Calvin and Hobbes

Well, I did not think I would be writing about another “retro” topic, but I was once again reminded about one of my favorites as a child. Next to Garfield, Calvin and Hobbes was easily my favorite comic strip. (Thanks to Drawn! for posting this article about the artist, Bill Watterson.) I have MANY clippings of the strip in various scrapbooks. Wikipedia does a nice job summarizing the strip. It even chronicles my favorite subject matter:

Calvin also builds snowmen; but these are usually grotesque, monstrous deformed creatures (e.g., two-headed snowmen, a snow monster with tentacles devouring a bunch of snowmen, a snowman who grabs another snowman’s head and uses it as a bowling ball, a snowman who scoops snow cones out of the back of a dead snowman, snowmen getting hanged, a buried giant snow monster destroying other snow men or holding their heads in its hands, and a prostrate snowman seemingly beneath the parked family car, surrounded by a host of worried “snow-onlookers”, etc.) In one storyline, Calvin builds a snowman and brings it to life using the power “invested in him by the mighty and awful snow demons”. The snowman immediately turns evil (reminiscent of the film Frankenstein) and becomes a “deranged mutant killer monster snow goon” by giving itself two heads and three arms. The snow goon then makes copies of itself, which Calvin eventually defeats by spraying water on them while they slept and freezing them solid. However, Calvin was caught by his parents and had to explain why he was outside when he should’ve been asleep (which wasn’t successful).

By the standards of today, I wonder if Calvin and Hobbes seems ancient considering it ended in 1995. I would hope that kids still like to read Calvin and Hobbes and find as much humor in it as I did.

The Long Tail

When I saw The Long Tail had been regarded as the next big business book by a couple news outlets, I was skeptical to whether or not I would like it. Althouhg, it had been mentioned in the same breath as one of my favorite books, Blink, and the author is the editor of of my new favorite magazines, Wired, so I thought I would give it a chance. The Long Tail chronicles how the growth of the Internet has lowered the impact of the “hit” market and increased the impact of the niche market. Chris Anderson discusses, among many things, how a normal “bricks and mortar” store only has limited shelf space, so the amount of the product they carry pales in comparison to a place like Amazon. In other words, more different kinds of products can be made available by online retailers since they do not have to spend as much money trying to move product off their shelves. Also, the means of production are now cheaper for the average person. Just ten years ago, you needed expensive equipment to produce a song or a video. Now, people are regualrly creating their own music and television shows and making it available to people. Since more products are available and many different kinds are available, people are able to find exactly what they want instead of settling for what is presented to them by the major media and retail corporations that have controlled our spending for so many years.

I thought this book is definitely worth the hype surrounding it. In this day and age when people expect the big hit, it is refreshing to see that we might actually be moving towards a day and age when the choice of MANY products takes precedence over choosing between a few products. I guess that day has already come, but it has not fully arrived yet. I like being able to decide what I think is worth buying instead of feeling like I need to choose between the lesser of a few evils. And with the ability to produce music, movies, and artwork at home, we are moving away from just consuming cultrue to producing. We are, hopefully, becoming a culture where people want to “do-it-yourself” instead of settling for what is on the shelf. I hope to one day self-publish a book of my artwork…and now, I feel like I can actually do that. I would never thought that day was possible even just a few short years ago. It remains to be seen, though, how money can be made from all of these niche markets, but for now, it is great to see the large availbility of so many prodcuts slowly dissolving the hit machine. Long live the Long Tail.

Massive Change

It has been slow going in the inspiration business recently, so I thought I would talk about something that I THINK it will be inspiring. I am very excited about an upcoming exhibiton at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago called Massive Change. From the MCA web site, it says:

Massive Change: The Future of Global Design is an exhibition that changes the way you think about design just as contemporary design is changing the way we live in the world. Design effects all aspects of our lives and holds the possibility of changing the very nature of human life itself. Massive Change is an exhibition grounded in a provocative proposition. It is a celebration of the human capacity to change the world and a call to recognize both the power and the responsibility of design.

Since my undergraduate degree was in industrial design, I still like to peek in occassionally to see what is happening in the world of design. The exhibtion runs from September 16th until December 31st.