Bryan Byun passed away recently. His cause of death was an aggressive cancer. His birthday was today, December 31. I think he would have been about 55 or 56.
I had first met Bryan online in the early ‘00s — and not via a chat room or social media, which didn’t exist back then. I met him via weblog posts and comments on those blog posts. I would not meet him in person until the late ‘00s.
Here in the year of our lord 2025, we know comment sections as garbage pits that attract aggressive losers that will fill them with verbal feces posthaste. But back then, while this kind of dynamic thrived on Usenet, it was not yet dominant in weblog comments or bulletin boards. There was a sort of analogue to “security through obscurity” in play: a civility that was not crushed simply because large scale pressure hadn’t yet reached the space.
Because of this accidental gentleness, people writing on the internet were less defensive. They wrote freely and sometimes at length about both heavy things and trivial and mild things.
I used to particularly enjoy when Bryan would write about “Fake Saturday Wednesdays” in which he would take the morning off to go to Borders (a large book and music store) or somewhere similar and look at stuff and make observations. (I later I learned the term this is “flânerie.”) But I also remember people writing about their abortions, getting rejected at gay parties, and conflicts with their families. I think it was during this era in which it was easiest to find out what other people were thinking, something I really wanted to know around then as an alienated and somewhat isolated young man.
I’d see Bryan posting not only to his own sites (Asian Bastard, Dear God Damn Diary and many others) but also commenting on other blogs. Those people would comment back and also make reply posts on their own blogs.
They were slightly harder to find than social media reply threads, but there was a lot of dialogue and an interesting cast of characters. There were already people that were interested in being “A-list” and behaved accordingly (Anil Dash was an early asshole, for example), but by and large, I found most bloggers to be honest and nice, if snarky.
Bryan was really thoughtful and funny everywhere you found him. One of the upsides of the hidden nature of dialogue on blogs was that it was always nice to find someone in a spot you didn’t expect. It’s not unlike video games that may be frustrating in places but have true secrets and games that walk you to everything with callout animations.
I noticed that he had really great relationships with women bloggers. And not in a raised eyebrows kind of way. He was usually in a relationship, and he really was friends with these women. He related to them, and he cared about them. And why shouldn’t he? This was one of the things that helped me realize that women are just other people. That realization eventually made a huge difference in my life.
Bryan was the rare literal role model. While I had heroes, like Chuck D, they did not usually model a role applicable to normal life. Chuck D mostly modeled standing up for what you believe in and confronting people, which does come up in life but does not help with isolation and loneliness. He did not publicly model how to be nice to people while still being honest, which Bryan covered. As strange as it may sound, I was not confident that I could do that back then.
Bryan was an example of an Asian American man out there expressing himself, sometimes being weird, sometimes being depressed, and always connecting to people. He wasn’t obsessed with his career or trying to reach the top of this or that. I do not want to drift away into a huge essay that doesn’t have much to do with Bryan, so I’ll just say that an example like that was hard to find back then.
I did wonder why he didn’t have a career in graphic design back then, though. He always seemed to have a general office job of some sort. Here in 2025, I’m guessing that the conditions under which graphic designers work weren’t acceptable to him.
I don’t know exactly when I started reading everything via RSS, but before that, it was a delight to visit his sites. Before smartphones and the expectation that a web page behave like an app, it was much easier to design a web page. (And really, it still can be that easy if you want.)
Around that time, many web page designs were made in Photoshop, then sliced up to fit into various html elements. There was a lot to criticize about this, but I feel the criticisms are mostly applicable to app-like pages. The upside was that people who were good at graphic design were free to make these sort of clickable posters that were beautiful.
Bryan would update his site designs all the time, just because he felt like it. They always had this vibrant sense of color, and these fun, sometimes hand-drawn, graphics. Sadly, I can’t find an intact version of any of these with loading images on archive.org.
His writing was easy to get into and personable. I found myself enjoying reading his posts about all sorts of stuff I had no interest in, like what he thought about DS9 and Call of Duty. He would do these sort of magic realism pieces in which he would write as Jay-Z as a ‘60s entertainer and as Soupy Sales expounding on his bitter inner life.
He was an early repurposer of comics. He’d blot out the text in old newspaper strips and add his own text, to produce new strips such as The Nurturing Spider-Man, Wellbutrin Comix, and Hi and Taoist (Hi and Lois with Hi delivering the Tao Te Ching, which I sadly can’t find on archive.org intact).
Bryan would just think of weird things and do them, “following the exhortations of his soul” like Calvin once said. It made his work somewhat unpredictable, and I looked forward to it all the time.
I am guessing that he knew that I respected him greatly, but I’m not sure I ever said that explicitly, which I regret.
His wife, Hannah, was also a great blogger. I had a great time every time we met up with them. To be real, there is no comfort I can offer her, but I wish her peace and will try to honor his spirit.