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So I just got home from traveling out to Maryland to visit my sister and her family for the Easter weekend. We got in the truck and drove the almost exactly one thousand miles to her home in Rockville, MD. It’s the second time we’ve done this, and we genuinely spend twice as much time traveling as we do actually spending time with family.
I genuinely love a good road trip, and the journey, which crosses through Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, is deeply satisfying. Almost exactly in the middle, of course, is Pokagon State Park in Indiana.
Searching through my blog, somehow I’ve never mentioned Pokagon by name here, though it has come up. We first went there almost ten years ago for our fifth wedding anniversary, and we fell in love with the place. Indiana has a historic inn system in its state parks, and Pokagon sits on a beautiful lake. I know Crysta doesn’t enjoy the traveling as much as I do, so I think visiting Pokagon is the only reason she hasn’t demanded we switch to flying out to Maryland when we make the trip.
I love the journey though, I really do. And I love seeing my family so much. It’s easy to feel isolated from them when we’re often so far away. It’s been an amazing six days. Besides my sister, her husband, and my two niblings, my parents, my brother and his long time girlfriend were also there. We won’t be together again until this summer, and that won’t come fast enough.
That said, it feels so amazing to be sitting in my own chair in my own home again right now. One of the best parts of a long trip like this is feeling yourself relax when your travels are over. Of course, we don’t get to relax for long with a con this weekend — but I’m going to take it where I can get it.
The world never stops.
This Saturday, April 26th, I’m going to be at Concinnity in Milwaukee, WI! Stop on by and say hi if you’re in town!
It took so long for Peregrine Lake to get off the ground. I first announced it back in December of 2019, and originally I was going to draw it. And then the world fell apart, and I found myself with zero ability to draw it anymore. I kept kicking the idea around, wanting to move it forward when in 2023 I jokingly suggested to my friend Ethan that they could draw the comic for me.
And they said yes, they’d love to, and I am not one to look a gift horse in the mouth.
We then spent almost a year regularly meeting, talking about my plans for the plots, the world, the characters, and all the things that would have otherwise just lived in my head. I started scripting comics, and Ethan got to work on concept art. And for most of 2023 we planned and got ready, and we hit the ground running in 2024.
And now we’re here. Honestly, I love everything we’ve put out over the last year. Ethan’s art is incredible, and tells the story in a way that I’m not sure mine would have. I love this comic, I love that you all are reading it, and I’m excited to show you what’s coming next.
Because we’ve only just scratched the surface on how weird this is going to get.
On April 26th I’m going to be at Concinnity in Milwaukee, WI! Stop on by and say hi if you’re in town!
Fandom is something we all get into because we, frankly, like something. I feel like that shouldn’t be something that I have to spell out, but every once and a while I find myself in a fandom space where that doesn’t seem apparent to someone.
I reblogged a post on Tumblr a couple of days ago which to explain fully to people who have never been in fandom spaces would take a lengthy explanation of “shipping” across multiple decades. But the cliffs notes version is that people who call themselves “antis” like to morally police the way people romantically pair fictional people.
In that reblog, the first poster (who is literally a teenager it turns out) puts together some bad faith suppositions about “proshippers,” and someone responds explaining how wrong they are. And I don’t want to discuss how self described “antis” weaponize accusations of pedophilia in these conversations, and we all agree that actual predators don’t belong in fandom spaces.
What I want to talk about is what I started with: fandom is supposed to be fun.
If people are engaging with a work in a way you don’t like? You don’t have to talk to them. If someone’s writing a fanfic that literally disgusts you? Don’t read it. If you don’t like a thing? Don’t engage with it. None of this is that difficult.
Like there was a lot of weird discourse in the Voltron fandom when the Netflix series was airing. Or at least that’s what I’m told. I honestly didn’t experience any of it — because while I loved the show and happily talked to friends about it, I didn’t engage with the folks who were making it weird. And guess what? I had a perfectly good time, and if the folks doing the stuff I didn’t like had a bad time it wasn’t because of me.
