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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So right now I’m sitting in my living room, kind of exhausted, looking at a green chair that used to sit in my Grandmother’s living room. This weekend was eventful, and I’m tired.

Crysta and I went down to Milwaukee so we could spend father’s day with my parents (along with some other family members). We went to the Brewer’s game on Sunday, and like any game of baseball, it was a good time. I’ve never been a huge sports person, but I love watching a good live baseball game.

Honestly it was an amazing day.

Before I left town on Saturday though, I swung by the local No Kings protest here in Eau Claire, and then spent a chunk of time at the local Pride celebration. I tend to be a bit of a shut in these days, so with all the awful stuff in the news it was nice to remind myself that there are good people in the world willing to stand up for what’s right and for each other.

My grandmother passed away not that long ago, and one thing I had my parent set aside for me was a chair. I realize that it looks a bit more gold in the photo, but trust me when I say it’s green in real life. This morning I loaded it into my pickup and drove it across the state and got it into my living room. I loved this chair as a kid, and importantly… it swivels. And when I was growing up adults would always yell at me not to spin the chair. Well guess what, it’s my chair now.

And no one can stop me from spinning.

I dunno — it was just a lot of stuff in a short amount of time. We also went out to dinner after the baseball game yesterday, but I think I’ll give my full opinion on that later this week in a different blog post. Because we went to a restaurant none of us had been to before, and uh… I have thoughts.

That was vague. I’m being vague. You’re just going to have to be okay with that.

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So it was literally more than twenty years ago that I first put one of my dumbest creations on the internet: The Steven Seagal Movie Generator.

Like I seriously publicly launched that dumb thing back in 2004, and for those of you who were unaware, it assembles a title, cast and plot of a fake Steven Seagal movie from elements of his (real) bad films.

I honestly got the idea from a former-friend, who in high school wrote a comedic piece about how you could mash up the titles of Seagal films in the weird underground “newspaper” that got handed out for a few years. But I took it a few steps further, and made a whole thing.

Mostly it just sat there though, a thing I made once and never went back to. I followed it up with the Sci-Fi Channel Movie Generator (later retitled the Syfy Movie Generator) in 2008. I spent more time on that one, doing a later design update that made the “Syfy” movies show up on a fake DVD back cover.

But the Steven Seagal generator just sort of sat there, untouched.

And Steven Seagal kept making (terrible) movies with (predictable) titles. Like a lot. But the generator still only spat out movies culled from the nineties and early 2000s, ignoring all of his new stuff. There was a whole library of awful movies that just weren’t in there, and it made the generator feel less relevant.

So, uh, I went and did something about that today.

First off, I redesigned the page. Now it looks like the back of a VHS tape box. Then I loaded the elements of about twenty-five additional films into the generator. And that was harder than I thought it would be, since some of the films are so obscure that they’re not well documented. I literally had to do some deep research to figure out a lot of the basic plot details that are now in the generator.

But I did it.

And it’s done.

And the generator is now fully loaded.

It’s still useless and dumb, though.

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So a lot of you know that I have a Patreon. If you didn’t, uh… you do now? I originally launched it for my comics, but it kind of transitioned to being mostly focused on my Witchcraft podcast years ago — because that’s where I had extra content I could give folks — but it’s overall just for “me” in general.

Anyways.

My goal for the last year has been to increase the “value” for Patreon patrons, with all paid tiers getting access to a copy of Super Awesome Action Heroes, and the five dollar and ten dollar tiers getting access to my novels (at different times — the five dollar tier patrons get them on a year delay).

For a while I had been doing Patreon exclusive “vlogs,” but those didn’t last just because I literally ran out of things to say in them. I mean, I’m boring. The only eventful stuff in my life is the eventful stuff happening to all of us right now. Back in April, I think I came up with something fun that I’ve now done two months in a row.

And that’s record reaction videos to episodes of The Pagan Invasion.

You see, for the April episode of BS-Free Witchcraft I did an episode on the structure of Satanic Panic propaganda, and used the first episode of 1991’s The Pagan Invasion as the example to illustrate my points. For that episode I needed to, obviously, rewatch that first episode for research.

Rather than just watch it in private though, I recorded my rewatch as a commentary and reaction video and posted it as a Patreon exclusive video. And even though the podcast has moved on from the topic, folks asked me to react to episode two… so I did that last week. I fully intend to review the whole series on my Patreon now, and each one of my videos ends up being like two hours long. I don’t know if I’ll get a chance to do one every month, but I plan to get through the whole series.

Honestly I’m not sure why I didn’t think of doing something like this before.

So yeah, we’re doing fun stuff there. Oh, also, before I forget to say something — July is the annual Q&A episode of BS-Free Witchcraft, and I need listener questions. If you have something you want me to respond to on the show, just send it in via the show’s contact form by July 11th 2025.

