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  I’m really enjoying my French novel, but it’s been a slow read for me. The author has an extensive vocabulary, which means I have to stop a lot to find out what new words mean. Of course, extending my French vocabulary is the entire reason I’m reading the novel in the first place, so it’s silly to be frustrated by this. But I am impatient to find out what happens next! (Today’s new word: “fiacre” — a horse-drawn carriage or hackney cab)

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  I regret nothing. #Inktober #inktober2026

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  I’m sitting in the Duke Pub in Toronto right now, listening the the Hurricane Dance Band. They’re fantastic. I’d forgotten how much I love Big Band music. Live, it has incredible drive and complexity. Everyone in the band is old — like, in their sixties and over, but the energy is amazing. So much fun. #BigBand #TheDuke

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  They all laughed at me when I made my website entirely static. Well WHO’S LAUGHING NOW

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  I thought I’d take a crack at a self-portrait in anime style, one I’ve never attempted. Anime is an interesting style to work in — it’s quite simple, so it forces you to discard a lot of detail and make simplifying choices over anything ambiguous (like hair/beard colour). I looked at a lot of references for the eyes — while normally enlarged, there can be a huge variation in eye size even between different characters in the same anime, from realistic to ginormous. I went somewhere in the midd...

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  I’m so old that I remember getting all excited about new software releases, rather than feeling only a sense of dread.

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  For today’s drawing I made another self-portrait, as a study of anime eyes. I’m now imagining some kind of slider you could adjust while watching animated movies. #Inktober #inktober2026

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  After too many years of being closed, the Lower Don Bike Trail opened a few days ago… mostly. I decided to check it out today and take a few pictures. I started at Pottery Road, heading south. There was a new pleasant pull-off zone by the river which I failed to stop for. Instead my first stop was at the tiny sculpture garden just before you pass under the Bloor Viaduct. The “sculptures” here are actually casts of architectural details of buildings in the city. 1/n #toronto #biking #Lower...

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  This morning I rented a bicycle on Sparks Street and did a 20K ride along the banks of the Ottawa River, exploring as I went. Apparently my timing is good — much of the path had been closed for the last two years and only opened two days ago, according to the bike shop employee. I explored the hydroelectric station in the middle of the river; an old railway bridge that had been converted to a bike/pedestrian bridge; and just enjoyed all the forested scenery and lots of birdsong on my ride. #o...

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  Our democracy, like our Parliament buildings, needs constant work. We need to dump our outdated first-past-the-post system and adopt some form of proportional representation! #fairVote #Canada

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  Today’s new phishing scam is based on Canada’s FINTRAC regulations. The scammers send a note from your financial institution quoting the regs and asking you to log in with your banking information and upload scans of your photo IDs. The scam would probably be a bit more effective if a) the scammers bothered to spoof the return address on the email, and b) they didn’t send 30 of them to me in one day, purportedly from every financial institution in the country. Gosh, nigerianprince@spammer25.p...

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  I’m visiting the Canadian Museum of History today. It has a magnificent collection of First Nations art. This is the plaster source of the sculpture “The Spirit of Haida Gwaii” by Haida artist Bill Reid. I think I’ve seen the final green marble sculpture in the Vancouver airport. Reid’s statement of what the piece is about really speaks to the world today: “Here we are at last, a long way from Haida Gwaii, not too sure where we are or where we're going, still squabbling and vying f...

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  I just took the Ottawa O-Train from where I was staying downtown to the airport. My other option was the bus, which would have been faster, but I strongly prefer travelling by train. The train trip can be as short as 40 minutes, if you make the connections between the three trains perfectly, or a half hour longer if, like me today, you have to wait the maximum amount of time for each train. This was my experience this week getting around Ottawa entirely by public transit — it’s fine, if you...

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  I went to see Minions and Monsters last night. I was expecting a straight-up monster movie, but I was delighted to see that much more than that, it was an homage to the golden age of silent film. There were so many sly (but mostly overt) references to many silent films, right back to Muybridge’s early motion studies. The movie itself it a fun piece of fluff, as one expects from minions. George Lucas has an amazing cameo. Jesse Eisenberg voices a character that seems entirely out of characte...

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  Today I explored the newly-opened sections of Biidaasige Park on Toronto’s waterfront. It completely exceeded my expectations. The new area is full of windy intersecting trails, with various levels for different views, a wide promenade at the mouth of the Don, and spectacular views of the downtown skyline. It’s all planted with native species, which have already been inhabited by birds. A huge flock of red-winged blackbirds emerged from a dense copse I was riding past. There were butterflie...

