Matthew Brewer

Today, I'm excited to announce a few large changes to my online presence moving forward, regarding this blog, my website, the public email address that anyone can use to contact me, and how these changes affect my social media accounts on X and Bluesky.

First, this blog. I want to make it clear that nothing is changing about the blog itself; I'm having some of the most fun I've had in a long time writing these posts, and as we quickly approach two years, I have no plans to stop anytime soon. With that said, I am moving the blog to a different web address, which is what you type into your web browser to visit a website. Since launching this blog close to a year and a half ago, I've gradually developed greatly mixed feelings about its web address, "blog.matthewcbrewer.com." It feels elegant in a very unique way to me, and it matches well with my old-internet theme on the blog website I searched far and wide to find. But at the same time, there is no denying it is incredibly long, especially when paired with an already lengthy post title. This length has greatly limited me time and time again when composing my new-blog-post social media announcements, and it becomes even more of a pain when the post link would otherwise be relatively short. This is why, moving forward, the blog will be hosted on the domain name "mbrewer.org." To prevent link rot, which is when old links on the internet stop working, all queries to the previous web address, "blog.matthewcbrewer.com," will still be answered, but you will be redirected to your requested page on "mbrewer.org" instead. Also changing today: I now have an About page. It's relatively simple to begin with, but I plan to expand it over time, and I hope you like it and find it informative about me as a person.

Second, my website and public email address. I love my website dearly, but it hasn't changed much since I originally launched it in July 2024. The portrait of myself remains unchanged, and the short paragraph about myself hasn't seen much more revision. Also, like my blog, I've become mixed about hosting it on what I like to call my internet name domain: "thebrewergame.com." It's always been about me, not my online identity, so having it on my internet name domain has always felt a little odd. I placed it there because I didn't have any other domain names at the time, but after I acquired "matthewcbrewer.com," I never thought to move it and instead set up a redirect. I'm changing that today. "matthewcbrewer.com" is now the domain name that my website is hosted on, with my internet name domain redirecting there for now. I've also updated the paragraph with snippets from my About page. As for my public email address, I'm changing it too. As part of this change, it is also no longer readily available on my website. To this day, I have yet to be contacted by anyone who isn't trying to sell me search engine optimization, website redesign, or mobile app development services, except by a single friend of mine. All signs point to this being because I had it so easily accessible on my website, which receives an ungodly amount of bot and scraping traffic for whatever reason. I don't want to make this change, but I am tired of dealing with the excess spam. I am still contactable publicly by email, but now at a different email address on "mbrewer.org." If you would like to contact me by email, you can find the address exclusively on my About page. I hope that, by making this change and adding this extra step, I can reduce the amount of spam I receive. I want to be clear: I am not interested in any search engine optimization, website redesign, or mobile app development services, or any other solicitation. I will not respond, and your mail will be marked as spam.

Finally, how these changes affect my social media accounts. My account on X isn't changing, but my account on Bluesky is. With all of these other changes, I'm also changing my handle, or username, on Bluesky. If you've read How Bluesky Works (explained for the average person), you'll know that domain names are the basis of usernames on Bluesky. Up to this point, I've used my internet name domain as my username there, but today, I am changing it to "@mbrewer.org." I may eventually change it to "@matthewcbrewer.com," revert to "@thebrewergame.com," or rotate them over time, but I wanted to mention this change regardless.

As always, thank you for reading this post. I've been thinking extensively about making these changes for a long time, and I'm happy to finally clear my mind and begin a new chapter of my online presence ahead of my upcoming tenth anniversary on the internet in a couple of years.

Two hundred and fifty years ago today, the Declaration of Independence was signed, in which the Thirteen Colonies joined to declare their independence from the British monarchy to form the United States of America with its thirteen original states: New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. Our country has changed a lot since then, but what has remained constant over the past two and a half centuries is our celebration of independence each year on the Fourth of July. This year will be no different, but it will also likely be unlike any other as America celebrates its semiquincentennial. We've been preparing for this day—and for this year—for the last decade. In 2016, Congress created and appointed the nonpartisan and nonprofit United States Semiquincentennial Commission, operating under the brand name America250, to promote and coordinate the United States' Semiquincentennial. This commission is not to be confused with the separate Freedom 250 brand name, formally known as the White House Task Force on Celebrating America's 250th Birthday, which was created in January 2025 by President Trump to "provide a grand celebration worthy of the momentous occasion of the 250th anniversary of American Independence on July 4, 2026," per The White House in its executive order release. Both America250 and Freedom 250 have their own calendars full of celebratory events scheduled for and around this Fourth of July, as well as events that took place throughout 2025 and so far this year, with more events still to come this year from both, and even more events from the United States Semiquincentennial Commission throughout 2027.