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With the spring weather, I’ve been able to take walks at night again. It’s not much, just a two and a half mile loop, but it feels good to clear my head at the end of the day.

Throughout most of my life I’ve always found peace in a good walk. To have nothing but my thoughts for thirty minutes to an hour while my body moves on its own is something that I need, and I tend to forget that when I don’t do it for a while.

It’s when I most feel like myself.

It’s strange, but when I do it I sometimes feel like my physical self doesn’t exist. That I’m just thought in that moment. Other times, it’s the opposite and I feel most connected to my body and it to the world around me. We’re getting into some weird shit here, I know — but it’s also true.

I don’t know if there was really a point to this ramble. Sometimes I’m reminded of who I used to be, and I realize how much of that isn’t and still is who I am now. And I feel like it’s only when I’m on walks like that where I truly can assess that kind of thing.

Or maybe I’m just talking out of my ass, who knows.

I feel like I’ve been falling behind on a lot of my creative projects lately, and I’m trying to get back on track. Progress is happening, but not at the rate I’d like it to. Sometimes my brain is like that I guess, and you can’t squeeze water from a stone. But stuff will get done, and I’ll see this stuff through.

In the meanwhile, I’ll just put one foot in front of the other.

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Before I get started here, I want to be very clear — I will never use Generative AI images in any of my public creative projects. Any comic I write will be drawn by an artist (myself or someone else), every piece of official art for my non visual stuff (books and podcasts) will be created by a person. While I have used Generative AI images in thumbnails historically, I stopped that practice years ago after I learned more. The existing generative AI models for creating image and videos like Sora run on stealing copyrighted materials and use so much energy that they’re incredibly bad for the environment.

So let’s have that level set before we go forward and anyone gets mad at me for doing something I haven’t done and will never do.

But I’m going to admit to something here — it’s fun to play around with image generators to create fake photos of things that don’t exist. Like it’s fun to make a “photo” of your personal RPG characters. You can commission an artist for a drawing, and I find trying to recreate that kind of art with AI to be gross.

But it’s almost impossible to find someone able to make a perfect simulacrum of a photograph of your Halfling Thief drinking at a rooftop bar in Chicago. Like you could definitely do it — but as a person who literally COULD do that kind of photo manipulation work myself, the number of hours I’d have to spend on stock photo websites, morgue file, and doing original shoots is fairly prohibitive. There’s a reason I draw the original art for Stormwood instead of going down that route.

But all of that said, I don’t think it’s ethical to share those images publicly once I’ve made them.

First off, I don’t know where that training data came from. I can’t be sure that I’m not spreading something that was based on stolen work. Like in my own work I might test something out with a stock photo I haven’t paid for, but I make sure I go out and buy it before I put it out to the public. Not doing so is, in my opinion, theft. With that in mind, how can I see these images I’ve created any other way? I don’t know where the sources were scraped from.

(I know generative AI doesn’t directly use the elements of images from its training data, as it works from refining noise until it resembles the description of the image — but I feel like we’re still in the spirit here.)

So until one of these models can promise that every single element in its training data has been ethically sourced, I feel like we’re dancing that line and I’m not comfortable posting it even in situations where I would make no profit from sharing it.

Secondly, there is the environmental concern. Right now AI companies are shoving this stuff into everything they can. This ends up using a ton of resources, and it’s being subsidized by investors. Like until a lot of this gets fixed, I don’t feel good encouraging the use of AI.

In an ideal world, this would be a fun toy and I could guiltlessly share its output the way I would a meme.

But it’s not, and I hate it.

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Right now I’m sitting in a cabin just outside Phillips, WI. Crysta and I are spending the week at the resort she went to growing up, just like we do every May to both celebrate her birthday and do something for our wedding anniversary (even if that part is a month early).

This is the sixth year that we’ve done this, and it’s just… nice? We spend the day sitting and staring at the lake from the porch in our nice reclining lawn chairs, and then when the sun goes down we watch old TV shows we have on Bluray and DVD.

Last night we finally finished our rewatch of the old British sitcom As Time Goes By. We literally started doing it years ago, but have only been watching episodes while on vacation, so it’s obviously taken some time to get through them all. Tonight we’ll start on Monarch of the Glen, and I expect it will take another three or four years to get through all of that and move onto something else.

Probably Hamish MacBeth, Ballykissangel, or Northern Exposure.

It’s just nice to be peaceful for a week. To let the mind rest for some time. I’ve been getting some writing done, but for the most part I’m just enjoying not having to think about a lot of my daily stresses. Internet coverage is spotty here, so I can’t even spend a ton of time online.

It’s pretty great.

Right now though, I’m going to put this laptop away, get out a good book, and read it on the porch while we stare at the lake. Life is pretty amazing sometimes when we are able to find the little moments of quiet in the storm.

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