The Chronicles of Crosarth – A Steampunk Adventure

So Big Minneapolis Anime was a lot of fun. Ethan and I talked to a bunch of folks about Peregrine Lake, I sold some books, and overall got to meet a bunch of interesting people. Overall, definitely a good trip, and I plan to return there next year.

But when I got home Sunday night, I got the unwelcome surprise of my personal website being down.

You see, literally millions of requests were coming into my server, hitting very specifically the old PHPBB2 forums that used to be the cornerstone of my site (and still manage the logins for the comment sections). Like it pulled 123 gigabytes of data in transfer in one day on a site where I normally do like 50 gigabytes per month.

I’ve pulled the files for the forum offline, and that has restored the website. Obviously if you try to access the forum, you’ll get a page not found error (because the scripts are literally no longer on the server). Only anonymous comments will be allowed for now (since I literally had to remove the login scripts).

Now what’s resulted is that the bots have died down… but they keep coming back every few hours checking for the pages I’ve removed. And while the rest of my site is fairly hardened against a DDOS, it’s frustrating. Requests were coming from so many IP addresses, I’ve had to block them based on the useragents — so sorry to anyone who accesses this site with old versions of Chrome. I had to make a call somewhere on how to stop them.

If we go a few weeks without those requests coming in, maybe I’ll reupload those scripts (under less common names) and tweak the code so the logins work again — but that forum will likely never come back fully online because of this and it sucks. It was a nice archive of a time of my life where my friends and I posted here instead of social media.

Honestly, this whole thing has been exhausting, and an annoying way to end an otherwise amazing weekend.

So I’ll probably make another post on this later in the week, but in good news I’ll be at Anime 414 this weekend in Milwaukee, WI. It’s just me on my own this time, so stop on by and say hi if you’re in town. In the meanwhile I’m going to do my best to take it easy…

…and to keep monitoring this damned website. Ugh.

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I love going on vacation and spending time with my family, but sometimes it’s just nice to be in my own home again.

Crysta and I spent the last week in the Northwoods with my family. And by “my family,” I mean there were ten of us in a cabin together. Besides my wife and I, there were my parents, my brother and his partner, my sister and her husband, and my sister’s two kids. And let me be clear, I had an amazing time the same way I always do. Between the St Germain Flea Market, playing softball on Lost Lake, going to the White Stag, spending time on the lake, and playing Connect Four with my brother, I loved every minute being with the people I love in my favorite place on Earth.

But I also just missed my own bed, my own chair, and just the privacy that kind of disappears when you, again, put ten people in one house.

Of course, the respite will be short. This weekend (Aug 2-3) Ethan Flanagan and I are tabling at Big Minneapolis Anime in the Twin Cities, and then the weekend after (Aug 9-10) I’m going to be at Anime 414 in Milwaukee. But, at least for now, I get to be home.

And it’s a nice place to be.

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So for those of you who aren’t on TikTok, you might not be aware that over the last few days a bunch of people have been obsessed with a particular situation. You see, a woman was invited to a party by a friend, and then the host was super rude to her and she left feeling bad about it. She made a video about how sad she felt, and then the host of the party came online to defend themselves. In that defense, they pretty much just established they were being dicks.

That’s it. That’s the situation. Obviously there are more details, but you’re not exactly missing any nuance. And, as I said before, people are obsessed with this. Videos have millions of views, people are making re-enactments, there is intense discussion… and it’s the lowest stakes thing possible. This isn’t the first time this sort of thing has happened. For example, back in 2021 “Couch guy” took over certain corners of the app — where folks spent weeks speculating about some random college kids’ romantic lives. Time after time, that social media app turns random people into the centers of intense attention, only to be forgotten about in a few weeks.

This happens on other apps too, of course, but I feel like the algorithmic feed and video format of TikTok focuses this kind of thing far more intensely than any other platform can.

I find myself asking if any of this is healthy, or if it’s remotely good for anyone. People gang up and pile on. Bystanders have their lives invaded, and people speculate about things that are probably nobody’s business. I mean, a lot of people are putting a lot of time and effort into someone being a shitty party host right now. I don’t know if I have any larger point other than how strange this all is — that we’ve built this world the way we have.

But I guess that’s TikTok.

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