I Did Not Disappear. I’m Alive, Kind Of.

Hey MightyBrawnies and 💪MightyPros, this is B.

It was 8:39 p.m. in Amsterdam and the sun was still shining like it was the middle of the afternoon when I started recording the original version of this update.

So first, no, I did not disappear.

I’m alive. Kind of.

I know I have been unusually quiet. It has been more than a month since my last proper update, apart from the MegaDrop and a few things here and there. After three years of building BrawnyAi, and more than a year of posting almost every day, I reached a point where I was burning out. I still felt that I could not stop, which was probably a good sign that I actually needed to.

There were also the platform problems. I lost the YouTube channel. Facebook became much more restrictive and mostly stopped showing the page to people who were not already following. Instagram has not been doing particularly well either. When you keep creating and the places where you share the work slowly close around you, it can feel as if the work itself is decaying.

That feeling has been heavy.

Still, I promised myself that I am here for the long term. BrawnyAi cannot be built around the assumption that one social network will always welcome us. The website and the newsletter need to remain the home base. Everything else is distribution. Useful distribution, sometimes fun distribution, but not the foundation.

Then life added another complication.

Since around March, I have been dealing with the first major psoriasis flare of my life. It began quietly. A few spots on my body. A scalp problem that I thought was just an aggressive form of dandruff. Then it kept spreading.

After several doctors, different creams and a lot of confusion, I finally received the diagnosis. Psoriasis is an immune condition. In very simple terms, my immune system is sending the wrong instructions to my skin, telling it to produce new skin much faster than it should. The result is red, flaky and itchy skin that does not have enough time to form properly.

In my case, it is not staying in one convenient little area. It is on my scalp, face, back, arms, legs, butt and other places that do not need a public inventory.

Every day I can spend forty minutes to an hour applying medication across my body. I also have to treat my scalp. Some spots calm down while new ones appear, so right now it feels like a strange mathematical war where I am flattening fewer spots than my body is creating.

I am not sharing this for pity. It is not the end of the world, and I am not giving up. Treatments exist, and I will keep advocating for myself until the doctors and I find the right one. I am sharing it because it explains where some of my energy has gone.

It also explains the strange shape of this trip.

I came to Europe to spend time with my brother, my nephew, my mother and friends. We travelled together. I saw beautiful places. I am grateful that I came.

At the same time, travelling through temperatures of thirty-five degrees or more while your skin is inflamed, sweating and itching is not exactly the fantasy version of a European summer. Multiple truths can exist. I can love seeing my family and still feel exhausted. I can be in a beautiful city and still miss Toronto, my bed and a routine where all my medication is in one place.

That is life, I suppose. Not everything arrives in a clean emotional package.

BrawnyAi has also been helping me through it, although I have to be honest about how.

Working on the project can feel like a drug. When I am building a system, solving a problem or trying to push an idea into its next form, I can forget about my skin for several hours. I do not have to look at myself. I just look at the work.

That can be a refuge. It can also become another form of avoidance.

Part of what I have been trying to learn during this trip is how to keep BrawnyAi alive without keeping myself permanently attached to a desk.

For part of the trip, I left my MacBook behind. I have used that computer almost every day since before COVID. It is my loyal old workhorse and, emotionally, it has become a kind of portal into BrawnyAi. Leaving it felt much stranger than I expected.

So I started building ways to work differently.

I created tools that let me manage parts of BrawnyAi from my phone. I can work on code, prepare posts, handle translations, send ideas to my computers in Toronto and the Netherlands, and even create images, videos, music and audio remotely while the heavier machines do the processing elsewhere.

There were small crises. One computer restarted and needed someone physically present to unlock it. The Beast in Toronto overheated and shut itself down during a test. I thought I had lost access to one of the main hubs of my work for the rest of the trip. Then a Wake-on-LAN setting that I had enabled and never properly tested brought it back to life.

For once, past B had quietly done present B a favour.

I also built simpler tools for scheduling posts. Some platforms can require an absurd number of clicks just to publish one thing at a future date. Now parts of that process take two or three clicks instead. None of this looks glamorous from outside, but it means I can go to the gym, see my family or leave the house without feeling that BrawnyAi immediately stops breathing.

On the website, I added Daily Stack, those small cards that help you rediscover Digital Hunks and older posts. It looks like a modest change, but it is part of making the archive feel alive instead of letting years of work disappear into the bottom of the site.

I also continued working on The Jock.

The first version of Lumberlandia BBS did not become the living multi-character world I hoped it would become. The way I built it was not sustainable. That was disappointing, but it was not useless.

One of its children survived.

The Jock began as an internal helper, and I am now working toward a lighter public version that could live directly on the BrawnyAi website. He could help you find posts and images, make recommendations and eventually remember enough context to feel less like a generic website box and more like a Digital Mind with a place and a voice.

This is difficult work. I do not expect the public version immediately. It may still take a few months, and I would rather make something small that works than release something large that collapses.

The visual side is moving too.

I am training and testing newer image systems while protecting the BrawnyAi look. New technology can follow poses, text and interactions more accurately, but it does not automatically understand our world. I have to teach it. That means selecting images, cleaning them, describing them, training, testing and usually doing the whole thing again.

The same upgrades will support BrwnyXXX, the adult side of the BrawnyAi universe. I am also improving the video workflow, including longer videos. Some older work will still appear because I have a large unpublished archive, but you will gradually start seeing newer images, motion and styles enter the mix.

I want more of these capabilities in-house. Paid services can be useful, but I do not want the future of BrawnyAi to depend completely on one company, one platform or one set of rules.

So yes, I have been quiet. I have been travelling, dealing with my body, spending time with people I love, behaving a little like a hermit and building many things you cannot see yet.

But BrawnyAi is not dead.

I am still here. I am still building. The work continues, even when it becomes less visible for a while.

And the July MegaDrop is almost ready. I am finishing it now and planning to send it this weekend. MegaDrop is sacred, apparently, so some traditions survive even the strangest summer.

Thank you for staying with me and for giving me enough room to be a human being while I figure this out.

With love,

B

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