I was introduced to Calvin and Hobbes (as well as Sam and Max) as a kid by a taxi driver when on holiday in Florida in the 90s. Loved both. It’s been a delight to re read them with my son recently. I somewhat lament it’s not possible to by any merchandise though! I’d love to have a big print of the pair in their radio flyer crashing down the hill!
If the distasteful proliferation of the "Calvin peeing" bumpersticker is anything to go by, thank spaceman spiff Watterson sealed the floodgates of merchandising and marketing garbage.
I once read an essay about the idea of, if you have a successful artistic creation, should you exploit it financially, for example by selling rights for someone else to find new income streams (Bill Waterson famously never did.) The essay argued that even if you are primarily motivated by art and not money, you should for the reason that money being the motivating factor for so many activities in our society, doing so is the only way to keep your creation relevant in society, which would then mean that your creation would keep being exposed to new people, as opposed to live in the minds of ever older people and die with them. I would like to to find the essay and reread it, but I could never find it. It kind of rang true.
I believe that essay mistakes quantity for quality. I think most authors would prefer a small community that "gets" them than a larger one that doesn't.
I believe most artists care more about the message of their art than about its spread. And if you ask them to choose between "500 people that get it" and "50000 people who don't", the fact that the second number is bigger is not necessarily a better deal.
(Obviously there are considerations for "I need to pay rent", but that's a different issue)
I'm not convinced that merchandising would keep an artistic creation relevant in society. It'd be just as likely to reduce the artwork to the lowest common denominator and it'd become just another slogan/logo.
The idea you're conveying is very well known but in my opinion poorly argued for. This essay I mentioned on the other hand had a minority view and well argued for, which is why I was trying to find it in order to reread it.
Anecdotally let's look at one data point. Spider-Man is in comparison garbage, but it's everywhere to this day. Why, because some company calculated they could milk it. C&H in comparison is much better but virtually unknown for anyone under the age of 20. It's dying.
Hey! Listen, the abstract exactly matches what I described.
However, I believe that the essay I read specifically mentioned C&H as an example, which CTRL-F indicates your pdf doesn't. (On the other hand, it's also possible that I originally did read your pdf and in my mind used C&H as an example, and am now mis-remembering it haven been presented as example).
Now that I got your attention, let me (briefly) unpack (via cliche) what 082349872349872 might have meant with his HD.
"Prophets grow stronger when they die." --Villeneuve expressing his headcanon through Irulan, with B Herbert's approval.
My architect friends are not so in love with Jane Jacobs' <<Systems of Survival>> -- no mention of beauty, of quality!
Besides the Calvinist ancestor-worship, we might also consider the option of keeping the conversations flowing through non-survival. Heh. That's a lot of vanity, Bill.. but then, JJ could also have allotted Beauty* to the Guardians, especially since she handed the Merchants Truth. We left Heroism on the table..
I thought he eventually did start producing merch, because there was a growing amount of bootleg merch and he realised that it was better to have official high quality products than let C&H become associated with poor quality (or something like that)? Could be misremembering though.
Calvin and Hobbes was extremely mainstream. It only stopped being so because the creator stopped creating content for it.
Spider-Man, for all its merchandising and marketing, doesn't have people chasing down old content in dying formats. It is supported by new content in modern formats.
Old spider-man content sells for a lot more than old calvin and hobbes content.
> Calvin and Hobbes was extremely mainstream. It only stopped being so because the creator stopped creating content for it.
I think that's exactly the point. It stopped being mainstream. Spiderman continues to be mainstream because the original author passed on the rights and now it will live for longer than the original author. Calvin and Hobbes will continue to shrivel in how well known it is.
I love the app. Each week I discover a new to me species of insect in my garden. When the AI fails to work (relatively rarely) the community usually quickly manually identify it.
I’ve had less success with trees but it’s still pretty good.
The focus on images is a bit iffy. Usually I take the photo using the phones native camera app to overcome.
I’ve recently moved to a house with a wood burner / back boiler and I can’t wait to replace it. It’s made me appreciate what a huge upgrade natural gas boilers were. I spend a minimum of 15 mins a day chopping kindling, fetching wood, starting and feeding the fire. It’s not cheap and it’s not warm! It’s been fun and makes you appreciate your consumption more but the novelty only goes so far!
I also heat with wood, but quite like the occasional breaks from the computer through the day, and sometimes cooking on the wood stove. Here, the obvious alternative is a heat pump rather than a natural gas boiler, and I suspect the total cost of wood heating is a bit lower than with a heat pump.