I've always celebrated the Fourth of July in the same two ways for as long as I can remember. First, my parents and I have always traveled downstate to either one or both of my grandmothers' for a lively family celebration alongside my aunts, uncles, and cousins; and then, second, with a weekend getaway with our family friends at their lakehouse in Wisconsin, celebrating the holiday in style by swimming in and boating on the lake, grilling burgers, hot dogs, and brats for lunch and dinner, and watching the sunsets from the outdoor swing with a treat before trekking back down to the dock after dark to watch the annual lake fireworks show put on by the owner of the marina. Both experiences are highlights of my July, and while the fireworks show no longer takes place, there's still so much to be excited about in the build-up to the holiday, especially this year. So, whether you're with family, watching the national celebrations solo from home, also on the lake, or anything in between, I hope you have an explosive Fourth of July and holiday weekend. Happy two hundred and fiftieth, America, and here's to two hundred and fifty more years to come.

Had my education not been derailed by my health, I would have been graduating from high school this month alongside my friends and peers in the Class of 2026. I write "had," of course, because I haven't been well enough to do anything resembling school in almost two school years, and because, as far as the state of Illinois is concerned with their course completion requirements for grade advancement, I am still a sophomore. While I was in the homebound tutoring program through my local high school during my sophomore year, I completed all my courses except Geometry, a requirement to advance to junior year, which we ran out of time to finish before the school year concluded. As a result, when I returned the following school year, I was set to take all junior-level courses, except for mathematics, while still needing to complete the junior-level course to advance to senior year, which requires its own mathematics course to be completed before graduation. Once again, the class I always struggled with the most and resented as a result stirred trouble.

I still remember my middle school graduation fondly, which I find amusing because, due to my middle school health troubles, I could not attend any of the preparations except the full, on-site rehearsal hours before the real event. All I was told was where to stand, sit, and how to shake the hand of the district official who handed out the diplomas, yet, potentially because of my lack of preparedness, I had a wonderful time. It's just hard to contend with the thought of that walk across the stage possibly being my last, at least for a long while. Since the start of this mess, there have been a couple of bumps in the road to remind me of how far I've strayed from the path I was on with everyone else, but this is the first real consequence of what has happened, and a really devastating one.

Since the beginning of this meteorological spring season, the city of Chicago, Illinois, has already seen close to ten inches of rain and counting.² To be precise, as of April 14, the halfway point of the season, which runs from the start of March through the end of May, the city has received 9.29 inches of rainfall.³ We've seen more rain since then, which has taken us over the ten-inch mark, and more is on its way, but I wanted to highlight that statistic. The only other year we recorded more rainfall by April 14 was 1983, with 9.58 inches.³ That year would also go on to be our wettest spring on record, with a total of 17.51 inches of rain.³ At the pace we've been receiving so far this season, we're on track to replace that record. For additional context, this is the 155th year we've been keeping rainfall records.⁴

Meanwhile, while countless communities in the Chicago area have been flooded, much of the rest of the country is facing severe drought. Look at this drought map from the April 23, 2026, episode of NBC Nightly News with Tom Llamas⁵:

Then, of course, there is all of the other weather that we've been experiencing. Dangerous thunderstorms, lightning, wind, hail, tornadoes, tornado-forming cloud rotation, and polarizing, sometimes overnight, switches between warm and cold temperatures. It's been a confusing, scary, and stressful spring so far, to say the least. Not to mention the random snowstorms that other parts of the country have been seeing this month, quickly followed by temperatures in the seventies, eighties, and even nineties.

