The weekend's garage sales are down at the bottom. Everything else is up here.

There's a game at every carnival where you spray a water gun at a bullseye, and whoever hits it most consistently walks off with the giant teddy bear. We've all seen it. What I didn't expect was for it to have a pattern.

We were at the Winona Peach Festival with some friends, a spot we've gone to most years since 2019. I'll be honest, festivals never really did it for me. Same corny rides, same games, a handful of vendors selling the same three foods. It was something to get out and do as a family, not something I looked forward to.

That's changed the last few years, and it's not just Winona. I noticed the same thing at the Dundas Cactus Festival too. Way more vendors, way more variety. My read on it: since COVID, a lot more people have started some kind of side hustle, and festivals and farmers markets have become the place to sell it on weekends. This year's Peach Festival was genuinely great, and I'm saying that as someone who runs his own business and makes his own art. There were real working artists with booths promoting their own work, way more food than burgers and hotdogs, way more of everything.

There were traditional portrait artists, woodn sculpture artists, textile artists, multimedia artists like this one using wood, paint and acrylic to make unique charcuterie boards, map artists take maps of a local area and display it in unique way. There are too many to name, I add more pics if you check out the Facebook or Instagram page.

Watching people take a simple idea and run with it is inspiring, even if the kids couldn't care less and just want the rides and games.

Anyway, back to the water gun. My friend had noticed that spots 11 and 12 kept winning, no matter who was standing in them. We tried it three times. Won the big teddy bear all three times.

Afterward I asked Kiki why he thought we won. He said, without missing a beat, that it was because he hit the bullseye better than everyone else. I told him skill is only half of it. The other half is noticing the pattern. Find the pattern, and you can solve almost anything. We played some more games, looked around the booths, ate some food, grabbed a bag of peaches. Good day. We'll be back next year, and now I'm curious what the Ancaster Fair and the Rockton Fair have going on.

Neeks

Dads corner

Turning Up the Hamilton Heat

Alright, teaser 2. I put out the first look at Hamilton Heat, the short film I've been quietly building on the side, and a bunch of you actually asked what happens next. Still not convinced this thing is ready for daylight, but here's a little more of it anyway. The title needs work still and I haven’t cut it to the soundtrack. The soundtrack itself still needs work. But its progress.

I went to school for animation and filmmaking a long time ago. Spent 10 years in the industry, then left to chase other things, but creativity never really left my blood. There's a lot of noise right now about AI in art, and I get both sides of it. Artists losing work to this stuff is real, and I don't blame anyone who's angry about that. I also get why people look at a lot of what's out there and call it AI slop. Sometimes it just doesn't feel right.

But something has been true since I was a kid watching cartoons, all the way through school and into the industry, technology keeps lowering the barrier to telling a story. If I wanted to make a 22 minute animated episode, that's hundreds of thousands of dollars and a team of 20 to 30 people. Some of those jobs are disappearing, same as in any industry going through this. But it's also never been easier to get an idea out of your head and in front of people.

Here's the catch though. You can't just tell AI to make a short film and expect something good. I've seen plenty that try, and they feel hollow. That's where the schooling actually matters, knowing how to tell a story, how to set a scene, the personal nuance and style that AI can't fake on its own. That's the part that turns something into slop or into something worth watching.

In the meantime, I get to make something I never thought I'd be able to pull off at this quality: a short film for my son.