On a trip to Alaska a few years ago, my friend Alex kept calling me "dawg". I thought it was kind of lame for two white guys from Canada to be calling each other dawg. So I started calling him "bear". There were many bears, and that seemed more Canadian. When we got to Skagway, we killed some time by going into a museum. There was a stuffed grizzly, posed in such a way that he almost looked like a rapper from the early 90s. "See?" I said, "The Homie Bear." The name stuck. It would have been a long-forgotten story, but I started blogging shortly afterwards, in 2002. I chose Homie Bear for my screen name and a whole universe of bears and robots and monsters was born. What started as a repository for silly jokes involving the word "poo" has turned into a whole world celebrating whimsy and wonder, and exploring the process of creativity.