Drawcember: Week 3
Can you believe Christmas is only four days away? The last two months of 2024 have gone by so quickly. This year more than any in recent memory, I’m reminded of the fragility and fleetingness of all that we love.
Drawcember: Week 2
Two weeks into Drawcember and I’ve only missed two days, but for very good reason! My mother came up to visit last weekend, so I was both playing hostess and performing in a very fun burlesque show at The Rio Theatre.
Drawcember: Week 1
Drawcember got off to a great start this week!
2025 Badass Goddesses calendar
My 2025 Badass Goddesses calendar has landed… You can visit my Shop to order yours today. It’s the perfect gift for someone in your life who likes to look up from their phone once in a while and see something pretty hanging on the wall, and the perfect way to support real art in an increasingly AI-generated world!
The Mirror Test
Rene Descartes (1596–1650) famously opined, "Animals are like robots: they cannot reason or feel pain." Four centuries later, biologists are still arguing about where to draw the line between that which is conscious and that which is merely alive. Even human consciousness has become to neuroscientists what the "cosmological constant" is to astrophysicists.
Chicago: Part 2
I’m still recovering from my whirlwind trip to Chicago, which concluded earlier this week. Definitely planning on a return trip some time in the spring or summer when we can bring our skates and explore the famed Lakefront Trail, Chicago’s version of our Vancouver Seawall, which loops around the shoreline of Lake Michigan with a beautiful scenic walking/biking/skating path.
Greetings from Chicago
I’m in Chicago this week, visiting the city for the first time with my mother and Rodger. It’s been an amazing trip so far with tons of walking and activities packed into each day, which is exactly how I love to travel.
Pinktober 2024: Week 5
This week wraps up Pinktober 2024, my first Inktober. What a great way to kick start my drawing habit after far too long away. Huge thanks to my podcast partner, Alison Price, at Starzology, for inspiring me to challenge myself.
Pinktober 2024: Week 4
Whew, Pinktober is just full steam ahead… A month of daily drawing challenges and it had to be the longest month of the year, or it seems like it anyway! This is why I prefer “dry February” to “sober October,” but I digress…
Pinktober 2024: Week 3
It’s been a busy week around here with Canadian Thanksgiving, a weekend trip to Bellingham to visit my mother and see a childhood friend for the first time in decades, fighting off the first strain of autumn colds that have been hitting everyone (including my partner, who I’ve alternated between caring for and avoiding like the literal plague all week!), interviewing for jobs, doing my current job, and all the usual stuff (recording podcasts, exercise, blah blah blah) and yet I’ve still managed to keep up with my daily Pinktober drawing challenges… yay, me!
Pinktober 2024: Week 2
I am loving Inktober/Pinktober! I really do better in life when I have an assignment, and boy, completing one drawing a day is certainly a challenging assignment… But it’s also awesome.
Pinktober 2024: Week 1
One week into Inktober/Pinktober 2024 and we’re off to a great start! I was a little worried at first, since I haven’t been drawing much of anything these last couple of years, but the first four days of the month have been awesome. I’ve been looking forward to each new drawing as a creative challenge, finding inspiration in the random sketchbooks I have laying around and in photos of friends and family (and of course, myself).
Living Memories & Dead Media
Every time I look at my bookshelf, or maybe not every time but more often than I'd like, I'm hit with two conflicting thoughts... I love having a collection of books to look at, like an externalization of my brain, but at the same time, they're an increasingly archaic and unwieldy format, and an unbelievable bitch to move should the need ever arise again.
Venus, badass goddess of love
Venus is the Roman goddess of love, beauty, fertility, and prosperity, equivalent to the Greek goddess Aphrodite. She holds a central place in Roman mythology, embodying the ideals of love, desire, and the aesthetic aspects of life. Venus is often depicted as a stunning and seductive figure, emphasizing her association with physical beauty and attraction.
blog life
It's funny how, even when you been out of school as long as I have, September is always a time of new beginnings. Whether it's the start of a new fiscal year or a new solar year, like it is for me, since my birthday is in late August, or just that natural sense of renewal that comes with the beginning of each new season. This year, I'm celebrating another kind of new beginning with a brand new web site, hosted on Squarespace.
Talking about the generations
I've been listening to The Fourth Turning is Here (2023), an audiobook by Neil Howe, who co-wrote the bestselling book Generations (1991) with William Strauss. The pair wrote a few other books together but Generations is the most well-known. In it they described their theory of recurring generational cycles in American and Western history.
Pinktober 2024
This year I'm going to be joining a tradition started in 2009 by artist Jake Parker, which you can read all about at Inktober.com. Jake Parker started Inktober to challenge himself to grow his drawing and inking skills and to improve his discipline, since the heart of the challenge is 31 days, 31 drawings.
The Astrology of LOST
The classic TV series LOST premiered 20 years ago, in 2004. This week, we're doing a deep dive into the speculative astrology behind some of the most beloved (and in some cases, reviled) characters in television history.
Fear and Coasting
Wow, is there anything less clickbait-y than existential dread? This one is probably just for me, but here we go... I've been reading Cintra Wilson's substack, Cintra Wilson Feels Your Pain, after recently rediscovering her for the third time in my life.
The Astrology of Friends
I recently had the opportunity to record a couple of fun episodes of the Starzology podcast with a couple of excellent guests, exploring the speculative astrology of two classic TV shows, Friends (1994-2004) and LOST (2004-2010). You can listen right now to the Astrology of Friends, featuring me, my mother Sionanne O'Neill and our good friend, Bo Wutzke.