works of wanderlust

Month: May 2025

  • media review: weird al

    I don’t even know what prompted it, but last night turned into Weird Al night at our house.

    I wandered upstairs to the teevee room and the Kid had started watching the most recent of his movies, “Weird: The Al Yankovic Story” which I had added to our digital collection a while back when it finally made its way into general circulation. If you haven’t yet checked that one out, it stars Radcliff of Harry Potter fame channeling some very weird al energy into an over-the-top fictionalized biopic of the titular recording artist’s life. I seem to recall it was based on a Funny or Die sketch piece, and while not to everyone’s taste, caught my attention on a flight over the Atlantic a couple years ago and prompted me to go looking to have a closer look when I wasn’t fighting the cradling embrace of an economy class international flight. This isn’t a plot rehash. If you are a Weird Al fan, the kind who bought Dare to Be Stupid on cassette tape in the eighties, you’re going to find something to laugh at in this flick.

    Of course, our fun didn’t stop there.

    The movie finished and the kid opened up Youtube to look up a couple videos—rapidly prompting a small existential crisis when she realized that the video for Tacky was tagged as being a literal decade old. We had worn a permanent groove in the digital tracks listenting to Mandatory Fun album on repeat back when she was about seven and I suppose marking your mortality in Weird Al album release dates may sound a little nutty, but we’re that. I don’t know if I won or lost the fatherhood award last night as she reached peak epiphany on just how much of her childhood was built on the foundation of Weird Al.

    Heck, I said just as we should have all been getting ready to go to bed, did you know he made a movie in the eighties. It was called UHF. I have the DVD.

    It’s a good thing UHF is under two hours or I would not have made it to Starbucks this morning for my coffee. We watched the whole thing in its this-thing-hasn’t-aged-great but its still somehow funny glory. The kid literally screamed “WHAT! Nooooo!” at the screen when the phrase “Today we’re going to teach poodles how to fly…” blurted out of the teevee. And I mean really, if Weird Al isn’t evoking raw emotional screams from teenagers what are we even doing here?

    Sadly Mr. Yankovic isn’t strolling into Western Canada for any tours any time soon—I checked—or I would have bought tickets even as the credits were rolling around midnight last night. Seriously.

  • pi dayrectory

    Oh, remember back in 2023 when my attempt to run a web server from a raspberry pi computer in my basement got hacked and some turd of a botscam hacker tried to hold my data hostage for a few thousands of dollars in bitcoin?

    Yeah, but I do.

    I tell people that there was nothing irreplacable enough on that little web server that I would ever have paid to unscramble the encrypted data for cash, and that’s true. But a year prior I did take the entire contents of my web comic website and migrate it over to that little server and damned if I know where the original copy went.

    So the website I had built to host my little web comic project, This is Pi Day, was suddenly gone.

    Fret not, dear reader, the art and files for those comics were triply backed up on three different computers, but damned if it wasn’t a pain in the ass that I would need to start from scratch on the website to share them again, ever.

    But fast forward right back here to 2025.

    My whole recent effort to consolidate my web properties under a single central domain has me leaning into the notion that it might be time to tackle that pain head on. I recently incorporated myself as a little consulting business and needed to think about how to build a brand for myself off that little four letter domain name I had named my new corporation after. Long story short, I landed on the idea of a multi-site wordpress installation to host the corporate website while keeping all the other hanging-off’rs alive and well. And still-long story short-ish, it wasn’t a lot of extra effort to hang yet another little subdomain off that installation upon which the effort to rebuild This is Pi Day could be foisted.

    I started work on that this week.

    I mean, heck, it won’t be fast or easy. There is something like two-hundred plus cartoon strips that all need to be uploaded and categorized and published. I spent an hour on it this morning and got something like fifteen of them up. It’s gonna take some weeks… buuuuut it is started.

    In the coming weeks expect to see piday.ca which points to piday.8r4d.com come back to life and fill up with all those old comic strips.

    Moral of the story? Shit happens. Back up your work. And if you get knocked down get right back up again, even if that takes a year or two.

    Or whatever. Go check out the comics. They were actually kinda clever if I do say so myself, and who knows what I’ll resurrect from the archives next.

  • weekend wrap four

    Used to be that May Long Weekend was a rite of spring to which we all looked forward. Maybe people still do. Entrenched as I am, it was just another weekend, albeit one where the family hung around the house for an extra day. In fact, the Kid has a five day weekend and as far as I know is still at home asleep as I write this.

    But long weekend or not we continue with the inventory of accomplishments to mark the passage of time.

    This past weekend we…

    Spent Friday evening playing host to the penultimate performance of the Kid’s high school musical debut as Rosie in Mamma Mia! A dozen friends and family made the trek to the high school theatre for the show, and what is better for the ego than the soothing tunes of ABBA while watching one’s nearly adult daughter play a randy middle aged washed up rock star?

    I must have eaten something funny Friday night tho, because Saturday morning was a wash of me recovering from a terrible night.

    We did manage to play host to my sister, niece and nephew who came up for the Saturday matinee and then joined us for burgers and milkshakes at the Varsity.

    I went to be early.

    Sunday was a great morning for a run and I wrote a whole post about my longest run of the calendar year.

    And then with the great weather temporarily bringing out the sun, I set up the solar-powered bluetooth speaker, blasted some tunes and planted my garden. Everything is seeded and watered and irrigated in a kind of haphazard organizational scheme of square-foot gardening meets my knees are not up for this anymore.

    We dug into the latest Star Wars series Andor over a glass of wine later that evening.

