The Chronicles of Crosarth – A Steampunk Adventure

Even though I just got home, it’s time to hit the road again — as on Saturday (April 26th 2025) I’m going to be at Concinnity in Milwaukee, WI.

Concinnity is a one day con held at MSOE downtown. This is the con’s 25th year, and even though I’ve been doing Wisconsin cons since, well, before this con existed, somehow I’ve never ended up going to it until now. Largely this is because it fell so close to No Brand Con historically, so I was usually far too burnt out to do another event so close to it. But as No Brand is on hiatus, I figured it was about time I dipped my toe in and sent off a vendor application a while back.

I’m excited to finally go to this. I’ll have all my standard stuff for sale, so if you’re in town and feel like going to a little college show, stop on by and say hello. After this con though I’m going to take a well deserved rest. This much travel can take a lot out of me — we’ve only been home for a couple of days, and we’re immediately hitting the road again with this con.

In fact I should probably go to bed right now.

My next cons after this won’t be until this summer, with Big Minneapolis Anime in Minneapolis August 2-3, and then Anime 414 in Milwaukee August 9-10. The former of which I’ll be sharing a table with Peregrine Lake artist Ethan Flanagan. I’m slowly building up to a full schedule again this year, and I’m trying new stuff as much as I can.

Hopefully y’all come with me for the ride.

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One year ago, on April 16th 2024, the first page of Peregrine Lake went online. One year since we first met Bev as she drove through a snow storm and said the exact thing most of us have said in that scenario.

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!

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So Meta/Facebook apparently used millions of books to train its AI model without the permission of the authors or publishers. These aren’t even books they purchased, but books they illegally downloaded. I’ve known about this for a few weeks (and apparently the story first broke back in January), but The Atlantic has a tool to see if a book has been stolen.

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.

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