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.
From introvert to interviewer
Everyone is interesting, you just have to ask the right questions. I came to this realization about 20 years ago when I joined what seemed to me at the time a huge software company of around 150 people. Over the decade that I worked there, I was their sole internal communication specialist, newsletter writer and resident interviewer of everyone from the mailroom to the CEO.
Book Tour: The Love Shelf
A couple of nights ago my partner and I were in the dairy aisle of the grocery store shopping for ingredients for dinner when the lady in front of us turned around, took us in from head to toe and exclaimed, "Oh my god, you guys have amazing energy. You're going to grow old together. I can see it. I'm psychic."
Annie Jacobsen: The Devil is in the Details
One of my favorite authors is Annie Jacobsen. For anyone who doesn't know her work, she's an American investigative journalist and author as well as a 2016 Pulitzer Prize finalist and television writer. She was recently interviewed by Joe Rogan about her latest book, Nuclear War: A Scenario. She was previously interviewed on his show in 2019 about her other books, and she has also appeared on the Lex Fridman podcast as well as many others.
Politics and propaganda
I've gone through a couple of extreme phases of caring and not caring about politics and the state of the world. I was raised by idealistic hippies, one of whom fled the United States during the Vietnam war to protest the draft and as a result I was born in Canada but raised partially in the United States.
The Mind and the Brain
I'm absolutely fascinated by how the human brain works, and many of the books I own are some variation on this theme, from Malcolm Gladwell to V.S. Ramachandran, Oliver Sacks, Jill Bolte Taylor and a myriad of other doctors, historians, scientists and popular science writers.
An ode to certain '80s excesses
Continuing my book shelf tour, this week brings us to the first shelf containing graphic novels. There are several such books on my shelves, mostly X-Men or related titles, like the excellent Elektra Assassin, about which I still harbor dark fantasies that one day some brave filmmaker will take up the challenge of bringing this cult classic to the big screen (or streaming, I’m fine either way).