respecting, GDPR-friendly Bunny Fonts: * Public Sans for navigation, UI, and metadata. * Newsreader as the serif for body text. * Young Serif for headers and titles. The reason for this change is the same as the update in colours—I was looking for a design for my website that, for lack of a better word, felt more serious and traditional. In fact, I wanted to wait until a specific time to make the change, like my blog's 1-year anniversary, or whenever I achieve #100DaysToOffload for the third time. Why? Good question. Despite my progressive views and rather _laissez-faire_ attitude, there's something I deeply appreciate about tradition. Let me be specific about what I mean by that: I mean I believe that there are certain things in life that have a serious weight and gravity that ought to be duly respected. The sacredness of ceremony and ritual. Ranging from the Indigenous practice of smudging and burning sage and sweetgrass in my abalone shell, to the joyful act of celebrating birthdays. I think tradition is regarded as a vehicle to ensure authority is obeyed, and that an argument can be made that no particular act or day of the year is more important or meaningful than another. That it's all arbitrary and self-imposed. In _The Invention of Tradition_, Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger wrote how many of the customs we assume are ancient, such as Welsh and Scottish national culture or the elaborate rituals of the British monarchy, were invented or elaborated only in the last couple of centuries. But, really, I think this idea of everything being profane takes just as much faith and belief. Émile Durkheim argued in _The Elementary Forms of Religious Life_ that the feeling of two worlds, sacred and profane, comes from the contrast between rare, intense gatherings and long stretches of scattered everyday life. The sacred is something a community makes when it comes together, a feeling he called collective effervescence, turning ordinary objects and people into sacred symbols. In Wittgenstein's remarks on Frazer's _Golden Bough_, he objected to treating ritual as bad science. People performing ritual aren't attempting to manipulate cause and effect. The ritual is closer to a grammar of gestures. Like kissing a photograph of someone you love. Ritual comes from a need to celebrate whatever we find full of value. G.K. Chesterton, who I've written about before, wrote in _The Ethics of Elfland_ that tradition is democracy extended through time, trusting a consensus of common human voices over the isolated, arbitrary record. "The democracy of the dead." Thiền monk and activist Thich Nhat Hanh's meditation on interbeing asks you to look at a sheet of paper, and see the cloud in it. Without the cloud there is no rain, without rain no trees, and without trees no paper. The paper is part of our perception, so we are in it as well. Nothing is standing alone, including the one doing the perceiving. Similarly, one of the earliest meditations I learned when I was practicing Buddhism as a teenager was to attempt to describe a flower without using any of my five senses: no sight, smell, touch, taste, or sound. No colour, no scent, no softness of petal, no shape. You quickly realize it's an impossible ask. We rely on the subjective, lossy interpretation of a reality we can never fully understand. The flower, like all else, is an illusion. Our entire life depends on us having faith in these senses, of having faith in this reality and our interpretation of it. And so I believe we lend ourselves to surrender and reverence, at the very least as an act of humility. I like to think about how the prisoners in Plato's Cave would be watching the shadows together—surely they'd eventually give the shadows names, they would share a misunderstanding, and maybe there would be solace there. None of us can step outside our senses to check whether anything is truly sacred or profane. We will never be able to verify the sacred from the dark. This is what unites all of us. We are all groping for something in the dark, and we are all watching the shadows dance on the cave wall. Together. To have something we agree is sacred—to have a shared language and appreciation for something beyond the materials of our senses, there is a wisdom there. ## Year of the Fire Horse I am not somebody that "believes" in Astrology, or Tarot, but I find the practice to still be incredibly interesting and helpful. Not in futures becoming known or in their fixed characteristics, but in the interpretation itself. Let me tell you a story from the stars. In 1966, Japan's birth rate dropped by about 25% during the Year of the Fire Horse (Hinoe-uma) because of an old superstition that women born that year had fiery tempers and would bring bad fortune or death to their husbands. According to sociologist Kikkawa Tōru in Nippon.com, a malicious rumour spread in the early Edo period, through puppet theatre and popular books, that women born in a Fire Horse year were hot-tempered and would devour their husbands. It was tied to the story of Yaoya Oshichi, born in a Fire Horse year, who committed arson in hopes of seeing the man she loved. Births fell from 1.82 million in 1965 to 1.36 million in 1966, then rebounded to 1.94 million in 1967. It has been sixty years since then, and the astrology has once again aligned. This is the year of the Fire Horse. Thankfully, people have come to their senses and the superstition hasn't caused a steep drop in births this year like it did six decades ago. Japan Research Institute's Takumi Fujinami found January 