I know that tribalism has always been here — but “arguments” should be recreational. Like I enjoy arguing that Jason Todd should have stayed dead, and my friend Becca hates the new Star Wars canon — but conversations about this stuff are for fun.
If you’re spending all your time policing what other people are doing (that otherwise hurts no one) instead of doing the things you actually like… you’re not actually engaging in fandom, you’re just being a dick. And, like, I don’t think it should be controversial to say you shouldn’t be one.
Like the stuff you like, don’t engage with folks who like stuff you don’t like, and maybe mind your business sometimes. This is supposed to be fun, stop doing stuff that makes it not.
And lo and behold The Witch and the Rose is in there.
It’s honestly frustrating how a major company like this can just blatantly violate copyright law. It’s not only copyrighted content, but stolen copyrighted content. We spent the last several decades with major companies going after people for piracy, and a company run by a billionaire can just casually get away with it. And from all reports, this is something Zuckerberg himself authorized.
I am, frankly, deeply frustrated.
Look, I have a nuanced opinion on generative AI. I think there are good applications when its created using ethically sourced training data — but the fact is literally none of the commercial products out there right now are. People keep trying to use it for everything, and companies keep shoehorning it into every product. But, like, you should not be using ChatGPT to get “answers” to questions because generative AI doesn’t actually understand what its saying. Large language models are literally fancy autocomplete, and it can “hallucinate” some wild stuff. You cannot trust anything it produces.
I hate that it’s called “AI,” because it leads folks to think something deeper is happening behind the scenes. But its not. Image generation is more interesting on a technical level, but again — none of the image generators available right now are trained on ethically sourced data.
Frankly, generative AI in all of its forms is trained on other people’s work, so (what we’re pretending is) AI can never truly produce a real work of creativity. It’s all derivative schlock. And if we lived in a world where it was built honestly and ethically, it could be useful for things like rapid prototyping and brainstorming.
But we don’t live in that world.
So don’t use it.
And fuck Meta, Facebook, and Mark Zuckerberg for stealing my book.
I love living in Wisconsin. I really do. I love living just south of the 29 divide between “up north” and the rest of the state. I love living in a smaller city too — all the advantages of civilization, but I can get myself either into the woods or into the countryside within five to ten minutes depending on the direction I pick.
But I do hate one thing: the fucking deer.
That’s right, this is a blog post where I complain about deer. There is no metaphor here or deeper meaning. Anyone who has talked to me for an extended period of time about the damned animals won’t be surprised by anything I say here, and this isn’t code for anything else. This is literally just about deer.
I don’t think people who live in places without deer understand how fundamentally annoying they are to live around. And, y’know, it’s my own fault — I chose to live where the deer are. It is very much on me that I have this problem. But it’s still a problem.
Yesterday morning, on the way home from the grocery store, on the most suburban looking street you’ve ever seen, I had to slam on brakes because a deer ran out into the street. Off to the side of the road were at least five more, sitting there… waiting. And this was not the first time this has happened. Heck, it’s not the first time it’s happened in the last few weeks. It’s at least the fifth or sixth.
And I know they’re more active around dawn and dusk, and that I go to the store right around sunrise right now, but it’s still deeply annoying.
When the weather is nice, I like to take walks. Heck, when my knees like me I even go on runs. One day a few years ago, running through the local park, a deer ran out in front of me and I almost barreled right into it. I barely avoided hitting a deer on foot. Deer are incredibly dumb and skittish.
They’re like rabbits who can wreck your car.
It’s always amusing to me when I talk to people who don’t live around deer who always get excited or in awe when they see them up north. I used to feel like that when I was younger and hadn’t spent years annoyed with them. Now when I see a deer I just roll my eyes and pray they don’t decide to run into me.
There wasn’t really a point to this beyond expressing my annoyance with the white tailed wildlife denizens of the local woods. I mostly just wanted to complain about them, so I did. Was it a waste of time? Maybe.
But I do feel better about it now either way.
On April 26th I’m going to be at Concinnity in Milwaukee, WI! Stop on by and say hi if you’re in town!
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