works of wanderlust

Category: art & photography

  • raising calvin

    I grew up on a steady diet of Calvin & Hobbes. 

    The still-famous cartoon strip by Bill Watterson was a fixture in our local newspaper during the entirety of my teenage existence, one of the sole reasons I read the paper that I delivered door to door, clipping out my favourite strips and then later buying the collections in multiple formats of increasingly crisply bound volumes. You could say it was formative for me, and that would be an understatement by a mile.

    The Kid graduated from high school this week and tho they were not allowed to decorate or bedazzle their gowns, they were given free passes to flare up their mortarboard caps.  She spent a whole evening in the basement and emerged later that night proudly showing off a collage affixed to the top of her cap: it was a collection of Calvin & Hobbes comic strips, arranged and glued to her lid, spattered artfully with colour and sparkles, and ready for a quick stroll across the diploma stage.

    This was not a surprise to anyone who knows her.

    To lay claim to some kind of parenting methodology that led us to this moment, my daughter walking across her graduation threshold literally wearing a comic strip that went out of print more than a decade before she was  born, that would be foolish of me. I mean it’s simple, really. She likes Calvin & Hobbes because (a) it’s a great and timeless cartoon, (b) I had numerous copies in the house, and (c) I read them to her frequently until she could read them on her own and then she read them frequently.

    Then, too, don’t forget that I even drew my own comic strip for a few years and you would not be the least bit surprised to read that one of my major influences for that effort was Calvin & Hobbes.

    That influence, it swirled through the rooms of our house for decades.

    Now, maybe it is that I may have internalized some of the lessons of a comic strips character who I adored because, truth be told, I was nothing like him growing up. Calvin was defiant of authority in a way that I could never muster. Calvin was wise and deep and whip smart with a purpose that I merely aspired towards. Calvin brought everything to a life lived with existential abandon that defied everything I understood about the metaphorical box in which I was raised and out of which I feared to step out. Deep down I knew that I was not Calvin, but that not just maybe, certainly, there was something aspirational in that defiant little character and his life of epic adventure and freedom.

    As we were driving home from the ceremony, I racing to get her back to the house so she could dress for prom, she was holding her cap in her hand and she turns to me and says something like “You know why I put this on my cap, don’t you? I’m basically Calvin, you know that right, Dad? You raised me to turn into Calvin.”

    And what does that even mean? Are you a mischievous troublemaker? Are you a socially misaligned youth? Or are you a creative soul unbound by rules? A philosophical genius wise beyond her years? A dramatic soul unleashed by existential undercurrents? Or maybe a bit of everything all rolled into one?

    Calvin & Hobbes was formative for me because while I was not Calvin, then too I could pretend to be that guy, act the part, read the strips and embody the spirit of this quirky kid, not so much unlike a neurotic rule-following father-figure guy in not but a mask and striped shirt.  But whatever I made of myself, there could be a chance—a risk—an epic possibility that I influenced something else. Did I actually parent my own Calvin into being?

    Formative, indeed. Formative squared. 

  • 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.

  • pi day

    May fifth is definitely not pi day, that annual nerdy celebration of a happy mathematical confluence between the calendar and one of the worlds favourite pastries, pie. Normally the geeky among us celebrate with an extra helping of dessert on March fourteenth: three fourteen. Three one four.

    May fifth is, however, something of an anniversary for me relating to pi day. 

    See, in 2016, leading into that year’s pi day, I checked to see if anyone had ever bothered to register the piday.ca domain name, found it unclaimed, and placed my stake on the little piece of digital real estate.

    I had plans, and like many half-baked ideas it made a little progress before sputtering out. I wanted to make a website celebrating pi day, but I just couldn’t think of anything more clever to do with it besides essentially creating a brochure for this obscure, silly math celebration.

    One year later, pi day came and went and I tracked a few hits to the domain but nothing of consequence.

    But I had been working on another project at the same time: I had been designing and writing and drawing a web comic that I was pulling together under the name of “This Dad’s Life” which was a kind of kids-say-silly-things and fatherhood snapshots in cartoon form.  But I didn’t really like the name, to be honest.

    I wonder if he’ll mention the dad guy character. I remember that guy. Handsome fellow.

    Then pi day 2017 came around and the kid said one of her trademark silly things: she told me she liked pi day because it was dad joke holiday. She was nine at the time and threw herself into dramatic fits of jovial groaning every time I pulled out one of my trademark dad joke puns. Pi day wasn’t just a geeky holiday, it was a punny celebration and the pinnacle of oddness that any dad-joke loving parent could celebrate with their kids.

    And I had this domain name I wasn’t really using for anything.

    I renamed my comic effort to “This is Pi Day” winking at the parenting tangent that the observations of my kid had brought into focus, and on May 5, 2017 published my first strip of nearly two hundred to that domain name. Eight years ago today.

    I wrote and drew that comic for about three years. The schtick got old, the kid got older and became less a silly kid and more a clever teen, which was great for me in reality but terrible for my content inspiration. The pandemic happened, and… well… maybe not a half-baked idea but it sputtered out regardless.

    I still own the domain name, largely because I signed up for a bunch of social media and other support accounts using an email based on it. And because I printed cards that I handed out with it on there. And too, because I stamped it into the corner of every comic I drew.

    Every once in while I dig out a strip from my archives and share it, explain it, but for a while I was just a guy with a comic strip online and a couple hundred fans.  And every May 5th another reminder comes up in my calendar that This is Pi Day was today.

