Love Edition
15 February 2026
This weekend is the confluence of Valentine’s Day, the ultimate exploitation of love for marketing; and in BC, Family Day on Monday, which, for better or worse, may define your understanding of love; and on Tuesday, Chinese or Lunar New Year, which might not be explicitly about love, but the concept of zodiacs reminds me of the Stoic expression amor fati, of loving your fate. But I cannot claim to have any particular insights into love, so perhaps this issue’s title is a bit clickbaity. Nonetheless, I send you my love, for what it’s worth, for reading this newsletter.
Monday
I watched this 1962 film by Karel Zeman in subtitles on the Kanopy service. I’m not sure what language they were speaking. It looked quite unusual as a combination of live action and animation. Once upon a time, I had seen a film by Terry Gilliam called The Adventures of Baron Munchausen which had similar elements, though I found that one annoying because it felt like it had anti-scientific tendencies. This one is mostly absurdly whimsical.
Tuesday
My daughter “had” to get a new device, so she let me have her old one. This one is bigger and faster than my old one and the screen protector has a paper-like texture to it, which feels nice to draw on. Also it is able to run the latest ios, so I am learning to use that. I don’t know if this will make my comics any better or easier to make.
Wednesday
I had been chatting with a friend about movies or TV series that are done in a single shot. This made me wonder about doing a comic without making any changes. This kind of defeats the purpose of using an ipad, because I like having layers and being able to erase lines. If you draw in pen on paper, you have just start over or make the best of it. I suppose this is more like life itself, where you don’t really get a do over.
Thursday
I had heard of Barbara Kingsolver but not read anything by her before. This novel tells two stories a hundred years apart with resonant themes. People in denial about evolution and climate change, for example. What caught my attention was a historical woman scientist from the 1800s named Mary Treat who studied carnivorous plants and other things. Apparently she corresponded with Darwin and other major scientists of the day. In this novel, she sits in her parlor with her finger in a Venus Fly Trap to see the effect. I had a Venus Fly Trap when I was a kid and enjoyed watching them eat ants.
Friday
I suppose this superstition has some peculiar explanation to it. Mine turned out alright. Hope yours did too. Fortunately, I do not suffer from triskaidekaphobia.
Saturday
I try to make certain actions routine so that I don’t have to think about them, but then if something is a little different, I get thrown off because I’m not thinking that carefully about them. I might like an AI to keep track of things I don’t want to think about. When I was done with tai chi class, I couldn’t find my keys or my fanny pack. I had to hope that I had forgotten them at home. Fortunately, they were at home and even more fortunately, my daughter was also home so that I could get in.
Sunday
Another episode in my graphic memoir in progress Not Made in Japan about my life a graduate student in southern Japan in the late 1980s. I had read some of the papers by Joseph Connell and he was an important scientist in seashore ecology and the role of disturbance on the diversity of ecological communities, so meeting him was a big deal. Kyoto University is one of the Imperial universities, as was Kyushu University, but it was extra hard to get into. English is a struggle for Japanese students, though in science at least, they had to write their thesis in English. Since I looked Japanese, I could look like a genius for speaking the language I had grown up with, until they heard my Japanese.
So that was my week. I hope you had a good one with a better one to come. I happened to look at some of the earlier newsletters from when I started a few years ago and seems I have gotten a lot wordier. Thanks if you have made it this far.