Apologies for this slightly chaotic / 'en rafale' update...

You've gotta admit that we had a pretty great summer here. I was still ambulating around in a T-Shirt and shorts until just a couple days ago, and my sister was still swimming with my nephews in her backyard pool. Winter's right on our doorstep, and that's cool with me.

I've been enjoying all the work I'm doing right now; the projects I have lined up for the next few months are challenging, interesting, and promising. I long ago weened myself off my Drupal / Joomla / Wordpress dependency and the work I'm doing now reflects that evolution: more project management, more speaking, writing, more multimedia video / audio production, and less web stuff.

I also finally got my camera back from repair at Pentax Canada, and have been pretty shutter-happy as of late. I'm not posting many here, but there are some at the bottom of this entry. I'll hopefully also pick up a couple new lenses before embarking on some travel plans I'm making for November, December and January.

Other than that, I started watching, for the first time ever, japanese anime. I'd never been a fan of the form, but after reluctantly watching Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle (in English, so sue me!), I can really appreciate the genius that goes into Hayao Miyazaki's animation. There's something surreal about the artwork in these movies that I could never imagine being replicated using real-world or CGI effects, much like an oil-painting has a special quality that photographs can't match.

The other art form I've been getting back into (far too much, most likely) is gaming. I've realized that I'm a sucker for good interactive storytelling; as a kid I liked sitting around the campfire and listen to people take turns filling in part of a story, or reading fantasy or sci-fi novels and building worlds in my mind's eye with nothing more than the author's words to go on. In that sense, good games are closer to books than to movies – they all tell a story, but movies don't let you fill in the blanks yourself. They don't challenge or dare you to construct parts of the tale like books, or, more obviously, games do... but that will be a post in itself.

PC and console games are the new books.