FInd me at Anime 414 2025!

by on August 6, 2025 at 12:30 pm
Posted In: Blog

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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Coming Home to a DDOS Attack.

by on August 4, 2025 at 11:21 am
Posted In: Blog

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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Find Us at Big Minneapolis Anime this Weekend!

by on July 31, 2025 at 9:23 am
Posted In: Blog

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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Home Again.

by on July 28, 2025 at 2:36 pm
Posted In: Blog

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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I’m not in Your Head, I’m not in Your House.

by on July 12, 2025 at 3:33 pm
Posted In: Blog

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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