Same Dot (Patreon)

Hi everyone! Patreon payments are paused and all content is currently ~free~. I've been packing up a storm and wow this is a lot of work for one person to manage 😅. But I'm mostly managing! Things are on track and I migrate in about two weeks. If you ever want to feel very powerful, I recommend booking off multiple city streets (in my case, for a moving van). They let you just do that, apparently. Part of me just wants to do it randomly for fun now.

But things have been very overwhelming! My living space and schedule are disrupted which is usually the worst for me. 

So I did what any sane person would do, and booked a trip to New Zealand.

Wait, did I say sane person? I guess I meant insane person. 

The comic above is one of my core memories. I'm sure I'm not the only kid who spent hours staring at a world map, but I never got sick of it. Maybe it's because I'd already been so far by the time I was 5 years old, or maybe it's because my dad was constantly away and I would marvel at all the random places he'd end up... but I was very young when I decided that I wanted to visit every single continent on the planet.

I organized a lot of my lifestyle around my desire to travel, and I've made some good progress.

I was obsessed with other places, people, and cultures. It's been my favourite way to learn! Nothing excites me the same way. I love planning routes and learning phrases and changing money and even the pain of the airplane is weirdly exciting. Other than Antarctica (which I've decided I can die happily without), there's only one continent left to visit. Oceania. 

I had an absurd number of aeroplan points burning a hole in my pocket. Two years ago it was not possible to go to New Zealand. The way was shut. I have no idea what's going to happen two years from now. 

So I'm going. This October. 

I was so sick and tired of this househunting situation that I decided I didn't want to live in limbo anymore and I made the decision. Then I booked the time off. Then I finally managed to buy a condo I wanted, for September.

Oops.

Then work decided they want me to go to Germany before that. 

Double oops.

This is kind of the way my life tends to go. I manage to live for a few years as an upstanding responsible citizen, and then things kind of conspire to throw my life into absolute f*&king chaos.

Like in 2018 how, suddenly, with two weeks notice I had to plan a whirlwind trip to Shenzhen. And then a month and a half after that I was in Africa. 

By the way did I ever tell you guys I spent a month in Southern Africa? 

I was so fixated on processing my trip to Shenzhen that I don't think I got a chance to talk about it! I recently dug this journal out because I thought I had some nice techniques that I wanted to copy for this upcoming trip and, wow, I forgot how nice this was?

I took really detailed notes on the chance that I might turn it into a travel comic, but then at some point I decided that travelogues without a good "hook" are kind of boring to the reader, so it sat on a shelf. 

But I would love to share more of this adventure :) So I scanned a bunch of the pages and I think I will post them here for you throughout October.

(Not just snapshots like this, properly scanned and cleaned with commentary and photos :) )

I'm very excited to be travelling again, and this time I'm taking it slow.

In the Dropbox Archive - JPow!

While we're on theme, here is the last serious attempt I made at a "travel comic"! Do you enjoy reading travelogues like this? The other style I do is "hourly" style (I also added Island Time as an example of that). 

Here is the link to the dropbox Archive , normally this is a Lab Tech bonus but Dropbox keeps changing their format and I don't have the spoons to figure out how to set the password again right now.  

Yours in chaos,

--Jam