Right now I’m sitting in my favorite chair in my living room, safely home after having spent Thanksgiving with most of my family in Milwaukee. Normally I’d still be there, and wouldn’t have come home until tomorrow night — but the forecast has a massive winter storm coming through tonight through tomorrow afternoon.

So, being a rational human being who doesn’t want to drive through six to ten inches of snow, Crysta and I cut our visit short and drove home today.

It was still a good visit. Thanksgiving was at my parent’s house, and altogether there were thirteen of us for dinner. Then, earlier today I guess since it’s still before midnight, I helped my dad put up the outdoor Christmas lights (which I’ve been doing with him the day after Thanksgiving for as long as I can remember). I would have taken a photo, except as a rule I don’t take photographs of the exteriors of loved ones’ homes and post them online because I don’t want to accidentally dox them.

It’s far too easy to figure that stuff out if you know what you’re doing.

Afterwards my brother came over to watch the Bears game, and when it wrapped up? Crysta and I hit the road and drove home. It’s weird to be home this early on Thanksgiving weekend, but, again, the roads are going to be terrible tomorrow, while tonight they were clear and safe.

I don’t know if there was much of a point to this entry besides just updating y’all on my mundane life. But, like, it’s a good mundane life. I think that it’s important to remember the simple joys of spending time with the people you love, and it’s nice to have a highlight to pull me out of the darkness this time of year.

So that’s what happened.

Also, remember, you can pre-order Buried Memories, the fourth book in my contemporary fantasy series the Mia Graves Saga, out December 15th 2025.

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This has been a strange week for a lot of reasons, but one of those reasons is deeply ironic. If you recall I wrote a whole blog entry about how I don’t care about having a large audience — instead preferring a smaller, intentional one. In that post I mentioned how I had a decent TikTok following, and how it was probably the least fulfilling part of my online presence.

Don’t get me wrong, I like using TikTok and posting to that platform, and I wouldn’t use it at all if I didn’t. Like, there’s a reason my Instagram is an abandoned mess, and my Facebook pages are largely automated. I just choose not to prioritize the pursuit of an audience there, y’know?

Well, that audience just got me a movie screener.

Like, literally the same day I wrote that post I got an email from a PR company offering me an advanced screener for the upcoming Bryan Fuller directed Dust Bunny. Why did I get this offer? My modest TikTok following, that’s why.

Now, normally I would have ignored that. I’m used to getting review requests I ignore, it’s just usually from some publisher of esoteric books trying to get me to review their author’s work on BS-Free Witchcraft. But, y’see, Crysta apparently had been following the production of this movie for quite a while, and my saying yes let us watch it weeks before it would hit theaters.

So I said yes.

I mean, I was just agreeing to review the movie, so what did I have to lose? I was going to see this thing eventually anyway. So on Saturday we watched it, I recorded my review Sunday night, and on Monday I posted it to TikTok.

Now here’s the thing, I don’t think this video is going to do that well for me. TikTok tends to hate any video I make that isn’t Witchcraft related or related to very specific BookTok drama. The algorithm driven engine behind that site doesn’t show my videos to the audiences that might want to see this review. It’s the whole reason I pitch my Internet Cockroach Theory to begin with. There’s a real chance I never get sent another opportunity like this again because, honestly, I don’t know if anyone’s going to really see this thing.

So, uh, maybe go watch this and share it if you want me to have future chances to see free movies ahead of time. ?

It’s funny, offers like this never really came when I used to regularly review movies for Nerd & Tie. Now that I’ve seemingly stepped out of pop culture commentary though, stuff just seems to come in on its own. Life is weird, and who knows what’s going to happen next.

I certainly don’t.

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As a person who makes creative projects and publishes them on the internet, there’s a push to find the largest audience possible. Modern social media focuses on follower count and reaching as many folks as possible, but the more I think about it — the more I see this kind of pursuit as unfulfilling. This isn’t a criticism of people who want that audience, and I definitely wouldn’t say no to it if it showed up at my doorstep, but these days I find myself wanting to focus on something else: developing a smaller, more intimate community.

