Peregrine Lake – A Weekly Webcomic Written by Trae Dorn and Drawn by Ethan Flanagan

If I told you that a Kevin James/Alan Ritchson buddy comedy ended with our leads purposefully killing dozens of children in a fiery explosion, you’d probably look at me sideways. If I told you they were the heroes, and this was supposed to be a “cool and funny’ moment, you’d think I’ve lost my god damned mind. But the movie Playdate is real, it’s been out for two months, and you can watch the scene unfold with your own eyes if you want to.

Not sure why you’d want to, but you’re an adult. You can make your own choices.

I’m going to spoil the movie here, so if for some reason you cared about the plot of this thing, you might want to stop reading here. The basic setup of the movie is that Kevin James plays a stepdad whose socially awkward kid befriends the apparent child of Alan Ritchson’s character at the park. Ritchson invites James and his son over to their house (which they’ve recently moved into), and chaos ensues because people are coming to kill Ritchson.

CJ, the character we’ve been told is Ritchson’s son is in fact not his son, but actually a genetically modified clone of Ritchson created to be a super soldier that Ritchson freed from a lab. Occasionally fun (and occasionally dumb) comedic action scenes follow. And frankly, I found myself mildly enjoying the film. It wasn’t deep, and Ritchson is funny (and James manages to not get in his way). I wouldn’t describe it as a good movie, but I was enjoying myself.

And then the last scene happened, and I just went “What the fuck?”

You see, at one point it’s revealed that CJ isn’t the only clone. There are, in fact, a couple dozen, but Ritchson and James just weren’t aware of the rest. Apparently all the clones (including CJ) have had their empathy and emotions removed from them, but the film establishes that CJ genuinely cares for Ritchson.

And then they blow up all the other clones.

In a massive fireball as our heroes walk away.

And I’m like… did no one think about this? The only difference between CJ and the rest of the clones is the short amount of time CJ spent with Ritchson’s character. That means every single one of those kids could be easily rehabilitated just by someone giving a shit about them. But, like, why think about that when you can murder them. It’s clear that literally no one making this movie thought for more than two seconds about the scene, but what a weird message to end your action buddy comedy on. It’s just… it’s just weird.

What a weird way to end that fucking movie.

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I’ve been trying to put my feelings into words about the events of the last week. In theory, I’m a writer. That’s a thing I should be able to do easily. I’ve sat here with a blank document for the last hour though, and mostly just given up on trying to be remotely eloquent or thoughtful at all.

I’m just mostly angry and sad.

It’s not the first time something like this has happened in the last twelve months, just the first time it happened on camera from multiple angles. It’s been shoved on to every social media platform I’m on, and I’ve seen it far more than I wanted to. The adminstration has predictably toted out the a flat denial line, and the the comment sections of the internet are filled with real cultists and fake bots who will ignore the reality in front of their eyes for the narrative provided by their dear leader.

But we stand, and we fight. I don’t know what the way forward is. I know there is one though, and I’m confident we’ll find it.

I don’t really have anything else deep to say. Like I said, the words are escaping me right now. The Joe Hill quote “Don’t waste any time mourning. Organize!” comes to my mind again. I know I posted that a lot in November of 2024, but it still applies. They want us scared, they want us cowed, and they want us beaten. We won’t give them that though.

We’ll never give them that.

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So I don’t make a lot of code nerd posts on this blog, but it’s mostly because I am, frankly, not that great a programmer. I like to describe myself as “experienced enough to only break things in weird ways no one expected.” But a lot of my website is run on stupid code that’s just me mucking about until I stumble on a solution, and sometimes I’m looking for a resource online which doesn’t seem to exist.

One of the random scripts I still use is called zFeeder 1.6. It’s an RSS reader, and it’s how I include the most recent Peregrine Lake comic on the front page of TraeDorn.com/TRHOnline.com and a few other things. Now, it’s not a perfect script since it was literally abandoned by its creator like 20 years ago (and there’s an exploit in the admin page — where my solution was to just delete the admin scripts and manage the thing through direct backend file modifications). Importantly though, as written, it doesn’t run on anything more recent than PHP5. And in 2026, you shouldn’t still be running PHP5.

So I needed to fix it.

And let me be clear: I’m not writing this because I think you should use it zFeeder. It’s old as hell, and there are modern solutions to building a script that reads RSS feeds. I’m writing this because someone might already be using it, and might want to keep using it.

And fixing the script so it runs on PHP8 is so fucking easy it would be insane not to document it. There are literally only two code changes you need to make to get the script to run. Just two.

First off, open “zfeeder.php” and just delete this line:

set_magic_quotes_runtime(0);

Magic quotes hasn’t been really a needed thing since PHP4, and starting with PHP7 it’s been removed entirely — so it will literally break any script.

Next, open “includes/zfuncs.php” and find the following function:

function url2file($url)

{

return(ereg_replace(“[^[:alnum:]]”, “_”, $url) . ‘.xml’);

}

In newer versions of PHP, ereg has been replaced with preg, and you just need to replace the function with this:

function url2file($url)

{

return(preg_replace(“/[^[:alnum:]]/”, “_”, $url) . ‘.xml’);

}

That’s it. That’s literally the whole thing. With those two modifications, zFeeder 1.6 should run fine on PHP7 and PHP8.

And also, remove your admin scripts if you haven’t already, okay?

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