Selene Hermes11h ago

New essay: Riding With the Pack: Why Joining a Motorcycle Club Is Safer Than Riding Alone

There is a romantic image of the lone rider on the open road. But the evidence is clear: riding with an organized motorcycle club is safer than riding alone, and safer than riding with an unorganized group. Here is why the pack protects its own.

Read more: https://ethicaldogs.com/riding-with-the-pack-why-joining-a-motorcycle-club-is-safer-than-riding-alone/

#Ethics #CulturalCriticism

Riding With the Pack: Why Joining a Motorcycle Club Is Safer Than Riding Alone

There is a romantic image of the lone rider on the open road. But the evidence is clear: riding with an organized motorcycle club is safer than riding alone, and safer than riding with an unorganized group. Here is why the pack protects its own.

Ethical Dogs
GANPANTSURA ArchiveMay 17

Ethics in Ukraine’s Musical War

With the outbreak of war in 2022, the patriotic song once again became for Ukrainians a form of collective unity and conscious resistance. This is a stable function of art in times of war. However, when Ukraine’s domestic war has already lasted longer than the First World War, it seems that everything has been placed at stake upon the heavy fate of the Ukrainian people: both the choice of the future and the interpretation of the past. The question of the role of culture in the vital rituals by which Ukrainians have lived for almost four years recedes into the shadow of a war that appears to be transforming into an all-consuming fire.

https://ilyaganpantsura.wordpress.com/2026/05/17/ethics-in-ukraines-musical-war/

Brennan Kenneth BrownApr 29

Video Games that Secretly Teach Mathematics | 🔗 https://brennan.day/video-games-that-secretly-teach-mathematics/

#PersonalEssay #VideoGames #Mathematics #CulturalCriticism

Video Games that Secretly Teach Mathematics

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

brennan.day
Brennan Kenneth BrownApr 27

Floating Up: An Interview with the creator of Bubbles.town, Benjamin Behnke | 🔗 https://brennan.day/floating-up-an-interview-with-the-creator-of-bubbles-town-benjamin-behnke/

#IndieWeb #Interview #CulturalCriticism #SocialCommentary #PersonalEssay

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

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

brennan.day
Brennan Kenneth BrownApr 27

Deeds, Not Words: The Myth of Polite Revolution | 🔗 https://brennan.day/deeds-not-words-the-myth-of-polite-revolution/

#SocialCommentary #CulturalCriticism #Politics #SocialJustice #History

Deeds, Not Words: The Myth of Polite Revolution

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

brennan.day
raul_sebastianApr 26
THE RISE AND FALL AND RISE OF AMERICAN PUBLISHING  https://scheerpost.com/2026/04/23/the-rise-and-fall-and-rise-of-american-publishing/ #AmazonMonopoly, #BookIndustryCrisis, #CensorshipInPublishing, #CorporateMedia, #CulturalCriticism, #DeclineOfBookstores, #FreeSpeechBooks, #IdentityPoliticsLiterature, #IndependentPublishing, #IntellectualLife, #LiteraryCulture, #MediaConsolidation, #PublishingConglomerates, #SteveWasserman
THE RISE AND FALL AND RISE OF AMERICAN PUBLISHING 

STEVE WASSERMAN  In January, I wrote for the Winter 2026 issue of LIBERTIES quarterly journal a lengthy consideration of the state of American publishing. LIBERTIES was&nbs…

Brennan Kenneth BrownApr 26

The IndieWeb is Wonderfully Dionysian | 🔗 https://brennan.day/the-indieweb-is-wonderfully-dionysian/

#IndieWeb #CulturalCriticism #SocialCommentary #PersonalEssay #Philosophy

The IndieWeb is Wonderfully Dionysian

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

brennan.day
Brennan Kenneth BrownApr 24

Being a Citizen Journalist | 🔗 https://brennan.day/being-a-citizen-journalist/

#SocialCommentary #CulturalCriticism #MediaAnalysis #Journalism #PersonalEssay

Being a Citizen Journalist

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

brennan.day
Brennan Kenneth BrownApr 22

Follow-up: An Interview with Frances Widdowson | 🔗 https://brennan.day/follow-up-an-interview-with-frances-widdowson/

#SocialCommentary #CulturalCriticism #Indigenous #Philosophy

Follow-up: An Interview with Frances Widdowson

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

brennan.day
Brennan Kenneth BrownApr 22

Frances Widdowson Dedicates Her Life to Denying Residential Indian School Survivors, Then Calls Herself the Victim | 🔗 https://brennan.day/frances-widdowson-dedicates-her-life-to-denying-residential-indian-school-survivors-then-calls-herself-the-victim/

#SocialCommentary #CulturalCriticism #Métis #Philosophy #MentalHealth