works of wanderlust

Month: April 2025

  • books if by foot

    I bought a new ebook reader.

    I mean, I don’t really want to go on and on about it. I don’t think I need to elaborate too much on the simultaneous desire to read more “literature” versus doomscrolling on the net. I don’t think I need to bemoan the need to get away from suckling at the teat of Amazon whose billionaire owner has leaned hard into modern corporate fascism. I don’t think I need to to explain the simple techno-joy in upgrading a beloved device to a newer, fancier version. I don’t think so.

    But I upgraded.

    I bought one of the nicer Kobo colour ereaders.

    What I wanted to write about instead of all those other things was that I’ve taken to walking while I read. You know—going for a stroll outside along the clear and obstacle free asphalt paths with my ebook in my hand and just snarfing through a half dozen chapters.

    I’ve completed three books inside of one week, and I’ve got three more on the go. Three!? Yeah. Some fiction, some light non-fiction, and then a big old economics text for when I’m freshly caffienated.

    I dunno.

    Maybe it’s a phase.

    Maybe I’ll get over it. Maybe I’ll trip and hurt myself. Maybe I’ll decide I’d rather look at nature than another screen. But for now, the spring muck is still pretty brown and the world is still pretty empty and the book reader is still pretty new, and I’m enjoying checking some books off my reading list from somewhere besides the couch.

  • lots to say, and lots of time

    There will be cross-posting, I warn you now.

    Who’s to say what is the right way and what is not? After all, log onto any search engine or social media tool and do a quick query for blogging advice and it all revolves around these vague concepts of user engagement and click-thrus and follower counts and blah-blah-blah…

    So few people are writing about the zen of writing. I even fall into that trap myself sometimes. I just write about what I think other people want to read, rather than writing about what I want to write about.

    I have a laundry list of other sites where I post.

    You may even know about some of them.

    I have a place where I write about art. I write about art when I do art, and then sometimes I don’t do much art at all, or I don’t feel like being all that introspective about my art, so I just don’t write about it.

    I have a blog for my video game. I’m making a video game. Did I mention that yet? Oh, maybe you already know that. I am coding a real-to-goodness video game in real-to-goodness code with art and music and ideas. Oh, the ideas. And I write about that when I hit milestones.

    I have a professional blog. I’m not that good at writing about myself as a professional, though. It is a lot of words about learning to learn and thinking to think and working to be better at working, or something, I don’t even know half the time. I am doing it to try to parse out the bits of my brain that think I might still have something to contribute to a business world. Is that working?

    I want to write more about just stuff. You know. Stuff. About travel and the dog and some book that I read that felt good and oh, did you know I sat on the couch and played this video game for a while and it was fun and mindless and no I didn’t learn any deep and abiding lessons from it, but it was how I spent my day and so I want to write about it?

    This is just a blog.

    I have blogged for half my life now. And that’s almost literally true. I say that because on June 27, 2025 that will be literally true, to the day. Wow.

    So here I am, resurrecting this notion of a random writing blog. And I’m going to write in it. And I’m going to cross-post into and from it. And some days it will be about nothing at all.

    And that’s the zen of it. Warned yet?

  • hiragana

    We have loosely settled on a trip across the Pacific.

    Unable to confidently travel southbound across the border for our semi-annual pilgrimage to the house of the mouse in California, my wife has set her sights on the sister park near Tokyo for sometime, hopefully, next year. And of course a couple weeks checking out more than just Disney, too.

    I love the idea of visiting Japan. The art and culture and food and architecture and everything that I feel would be familiar from the exports of media and such in which I partake locally.

    And as is my oft-usual approach to these things, I’ve started to prepare for this still-hypothetical trip by taking language lessons. In other words, I’ve been studying Japanese…for about a month now.

    And while the actual need to speak the language as a European-toned North American tourist has been repeatedly called into question by many friends, many Asian-descended themselves, I can’t help but feel having a basic grasp of how to (at the very, very least) read some of it might come in all too handy.

    I mean, let’s just forget for a moment the academically-rewarding aspect of learning any language, and take that as a given: Learning new languages is simply, well, human.

    But instead picture Brad stumbling through the Tokyo subway system or down a bustling alley and having some basic ability to read the signs for a shop or a washroom or even an exit. In that aforementioned Euro-centric approach I’ve taken to travel, the languages are almost always close enough and use the familiar latin-descended alphabet system. I get by. But arriving in Tokyo I would assume that recognition and some general familiarity with hiragana and katakana script will give me some advantage. And increase my enjoyment and comfort on such a trip, too.

    Thus, I have been learning. Learn slowly, of course, using apps and flashcards and online resources. But learning.

    And that hypothetical concept of a maybe trip to Asia next year seems a little bit more real in the process.

  • blog-iversary

    This coming Sunday, April 20th 2025, marks the twenty-fourth anniversary of my first blog post.

    You can’t even read it.

    I can.

    I mean, I have an archive of it somewhere in a document, stored away safely on multiple hard drives and backed up to the cloud and generally tucked away for some future time when I want to read about how I spent some random, idle day in April 2001. 

    But you can’t read it.

    That said, I have been thinking about that blog lately because of a long list of reasons, not the least of which is the state of technology, freedom, democracy and more in this world, and how so many of us enthralled by the idea of cheap fame are dumping billions of hours into populating the apps and websites of private companies. And how some of those companies are revealing just how much of a bait-and-switch this aways was, how sinister and self-serving they have always been, how much of this gets fed into the AI behemoth, and how we have collectively tethered a decade of creative energy into feeding a corporate beast that does not care a whit about the soul of humanity.

    I should never have shuttered that blog of mine, the one that would now be twenty-four years old and a few millions of words strong.

    Every so often I sit down and try to resurrect something of that vibe, though.

    Every so often I kick off a new site with a grand idea and think, now if I could just get some momentum on this topic or that theme and maybe I could start writing more again.

    But it never sticks.

    And maybe it never will again.

    But it doesn’t mean I won’t keep trying to write, because as I realize with each passing day, not writing as much as I can, logging what I want to write about and not caring my own whit about cheap fame or filling up the follows or feeding some corporate social vortex, I can maintain my own little bit of that human soul. 

    And you can definitely read this.

    For now.