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

If yoiu don’t spend time in the odd corners of bookish and queer social media, it’s likely you’ve never heard of Paul Castle. Hell, even if you are in them, you may have scrolled on by, never to take note. But for those of us who have had him slide across their algorithmically driven feeds, he’s become fairly infamous over the last few years. Paul is a blind creator who makes couples content with his husband Matthew, but more importantly for this discussion, he is the writer and illustrator of children’s books that he independently publishes.

Now, I’ve never read his books, so I can’t comment on whether they’re any good or not. I have seen the illustrations though, and they, honestly, look very nice. His books are queer positive, and his determination to still create this work with his remaining vision is admirable. If that were all there was to talk about, this would be a potentially feel good story, and I probably wouldn’t be writing about it in my personal blog.

But, y’know, this isn’t the end of the story by far.

You see, if you follow one of Paul’s accounts long enough, you’ll inevitably end up on a video where he stands in front of the camera, crying about how some obstacle has gotten in the way of his books getting to people. Maybe a bookstore supposedly cancelled an order. Maybe it was something else. Paul will always frame this as his book getting “banned” and that anyone not working with him directly is an act of persecution. This will result in a spike in sales of his books from his TikTok shop. I won’t go into too many details, but others have detailed things on multiple occasions if you want to dig into this. I’m not here to argue about the veracity of his statements. I have doubts, of course, and I’ve definitely been critical of the tactic of “pity marketing.” I made a video in June of 2025 where, after he started talking about how he wanted to start publishing other authors, I said that people should avoid it. My reasoning was pretty simple — the only advantage to working with a “publisher” that small is that they can help you get into bookstores.

And the one thing Paul Castle has proven is that he’s bad at getting his books into bookstores.

I made other videos too, but the pity marketing is not the point of this post. My big problem is what happens after Paul Castle makes his videos. That’s where the real trouble begin.

You see, inevitably his millions of followers will go after anyone who criticizes him or does some sort of perceived wrong against him. When one of his videos talked about a bookstore owner named Tanya, his followers went and attacked a completely unrelated woman who shared a name. Now this could be chalked up to an overzealous fanbase acting on their own, but it’s rather clear that Paul Castle is more than happy to rile people up on purpose too.

Almost a week ago, Castle made a video on his PaulCastleStudio account dragging up a video from three months ago, claiming that someone who criticized his marketing tactics had been ableist. Never mind that the video he points at doesn’t make any ableist statements, and just points out how manipulative his marketing techniques are. Paul claimed he didn’t want people going after her, but while he censored the person’s face, he didn’t censor the name on the wall behind her.

The creator has now received a barrage of harassment across multiple platforms, and has made a response to the entire situation that is chilling. I’ve gotten a handful of harassing comments on a YouTube Short from October, because people found it looking for her. And it’s not the first time he’s done this. When an Ingram employee was critical of one of his marketing tales, he went after her. When he printed some books through IngramSpark, and she happened to get assigned to his account, he made another video complaining about it. That person also got harassed by his fans.

He knows that if he calls someone out that this will happen, and since he keeps doing it — it’s apparent he doesn’t care.

And I guess I just wanted to write down how incredibly fucked up that is.

It’s also interesting to note that he seems to exclusively target women. My masculine presenting, nonbinary ass has never been singled out. Don Martin, who’s been highly critical of him, has never been singled out either. Maybe it’s just coincidence. Maybe Martin has a bigger platform as a traditionally published author. Maybe I’ve been too specific and controlled in my criticism that it doesn’t give him enough ammo. Maybe it’s just because the demographics of bookish spaces just lean towards women.

But it’s odd that a pattern seems to bubble to the surface.

Anyways, this is a weird post to put a promotional tag on, but remember that pre-orders for Welcome to Peregrine Lake: Peregrine Lake Chapter One can now be made through BookShop.org and Amazon! The book is out May 1st.

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This week Discord announced that to continue to have full access to their platform, all users will be required to verify their ages using either a face scan or a photo of their government ID. This massively intrusive policy goes into effect in March, and if you trust Discord with this kind of data… please remember that in October 2025 there was a massive data breach of over 70,000 records from one of their former vendors.

This is bad. Very, very bad.

Over the last decade, Discord has risen to prominence as a place where people can build niche communities. Both companies and individuals have used the service to build their own “servers” for niche discussions and direct interactions. It’s effectively been used to emulate the features of old school forums and chat rooms because people have gotten sick of the toxicity of centralized social media.

But for all of its perceived privacy and siloing, Discord is still just another central company controlling the platform. They own every “server,” and you’re just using their space. So when a policy decision like this happens, it means we’re all screwed.

To me this is just another example of how we need to decentralize the web again. Because we used to have siloed, independent online communities where people could talk about their niche thing and connect in private. We called them forums. Someone would just pay for a little webhosting, install PHPBB, and then boom — there you go. You might make it so only logged in users can read them, but anyone can get them off the ground. Now can they handle everything Discord does? No. Sadly with the death of Skype there are very few good, free options for voice chat out there. But that’s not what 90% of Discord communities are used for.

I mentioned this almost a year ago (and touched on it again in November), but modern forum software has come a long way since PHPBB2. We run a Flarum install for Nerd&Tie[dot]Social (the official Nerd & Tie forums), and that works amazingly on mobile. There are other options like Discourse and MyBB too. But you just need one person in the community to get some shared hosting, do the install, and then bob’s your uncle. Setting up independent forums is the only way to ensure that our communities are no longer at the whims of corporations that fundamentally do not care about us or our online safety. Use fake names. Hide your personal information. Only share what you want to share.

Use the internet like it’s 2006.

I call it being an internet cockroach, some call it the “Indie Web,” but either way the only reason that we’re at the whims of these companies is because we let ourselves be. There’s a simple solution to that problem, and it’s just to go do stuff on our own.

Seems like the best option, really.

(Also the old forums for my site still exist. No one’s used them in years, but they’re technically still up as of 2/2026)

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