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

Nostalgia can hit you hard, and yesterday was certainly felt like a one two punch of it.

First off, I stopped by “Collector Con,” a small con held at the Lismore in downtown Eau Claire. For those of you know my history with conventions, you’d know that when that place was a Ramada it was home to No Brand Con for five years in the late 2000s. I was only there for an hour or so, but it was my first time back in that convention center since I was twenty-nine years old. Like literally the last time I was there was a month before Crysta and I moved to Indiana in 2010.

Which was almost exactly fifteen years ago.

It’s a strange thing to return to a place like that. The room felt smaller than I remembered it, but it’s largely unchanged for better or for worse. It makes me miss running No Brand Con in the space. It never really felt the same after the con moved out of Eau Claire, and even though it felt great that last year in Stevens Point, nothing compares to home sometimes I guess.

Afterwards, I headed over to a friend’s house to hang out with a bunch of old friends from my early twenties. A group of three of my friends (all named David) have been regularly getting together as “The Council of Davids” for dinner for a while, and they’ve started inviting more and more of us to join them. It was a lovely evening talking with old friends (some of whom I haven’t seen in years), a just being social was, frankly, nice.

I have spent the last chunk of my life being a bit of a shut in, and I didn’t use to be. I’m at heart a social being, and I think I need to train myself to have the energy to get out more again. I, believe it or not, am happier when I actually spend time around other humans.

It’s easy to forget when sitting at home is often so much easier.

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So I talked about this on my Tumblr and my TikTok (and cross posted stuff to Bluesky and YouTube), but it would be deeply ironic if I didn’t post something about it here on my actual blog/site. With TikTok likely being banned in the United States in a few weeks, we’re seeing a major social platform go down. A platform where people have built community and connection. A platform people use to get new information, and which has been used to shine a light on current events in ways most people don’t normally get to see.

It may just be gone for users in the US.

And this highlights a major issue with the way people currently use the internet — it’s dependent on centralized platforms. Whether it’s TikTok, Facebook, Bluesky, and even my beloved Tumblr — everyone reserves their interactions what seems like less than a dozen sites/apps. And when everything is based on so few sites, it means that in the best case scenario we surrender control of our speech to those companies’ moderation policies or they can disappear taking down large swaths of our shared culture, content, and ability to communicate.

And that’s why what we direly need right now is to decentralize our internet experiences. You need to build your own shit, and you need to do it now.

This blog that you’re reading (whether its on my main site or one of the comics I write/wrote’s page) is hosted on my own site. I pay every month for some shared server space, and run my own blog software. For most folks, within a few clicks they can get a WordPress installation running on it and build their own online presence.

Now, I know that’s not feasible for everyone, so the other option is just starting a blog on a smaller blogging site. It’s not as good, but it’s better than the current system.

Now, you might be asking yourself, how do I follow people when they’re all posting to separate websites. The answer is simple: the humble RSS feed.

For those unfamiliar, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS feeds are effectively a list of updates to a site — sometimes full text, sometimes just summaries. If you listen to podcasts, you actually use these all the time as they’re the backbone of how podcasts operate. All you have to do to follow folks is find a good RSS reader (I use Thunderbird since I already use it as my email client). There are apps for every platform under the sun.

Likewise, we need to start building forums again. We’ve tried starting this with Nerd & Tie [dot] Social ourselves, and modern forum software is easy to set up. If you can’t set one up yourself, but have a friend who can… use it. Build as many small communities as you can across the web.

Because here’s the thing, when there are only a few sites, it’s easy to destroy them. But when there are thousands — maybe even millions — of small communities and sites suddenly you can’t easily remove communities from the web.

Now is discoverability harder in this world? Yes. We’re reliant far more on word of mouth and exchanging links with eachother. But that’s what we exchange for resilience. This is how the old web worked in the 90s and most of the 2000s. We need to rebuild this kind of world, or else we will always be at the mercy and whims of politicians and billionaires.

Which is kind of bad, y’know? Let’s make a world where we all have control of our spaces, where we can spread to every nook and corner of the web.

Let’s be cockroaches.

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I know hardly anyone ever reads what I type in this blog, it’s sporadic posts only getting occasionally seen by the folks who follow me on other social platforms clicking through on indistinct links I don’t describe well enough, along with the occasional passersby on my comics who bother to scroll down past what they actually went there for. But I had a strange need to write something tonight — to put down some words in this blog which started when I was twenty-five years younger than I am today.

I sometimes wonder about how stable the world will be in a few years with the chaos we’re currently living through. Is it a good thing we haven’t bought a house yet? Will our savings have any value when all things are said and done? Is the world we live in now the final stages of something that will feel like a distant memory when I’m older?

Assuming I get to be older?

I’ve been watching old archived episodes of The Computer Chronicles, slipping back into time capsules of the 1980s and 1990s through the rose tinted glasses of retro techno-optimism. I don’t miss living in that time period (beyond the general comfort of being a child who didn’t have to remember to check the date on spinach at the grocery store), but I find myself missing the feeling that technology gave me when it frankly just couldn’t do as much.

That probably didn’t make a ton of sense. I don’t really know that I was trying to though.

With the current state of the world, I’ve found myself as stressed out as I did five years ago. And honestly, it’s making writing harder.

Which is, frankly, kind of a problem when you’re knee deep in writing a novel and an ongoing comic. Stuff’s moving, and it’s moving slowly. I may delay the fourth Mia Graves novel a couple of months if I can’t make serious progress in the next two weeks on this draft. Peregrine Lake, thankfully, comes more easily just because I’m not doing that alone and I only have to get the gist of certain things down on the page for Ethan most of the time.

This was a ramble, and a largely pointless one. But it’s the kind of post I used to write here every week for years. I spent a lot of time reworking stuff on this site the last few days, even though almost all of it’s invisible. Like it is no longer unusable on a smart phone now. Because of that I ended up testing and looking at stuff I hadn’t really poked at in a really, really long time.

And I know in a few days I’ll write a new post here about the Shadowcasting eBook becoming available on other platforms beyond Kindle — so this will shuffle off the main page of my site and down the list into the abyss on the comic sites where no one will read this… but I just felt like talking, and you were here to read it.

I should probably take a shower and go to bed. I have a dentist appointment in the morning. I am a responsible person with a regular dentist and doctor.

Couldn’t say that twenty-five years ago.

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