I know I’ve been a little quiet these last couple of weeks, but for the record I’m still here. Still existing. Still getting up every morning.

This was my first weekend at home in like a month and a half. No travel, no conventions, nothing but sitting back next to an open window, watching TV with Crysta, and ordering delivery food. It’s been nice, it’s been quiet, and I finally feel like I’ve been able to relax again.

Last weekend was my Grandmother’s memorial, which was an emotional experience I’m not going to go into all that much — but it was good. Emotionally draining, but good. The two weekends before that I was conventions, and the two weekends before that I was in the Northwoods. And even though I spent many weekdays back at home, it’s not the same as being able to fully relax.

Relaxing is good.

So right now I’m enjoying the cool breeze on a Sunday night. The sun has set, the bugs are making their nightly racket, and I might try to get some more writing done before the end of the night. Sometimes life is about the simple things, the simple joys, and just being able to take a deep breath and appreciate them once you’re given the opportunity. Tomorrow the cacophony will begin again as I go back to work, but for now the world is quiet, peaceful and still.

And I’m going to appreciate every second of it.

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So this year’s convention train keeps going, because even though I’m still exhausted from Big Minneapolis Anime last weekend, I’m off to another con in a few days (August 9-10).

Like last year, I’m tabling at Anime 414 in downtown Milwaukee at the Baird Center (a name I can never remember for the life of me). I’m in spot 122 (to the right side of the room as you come in), and you should stop by and say hi if you’re there.

Big Minneapolis Anime and Anime 414 are both interesting shows because they’re very “comic con” in their business model even though most Anime cons are like, the exact opposite of this? But hey, whatever works. I had a good time last year at 414, and I hope to have a good time this year.

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So Big Minneapolis Anime was a lot of fun. Ethan and I talked to a bunch of folks about Peregrine Lake, I sold some books, and overall got to meet a bunch of interesting people. Overall, definitely a good trip, and I plan to return there next year.

But when I got home Sunday night, I got the unwelcome surprise of my personal website being down.

You see, literally millions of requests were coming into my server, hitting very specifically the old PHPBB2 forums that used to be the cornerstone of my site (and still manage the logins for the comment sections). Like it pulled 123 gigabytes of data in transfer in one day on a site where I normally do like 50 gigabytes per month.

I’ve pulled the files for the forum offline, and that has restored the website. Obviously if you try to access the forum, you’ll get a page not found error (because the scripts are literally no longer on the server). Only anonymous comments will be allowed for now (since I literally had to remove the login scripts).

Now what’s resulted is that the bots have died down… but they keep coming back every few hours checking for the pages I’ve removed. And while the rest of my site is fairly hardened against a DDOS, it’s frustrating. Requests were coming from so many IP addresses, I’ve had to block them based on the useragents — so sorry to anyone who accesses this site with old versions of Chrome. I had to make a call somewhere on how to stop them.

If we go a few weeks without those requests coming in, maybe I’ll reupload those scripts (under less common names) and tweak the code so the logins work again — but that forum will likely never come back fully online because of this and it sucks. It was a nice archive of a time of my life where my friends and I posted here instead of social media.

Honestly, this whole thing has been exhausting, and an annoying way to end an otherwise amazing weekend.

So I’ll probably make another post on this later in the week, but in good news I’ll be at Anime 414 this weekend in Milwaukee, WI. It’s just me on my own this time, so stop on by and say hi if you’re in town. In the meanwhile I’m going to do my best to take it easy…

…and to keep monitoring this damned website. Ugh.

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Hey kids and candelabra enthusiasts, this is your reminder that Ethan Flanagan and I will be at Big Minneapolis Anime this weekend (August 2nd and 3rd) at the Minneapolis Convention Center in, I guess, Minneapolis? I don’t know if that bit was clear.

If you type something like Minneapolis enough times it begins to stop looking like a word, and just sort of… weird symbols.

Anywho, if you’re coming to the con, you should stop by, talk Peregrine Lake with us, and maybe buy some of Ethan’s art and my books. We had hoped to have the first book out for Peregrine Lake when we scheduled this, but we’re a bit behind schedule getting the print-ready pages done. So instead just say hi and have some fun. Our table is listed under “Nerd & Tie” (because the eventual physical copies of the comic will be published under that label like the rest of my catalog). It’s going to be a good time.

Also just a reminder, the weekend after (August 9th and 10th) I’ll be down at Anime 414 in Milwaukee. That’ll just be me, so I’m under the Trae Dorn Productions banner there. Hopefully I’ll still be upright by then.

GUESS WE’LL FIND OUT.

