A Northwoods Gothic

It's been a long time coming, but I'm super excited to announce the upcoming release of the first Peregrine Lake print collection. "Welcome to Peregrine Lake" is officially releasing May 1st, and it collects the first chapter of the comic. Additonally, it has the short prequel bonus story "The Move" (which we made only available for a limited time online) which shows how Lynn and Megan moved from Eau De Puanteur to Peregrine after the events of UnCONventional. You can pre-order the book right now online through either BookShop.org or Amazon, or your favorite retailer with the ISBN 9798348498733. Ethan and I have been working really hard on this, and I'm excited that you'll be able to take it home in a physical format finally. If you haven't been reading the comic, this is a great place to start of course. From the back of the book:Bev Armstrong is having a hell of a time. She's recently inherited her uncle's house near a small town called Peregrine Lake. After losing her job and getting dumped by her boyfriend, it seemed like the perfect place to start her life over. It probably isn't. The Village of Peregrine Lake is nestled in the western part of the Wisconsin Northwoods. Just another small town with small town problems, but in the cold and dark of Wisconsin winter, something may be watching you out there in the woods. It may not be safe to be there on your own. ...and also, Pappy's Sunset Bay Supper Club out on Highway P has the best french onion soup you'll find for at least a two hour drive. You definitely have to try it. This is probably the proudest I've ever been of a comic I've put out, and I'm so happy that folks are enjoying it.

We’re excited to announce some upcoming book titles by the creators here at the Nerd & Tie Network! To start The post Pre-Order New Books by E.H. Lupton, Trae Dorn, and Ethan Flanagan! first appeared on Nerd & Tie Network.

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)

A Northwoods Gothic

I'm not sure why I have to say this sometimes, but fandom spaces are adult spaces. What we consider organized fandom was built by adults, for adults. But there are people who forget this. Like I've seen people admonish adults for being involved with fandom, saying "adults should be doing adult things" (whatever the hell those "adult things" are), and I've seen kids lament growing up saying they'll have to stop liking anime or comics or whatever property they're passionate about. And I'm just like... no kid, that's not how it works. That's the opposite of how it works. Modern organized fandom, as we know it, really starts with Star Trek. There were certainly fans of fantasy and science fiction before that — science fiction conventions have existed since the 1930s —but this was an inflection point where the culture we know today started. Star Trek fandom galvanized in a way we hadn't seen before. People formed fan clubs, published zines, and organized conventions. And importantly, these were actions done by adults. To be more specific, it was dominated by adult women. Now obviously people of all genders were involved, but its undeniable that they were and remain the dominant group. Those zines were often filled with Spirk fanfic, and it's the origin of fanfic and shipping culture. Elyse Rosenstein, Joyce Yasner, Joan Winston, Linda Deneroff and Devra Langsam organized the first Star Trek convention in 1972, which was arguably the first modern media convention. All of these things were done by adults, for adults. And the successors of these fannish actions and organizations (the modern fandom sites like AO3 and the massively scaled fandom convention scene) are still made by adults primarily for other adults. It's not to say that younger people can't be welcome in these spaces, but they importantly are not centered. Yet some people forget this. There are a couple of reasons for this. One major one is that a lot of fan activity is online now. In the decades before widespread internet access, a lot of fan activity happened at in person fan club meetings. Adult nerds would meet regularly to socialize with other adult nerds. We saw the faces of our fellow fans, and knew more about their lives. When things moved online though, while we were able to connect farther and wider, these connections became more surface level. People were just avatars on screens, and there's a funny thing that happens when that's our reality. We start assuming that everyone else is just like us. We assume that people's backgrounds, opinions, and ages are similar to our own when it's not contradicted with direct informaition. A young person reading fanfic on AO3 starts to assume that the authors are their peers and not, say, a 40 year old office worker writing on their lunch break. The whole fandom world looks like it's also young people because they've never known better. Secondly, our culture infantalizes anything done by women, and as I said repeatedly in this, women have always dominated organized fandom (regardless of what some CHUDs on social media pretend as they decry the latest comic book movie casting). That means that misogyny makes people think of fandom as childish, whether they realize it consciously or not. The truth remains though: fandom spaces are adult spaces, and they only survive because they're adult spaces. The world of fandom does not end when you reach adulthood, it opens up.

The team is starting their recovery investigation by visiting the scene of the crime. Then maybe the scene of another crime. The second crime is a metaphor. The post C3E4. Whose House? (Trial Period Part 4) first appeared on Nerd & Tie Network.

We're excited to announce another guest for No Brand Con 2026: Tappy Toe Claws! Tappy Toe Claws is a cosplayer, twitch streamer, podcaster and self-proclaimed, sometimes publicly-endorsed, internet f...

A Northwoods Gothic