2026 births up 0.5% year over year, with no Fire Horse effect. A December 2025 survey found about 80% of mothers knew of the superstition, but 76% said they didn't care. What comes next year? The year of the Red Goat, the Fire Sheep, or Ram. The Fire Sheep is gentle-natured, but willing to take a stand when provoked, and capable and decisive, but also somewhat careless and reckless. They're honest, upright and frank, tending to be natural storytellers. I like to imagine this as a good omen for 2027, of a being both tender and brave in the face of what is to come. I was born in April of 1996, I am a Fire Rat. Fire Rats are bolder and more outgoing than other Rats, with big ambitions and a talent for persuading people. The downsides are impatience, impulsiveness, and a tendency to burn out and start more than they finish. Funnily enough, the Rat is the first animal of the Chinese Zodiac, and I am also the first animal in the Western Zodiac, the Ram Aries. Not only that, but the Ram is a fire sign too, ruled by Mars and cardinal. By chance, both signs describe bold, quick-moving ambition. Both warn about impulsiveness and burning out. Beyond that, the Rat sits directly opposite the Horse in the Chinese Zodiac, so Rats "clash" with the Fire Horse year we're in now. The diametric opposition is thought to bring on a turbulent year for us rats, with advice to be careful about big changes and to look after your health. And yet, this has easily been the best year of my life. What the year gave me was the opportunity to look closely, to learn where the story came from, and—at this very moment—to sit down and write this. That is what ritual and tradition do. They give us a story and frame around spans of time, reminding us of what matters, and to pay attention. Which brings me back to my redesign, of transitioning to greyscale with old-style serif headers. It sounds silly, but it's a small ceremony for me. To say my space of writing deserves weight and gravity. It's arbitrary, and I choose it despite that. That's all tradition is. I named my new palette after a flower I can't describe without the illusions of my senses. Next year is the Fire Sheep, the Ram in some tellings, which is my sign here in the west. Tender and brave are good things to be try to be, regardless of who (or what) is asking it of you.

This blog is an expression of the things I love—I love community, religion, science, good web technologies, and history, just to name a few topics off the top of my head. Of course, I also love writing. Focusing on what I love and what brings me joy is how I've been able to sustain my publishing cadence over the past year without it ever becoming a slog, or burning me out. I'm incredibly lucky and privileged to be able to truly do what I love, but I've also cultivated the wisdom to stay firm on my values and not deviate toward something more conventional or accept others' advice when it goes against those values. For example, there are times when, if I write "too much" on a particular topic, people will tell me I'm wasting my time and effort. That's quite an absurd premise to me! I could never consider the act of writing wasteful, nor sharing my thoughts on something I think is worth writing about. If I ever thought "eh, this isn't worth my time," then I would have far less writing and far fewer thoughts. I always try to meet the world with good-faith curiosity. And sure, that bites me in the ass sometimes. Curiosity killed a cat, satisfaction frought it back,. I've never confronted a topic or person I've tried to avoid or shy away from. ## I ♥ Internet Weirdos Anyways, something else I really love is people; I love talking to people of all shapes, flavours, and backgrounds. There's a lot of human interest in my writing. Something wonderful about the Internet is that there are so many weird people on it. And I'm using "weird" as an umbrella term for an incredibly wide range of folks: those who have incredible niche interests, those who are unconventional, and those with puzzling, baffling pathologies (usually those who act in continued bad faith). A lot of the time, society is incredibly unfair and cruel to weirdos—those who have harmless (and fascinating) hyperfixations are ridiculed and mocked. Cringe culture. And there is a good argument to be made that this is the fault of irony and malignant detachment. "Typical" people ridicule those who are unashamed and vulnerable in their passion and love for something that "doesn't merit" that kind of affection or affiliation. I love weirdos because I myself am a total weirdo. I'd never try to pretend otherwise. I'm silly—it's no surprise that April Fools' Day is my favourite holiday. Some weirdos, though, are not simply misunderstood good people in the margins. (And it's totally unfair that such disparate groups of people get grouped together.) There are really shitty people out there who fit the bill. The reply-guys and the rage-baiters—those who are completely aware of the malice and harm they're propagating. Those who spend their finite time alive intentionally trying to fuck with or hurt people. The most common advice you'll see is "don't feed the trolls"—the idea that any sort of interaction is the attention they're desperately in search of, oxygen for the flames. If you ignore this type of weirdo, they'll either stop acting like this or stop bothering you and go harm somebody else instead. This has never been advice I've taken, personally. "Don't feed the trolls" has been challenged by researchers who often find ignoring trolls doesn't stop the behaviour. Trolling often reflects deep-seated prejudices that need confrontation, rather than avoidance. The Engaging News Project found that when a recognized reporter waded into comment sections, incivility decreased by 17 percent and people were 15 percent more likely to use evidence in their comments. As one ABC opinion piece put it, _"It's almost impossible to truly ignore a troll. It's like saying mosquitos are just annoying and won't hurt you and you should just ignore them."