If you spend any amount of time on social media these days, especially TikTok, you'll find a surprising amount of anti-Wiccan sentiment... and a lot of it's pretty weird. Thumper Forge, Gardnerian Wiccan and author of the forthcoming The Chaos Apple, joins me as we, frankly, debunk some of the worst of it and talk about why we think this has happened.

One of the most frustrating things over the last few months has been dealing with my website getting constantly hit with requests from malicious bots repeatedly hammering and scraping my website. Back at the beginning of August I described it as a DDOS attack -- where bots were hammering the old TRHOnline Forums. It took down the Perl interpreter on the server, was burning through my bandwidth, and effectively crashed my whole website. I ended up band-aiding some stuff (and taking the forum offline), but in September I effectively had to recode my whole website in PHP to keep the thing online. The bots, which ignore the robots.txt file on my server (or are deliberately targeting things listed on it), have been largely running from cloud service providers. They disguise their useragents as normal people, but it's easy to backtrack their IPs (and they don't request a website the same way a human end-user does). I stopped it for a while by blocking any requests from Google's cloud services back in September, but they restarted this month running off of Alibaba and Tencent's. It's like playing wack-a-mole. Like I don't know if this is for illicit AI scraping or if it's an attempt to find an exploit in old PHPBB code (they keep trying to get to the version of the forum I took down -- which now redirects them to a Rick Roll). I mean, maybe I really am the victim of a DDOS attack, though I find that highly unlikely. It's mostly just annoying, because there are a million things I'd rather be doing than this like talking about my upcoming novel or the great episode of BS-Free Witchcraft coming out Saturday with Thumper Forge. But no, instead I'm searching out IP blocks I can ban from my site to keep it running, hoping I don't accidentally kick some legitimate visitors. It's just annoying and I hate it. 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

YouTube video by Patrick Willems Presents

I talked about this back in May, but I've sometimes go out and play around with different generative AI products just to see what they can do. I never share what I "make," and I never even mention what I'm using because I don't want to be seen as promoting this stuff. My attitude generally has been that I believe the current way that AI companies scrape content from real artists and writers is unethical, but that the underlying technology could be used ethically if the tech bros running these companies had any respect for artists, writers, or any other creative human endeavour. Genuinely my emotional response to the AI companies throughout this has been mild frustration and annoyance. Like here's fascinating tech we could be using for something interesting, and instead we're ripping off creative people and making some of the most soulless images and "writing" I've ever seen. I'm rolling my eyes and shaking my head for the most part. That is not my response to AI music. A couple of days ago I decided to try out an AI music product, since I'd never really dived into that end of the pool. So I messed around, made some funny songs (like I may have a pop punk song about the 1998 failed TV pilot Blade Squad on my computer right now because of it). I even used it to remix some of my old original work that not even I care about. Ever wanted to hear an orchestral metal version of my old Happy Wednesday song Dead Birds? That's a thing on my harddrive now. I uploaded the Stormwood theme I wrote back in 2019 and added in the lyrics I wrote for it but never recorded too. But the more I thought about it, the angrier I got. Like, really, really angry. Like shouting in my truck as I drove home from the store angry. The creation of music is a fundamental, human thing. I don't think most people know this about me, but I once had aspirations to be a professional singer. Like my pragmatic brain kicked in when I was, like, eighteen -- but the passion that made me want that never went away. There's a reason I've put out my own terrible music on and off over the years, and miss being in a band. Music moves me in a fundamental, human way, and I don't think that's an uncommon experience. The right modulation at the right time in a song scratches a very specific itch in my brain. The human voice alone pulls at strings in me I don't know how to describe. Music is different than a lot of other creative stuff to me. The writing of something as a creative act is, y'know, important -- but I also know I can write a better novel than ChatGPT can churn out. But once the text is down, it's done. Music is different. Music is written, but every performance is a work of art on its own. Music is alive. Music is living. Every cover of a song brings different soul, different heart. If I, say, listen to Golden from the soundtrack recording of K-Pop Demon Hunters Ejae's performance moves me... but not as much as her live performance on Fallon, even if it was in a lower key. When I listen to anything by Within Temptation, Sharon den Adel's voice just hits me like a freight train in the best way. Singing like that is a full body, physical thing that I think most of us can feel connected to. So when I hear a simulacrum clearly trained on den Adel "sing" anything back to me, I just get filled with rage. I don't hate most music production tools. Autotune doesn't bother me -- it's just another instrument, and a human performance underlies it. Samples don't bother me, because that feels like an act of composition (and a human made those choices). There is no human connection to this "music" though. There was no soul put in by an artist. No human touch to the composition. No producer sat there fiddling with settings until it punched just right. This is just hollow and monstrous. We haven't even touched on the environmental impact of datacenters, or the fact that the economics of this whole industry seems like a bubble driven by a shell game that could plunge our economy into chaos. I don't think I was truly radicalized against generative AI until experiencing this. The people who made this product don't give a shit about music, it's just another product to them. Another thing they can monetize while they destroy the world. And so now I'm angry. Uhhh, I have a book coming out and I need to promote it here. So, I guess you should pre-order Buried Memories, the fourth book in my contemporary fantasy series the Mia Graves Saga, out December 15th 2025. That transition wasn't awkward at all, I don't know what you're talking about.

A Northwoods Gothic