Partial Edition

May the 4th be with you 2025

I suppose this could have been the Star Wars edition, but the Force is not strong in me at the moment. I have had some unusually busy mornings this week, which threw off my comics making habit. Those are my excuses and I’m sticking to them.

Monday

I saw John Wick 4 on Netflix, which is a crazy series. It sort of has a samurai movie feel to it with the rules of conduct and the stylized fight scenes and beautiful cinematography. Okay, it’s dumb, but I can’t help it. All he wanted was “Loving Husband” on his tombstone.

Tuesday

I had already mailed in my ballot a while ago to avoid waiting in lines. The consequences of this Canadian federal election seemed a bit more consequential than usual, with the threats from south of the border. In some ways the scenario seemed familiar with the unpopular incumbent resigning and the apparently vastly more qualified replacement going against a populist. Though saner results prevailed, it did reveal a growing divide in worldviews.

Wednesday

I alternate between having scrambled eggs and oatmeal for breakfast. Protein versus fibre. I’m sort of hedging my bets. Anyway, when I started looking for tips on cooking scrambled eggs, I was surprised by the diversity of advice, sometimes contradictory. I do not have an especially discriminating palette, so my priority is simplicity.

Thursday

Usually I spend about half an hour to draw a comic after breakfast. But I had to do my routine blood work, which meant skipping breakfast. And then by the time I got back, I had many other things I had to do for the project I am working on. I like doing the comics in the morning before I have other things I have to think about. Often I do things in a connected series, so that if I don’t do the first thing, then I often forget to do all the other things. One time in university, I had skipped another class to cram for an exam, but then my timing was thrown off and ended up showing up at the end of the period for the test. Fortunately, I was still allowed to write it, though I didn’t do that well anyhow.

Friday

Since starting this habit of drawing a comic a day, I haven’t missed too many, and even more rarely missed two in a row. But we had workers coming in early to swap out our fire sprinklers, which had originally been recalled twenty-five years ago. Some of them required the dry wall to be cut out to fix the piping. I suppose I could look up a YouTube video to patch those up, but then it would look like a guy who didn’t know what he was doing had done it. If the outcome doesn’t matter so much, then I think it’s worth trying yourself. in this case, I guess I’ll look up someone who does this professionally. Recently, a person was impressed by the interpretive text that I had written. I had not thought it was a big deal, but I do think that sometimes it can make a difference to get people who know what they are doing.

Saturday

Speaking of doing things where the outcome doesn’t matter so much, I decided I better do a comic or I might fall off the wagon altogether. This was just what I had just been writing about. Nothing profound or even funny, but I feel it is useful practise to attempt to express what I happen to be thinking, to remind myself that I am not just a consumer of content. I did this one before breakfast for a change to make sure I got it done before having to leave for the opening of the exhibit I had worked on. Maybe I’ll get around to doing a comic on that next week.

Sunday

Not Made in Japan cont. In my continuing comic about my life in southern Japan in the late 1980s, I joined a course with Japanese summer students from Kyushu University at the Amakusa Marine Biological Laboratory. Plankton consists of the creatures that float around in the ocean or in fresh water. Tanaka sensei was the number two at the lab. Plankton can be kind of weird to look at. I think they might make interesting designs for spaceships.

That was a bit of my week. I hope you had a good one with a better one to come.