This has been a strange week for a lot of reasons, but one of those reasons is deeply ironic. If you recall I wrote a whole blog entry about how I don't care about having a large audience -- instead preferring a smaller, intentional one. In that post I mentioned how I had a decent TikTok following, and how it was probably the least fulfilling part of my online presence. Don't get me wrong, I like using TikTok and posting to that platform, and I wouldn't use it at all if I didn't. Like, there's a reason my Instagram is an abandoned mess, and my Facebook pages are largely automated. I just choose not to prioritize the pursuit of an audience there, y'know? Well, that audience just got me a movie screener. Like, literally the same day I wrote that post I got an email from a PR company offering me an advanced screener for the upcoming Bryan Fuller directed Dust Bunny. Why did I get this offer? My modest TikTok following, that's why. Now, normally I would have ignored that. I'm used to getting review requests I ignore, it's just usually from some publisher of esoteric books trying to get me to review their author's work on BS-Free Witchcraft. But, y'see, Crysta apparently had been following the production of this movie for quite a while, and my saying yes let us watch it weeks before it would hit theaters. So I said yes. I mean, I was just agreeing to review the movie, so what did I have to lose? I was going to see this thing eventually anyway. So on Saturday we watched it, I recorded my review Sunday night, and on Monday I posted it to TikTok. Now here's the thing, I don't think this video is going to do that well for me. TikTok tends to hate any video I make that isn't Witchcraft related or related to very specific BookTok drama. The algorithm driven engine behind that site doesn't show my videos to the audiences that might want to see this review. It's the whole reason I pitch my Internet Cockroach Theory to begin with. There's a real chance I never get sent another opportunity like this again because, honestly, I don't know if anyone's going to really see this thing. So, uh, maybe go watch this and share it if you want me to have future chances to see free movies ahead of time. 😆 It's funny, offers like this never really came when I used to regularly review movies for Nerd & Tie. Now that I've seemingly stepped out of pop culture commentary though, stuff just seems to come in on its own. Life is weird, and who knows what's going to happen next. I certainly don't.

A Northwoods Gothic

As a person who makes creative projects and publishes them on the internet, there's a push to find the largest audience possible. Modern social media focuses on follower count and reaching as many folks as possible, but the more I think about it -- the more I see this kind of pursuit as unfulfilling. This isn't a criticism of people who want that audience, and I definitely wouldn't say no to it if it showed up at my doorstep, but these days I find myself wanting to focus on something else: developing a smaller, more intimate community. I've eluded to it in some of my TikTok posts, but I honestly think at this point in my existence of "person who makes shit and puts it online" I get much more satisfaction communicating with a handful of folks who really like what I'm doing. Like UnCONventional never had more than, like, four hundred regular readers, but that audience actively engaged with what I was making. They fought in the comments over character motivations, and genuinely cared about the outcome. BS-Free Witchcraft has a regular listenership of a few thousand, but I love the feedback I get from the small group that gathers on the Nerd & Tie Discord. In theory, with almost twenty-three thousand followers on my TikTok, I have the potential to reach so many more people there than I do anywhere else, and it's not that large a following in the grand scheme of the social web. But reaching that audience seems less fulfilling than the three digit numbers currently reading Peregrine Lake. Intentional small audiences with a sense of community feel much more connected, and I think that's probably the more emotionally healthy pursuit for me right now. It's definitely a more sustainable one, and one hundred percent a more achievable one... because I have achieved it. But the thing is, these communities are two way streets. Like there are tons of people making stuff and putting it out to small communities like mine, and the only reason they're sustainable is that the audience interacts back. If you're reading fics on AO3, leave a comment. If you like the YouTube video of a small creator, tell them how much you appreciated it. If you're reading a comic, let the creator know how much you're enjoying it. Every single person who makes stuff wants to know you're out there, and that interaction is what makes making stuff feel worth it. Participate -- because that's how you build community. I don't know if there was really a point to this past my climbing up my own asshole about the nature of internet fame and audiences, but I kind of had the need to write it anyways. Who knows why the hell I do anything.

