A bit of a silly post today, but there are these two running jokes about how messed up writers’ search histories are and how chaotic their open internet browser tabs must be. Now, I’ve never been much of a tabs guy myself, since my brain will likely be crushed under the weight of all that chaos, but I did catch myself with an unusually colourful browser tab situation today, so I wanted to share that snapshot with you:
 

• Gmail Account #1 (big grown-up serious email address)
• eBird – 2026 total birding list
• eBird – profile page for the northern shoveler (it’s a duck … that shovels)
• eBird – profile page for the black-capped chickadee (named after the sound it makes when it’s freaking out)
• e-Bird – profile page for the greater white-fronted goose (if they could fit more adjectives, they probably would have)
• Gmail Account #2 (created in high school, not fit for resumes, mostly spam)
• World Population Review – Democracy Dictatorship Index
• Transparency International – Corruption Perceptions Index
• Wikipedia entry for “MMM (Ponzi Scheme)”
• Google search – Uzbek Ministry of Justice
• Google search – Tajik translation for “scales of justice”
• Wikipedia entry for the novel Children of the Arbat

 
The bird entries there shouldn’t be a surprise given my previous post here and my hope is some of the other ones will be contextualized once I’m able to publish my novel. For now, just breathe the chaos in with me.

I have a grave announcement to make – this site will also occasionally be used as a birding journal.

Apparently intent on ticking off as many Millennial stereotypes as possible, this year, I’ve gotten really into birding. It all started last summer when our group of friends picked up Wingspan, the chillest board game we’ve ever played.

The game was then picked up by our kids and the middle one has always had a bit of an obsession for all things animal, so infecting him with the birding bug came naturally. After that, it wasn’t long before I got pulled in as well. I’ve got my own birding journal, which I have committed to procrastinating on, but I think the intro that I wrote in it a few months ago would probably be the best way to summarize my journey so far:

Predictably, I have done very little to pay down my bird debt since I wrote this original entry and its only grown since. I’m still juggling way too many things and while it would be nice to commit full-time to a retirement hobby, it gets a bit challenging with a day job, three kids and a writing career whose ignition is still turning without significant results.
​
That said, I have practiced some productive procrastination and instead of updating my journal, I’ve decided to cross-stitch my 2026 bird list instead:

It gives my hands something to do while we watch TV in the evening since I’ve been very jealous of my wife and her knitting for a couple of years now.
​
So, I would expect a few more occasional updates on our birding adventures here from now on. We’re heading over to the east coast of Vancouver Island in mid-October, and expect to pick up a few lifers there (“lifer” being birding lingo for a bird you’ve seen and/or identified for the first time in your life).

Recently I’ve been rewatching Ted Lasso, somewhat in preparation for watching Season 4, even though I’m still gutted by Phil Dunster not returning (I enjoyed the first season of Rooster at least, so the scheduling conflict that keeps him away is not all bad). So the last couple of weeks, Apple TV has been trying to convince to watch their new Mayday movie with Kenneth Branagh and Ryan Reynolds. Now, I’m a sucker for Reynolds (I know, I know, it’s a character flaw) but I’m also a sucker for seeing present-day depictions of anything to do with Russia and the Soviet Union.

Thus suckered into the movie, I can’t say it was anything surprising. It’s a tidy piece of propaganda about how great America is with some lip service mixed in about how they’re not perfect and not all Russians are evil monsters – a good reminder, if a little trite in the context of the movie. However, it did have good chemistry between the leads, fun action scenes, some funny moments and I respect Branagh’s decent attempt at Russian. So while its virtues can help me forgive most of its sins, I cannot bring myself to forgive them for their absolute butchering of geography towards the end of the film.

Warning, here be spoilers.
​
At the climax of the movie, our protagonists hijack a small commercial plane at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow and try to escape to Finland. Alas, they soon discover that they don’t have enough fuel to take them all the way to Finland so they would have to land the plane onto an American aircraft carrier in international waters in the Baltic Sea. Here’s the glaring problem though:

As you can see from the above, while it’s true that a straight line between Moscow and the Finnish border takes the plane over the Gulf of Finland, which technically is part of the Baltic Sea, you have to consider that a) a slight course correction would have resolved the issue and b) even if their route took them over that stretch of the Gulf of Finland, there was no way an American aircraft career would be casually parked there in 1987.

But to add insult to injury, the film established that the good guys reached the aircraft career in about an hour, despite the Baltic coast being 700km away from Moscow, a distance that would be impossible for the tiny little prop plane with an open door and one busted engine to cover.

I will absolutely admit that I should probably be making a more concerted effort to suspend my disbelief here and not descend into borderline pedantry while the geographic discrepancy goes unnoticed by almost every viewer of this movie. I will also probably commit similar errors in my own writing, though the goal is not to use quite this much artistic licence when I write. To me, this experience is about finding that line I have in my own head and hopefully staying on the right side of it with my own craft. Because while I can forgive some random watering hole in the middle of a Russian forest having television reception and a bright neon sign, funky geography is what takes me out.
​
But hey, at least they didn’t try to establish that the movie is set in Russia by just slapping some random church cupola on a manor and calling it a day (looking at you, Fate of the Furious).

Well look at me. Actually posting stuff.

One of the things I’ve been trying to do this year was pushing my way further into reading. As for most things in life, my main motivation for this is my wife, who’s had her own record-breaking reading year and who’s trying to get through all the Booker prize longlist novels before the shortlist is even announced. So inspired by her, I’m also trying to make this my most prolific reading year yet.

The book I read most recently was Katabasis by R.F. Kuang. I’d read Yellowface before, which became one of my favourite books that year, so I was really curious about this one, and once a signed copy came up for auction in support of the Vancouver Writers Fest, I couldn’t pass up a chance to grab it.
​
At first, I would say I was disappointed. Not because I necessarily expected something similar to Yellowface, but I think I felt the pacing slog in the first third and I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the main characters and their motivations. That said, by the halfway mark it really grew on me and then I just zipped through it, hooked on all the various twists and turns and the character development for the protagonists.