So my personal site, which has been around in one form or another since 1996, has been running on Perl since 2001. Especially this blog.

And lately my webhost has been shitting the bed with Perl scripts. Like random 500 errors will just kick up on scripts that otherwise work. The problem is not my code (which I maintain and normally runs fine), but something that’s intermittently happening on my webhost’s end.

And support is just awful.

I’ve cycled through half a dozen support techs. Initially it took me forever to find one who would believe me when I said I was talking about Perl and not PHP. Then I found someone who saw the problem, and asked me to document instances of it happening, and acknowledged my code was not at fault — but then I got cycled to ANOTHER tech, and this one thinks it’s my code not serving headers.

Which it is.

And this guy just doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It’s not as easy as just finding a new webhost either — a lot of hosts don’t support Perl anymore. So now I think my only solution is to recode my whole site to run in PHP — either to stay with my current webhost or to move to a new one.

Which sucks, because I don’t know PHP anywhere near as well as I know Perl.

So now I’m stuck googling functions, figuring out shit in a language I only kinda know. I’ve gotten one script done, and I’m just going to have to build a whole parallel version of my site in PHP and launch it when I’m done. But if you get random 500 errors on my site, that’s what’s happening.

Just hit reload in a few minutes I guess, and it’ll come back.

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I’m finally finishing the last edits on the fourth Mia Graves novel, and over the next few days I’ll be doing the formatting of the book’s interior and reaching out to the company I pay to do my book covers. This book was supposed to be in this state literally six months ago, and while I know the deadlines are self imposed, I really do hate missing them.

This month is a busy one. Besides my birthday, I have Eau Claire Comic Con in a little over a week (September 13th), followed by “Meatgrinder Weekend” (where we’ll record season 6 of that podcast), and then the week after that I’ll be doing a small appearance at CritWitchCon on Friday the 26th. Mixed in, I also have to finish prepping stuff for the opening of Campaign 3 of Stormwood & Associates, write more comics for Peregrine Lake, and get a couple of months of BS-Free Witchcraft prepped and recorded. Also, there’s some other stuff I can’t say publicly yet (in case it falls through).

It’s a bunch of stuff.

And honestly, I still feel bad that it’s taken me this long to finish this novel. Like I forget that I am doing all of this plus working a full time job. I did two cons in August, went to my grandmother’s memorial, and finished production on Season 5 of The Meatgrinder. I think I need to give myself a break sometimes.

…we all know that’s not going to happen though, right?

Anyways, I really like what I’ve written. It’s not quite the book that I originally intended to write, but I’m proud of what I came up with in the end. I won’t announce the title until the cover reveal, but you’ll find out before the end of the month most likely. In the meanwhile, I need to remember that even if some things are taking me longer than I hoped, I’m still getting them done.

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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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