I’ve eluded to it in some of my TikTok posts, but I honestly think at this point in my existence of “person who makes shit and puts it online” I get much more satisfaction communicating with a handful of folks who really like what I’m doing. Like UnCONventional never had more than, like, four hundred regular readers, but that audience actively engaged with what I was making. They fought in the comments over character motivations, and genuinely cared about the outcome. BS-Free Witchcraft has a regular listenership of a few thousand, but I love the feedback I get from the small group that gathers on the Nerd & Tie Discord.

In theory, with almost twenty-three thousand followers on my TikTok, I have the potential to reach so many more people there than I do anywhere else, and it’s not that large a following in the grand scheme of the social web. But reaching that audience seems less fulfilling than the three digit numbers currently reading Peregrine Lake.

Intentional small audiences with a sense of community feel much more connected, and I think that’s probably the more emotionally healthy pursuit for me right now. It’s definitely a more sustainable one, and one hundred percent a more achievable one… because I have achieved it. But the thing is, these communities are two way streets. Like there are tons of people making stuff and putting it out to small communities like mine, and the only reason they’re sustainable is that the audience interacts back.

If you’re reading fics on AO3, leave a comment. If you like the YouTube video of a small creator, tell them how much you appreciated it. If you’re reading a comic, let the creator know how much you’re enjoying it. Every single person who makes stuff wants to know you’re out there, and that interaction is what makes making stuff feel worth it. Participate — because that’s how you build community.

I don’t know if there was really a point to this past my climbing up my own asshole about the nature of internet fame and audiences, but I kind of had the need to write it anyways. Who knows why the hell I do anything.

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November 17th 1984 is the canonical birthdate of Lynn Guadalupe Baxter, one of the main characters of Full Circle (2006), UnCONventional (2009-2019), and Peregrine Lake (2024-current). That makes today her official 41st birthday.

So, uh, happy birthday to a fake person who mostly just lives in my head I guess?

Out of all the characters I’ve ever written, Lynn is arguably one of the most important ones in my heart. I’ve definitely written more about her than any other character in my life, but that’s just largely due to how long UnCONventional ran. I first came up with her way back in 2003 for a project I never ended up doing called “Re-entry.” I’ve posted the original art I drew of her before when I was coming up with that, but I didn’t end up introducing her to the world until the (now offline) short lived Full Circle interactive fiction project I did with some friends in 2006. That didn’t last that long, but I dug her back up when I was launching UnCONventional in 2009… and she’s managed to stick around ever since.

One of the reasons Lynn is so important to me is that in her creation, I deliberately put into the character a lot of the things I don’t like about myself. I took a lot of my anger, sadness, and worst impulses and put them into her. I think I felt like that if I could make a character with those traits and love her, I could maybe learn to accept them as a part of myself.

What I never expected was for so many other people to love her too.

Now let’s be clear, Lynn is not an author avatar — she’s dealing with a lot of things I’ve never had to. I’ve had support she didn’t, and didn’t ever have to face some of the challenges she has. But in many ways she’s been a means to accept things about myself I sometimes have had a hard time doing so otherwise. She’s important to me in ways none of my other characters are, and it’s been a joy to write her for so long. Lynn Baxter is my favorite fake-person, and to her I guess I say happy fake-birthday.

I look forward to telling more of your story.

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You need to start writing a blog. Yes, you — the person who is reading this right now, either on my blog or a syndicated version on one of the websites I distribute this to. You need to go out, find some web space or a blog host, and start writing a blog.

And you need to do it now.

I talked about this back in March in my post about being an internet cockroach, but we’re siloing our internet into these social media black holes. Like I literally made a video about this today, and if you don’t follow me on the specific platforms here I post those, you’d have no idea that I said anything about this. We’re putting too much content into these black holes that cannot be archived, cannot be searched, and cannot be found years later. One of the reasons the web has, frankly, become worse is that we’re feeding everything into these centralized platforms that hide from the light of day.