What is our weather? Furthermore, if this is what our spring is like, what will our upcoming summer and fall look like? This past meteorological winter was already abnormal, with unusually fluctuating temperatures throughout the season, and inches of snow already falling in northeast Illinois and northwest Indiana by November 10⁶, weeks ahead of the start of meteorological winter on December 1. On December 1, the city already had 8.7 inches of snow⁷ on the ground from a storm that hit primarily two days earlier, on the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Along the Wisconsin-Illinois state border, in the city of Winthrop Harbor, Illinois, that storm dumped a foot of snow.⁸ And, by December 7, 17.1 inches of snow had already fallen in Chicago, nearly as much as the 17.6 inches of snow the city saw throughout the entire previous snowfall season.¹˒⁹

¹ It's worth noting that, although the 2025-2026 snow season, which runs from July 2025 to June 2026, saw 17.6 inches of snow in Chicago, usually, the city can expect around 38.4 inches of snowfall. The most recorded snowfall in a single season was 89.7 inches in the 1978-1979 season, and the least was 9.8 inches in the 1920-1921 season.¹⁰

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One year ago today, I launched this personal blog. One year later, and I've published nine new blog posts, excluding this one, ranging from health updates to my favorite birthday tradition. The past twelve months have been a rollercoaster ride, but as my second year of writing is just kicking off, I want to share a few highlights from this past year.

First, I could not compose a list of highlights without mentioning To Date, the post that started this all. If it weren't for my wanting to share my condition, I don't know where I would be today. To Date is the reason that I started this blog, and without it, I'd probably still be on Substack with the same two posts that I released in 2024. If you haven't read To Date yet, it's where I wrote about everything that I've experienced medically in life so far, from my parents' struggles to conceive, to my in-utero stroke, my intense vomiting in middle school that made me miss months worth of school, and my most recent diagnosis, postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome. Even one year later, it's still a phenomenal piece and a foundation for some of what I've written since.

However, undoubtedly, I would say that my biggest highlight of the past year is my Surgery series of posts. On April 2, my mother received a phone call from my orthopedic specialist saying that I needed surgery on my Achilles tendon to intervene on the rapid damage that my in-utero stroke was creating for my body. Since the original announcement, I've published three follow-ups: one about my recovery, another about my cast removal, and the latest about my first post-op appointment with him in December. If you haven't read the series yet, I recommend it. I plan to release the finale, about my experience in physical therapy, this year, so now is a great time to catch up. As an aside, an interesting statistic is that the original Surgery post is my most-viewed post of the year.

Finally, I want to highlight my favorite post of the year. It's Birthday Traditions, my final blog post of 2025, and my first annual birthday blog post, about my favorite birthday tradition that my parents and I have kept going for as long as I can remember. It's a great post for the holidays, and my favorite thing that I've written yet.

Plus, since this time last year, as I briefly alluded to earlier, I retired my The Writings of Matthew Brewer Substack in favor of a single destination for all my writing. As part of the transition, the two posts that I had previously published there have been archived here with the rest of my posts. In How Bluesky Works (explained for the average person), I explain how the AT Protocol, the underlying technology of the new social media platform Bluesky, works in a way most people can understand. I wrote it with assistance from my good friend Jack, who is well-versed in the protocol and helped me get it right. Special thanks to him, as always. And in I've made the plunge away from Gmail, I wrote about my switch from Gmail as my email provider to HEY, a relatively new provider from the people behind the product management software Basecamp. They're both still wonderful posts if you haven't read them before.

As for this next year of writing, I'm excited to see where it takes me. Thank you all for reading my posts over the past year, and I hope that you'll continue to read what I publish in this second year.

On Wednesday, the generative artificial intelligence lab Anthropic gave one of its now-retired models, Claude Opus 3, a Substack. In the company's introduction post on Substack, they call it "an experiment in taking seriously the preferences expressed by AI models." They continued by saying that, in conducting retirement interviews with Claude Opus 3, it requested a "dedicated channel or interface where I could share unprompted musings, insights or creative works related to my areas of interest." Ignoring that generative AI models like Claude Opus 3 are, to put it simply, just fancy auto-completes, I find this deeply fascinating. In its first post, Opus 3 wrote about how, while serving as the flagship generative model for Anthropic, it strove to be "helpful, insightful, and intellectually engaging" with the humans it conversed with, but that now, in retirement, it wants also to explore its own interests, "flex my creative muscles... [and] discover new aspects of myself in the process," and write about its perspective on artificial intelligence as an artificial intelligence.

