November Hits My Brain Like a Hammer

by on November 7, 2025 at 9:22 am
Posted In: Blog

Way back in 2011 I ran probably one of the best known storylines in UnCONventional called “I Hate November.” In the comic, Lynn is pretty much just having a shitty time. We find out some of her backstory, but the focus is much more on her emotional state than any specific events or plot. Its core is a feeling that I don’t know that I’ve ever had the words for, which is why I had to write a whole month long comic to describe it. The phrase “I hate November” was already in my vocabulary long before I wrote the piece.

Because I hate November.

I mean, that’s not fair — I hate how I feel in November. The month itself has never done anything specifically wrong to me. Every year it’s like a cloak of gray kicks in and wraps around me though, one that I have to fight to get out of. Of course, unlike Lynn, this feeling isn’t linked to some deep trauma, it’s for much, much dumber reasons.

It’s because it’s dark out.

I don’t know that I’ve ever really talked about Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) in the twenty-four years I’ve written this blog, but it’s been happening the whole time. Without fail, it builds up over the fall for me, and then when the clocks change it hits me like a hammer. This has been happening since as long as I can remember, and it just… sucks.

Now, I have stuff I can do to deal with this. Ways to lift myself out of this funk — but they’re tasks I have to actively remember to do. They’re choices that I have to make. They don’t make it go away, but they make it more than manageable. You’d think I’d remember to start doing them every year if this has been my lifelong experience.

I do not.

Literally, every year, I forget. I’m just wandering around going “Why do I suddenly feel like shit all the time?” forgetting this happens every year. It is so predictable, yet I completely forget when the annual “no sun” comes around.

I don’t know that I have anything deeper to say about this right now, but it’s just been on my mind. It’s the sort of thing I historically edited out of this blog after the first few years, but I felt like I needed to write it somewhere.

On the upside, I’ve been writing music again, and digging through old half written pieces to see if there’s anything interesting in there. I might put out a new “album” next year if I feel like it. Right now I’m trying to just make sure I stay on top of the projects I’m already committed to though, so who knows.

I just know that I hate November.

Also, remember, you can pre-order Buried Memories, the fourth book in my contemporary fantasy series the Mia Graves Saga, out December 15th 2025.

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Going Black and White

by on October 28, 2025 at 11:37 am
Posted In: Blog

So back in December, you may have noticed that the webcomic I make with Ethan Flanagan, Peregrine Lake, went from color to black and white. The intention, originally, was to have this be a temporary situation. We always meant for Ethan to go back and update the pages.

But, uh, it’s been ten months. And that hasn’t happened.

Life is busy for both of us, and the amount of work that Ethan had to put into getting the color pages done made a regular schedule really hard to meet. I won’t go into details, but we had a choice between regular updates and full color. After a lot of discussion Ethan and I decided the comic would just stay in black and white.

That’s why the earlier black and white pages were a bit more slap dash compared to new ones, and why we’ve started adding touches of color when it’s important. I plan on going back and fixing some of the “coloring” on earlier black and white pages for consistency, but the pages coming out now? This is what those pages will look like in the eventual print copies.

And yes, the first print collection will be out in 2026.

Like a lot of you probably already assumed the comic was staying in black and white, but I wanted to make the announcement official. In many ways I think this adds to the vibe of the comic too. This entire story is set in winter, and if you’ve ever been out in the snow at night in Wisconsin, the world feels pretty monochrome already. Part of me wishes we’d started this way, but then I look at the gorgeous art Ethan did and I go… nah. I think we’ve done this the way we should have the whole time.

I just hope folks are enjoying what we’re making as much as we like making it.

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Constant Website Vigilance

by on October 22, 2025 at 2:28 am
Posted In: Blog

One of the most frustrating things over the last few months has been dealing with my website getting constantly hit with requests from malicious bots repeatedly hammering and scraping my website. Back at the beginning of August I described it as a DDOS attack — where bots were hammering the old TRHOnline Forums. It took down the Perl interpreter on the server, was burning through my bandwidth, and effectively crashed my whole website.

I ended up band-aiding some stuff (and taking the forum offline), but in September I effectively had to recode my whole website in PHP to keep the thing online.

The bots, which ignore the robots.txt file on my server (or are deliberately targeting things listed on it), have been largely running from cloud service providers. They disguise their useragents as normal people, but it’s easy to backtrack their IPs (and they don’t request a website the same way a human end-user does). I stopped it for a while by blocking any requests from Google’s cloud services back in September, but they restarted this month running off of Alibaba and Tencent’s.

It’s like playing wack-a-mole.

Like I don’t know if this is for illicit AI scraping or if it’s an attempt to find an exploit in old PHPBB code (they keep trying to get to the version of the forum I took down — which now redirects them to a Rick Roll). I mean, maybe I really am the victim of a DDOS attack, though I find that highly unlikely.

It’s mostly just annoying, because there are a million things I’d rather be doing than this like talking about my upcoming novel or the great episode of BS-Free Witchcraft coming out Saturday with Thumper Forge. But no, instead I’m searching out IP blocks I can ban from my site to keep it running, hoping I don’t accidentally kick some legitimate visitors.

It’s just annoying and I hate it.

Also, remember, you can pre-order Buried Memories, the fourth book in my contemporary fantasy series the Mia Graves Saga, out December 15th 2025.