One of the things that used to make the internet so useful was that people posted their random thoughts to blogs on the public web — be it on their own sites, LiveJournal, Blogger, etc. Your friends would either just visit your blog or subscribe to your site’s RSS feed (here’s mine!).

This made it easy to find information, let the sites get archived by services like Archive.org, and kept our platforms diversified — in case one site went down.

Blogging is the easiest thing to do out of any of these things too. You just post whatever you’re thinking the same way a lot of folks use platforms like BlueSky. Just… do that thing on a blog like this one.

You can self host like I do if you have the money, or use a dedicated blog platform. There are a bunch still out there. Heck, if you have an old TRHOnline account, you could even do it here (but maybe don’t, my software is terrible). Between services like Blogger, WordPress.com, Pillowfort.social, and a bunch more I’ve never heard of… there’s a place you can put it.

Importantly the first steps in building a better online experience for everyone has to come from us. We need to refracture into the smaller communities the internet used to be driven by instead of the outrage and algorithm driven centralized platforms we have today. And the easiest way to do that… is to start a blog.

And it can be about anything. Whatever you’re thinking. Just do it.

And tell me about it when you do.

Also, remember, you can pre-order Buried Memories, the fourth book in my contemporary fantasy series the Mia Graves Saga, out December 15th 2025.

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Way back in 2011 I ran probably one of the best known storylines in UnCONventional called “I Hate November.” In the comic, Lynn is pretty much just having a shitty time. We find out some of her backstory, but the focus is much more on her emotional state than any specific events or plot. Its core is a feeling that I don’t know that I’ve ever had the words for, which is why I had to write a whole month long comic to describe it. The phrase “I hate November” was already in my vocabulary long before I wrote the piece.

Because I hate November.

I mean, that’s not fair — I hate how I feel in November. The month itself has never done anything specifically wrong to me. Every year it’s like a cloak of gray kicks in and wraps around me though, one that I have to fight to get out of. Of course, unlike Lynn, this feeling isn’t linked to some deep trauma, it’s for much, much dumber reasons.

It’s because it’s dark out.

I don’t know that I’ve ever really talked about Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) in the twenty-four years I’ve written this blog, but it’s been happening the whole time. Without fail, it builds up over the fall for me, and then when the clocks change it hits me like a hammer. This has been happening since as long as I can remember, and it just… sucks.

Now, I have stuff I can do to deal with this. Ways to lift myself out of this funk — but they’re tasks I have to actively remember to do. They’re choices that I have to make. They don’t make it go away, but they make it more than manageable. You’d think I’d remember to start doing them every year if this has been my lifelong experience.

I do not.

Literally, every year, I forget. I’m just wandering around going “Why do I suddenly feel like shit all the time?” forgetting this happens every year. It is so predictable, yet I completely forget when the annual “no sun” comes around.

I don’t know that I have anything deeper to say about this right now, but it’s just been on my mind. It’s the sort of thing I historically edited out of this blog after the first few years, but I felt like I needed to write it somewhere.

On the upside, I’ve been writing music again, and digging through old half written pieces to see if there’s anything interesting in there. I might put out a new “album” next year if I feel like it. Right now I’m trying to just make sure I stay on top of the projects I’m already committed to though, so who knows.

I just know that I hate November.

Also, remember, you can pre-order Buried Memories, the fourth book in my contemporary fantasy series the Mia Graves Saga, out December 15th 2025.

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So back in December, you may have noticed that the webcomic I make with Ethan Flanagan, Peregrine Lake, went from color to black and white. The intention, originally, was to have this be a temporary situation. We always meant for Ethan to go back and update the pages.

But, uh, it’s been ten months. And that hasn’t happened.