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  Hmmm. Last night’s weather forecast said that we were supposed to get thunderstorms with over 60mm of rain today (that’s over 2 inches). But today’s forecast just says “cloudy”. I did hear a single half-hearted thunderclap overnight. I guess I can stop building the ark now. #toronto

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  Let’s get an update on the score of the game “Doug Ford vs the People of Toronto”. On one side we have the citizens, whose goal is to have a liveable, beautiful city that they can get around in. On the other side is the Premiere of Ontario, whose goal is to sell off every bit of public wealth to his friends/donors, or use it to buy votes from low-information voters. First, let’s look at previous rounds. Doug solidly won the “science centre” round, neatly destroying the beloved architectural...

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  In Canada one way we do bilingual signage is just to overlap the common bits. For example, there might be a street named “Smith Street” in English or “Rue Smith” in French, so the street sign will say “Rue Smith Street”. I’ve been waiting for some builder with a sense of humour to make a “Rue McClanahan Street” or a “Rue The Day Street”. The other one that amuses me is Shower Gel, or “Gel Douche” in French. Because it sounds like the labels on the bottle are insulting you. “What’s in this b...

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  Today in terrifying public transit, this O-Train station in Ottawa uses only one track for both northbound and southbound traffic. The next southbound train is scheduled to arrive one minute after the northbound. It’s like stunt transit. #ottawa #oTrain

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  Good morning Toronto. The sky is no longer Blade-Runner orange, but the air quality is significantly *worse* than yesterday with an AQI of 323. (That’s considered “hazardous”). You should not be breathing outdoor air unless you are wearing an N95 mask. As usual, no one I see outside (playing with their kids, jogging, etc) is taking any notice. #Toronto #AQI

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  There is an active shooter right now at the Salsa on St. Clair festival. Two dead, three others injured. Police are advising people to stay away. #toronto

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  As an atheist I rarely mention religious texts, but with the now-every-year heat waves in Europe and now-annual massive wildfires everywhere — and STILL no meaningful coordinated government action on climate change — I am reminded of the story in Exodus. In the story, the Pharoah faces an increasingly more damaging series of plagues because of his inaction — rivers of blood, frogs, gnats, flies, boils, hail, locusts, etc — and he still does nothing. He only finally takes action when his own so...

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  A Fedi version of Queer Eye: Five autistic queer Fedifolk (one in a fur suit) travel to help out a regular person each episode. By the end of the episode, the team have degoogled the recipient, installed a thoughtfully selected Linux distro on their formerly-windows machine, replaced much of their software with open source alternatives, stocked their home library with Murderbot novels and cozy queer SF, and given the recipient a new Special Interest to hyperfocus on. #FediQueerEye

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  Toronto’s Trans March happens today, so it seems a good time to say this: I’ve recently seen some content online — including some from a former friend — from gay people trying to effectively cut Trans folk out of the LGBT community. “It’s not the same thing” they say. Well, duh. Yes. Being Trans is a completely different thing than being gay. A person can be gay, or trans, or both, or neither. As a cis gay man, I have zero internal understanding of what being trans is like. It’s alien to...

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  So these signs went up all over downtown Ottawa, and now they are being taken down rapidly. The issue is the second word in the title, which is missing the letter “L”. This highlights the difference between spell checking and proofreading.

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  While I was at Pride today I ran into an old friend who runs a business on Church Street (which has been pedestrianized this summer as part of a pilot project). I asked him if the pedestrianization had impacted his business, and he told me that yes, it had — his business had improved noticeably. He said every member of the BIA supports the change (except for one guy who is strongly opposed). It’s the answer I expected, since that’s been the effect everywhere else it’s been tried. But it was...

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  I thought I saw an unusual bee in the garden today, but on closer inspection, it was not a bee at all! This is the snowberry clearwing, a moth in bee drag. It’s also called the bumblebee moth, the hummingbird moth, or (my favourite) the flying lobster. I imagine that looking like a bee might deter hungry birds. #moths #garden

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  #SilentSunday

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  One of the characteristics of the current right in politics is a hatred of the idea of common wealth — the things and services that citizens own and collectively benefit from. E.g. I may not be able to afford a big lawn for my kids, but collectively we have beautiful parks where all the kids can play. Here in Ontario, Doug Ford seems really focused on identifying any public wealth we have and finding a way (ethical or not) to convert it to private wealth for his cronies and donors. He’s don...

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  Three years ago a pair of robins built their nest on a little ledge under the window of my home office, giving me an excellent view of their child-rearing. I took these pictures over a 14-day period, ending on this date. I learned a lot - first, that robins don’t live in the nests. It’s just for the eggs, and fledglings immediately abandon the nest once they can fly. Second, if the eggs don’t hatch fast enough, mom dumps them out. Third: baby robins poop in tiny contained packages that are...