_ Kyle Van Oosterum argues for "reparative civility," a Confucian-inspired disposition of turning inward to cultivate open-mindedness, tactfulness, and courage rather than withdrawing from those we find difficult. Even if empathic engagement doesn't change a die-hard troll, I can demonstrate to bystanders the practice of grace. Bradley Warfield's work on dialogic communication ethics reminds us that much online discourse is "ethically impoverished" in its other-directedness—which is why choosing to engage dialogically matters. From _Innovations and challenges in digital literacies: literacies of repair_: > "In her study of the vernacular 'troll whispering' strategies of young people, Patricia Lange (2018) reports a range of techniques, from practices of 'deep listening' designed to find out what motivates trolls to collective counter-responses by affinity space participants... Among the most interesting findings in Lange's study was the intense awareness among her interviewees of their own potential for troll-like behaviour, the sense of 'an inner troll that may come out in all of us.'" In 2016, political scientists David Broockman and Joshua Kalla sent canvassers door to door in Miami-Dade County for ten-minute conversations with voters about transgender rights. They didn't debate, but instead invited people to remember a time they'd been judged personally for being different, "encouraging active perspective-taking." The result? The study found that "conversations substantially reduced transphobia, with decreases greater than Americans’ average decrease in homophobia from 1998 to 2012. These effects persisted for 3 months." There are other famous examples of successfully extending the olive branch. Daryl Davis, a Black blues musician, befriended members of the Ku Klux Klan. About 200 of them have quit the Klan after getting to know him. Or Megan Phelps-Roper, who grew up on Westboro Baptist Church picket lines, spewing homophobia and other bigotry. Then, on Twitter, strangers just kept talking back to her—civilly and with curiosity. In 2012, she left the church for good, and she credits those arguments as the reason why. The fear that engagement entrenches people—the so-called "backfire effect"—turns out to be much rarer than the study that made it famous suggested. When political scientists Thomas Wood and Ethan Porter tried to reproduce the finding across 52 issues and over 10,000 subjects, they found almost no cases of corrections making things worse. "Nobody changed" is not identical to "nothing happened." Psychologists Sara Algoe and Jonathan Haidt coined the term _elevation_, which is the feeling people get from watching someone respond to cruelty with patience. A warm, motivating jolt that makes onlookers want to be more decent themselves. I freely admit I play the game as intended, and I get down in the mud and dirt. I'm not an intelligent, detached commentator pontificating from the sidelines, somehow above it all. I'm not somebody who pretends I'm above anybody else—I'm not going to outsmart anybody who talks to me in bad faith, or claim I have the rhetorical magic to change their mind. Most conversations end where they started. As I've mentioned in my defence of venting posts, so many of us have maladaptive coping mechanisms because that's all we knew how to do in order to survive. Don't get me wrong here—this isn't an excuse for shitty, bad-faith behaviour. And I'm also sure that, in many cases, these weirdos live comfortable, privileged lives that aren't even on the margins. But you're still dealing with a human being here. Difficult, unlikable, cruel people are still people. You personally have every right to set boundaries and avoid and ignore people like that, but that isn't what I choose to do. I love people, and I try to meet them where they are, no matter how low that is. I don't think giving people a chance is a fault of mine. I don't think I've wasted my time corresponding with people, or writing about that correspondence. I don't think I've wasted my time or effort trying to sincerely connect with another person. And I will continue to do that, over and over again. Because I'm a weirdo myself, clearly. Because I love reckoning with difficult, impossible things. For me, the choice to engage—over and over, with weirdos and trolls and difficult people—is a deliberate ethical practice, rooted in love and curiosity, one I've never once regretted. My attitude of curiosity and openness is how I've been able to continue finding so many things to write about. And, frankly, tomorrow is always a blank page for me. If I write 2,000 words on a topic, then I've spent only a day or so on it, and I have thousands of days. I move on, and I find something else to write about, and today's post will most likely be forgotten in the archives and will certainly be eroded by the tides of deep time. Time will always pass us by; the Earth will never stop rotating. Remember, we must die. Since I started this blog, I've felt that I've been spending my time wisely. I am doing the good writing and work I've always wanted to do.