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I love going on vacation and spending time with my family, but sometimes it’s just nice to be in my own home again.

Crysta and I spent the last week in the Northwoods with my family. And by “my family,” I mean there were ten of us in a cabin together. Besides my wife and I, there were my parents, my brother and his partner, my sister and her husband, and my sister’s two kids. And let me be clear, I had an amazing time the same way I always do. Between the St Germain Flea Market, playing softball on Lost Lake, going to the White Stag, spending time on the lake, and playing Connect Four with my brother, I loved every minute being with the people I love in my favorite place on Earth.

But I also just missed my own bed, my own chair, and just the privacy that kind of disappears when you, again, put ten people in one house.

Of course, the respite will be short. This weekend (Aug 2-3) Ethan Flanagan and I are tabling at Big Minneapolis Anime in the Twin Cities, and then the weekend after (Aug 9-10) I’m going to be at Anime 414 in Milwaukee. But, at least for now, I get to be home.

And it’s a nice place to be.

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Ever since I started making witchcraft content online, I started using a phrase “I’m not in your head, I’m in in your house.” It’s kind of a tag I end up adding on to a lot of other stuff, but I thought I should explain what I mean when I say that because I think it’s something maybe more people should keep in mind.

The first part, “I’m not in you head” should be pretty obvious — I don’t have your experiences. Like, I haven’t felt what you’ve felt or seen what you’ve seen. There’s so much in witchcraft that ends up being internal, and I don’t have the ability to truly have that shared experience with you. I’m not here to delegitimize those things, but likewise you shouldn’t assume those things can be pushed on other people.

The second part, “I’m not in your house,” is simply that I’m literally not in your house. I’m not going to smack that white sage out of your hand and wag my finger in your face. While I might tell you that I think you shouldn’t do something or that what you’re saying is ahistorical and wrong, in the end I cannot stop you from doing anything. I am not in charge of you or what happens in your home.

And for some reason some folks… act like I am?

So if you follow me on social media, you know that I sometimes end up in weird arguments that if you think about them for more than five minutes make no sense. Like I’ll make a post saying “I think this is a bad idea” and I understand people initially giving me push back, sure. Like that’s normal human instinct.

But as the conversation continues, with a few of them (not all — just a few) it becomes increasingly clear that for some reason they think I must be in charge of them. Like that I can somehow stop them from doing anything. Because let’s be clear, I can’t.

So yeah.

I’m not in your head.

I’m not in your house.

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So for those of you who aren’t on TikTok, you might not be aware that over the last few days a bunch of people have been obsessed with a particular situation. You see, a woman was invited to a party by a friend, and then the host was super rude to her and she left feeling bad about it. She made a video about how sad she felt, and then the host of the party came online to defend themselves. In that defense, they pretty much just established they were being dicks.

That’s it. That’s the situation. Obviously there are more details, but you’re not exactly missing any nuance. And, as I said before, people are obsessed with this. Videos have millions of views, people are making re-enactments, there is intense discussion… and it’s the lowest stakes thing possible. This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened. For example, back in 2021 “Couch guy” took over certain corners of the app — where folks spent weeks speculating about some random college kids’ romantic lives. Time after time, that social media app turns random people into the centers of intense attention, only to be forgotten about in a few weeks.

This happens on other apps too, of course, but I feel like the algorithmic feed and video format of TikTok focuses this kind of thing far more intensely than any other platform can.

I find myself asking if any of this is healthy, or if it’s remotely good for anyone. People gang up and pile on. Bystanders have their lives invaded, and people speculate about things that are probably nobody’s business. I mean, a lot of people are putting a lot of time and effort into someone being a shitty party host right now. I don’t know if I have any larger point other than how strange this all is — that we’ve built this world the way we have.

But I guess that’s TikTok.

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So anyone who follows me on social media already knows I’ve been having some issues with the Apple Podcasts entry for BS-Free Witchcraft. For some reason, the main Apple Podcasts page for the show is missing about a full quarter of the episodes. Like there are some random ones missing (like episode twenty-nine), but also like the entirety of July 2022 through February 2024 are just… gone. Even though they’re still in the feed, Apple just doesn’t have them listed anywhere.

And, like, these episodes appear fine on Spotify and Amazon and any platform where you just plop in the RSS feed. It’s only Apple Podcasts where this is happening.

And I’ve gone through everything I can think of to try and fix this. There is nothing within my power to correct this.