Life is busy for both of us, and the amount of work that Ethan had to put into getting the color pages done made a regular schedule really hard to meet. I won’t go into details, but we had a choice between regular updates and full color. After a lot of discussion Ethan and I decided the comic would just stay in black and white.

That’s why the earlier black and white pages were a bit more slap dash compared to new ones, and why we’ve started adding touches of color when it’s important. I plan on going back and fixing some of the “coloring” on earlier black and white pages for consistency, but the pages coming out now? This is what those pages will look like in the eventual print copies.

And yes, the first print collection will be out in 2026.

Like a lot of you probably already assumed the comic was staying in black and white, but I wanted to make the announcement official. In many ways I think this adds to the vibe of the comic too. This entire story is set in winter, and if you’ve ever been out in the snow at night in Wisconsin, the world feels pretty monochrome already. Part of me wishes we’d started this way, but then I look at the gorgeous art Ethan did and I go… nah. I think we’ve done this the way we should have the whole time.

I just hope folks are enjoying what we’re making as much as we like making it.

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One of the most frustrating things over the last few months has been dealing with my website getting constantly hit with requests from malicious bots repeatedly hammering and scraping my website. Back at the beginning of August I described it as a DDOS attack — where bots were hammering the old TRHOnline Forums. It took down the Perl interpreter on the server, was burning through my bandwidth, and effectively crashed my whole website.

I ended up band-aiding some stuff (and taking the forum offline), but in September I effectively had to recode my whole website in PHP to keep the thing online.

The bots, which ignore the robots.txt file on my server (or are deliberately targeting things listed on it), have been largely running from cloud service providers. They disguise their useragents as normal people, but it’s easy to backtrack their IPs (and they don’t request a website the same way a human end-user does). I stopped it for a while by blocking any requests from Google’s cloud services back in September, but they restarted this month running off of Alibaba and Tencent’s.

It’s like playing wack-a-mole.

Like I don’t know if this is for illicit AI scraping or if it’s an attempt to find an exploit in old PHPBB code (they keep trying to get to the version of the forum I took down — which now redirects them to a Rick Roll). I mean, maybe I really am the victim of a DDOS attack, though I find that highly unlikely.

It’s mostly just annoying, because there are a million things I’d rather be doing than this like talking about my upcoming novel or the great episode of BS-Free Witchcraft coming out Saturday with Thumper Forge. But no, instead I’m searching out IP blocks I can ban from my site to keep it running, hoping I don’t accidentally kick some legitimate visitors.

It’s just annoying and I hate it.

Also, remember, you can pre-order Buried Memories, the fourth book in my contemporary fantasy series the Mia Graves Saga, out December 15th 2025.

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I talked about this back in May, but I’ve sometimes go out and play around with different generative AI products just to see what they can do. I never share what I “make,” and I never even mention what I’m using because I don’t want to be seen as promoting this stuff. My attitude generally has been that I believe the current way that AI companies scrape content from real artists and writers is unethical, but that the underlying technology could be used ethically if the tech bros running these companies had any respect for artists, writers, or any other creative human endeavour.

Genuinely my emotional response to the AI companies throughout this has been mild frustration and annoyance. Like here’s fascinating tech we could be using for something interesting, and instead we’re ripping off creative people and making some of the most soulless images and “writing” I’ve ever seen. I’m rolling my eyes and shaking my head for the most part.

That is not my response to AI music.

A couple of days ago I decided to try out an AI music product, since I’d never really dived into that end of the pool. So I messed around, made some funny songs (like I may have a pop punk song about the 1998 failed TV pilot Blade Squad on my computer right now because of it). I even used it to remix some of my old original work that not even I care about. Ever wanted to hear an orchestral metal version of my old Happy Wednesday song Dead Birds? That’s a thing on my harddrive now. I uploaded the Stormwood theme I wrote back in 2019 and added in the lyrics I wrote for it but never recorded too. But the more I thought about it, the angrier I got. Like, really, really angry.

Like shouting in my truck as I drove home from the store angry.