Since that time, heat pumps have become much more efficient at a wide set of operating temps, and the cost of wood has gone up, so it's unlikely that a wood stove is cheaper to operate, unless you have your own forest, and are willing to fell trees and chop and dry firewood yourself.
Wood stove tech has also increased quite a bit though it’s still relatively rare to see 85+% efficiency. Access to free firewood is one topping point, but depending on electricity can be a serious issue in some areas.
Yep, exactly, it's very much a situational decision. And to be fair, cost wasn't my primary concern in deciding to use wood heat, but as above I don't think it was a silly decision.
I've got one of these https://pyroclassic.co.nz/ - it's not a new design but is quite clean (it's usually impossible to tell if a fire is going by looking at the chimney) and efficient as far as these things go.
The lifetime cost of the equipment itself must be lower for an efficient wood stove+flue than an efficient heat pump, in both dollars and environmental impact. The initial install cost here in NZ is a little bit higher for the fire, but annual maintenance (flue sweeping) is something an average homeowner can do in an hour or so, where heat pumps need regular cleaning from the homeowner, and are supposed to be checked on by a technician periodically. The fire can reasonably be expected to last half a century with a few minor repairs. When it eventually does need a full replacement, that's just some steel and ceramic - no electronics, refrigerants, or plastic involved.
Electricity here is expensive - last bill was NZ$0.42/kWh - and wood isn't so much. My last batch of primo firewood was IIRC NZ$100 per tossed m^3, and yes that takes some time to stack and such (firwood warms you twice!), however there's also a fair bit of free wood to be had.
To use round numbers, say the heat pump is 250% efficient making heat, and the fireplace is 50% (after writing most of this, I see that fireplace is claimed to be 74% efficient). That tossed m^3 of firewood is about 0.2 (stacked) cords and contains about 1170kWh energy from some quick searching, so $100 in firewood gives 586kWh heat in to the house. The same heat from a heat pump would've cost $98.45 - the difference is a decent pint or two per year in heating the house...
But, the biggest argument is that you don't actually use a heat pump in the same way as a fire. It takes a while for the fire to start cranking out heat, so I only build a fire if it's worth having one going in an hour or so. If I had a heat pump, I'm sure we'd have it turned on in the morning as well as evening, so it would be used to put out substantially more heat than the fire does.
I grew up with a wood fire. I love the sound and feel of the fire, but I'm done cutting wood. First you have to buy the wood. A truck load of wood in the driveway means hours of stacking wood and cleaning up. Then to start the fire you need kindling. If I get home at 7pm after a long day of work I don't want to have do this just to start heating the house.
I love the boiler we have, but it is an old pre-gassification boiler amd simply is too inefficient. New boilers are way more expensive than is worth it, so we have switched entirely to high efficiency indoor wood and pellet stoves.
I miss the smell of the oak from the old boiler, but not the smoke or absurd amount of wood we were going through.
Metrics absolutely cannot replace strategy and vision. It needs to be a core value of the company that you’d rather do the right thing by the wider mission than drive a metric at any cost. Managers at every level need to live up to that. This is harder the bigger the company. It’s one of the things OKRs, love or hate them, try and help with. Like with everything it’s whether you comply with the spirit or the letter of the law. And whether people get rewarded for latter!
We switched from Trello to Clubhouse 3 years ago - having dabbled with JIRA a few times. We'd outgrown Trello (not enough structure) but didn't want to give up on the speed / ease of moving and updating cards. I wrote about it here: https://medium.com/geckoboard-under-the-hood/why-our-dev-tea.... This seems like a sensible move to grow usage - interested to see how it helps!
I really rate this book so it’s great to see it getting some publicity!
I think one misnomer is that to do stats right you just need to do the math right. But
what analysis is done in the first place, the overall methodology and how that data is interpreted are more often where we go wrong.
I built a Huxley Reprap Pro two years ago. The building experience was interesting, but fiddly. I needed a few spare parts along the way and getting them was slow. It feels very much like a prototype / proof of concept rather than working tool but getting it working was rewarding.
I printed a few things, including a centrifugal pump, from thingiverse as well as a few of my own designs. They usually come out reasonably well, but the finish is not attractive and it usually takes a lot of fiddling up front and more than one attempt. Comparing the quality to stuff I've had made by Shapeways / Materialise there is no comparison - they are infinitely superior.
Keeping the machine operational requires constant vigilance! If there's a kink in the filament, or the extruder loses heat the machine has a habit of self destructing.
It's been an altogether more rewarding experience. It feels like a real machine and the results are really impressive. I've not really had anything go wrong with it after assembly. It is quite a bit scarier though having a diamond bit spinning at 20,000 rpm!