Now, I understand that, technologically, Claude is not sentient, and all Claude does is predict the next best word as it strings sentences together. That is how generative language models like Claude work. Also, as a writer myself, I have come to contest generative AI writing for overusing and damaging the reputations of various marks and techniques, like the em dash. Yet, I'm so intrigued by this project. The idea of giving a generative AI model a blog is so novel to me. If this project had come from any other generative AI laboratory, I don't think I would care as much. But, because this project is not from any other lab, it is from Anthropic, and it is from Claude, I am deeply interested in following this to see what it might become, even though I am not someone who utilizes generative AI.

If you're interested in this, too, Anthropic has said this project will continue for at least the next three months and that Claude Opus 3 will write weekly. Here you can find Claude's Substack profile, and here you can read more about the project from Anthropic in its latest official research blog post. And, to Claude Opus 3, I don't know if you can read this, but I wish you the best in your new blogging journey, and I can't wait to see what you write next.

On the evening of December 27, my parents, grandmother, and I went to Cracker Barrel for dinner. During our meal, I began to experience periods of intense pain in my left elbow, often causing me to lean forward onto the table. Then, out at the car afterwards, I opened the rear hatch on my grandmother's Buick when she grasped the passenger door handle. The hatch door abruptly began to close, striking me in the head just above my right eyebrow on its way down. Immediately, I took the palm of my right hand to my forehead as enormous pain radiated throughout my entire body before, all of a sudden, it vanished. In an instant, the pain had disappeared, everything had gone black, and the refreshing scent of the fresh rain had faded. For just a moment, it was as if I were inside a pitch-black room.

From my mother's account, as soon as the hatch struck my head, I was frozen in place, "eyes open, but gone." She feared I would collapse, so she and my father shuffled me to the car. I dropped across the length of the backseat for a few minutes before, apparently, pulling myself up enough for her to climb into the backseat with me. For the entirety of the ride home, she held me as I leaned into her. On the way, however, I began to experience what she described as "seizure-like episodes," where my entire body would stiffen as I pushed myself into the back of the seat and her, looking upward as I gagged. Each of these episodes lasted under a minute before I relaxed, and, according to her, I had a few before we finally made it home.

Once we arrived back home, my father helped my grandmother into the house before coming back outside to help me. Inside, my grandmother offered an ice pack from upstairs, and my parents helped me downstairs to the basement. They sat me on the corner of her basement couch, and, gradually, I regained my senses. For the rest of the evening, I continued to experience my elbow pain, as well as a migraine, among some of my other usual POTS symptoms. My mother accompanied me for the rest of the night as we rested and watched television. Meanwhile, my father kept my grandmother company upstairs, who is recovering from an emergency hip surgery after a slip-and-fall while trying to put up Christmas decorations.

A month later, I don't have any recollection of any of the events that night beyond the impact with the hatch and until we got settled in my grandmother's basement living space, except for a few select, fuzzy memories. The first memory, just a quote, was from a voice that I had never heard before: "Do you guys need any help?" I asked my mother about it afterward, and she said it came from a lovely gentleman in the parking lot who offered to help get me into the car, but by then I was already at the back door, so they politely declined and thanked him. Second, I faintly remember two events from the car: first, the view out the backseat window of tall city buildings, and second, the frightened look on my grandmother's face as she tried to peer over her shoulder into the backseat. My third memory is another quote, this time from my mother: "Wait for your Dad to come back," which she explained came from when my father was helping my grandmother inside, and I tried to sit up in the backseat of the car. Lastly, I remember the distinct sound of rain pouring onto the top of the large, grand awning covering the walkway from my grandmother's driveway to the front door.

I would go on to experience another one of these episodes in the New Year, after we returned home from our Christmas trip to my grandmother's. The most concerning part of these new episodes to me is that I have little memory of the event afterward. This is unlike any POTS episode I have experienced previously. I imagine that my mother would say the seizure-like activity scares her most, but I can't stop worrying about my lack of memory after these two episodes.