The creation of music is a fundamental, human thing. I don’t think most people know this about me, but I once had aspirations to be a professional singer. Like my pragmatic brain kicked in when I was, like, eighteen — but the passion that made me want that never went away. There’s a reason I’ve put out my own terrible music on and off over the years, and miss being in a band. Music moves me in a fundamental, human way, and I don’t think that’s an uncommon experience. The right modulation at the right time in a song scratches a very specific itch in my brain. The human voice alone pulls at strings in me I don’t know how to describe.

Music is different than a lot of other creative stuff to me. The writing of something as a creative act is, y’know, important — but I also know I can write a better novel than ChatGPT can churn out. But once the text is down, it’s done. Music is different. Music is written, but every performance is a work of art on its own. Music is alive. Music is living. Every cover of a song brings different soul, different heart. If I, say, listen to Golden from the soundtrack recording of K-Pop Demon Hunters Ejae’s performance moves me… but not as much as her live performance on Fallon, even if it was in a lower key. When I listen to anything by Within Temptation, Sharon den Adel’s voice just hits me like a freight train in the best way. Singing like that is a full body, physical thing that I think most of us can feel connected to.

So when I hear a simulacrum clearly trained on den Adel “sing” anything back to me, I just get filled with rage.

I don’t hate most music production tools. Autotune doesn’t bother me — it’s just another instrument, and a human performance underlies it. Samples don’t bother me, because that feels like an act of composition (and a human made those choices). There is no human connection to this “music” though. There was no soul put in by an artist. No human touch to the composition. No producer sat there fiddling with settings until it punched just right.

This is just hollow and monstrous.

We haven’t even touched on the environmental impact of datacenters, or the fact that the economics of this whole industry seems like a bubble driven by a shell game that could plunge our economy into chaos. I don’t think I was truly radicalized against generative AI until experiencing this. The people who made this product don’t give a shit about music, it’s just another product to them. Another thing they can monetize while they destroy the world.

And so now I’m angry.

Uhhh, I have a book coming out and I need to promote it here. So, I guess you should pre-order Buried Memories, the fourth book in my contemporary fantasy series the Mia Graves Saga, out December 15th 2025. That transition wasn’t awkward at all, I don’t know what you’re talking about.

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So if you haven’t heard the news yet, No Brand Con is coming back. Not only are we running the convention again, but we’re bringing it back to Eau Claire — something folks have been begging us to do for the last decade. May 1st-3rd 2026 we’re going to be down at the Lismore Hotel for the twenty-first No Brand Con.

It’s been hard keeping the news under wraps, as this has been in the works for months. We’ve kept our mouths shut, because we didn’t want to get anyone’s hopes up or let folks down if plans fell through. We’re literally bringing the convention back to its home town, and to the only remaining venue it had in this town too (the Lismore used to be the Ramada we were hosted in from 2006-2010).

No Brand Con, to me, never felt right in the Dells. The Chula Vista was way too sprawling a venue for us, and we never felt connected to the location. We ran five cons there from 2016-2022, and each year it just felt like we were drifting away from the core of the con’s identity there. Stevens Point wasn’t a bad home, and I think 2023 did feel like we were recapturing something, but things just didn’t work out there.

So we took a long hard look at things over the last two years, and I think some of us really took a hard look at what made the con great for so long. Our most successful years were tied to our home town — the town that most of the staff still live in honestly. And every time we held it away from that, we were just losing that identity more and more.
Coming back to Eau Claire was the obvious and only choice.

I co-founded this event with a few other folks so many years ago. We’ve seen generations of staff come and go, and lost a few of them along the way. But the core of this convention is the community we build together. Growing up, conventions like this were the first place I truly felt like myself, and I’ve been very clear over the years that my goal was providing that kind of place for others.

I’m so excited that we’re back, and I don’t think we’ll ever leave again.

Also, remember, you can pre-order Buried Memories, the fourth book in my contemporary fantasy series the Mia Graves Saga, out December 15th 2025.

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