Of course I’ve since reached out to Apple’s support (and they assure me they’re looking into it — though who knows how automated that email was), and I’ve created a work around. Using the Nerd & Tie Network backend, I’ve made an alternate Apple Podcasts feed for the show I’m calling the “White Logo” feed (as I’m having it display the old white version of the show’s logo instead of the current green one). Both the White Logo and the classic “Green Logo” pages will get the new episodes, but the White Logo version has the full archives for anyone who wants to use Apple Podcasts to listen to the show.

For some folks this would be satisfactory. Like there’s an alternative route for listeners to get the show, and Apple is working on it. But my brain… it just won’t stop thinking about it.

And this is not helpful. I literally can’t do anything I haven’t already done. Literally everything within my control has been tried. I’ve made sure there aren’t any weird settings in the feed, and that there aren’t any major errors. I’ve tested the feed in multiple podcatchers, and even looked at weird ones online that no one uses and found that they’re working fine. There is literally nothing I can do but wait for Apple Support to fix it, and hope that it gets resolved.

My stupid, obsessive brain just won’t shut up about it though.

It’s so frustrating. Why am I wired like this, where it’s so hard for me to let go of an unsolved problem. I fixate until I find a solution, and when there is no available solution it just stews in there, rattling around.

Ugh.

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This last weekend Crysta and I celebrated our fifteenth wedding anniversary. Now, you may be saying to yourself “Hey Trae, didn’t you do something in May for your anniversary?” and yeah, yeah we did. But we also did more stuff because we felt like it.

Because sometimes you just want to do fun stuff.

Since the Stardust Drive In up in Chetek didn’t open this year (and we’re really hoping it comes back — but this is the usual death knell of a drive in), we haven’t been able to go to a drive in movie theater this year. We started going to drive ins for our second wedding anniversary way back in 2012, and it’s kind of a big thing for us. With Stardust a no-go, the closest drive in is the Big Sky in the Wisconsin Dells — but that’s a two hour drive, and not something we can easily go to and drive home in a night.

So we got a hotel room.

We actually got a room in Mauston (because it was only a 20 minute drive to the theater and way cheaper than a room in the Dells), and had a wonderful night out seeing the live action remake of How to Train Your Dragon. On Sunday morning, instead of driving straight home, we instead drove back to the Dells and met up with my brother David and his partner Mary for breakfast at Paul Bunyan’s. They suggested doing it a week ago when we saw each other on Father’s Day, and I was 100% on board immediately.

We used to go to the Paul Bunyan’s in Minocqua, but due to some family stuff with the owners and the pandemic, that location never re-opened after it was shut down in 2020. We had a wonderful time hanging out for a bit, and it’s just a fun, kitschy place to spend some time.

Honestly I feel so lucky to have spent these last fifteen years married to Crysta, and I look forward to the rest of our journey. We’re both so different than who we were when we first got married, but we’ve changed and grown together. I look forward to finding out who we become in another fifteen years.



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So I talked about it briefly in my entry earlier this week, but when I was in Wauwatosa last weekend to see family, we went out to dinner on Sunday night. Because it was Sunday, options were a bit more limited, so we ended up somewhere none of us had ever eaten at before: Buckatabon Tavern & Supper Club.

Now, if you know me, I’m a sucker for a supper club. I’ve spent my whole life going to various supper clubs across Northern Wisconsin, and the idea of a new place recreating that vibe in the Milwaukee suburbs sounded appealing. But here’s the thing… this place is not a supper club.

Sure they have a relish tray on the menu (which has disappeared from most current operating supper clubs, but what the heck), but you’re going to pay $15 for it. Most real supper clubs will provide at least a soup or salad with an entree (and in some cases, like the Fireside in Rhinelander, both), but you’ll be paying extra for that experience.

There isn’t even a French Onion Soup on the menu.

And look, the place is decorated in a kitschy way that somehow sits between the now-shuttered Al Gen in Rhinelander and maybe the Clearview Supper Club in St Germain, and the staff was friendly… it’s just not a supper club.

And the thing is, if it hadn’t advertised itself as a supper club, I might have liked it. The food was mostly good, but it wasn’t perfect — my burger was excellent, but several of my family members ordered their steaks medium rare and had them show up almost well. The broccolini that came with the pecan crusted trout was just… not good. All of it could be forgiven for just being a busy night, since it was Father’s Day.

But they promised a supper club.

And it wasn’t.

Like this is the Epcot version of a supper club — it looks a lot like the thing, but it’s all surface and in the end you’re spending way more money than if you had just traveled to the real deal. I wanted to like this place, I really did. But it just misses the whole point of the thing it’s trying to be.

I liked the pride stuff at the bar though. As a queer person it did make me feel relatively safe there.

I just wish it had been a supper club.

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