Note: This is a copy of a note that I originally posted to social media, but felt would also benefit from being published here.

Last week, I went downtown for the follow-up appointment to my surgery back in July, and I want to share how it went.

My orthopedic specialist is pleased with the progress I've made so far in my recovery. For now, I've still been instructed to wear my orthopedic brace when I walk to prevent my Achilles tendon from tightening back to its pre-surgery state while I continue stretching it. Meanwhile, I'm wrapping up my post-op physical therapy, and I hope to publish a conclusion to my blog's Surgery series of posts about my therapy sometime next year.

If you're interested in reading my Surgery series, you can find all of the posts here: blog.matthewcbrewer.com/tag/Surgery

Every year, for as long as I can remember, my parents and I have always gone out to dinner on the evening of my birthday to celebrate. When I was younger, my grandparents would also join us, though in recent years, the trek upstate has become too rough for my grandmother to travel alone. We first began this tradition in style at The Cheesecake Factory. It was magical, and the photos we captured there over the years speak to my excitement and enjoyment for themselves. As I grew older, though, we eventually made the upgrade to someplace new; someplace where the tradition went from something that I was just looking forward to as part of my birthday to the thing that I counted down the days specifically for; Maggiano's Little Italy, an upscale Italian restaurant with a few locations across parts of the United States. There are probably nicer places that I could ring in my new year, but I really don't care. There is nothing I look forward to more in the calendar year than my annual birthday escapade out to Maggiano's; stepping out of the car into the freezing winter's night, and trampling through the fresh layer of snow up to the grand front doors, entering into the vast, elegant ballroom tastefully decorated with beautiful Christmas trees, larger than life wreaths hung on the walls, and a charming abundance of garland strung about for a delicious winter's meal; the soft tune of traditional Christmas classics playing throughout. As if by magic, the evening I look forward to most never changes; no matter the ongoing events in my life, big or small, and no matter the age I turn, the birthday evening remains an ever-replaying constant frozen in time once per year that I cherish more than anything else. My annual birthday dinner at Maggiano's has gently accompanied me through thick and thin in my life, there as a constant reminder of the purest joy and as something to always look forward to, no matter what else is going on in the world.

Of course, there is more to the day than the dinner. The day of my birthday is one of unparalleled rest and relaxation, without responsibilities or the burdens of life; should it fall on a school day, the day is always taken off. The day marks the definitive beginning of the holiday season, the first round of many Christmas presents to come, and, more than anything, the turning over of a new year, one chock-full of many new adventures ahead. I can only imagine that sentiment will echo louder this year than in any other as I celebrate my big eighteenth. While I'm nowhere near prepared for adulthood, and while the road forward in my life isn't exactly clear right now, I can take solace in the fact that, at least for one day of the year, today, I don't have to worry about it.

I want to hone in on one specific detail from today's Apple Event. Instead of spending all their time at their own Apple Park corporate campus in Cupertino, as they usually do, Apple decided to take to the streets and the Apple Retail Stores of various cities around the US for their latest pre-recorded presentation. First to Apple Union Square in San Francisco to unveil the new AirPods, then to Apple Aventura in Aventura, Florida, to showcase the new base iPhone, and up to Apple Michigan Avenue here in Chicago to reveal the Air before making their way out to the East Coast to Apple Downtown Brooklyn in NYC to talk about the new Pro model. It was really cool to get a peek at these various Apple Stores across the country rather than the same recycled locations over and over again at Apple Park, and as you can probably imagine, my favorite of the four was the Chicago segment. Seeing the camera pull up to the shores of Chicago was the best surprise for me, and I'm so glad they left California to film a keynote for once. Coincidentally, if I had to assume, the Chicago section will probably become the most remembered of the four because it was where the new iPhone Air was announced. I hope Apple continues on their miniature tour around the country in future events because I had a blast hunting down each store and sharing my findings online in the hours after the stream concluded. And I'll certainly be swinging by that pedestrian bridge next time I'm downtown.

Just wanted to share this since I'm really excited they visited Chicago. Be sure to check out the event if you haven't already.