Student Edition

5 July 2026

As I discuss more later, I am starting an online course about making comics for writers. So you will be able to see whether it makes a significant difference to the quality of my comics starting next week.

Monday

This was the first time I did this self-guided tour of gardens in our neighbourhood. One of them had a relatively large pond. He said the goldfish were able to survive the raccoons and herons because it was fairly deep and had a bridge for shelter. I remember seeing a simulation about community ecology that mentioned the importance of habitat heterogeneity so that the prey don’t get wiped out.

Tuesday

Mixed up the date that I originally posted this comic. Apparently the movie is based on the Borderlands video game that I’d never heard of, but they must have had a pretty big budget to hire Cate Blanchette, as well as Kevin Hart and Jamie Lee Curtis and Jack Black as the voice of the robot. I couldn’t really tell you what it was about, but it was kind of fun while it lasted.

Wednesday

The Canadian soccer team did not have a game on Canada Day, but it seemed like some residual patriotism was lingering with people already wearing Canada fashions. Since I don’t really have a regular work day, have a holiday in the middle of the week does not really make any difference to me. I think if we can celebrate where we are, without forgetting that things could be better, or having to denigrate other places, that would be nice.

Thursday

I Must Be Dreaming is a hybrid sort of book by the New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast. She has comics as well as written passages, sort of like this newsletter I suppose, except, of course, more interesting and also apparently written by hand. I don’t sleep as well as I used to, but that seems to be more biological than psychological. In any case, I don’t tend to remember my dreams. If you want to remember them, it seems to you need to practise and write them down right away. I’m not convinced it would be worth the effort, unless I was going to make a book of them. The Baku is supposed to be a Japanese mythological creature, though I had never heard of it before, not that I’m any kind of authority on Japanese culture.

Friday

I have been paying attention to this World Cup, since Vancouver has been one of the hosts. The idea of time in soccer games seems a little weird to me, but interesting, particularly given the number of games I have seen decided in the extra minutes tacked onto the end of what seems to be the regular amount of time. I had not known about the significance of red cards until I saw two given out in Canada’s game against Tunisia, where you not only lose the particular player but you don’t get to replace them. I think I prefer the ten minute highlight reels so I don’t have watch players writhing on the ground so much. The World Cup has also reminded me of my profound ignorance of geography and legacies of colonialism.

Saturday

I remember seeing Seinfeld dismissing the need for classes for doing standup comedy, that you just need to do it and if you’re going to be any good, then you have to figure out for yourself. Or something along those lines. This may also be true for making comics, but I have been thinking that I might have plateaued, so it might be good to get a little extra boost or new perspectives from taking an online course. I hope I still have room in my head for new ideas.

Sunday

This instalment of my Not Made in Japan, my graphic memoir in progress deals with an almost catastrophe. I tend to be bad at dealing with bureaucratic red tape and I think it was exacerbated my the state of my language ability at the time. If you are actually fluent, then you presumably don’t have a problem, because you can just function properly. And if you are a total beginner, you know that you don’t know what you are doing, so you get help from people who do. But this in between phase can be tricky, when it might seem like you know what you’re doing, so others don’t intervene, and you think you know what you’re doing, so you don’t worry, but then it turns out that you don’t actually know what you’re doing. So maybe I should worry more than I do, but I find that a tedious way to live.

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