# Ideas

2025-02-17 | 828 words
ORIGINAL: https://brennan.day/ideas/

Projects I want to build, essays I want to write, things I want to make real.

This is my public idea backlog. Some of these will happen. Some won't. Some are half-baked. Making this public creates accountability and invites collaboration.

If you're working on something similar, let me know. If you want to build one of these together, email me at mail@brennanbrown.ca. If you think I should drop one of these ideas, tell me why.

## Technology & Digital Culture

• DONE | Medium Catalogue Refresh - Curating my best long-form work into a living portfolio, with notes on what each piece means to me now.
• Was My Controversial Piece Botted? - Investigating the strange engagement patterns on a polarizing article, and what it says about authenticity online.
• DONE | "Following" Doesn't Work Anymore: Here's What We Can Do Instead - Exploring the fatigue of algorithmic feeds and proposing alternative models for curating attention (APIs? RSS, human-directed discovery).
• The Moral Schizophrenia of ChatGPT - Examining the ethical cognitive dissonance of AI tools (eg. their takes on veganism, current atrocities, etc.)
• The X Bias of Thinking Something Is Low-Quality Because of Low View Count - How metrics distort our perception of value, creating a vicious cycle that buries genuine work.

## Media & Critique

• Video Games vs. Films: Why the Enshittification? - Comparing the trajectories of two entertainment industries--why one feels increasingly hostile to audiences while the other evolves (or doesn't).
• Anti-Intellectualism, and Video Essays: Stepping into the Bubble of Seriousness - How the video essay format legitimizes deep dives while sometimes becoming a performance of intellect rather than its substance.
• The Art of Joybaiting - Analyzing the online trend of crafting content purely to evoke warmth or nostalgia, and its emotional commodification.

## Personal & Reflective

• DONE | Eulogy for Lighthouse Labs - A reflection on the end of the coding bootcamp experience I was interested in taking that is now completely gone and bankrupt.
• DONE 1 | DONE 2 | On Being a Cusp Baby / Zillennial - Capturing the unique cultural dislocation of being between Millennial and Gen Z, and the identity that emerges in the gap.
• My Health Scare with HSP - A personal account of dealing with Henoch-Schönlein Purpura, now often called IgA Vasculitis, mistaken diagnoses, and how it lead to me dropping out of high school.
• DONE | Phantom Failure - Recurring dreams about failing classes during a semester taken only for student loans--exploring anxiety, self-worth, and the ghosts of past choices.
• The Acquaintance's Premature Baby, the Old Friend Who Might Be Dead - A meditation on the loose threads of relationships and the quiet, unanswered questions we carry out of love.

## Society & Identity

• DONE | Why You Should Still Always Mask Up, Even in 2026 - Making the case for masking as a lasting practice of care, disability justice, and collective responsibility beyond the pandemic narrative.
• On Spectrums - Exploring the cultural and personal meaning of spectrums (autism, politics, sexuality, colour) as tools for understanding beyond binaries.
• Getting Out of Your Wheelhouse - Arguing that to be diverse, vast, and unpredictable in your interests and output is to become anti-fragile in a specialized world.
• The Mythology of Gender / Gender Optionality - Examining gender as a narrative and social technology, and what "optionality" could look like.
• Consent Theatre - Critiquing the performative "yes" and institutional checkbox exercises that simulate consent culture without substance.
• Gender Immigration - A metaphorical exploration of transitioning as a form of migration--between identities, communities, and legal/social territories.

## Writing & Creativity

• The Iceberg of Success Model - Using the iceberg metaphor to dissect the hidden work, failures, and quiet time beneath any visible creative achievement.
• Expand journal entries into memoir material - Raw material written since 2011 on 750words. Time to mine it for actual essays. The ore is there. I need to refine it into something publishable.

## Infrastructure & Tools

• DONE | Build IndieWeb implementation
  Webmentions, microformats, POSSE, IndieAuth, Micropub, WebSub: all 9 of 9 key IndieWeb building blocks implemented and verified.
• Privacy-respecting analytics alternative
  Something simpler than Plausible, more powerful than nothing. Just answer: "What are people reading?"
• Markdown-first CMS for non-technical writers
  Most writers don't need WordPress. They need a way to write in Markdown and publish to their site.

### Community Tools

• Calgary literary map?
  Where writers meet, where readings happen, where bookstores are. Interactive, community-maintained.

## Themes & Starters

• DONE | Create more JAMstack themes for underserved use cases
  Poets. Academic portfolios. Nonprofit documentation sites. Zine archives.
• Build Eleventy starter with everything I always add
  RSS, sitemap, semantic HTML, accessibility checks, image optimization, the works.

## Related

• /now: What I'm actually working on right now
• /interests: The broader themes these ideas connect to
• /projects: Evidence that I finish things sometimes