  • photo phails

    There was a time when I would have proclaimed myself a real photographer. I didn’t just have the right equipment, but I knew what I was doing, took thousands of photos, and even sold some pics.

    Not only would I likely need to wipe the dust off my SLR right now, I’m not even sure where I would start to build back into the whole photographer lifestyle again.

    There are a bunch of reasons I don’t take many pics anymore.

    I mean, I seem to have ranked these but they are all kind of equally impactful. At some point, each of them has had a huge impact on how I feel about clicking the shutter button lately

    First, and obviously, my photography hobby shifted to art. As in, rather than drag a big heavy camera out into nature to snap more photos of the river valley, I started dragging out big heavy watercolour and art sets into nature instead.  I used a camera, but I used it to take reference photos. You do that for a couple years and suddenly you realize that the habits of dragging a bulky camera along on walks has transitioned into something else entirely. 

    Second, social media used to be my jam. Back when the sites were actually about sharing and building community around creativity, it was still fun to take lots of pictures to build an online profile and portfolio. As the sites transitioned in ad mills and rage-baiting micro-vids, my effort to share my photography turned from a fun hobby into a hustle gig that I wasn’t willing to scramble. I stopped posting as much, and too I didn’t blog as much so didn’t need pics to accompany my posts, so my biggest client—me—suddenly wasn’t shipping as much.

    Third, and the reason I would often tell other photographers in commisseration of our mutual struggles was the perpetual expectation that I was the guy with camera at events, at work, at volunteer gigs, on travel outings, everywhere. I became the defacto documentarian of everything and it was tough stepping away from that without hanging up the whole camera rig and just not bringing it. I get that this was a little selfish of me, and even might come across as mildly disrespectful to friends and family who were probably just trying to respect my craft and give me chances to participate, but it does get in your head that maybe your only worth is because you own a camera.

    And finally, I would tell you that my subject matter has shifted. I picked up the photography habit first because I was in a new city and then later because I was a new dad, and then even later because life was full of photographable things. But as I alluded to above one can only photograph the river valley so many times, and then too, the kid became a teen and her willingness to be my goofy subject and model waned to raw annoyance, and the whole part where I travelled with a big old camera rig turned into a post-covid, travel light, just slip the good-enough phone camera into my pocket for snapshots mode. Heck, that iPhone takes hellagood pics ninety-five percent of the time.

    Does all this make me sad?

    A little bit. I mean, like running, photography brought me to many places and gave me a whole bunch of interesting opportunities to interact with the universe. It was an excuse for long walks on novel trails. It was a skill worth honing and which showed measurable progress the more I practiced it. And it definitely complemented my blogging. 

    I haven’t given it up, either. 

    Part of me is writing this because, well, in being all introspective on things I was pondering dusting off and charging up the camera later this week. It is spring and the trees are budding and the world near me is about to flower up.  I will definitely dig out my art supplies, but maybe some quality time with the old SLR should be on the agenda, too.

  • from high altitude.

    Anyone in search of an example of modern evolutionary pressure look no further than the common fly. 

    Back in the city, like up high in the mountains, flies are ubiquitous.

    But unlike the mountains, the cities are filled streets, buildings, parks and coffee shops full of people. City flies need to be smart and fast.  Any fly that is not keenly aware of its surroundings and has not the instinctual inclination to leap into the air and off into the safety of flight is doomed to be swatted by any of a million people. Flies are not be dullards, and any fly born without the inbuilt drive to flee is unlikely to survive long enough to pass on its disadvantageous genome to a future generation.

    We have spent nearly three days up high in the backcountry camping in the mountains where a million variety of insects thrive. In fact even high up above the tree line where even in mid-August patches of snow remain in the share of large rocks, there are so many flies that an adventure-seeker is bound to spend as much time swatting away bugs as admiring the views. And it struck me as curious—though probably less so for the fly which I smacked dead upon my bare forearm—that there must be significantly less pressure, evolutionarily speaking of course, for mountaintop flies to carry a genome that knows better than to get smacked by a human—which a fly may rarely, if ever, see in is short life on the side of a mountain—than for one of its city cousins who encounter humans as a matter of course and have no such luxury as to leisurely investigate a bare forearm on a Friday afternoon.

    inhospitable conditons

    There were insects of all variety everywhere, swarming and buzzing in my ears, tickling my nose and even swooping with indifference into my mouth (which admittedly I didn’t realize was so regularly slack jawed) but even that wasn’t the biggest barrier to success atop a mountain. I had brought along a minimal watercolour set: every gram of weight mattered when you need to lug everything required to survive for three days in the backcountry up a literal cliff face. Seven pans squeezed into an altoids tin, a self-watering brush, a single black pen, and a thin watercolour notebook, all of it sealed into a zipper bag. Three of my hiking companions were lingering nearby as I tried to capture *something*  and there was not a moment to spare in this absolute paradise atop a mountain. Amazing views. Unbeatable scenery. Not an art studio.  I often art under non-ideal conditions, but occasionally I art at the borders of impossible. But apparently it was not.

    Nearly every fly I encountered up on that mountain was indifferent to the risk of sudden death carried by my swiftly moving hand.

    Nearly every fly sat patiently and still as I reached over and snuffed it away.

    Smacking a city fly requires speed and agility on the part of a human, but one feels superhuman atop a mountain as the dull flies understand too little what awaits the looming shape and shadow of a hand moving towards them.

    Evolution at work.