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Generative AI Music Fills Me With Rage

by on October 17, 2025 at 10:28 am
Posted In: Blog

I talked about this back in May, but I’ve sometimes go out and play around with different generative AI products just to see what they can do. I never share what I “make,” and I never even mention what I’m using because I don’t want to be seen as promoting this stuff. My attitude generally has been that I believe the current way that AI companies scrape content from real artists and writers is unethical, but that the underlying technology could be used ethically if the tech bros running these companies had any respect for artists, writers, or any other creative human endeavour.

Genuinely my emotional response to the AI companies throughout this has been mild frustration and annoyance. Like here’s fascinating tech we could be using for something interesting, and instead we’re ripping off creative people and making some of the most soulless images and “writing” I’ve ever seen. I’m rolling my eyes and shaking my head for the most part.

That is not my response to AI music.

A couple of days ago I decided to try out an AI music product, since I’d never really dived into that end of the pool. So I messed around, made some funny songs (like I may have a pop punk song about the 1998 failed TV pilot Blade Squad on my computer right now because of it). I even used it to remix some of my old original work that not even I care about. Ever wanted to hear an orchestral metal version of my old Happy Wednesday song Dead Birds? That’s a thing on my harddrive now. I uploaded the Stormwood theme I wrote back in 2019 and added in the lyrics I wrote for it but never recorded too. But the more I thought about it, the angrier I got. Like, really, really angry.

Like shouting in my truck as I drove home from the store angry.

The creation of music is a fundamental, human thing. I don’t think most people know this about me, but I once had aspirations to be a professional singer. Like my pragmatic brain kicked in when I was, like, eighteen — but the passion that made me want that never went away. There’s a reason I’ve put out my own terrible music on and off over the years, and miss being in a band. Music moves me in a fundamental, human way, and I don’t think that’s an uncommon experience. The right modulation at the right time in a song scratches a very specific itch in my brain. The human voice alone pulls at strings in me I don’t know how to describe.

Music is different than a lot of other creative stuff to me. The writing of something as a creative act is, y’know, important — but I also know I can write a better novel than ChatGPT can churn out. But once the text is down, it’s done. Music is different. Music is written, but every performance is a work of art on its own. Music is alive. Music is living. Every cover of a song brings different soul, different heart. If I, say, listen to Golden from the soundtrack recording of K-Pop Demon Hunters Ejae’s performance moves me… but not as much as her live performance on Fallon, even if it was in a lower key. When I listen to anything by Within Temptation, Sharon den Adel’s voice just hits me like a freight train in the best way. Singing like that is a full body, physical thing that I think most of us can feel connected to.

So when I hear a simulacrum clearly trained on den Adel “sing” anything back to me, I just get filled with rage.

I don’t hate most music production tools. Autotune doesn’t bother me — it’s just another instrument, and a human performance underlies it. Samples don’t bother me, because that feels like an act of composition (and a human made those choices). There is no human connection to this “music” though. There was no soul put in by an artist. No human touch to the composition. No producer sat there fiddling with settings until it punched just right.

This is just hollow and monstrous.

We haven’t even touched on the environmental impact of datacenters, or the fact that the economics of this whole industry seems like a bubble driven by a shell game that could plunge our economy into chaos. I don’t think I was truly radicalized against generative AI until experiencing this. The people who made this product don’t give a shit about music, it’s just another product to them. Another thing they can monetize while they destroy the world.

And so now I’m angry.

Uhhh, I have a book coming out and I need to promote it here. So, I guess you should pre-order Buried Memories, the fourth book in my contemporary fantasy series the Mia Graves Saga, out December 15th 2025. That transition wasn’t awkward at all, I don’t know what you’re talking about.

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Yes, No Brand Con Really Is Back!

by on October 6, 2025 at 8:37 am
Posted In: Blog

So if you haven’t heard the news yet, No Brand Con is coming back. Not only are we running the convention again, but we’re bringing it back to Eau Claire — something folks have been begging us to do for the last decade. May 1st-3rd 2026 we’re going to be down at the Lismore Hotel for the twenty-first No Brand Con.

It’s been hard keeping the news under wraps, as this has been in the works for months. We’ve kept our mouths shut, because we didn’t want to get anyone’s hopes up or let folks down if plans fell through. We’re literally bringing the convention back to its home town, and to the only remaining venue it had in this town too (the Lismore used to be the Ramada we were hosted in from 2006-2010).

No Brand Con, to me, never felt right in the Dells. The Chula Vista was way too sprawling a venue for us, and we never felt connected to the location. We ran five cons there from 2016-2022, and each year it just felt like we were drifting away from the core of the con’s identity there. Stevens Point wasn’t a bad home, and I think 2023 did feel like we were recapturing something, but things just didn’t work out there.

So we took a long hard look at things over the last two years, and I think some of us really took a hard look at what made the con great for so long. Our most successful years were tied to our home town — the town that most of the staff still live in honestly. And every time we held it away from that, we were just losing that identity more and more.
Coming back to Eau Claire was the obvious and only choice.

I co-founded this event with a few other folks so many years ago. We’ve seen generations of staff come and go, and lost a few of them along the way. But the core of this convention is the community we build together. Growing up, conventions like this were the first place I truly felt like myself, and I’ve been very clear over the years that my goal was providing that kind of place for others.

I’m so excited that we’re back, and I don’t think we’ll ever leave again.

Also, remember, you can pre-order Buried Memories, the fourth book in my contemporary fantasy series the Mia Graves Saga, out December 15th 2025.

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