We’re excited to announce Ask a Medievalist is joining the family of Nerd & Tie Network shows! Dr. Jesse Njus The post Ask a Medievalist Joins the Nerd & Tie Network! first appeared on Nerd & Tie Network.

We're excited to announce Ask a Medievalist is joining the family of Nerd & Tie Network shows! Dr. Jesse Njus teaches graduate and undergraduate theatre history at Virginia Commonwealth University, an...

A Northwoods Gothic

November 17th 1984 is the canonical birthdate of Lynn Guadalupe Baxter, one of the main characters of Full Circle (2006), UnCONventional (2009-2019), and Peregrine Lake (2024-current). That makes today her official 41st birthday. So, uh, happy birthday to a fake person who mostly just lives in my head I guess? Out of all the characters I've ever written, Lynn is arguably one of the most important ones in my heart. I've definitely written more about her than any other character in my life, but that's just largely due to how long UnCONventional ran. I first came up with her way back in 2003 for a project I never ended up doing called "Re-entry." I've posted the original art I drew of her before when I was coming up with that, but I didn't end up introducing her to the world until the (now offline) short lived Full Circle interactive fiction project I did with some friends in 2006. That didn't last that long, but I dug her back up when I was launching UnCONventional in 2009... and she's managed to stick around ever since. One of the reasons Lynn is so important to me is that in her creation, I deliberately put into the character a lot of the things I don't like about myself. I took a lot of my anger, sadness, and worst impulses and put them into her. I think I felt like that if I could make a character with those traits and love her, I could maybe learn to accept them as a part of myself. What I never expected was for so many other people to love her too. Now let's be clear, Lynn is not an author avatar -- she's dealing with a lot of things I've never had to. I've had support she didn't, and didn't ever have to face some of the challenges she has. But in many ways she's been a means to accept things about myself I sometimes have had a hard time doing so otherwise. She's important to me in ways none of my other characters are, and it's been a joy to write her for so long. Lynn Baxter is my favorite fake-person, and to her I guess I say happy fake-birthday. I look forward to telling more of your story.

You need to start writing a blog. Yes, you -- the person who is reading this right now, either on my blog or a syndicated version on one of the websites I distribute this to. You need to go out, find some web space or a blog host, and start writing a blog. And you need to do it now. I talked about this back in March in my post about being an internet cockroach, but we're siloing our internet into these social media black holes. Like I literally made a video about this today, and if you don't follow me on the specific platforms here I post those, you'd have no idea that I said anything about this. We're putting too much content into these black holes that cannot be archived, cannot be searched, and cannot be found years later. One of the reasons the web has, frankly, become worse is that we're feeding everything into these centralized platforms that hide from the light of day. One of the things that used to make the internet so useful was that people posted their random thoughts to blogs on the public web -- be it on their own sites, LiveJournal, Blogger, etc. Your friends would either just visit your blog or subscribe to your site's RSS feed (here's mine!). This made it easy to find information, let the sites get archived by services like Archive.org, and kept our platforms diversified -- in case one site went down. Blogging is the easiest thing to do out of any of these things too. You just post whatever you're thinking the same way a lot of folks use platforms like BlueSky. Just... do that thing on a blog like this one. You can self host like I do if you have the money, or use a dedicated blog platform. There are a bunch still out there. Heck, if you have an old TRHOnline account, you could even do it here (but maybe don't, my software is terrible). Between services like Blogger, Wordpress.com, Pillowfort.social, and a bunch more I've never heard of... there's a place you can put it. Importantly the first steps in building a better online experience for everyone has to come from us. We need to refracture into the smaller communities the internet used to be driven by instead of the outrage and algorithm driven centralized platforms we have today. And the easiest way to do that... is to start a blog. And it can be about anything. Whatever you're thinking. Just do it. And tell me about it when you do. Also, remember, you can pre-order Buried Memories, the fourth book in my contemporary fantasy series the Mia Graves Saga, out December 15th 2025.

A Northwoods Gothic

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.