    And the next morning the kid came with me for coffee, yeah coffee, and we sat in Starbucks for an hour me writing and she doing her physics homework.

    I started a secret series behind the scenes of this blog. I’m going to try doing more month-long self-improvement experiments. You can read more about the first of those in a month when I post the results.

    I spent a chilly afternoon adding a bunch of security fixes to this blog because I noticed that along with the increase in readship traffic there has been a parallel increase in bot hackers trying to barge through my password. Suck it hackers. Go use your powers to hurt some greedy billionaire corpo, not some asshole in a starbucks trying to hold his sanity together.

    Of course, what with it being a long weekend, Monday was the regular orchestra rehearsal night, not cancelled despite the holiday because we have a concert in less than two weeks.

    And then I went to bed a little early. It was a long weekend, after all.

  • accidental distances

    It was only a little accidental that I ran my longest run of the season yesterday. But heck, it wasn’t much to brag about either way: barely thirteen klicks all in.

    And barely one when it came right down to it.

    My running is not doing great these days. I mean, I have always had good seasons and bad ones. I’ve been tearing up the trails for going on eighteen years now so anyone is bound to have a roller coaster of ups and downs during that time, no matter who you are. Injuries have sidelined me for as long as half a year or more. Winters have often been scaled back. And race plans always seem to set the real tone of how my summers go: any time I’ve signed up for a marathon it would be foolishness not to focus on building endurance and strength and distance with every spare waking thought.

    My fatigue caught up with me in the last week, tho. I walked in our regular Thursday run because I was bagged. And then I started getting leg cramps overnight on the weekend that gave me at least one sleepless night laying awake hoping that the charlie horse in my calf didn’t startle me awake again. So, waking up Sunday morning I was barely fifty-fifty on going out for my regular run. I barely, just barely made it out for one. I ended up accidentally logging thirteen.

    I lack a coherent plan, I realize. 

    I have written quite a bit on my own distractable nature these days.

    I am trying to walk a creative path, trying to rebuild a professional self, trying to navigate a transitory phase of my parenting career, trying to stay optimistic in the normalized collapse of western democracy, trying to eat better, trying to read more, write more, be more, trying, trying, trying. 

    I’ve let my running take a bit role in the stage play that is my life this year.

    It turns out that I am recovering from an injury to my soul that I wouldn’t have thought would crack my running agenda but somehow that is one of the plainest examples of the damage.

    And oddly enough, the path back to the paths isn’t clearly one straight through forcing myself to just run more, dammit. Sure, it feels good for a bit when I do it, but there is something bigger going on in my deepest self that I haven’t quite figured out, and it seems as though might need a bit of work on those aches and pains before the deeper trails clear out for me.

    We ran down into the river valley yesterday morning, down the big hill towards the footbridge under the freeway bridge, along the path budding with spring green, basking in the glow of the May sunlight and still-fresh air and the cool breeze that made it almost perfect for a morning run. We ran out to meet the other half of the crew who had started on a longer training loop an hour before us, ran to meet them and run back to home with this little cadre which after all seems like the whole point of it all lately. Ran and ran and ran, further than any of us had planned when we set out. A little accidental, and not much to brag about, but the longest run of the year for me, the longest run in a year when something is seeming to be gnawing at my feet and holding me back.

    No coherent plan, after all. Distractable and accidental.

    Recovering, but uncertain, unsteady. Not great.

  • performance anxiety

    There is a teensy chance that people are actually reading this site.

    I may have mentioned in a previous post that I wrote a blog for something like sixteen years, pulling it down about five years ago when I got into a management role at work and had employees who literally hated me because “me bad man enforce corporate rules and make them accountable for their work” and were subsequently googling my demise. I didn’t need that shit.  

    I have no management job anymore and frankly I may not have perfectly formed and balanced opinions but in the sea of stupid that reigns over the world these days, I’m probably ranking highly on the rational and open minded person scale.

    Point is, I restarted this blog. 

    No, I didn’t just start blogging again. I restarted THIS blog. It is a fresh new wordpress installation, it has a new name (though I’ll likely change it six times before the year is out) and I will not be reposting my sixteen years of archives. But. But. But it exists at the same address.

    All the old post links might be broke, but the important ones are live again.

    I naively figured it would take a year or two before anyone figured out it was back. A window of obscurity to savor and enjoy?

    Here’s the thing tho. Yesterday, just as an example, 884 people downloaded my RSS feed. And it wasn’t like a bunch of russion troll bots either. I think, maybe, y’know, maybe people kept this in their feed readers—which was almost as surprising to me as learning that at least 884 people still use RSS feed readers.   

    And bonus stat, a bunch of those people clicked the link and actually read the thing I posted. Crazy.

    That does change a couple things. I mean, if nothing else I thought I was screaming into the digital void. Sure, archives. I wasn’t writing anything I didn’t want angry future sleep-at-their-desk and clock out two-hours-early expecting-no-repercussions employees to read… but still. I figured slim chance, right?

    But you’re reading this right now. So… you either lurk in the depths of the digital void like a weird mythical creature or folks are still reading this blog. And that’s all the same difference as singing an a stage is to singing in the shower. It’s a lot different when people are watching.

    First of all, welcome. I don’t do comments. It’s a pain in the ass larger than I could conceivably explain. So what I’m trying to say is that if you feel as if you want to respond, I’m on Bluesky, yadda, yadda, whatever, wahtever. 

    Second of all, I know you’re here now. I’ll try not to overreact and just keep writing what I would normally write. I mean… this post is… I mean… it’s reflexive to seeing those stats, but after this… I’ll… well… you get it.

    *deep breath*

    Cue the music and… here we go.