A friend of mine was reading a C&H book (probably the same one) a while back. Suddenly he ran to the bathroom, and there was a flush followed by gales of laughter.
I'm studying Spanish, so I made a little script that fetches Calvin & hobbes cartoons in both Spanish and English and then converts each strip into bilingual strip with ImageMagick. It works well enough (>99%).
Well, it should be pretty straightforward to first check whether the loop is working at all and then step-by-step echo the variables for example to see what's missing.
Yeah, why not. I didn't give it much thought. This script makes some assumptions about the site structure, that's why it's able to be so short. Of course if you were able to get the image links without grepping, then it would be even easier.
A bit unrelated, but I have been working on a bot that fetches comics mostly Garfield from go comics, and the 32 char url you get back does not seem random, but I have not yet been able to figure out how it is formed.
I was gonna say you're nuts, but it seems there's a some kind of pattern, so sorry about that :D. These are the filenames for three different Calvin & Hobbes cartoons from Feb 8 to Feb 10. 24 hex similarity, so... you need to reverse 32 bits?
145afe502d7601393f0c005056a9545d.jpg
126fdbc02d7601393f0c005056a9545d.jpg
163e6fa02d7601393f0c005056a9545d.jpg
It could be some kind of combined hash for date + comic + service.
My wife and I aren’t having the greatest time reading them to our toddler (she’s probably too young for them, but she says she really likes them). Calvin’s parents don’t like him! I don’t like exposing her to parents who are resentful toward their kid.
Also, shortly after he retired Bill Watterson ate at my dad’s restaurant. My dad recognized his name on the check, and told him how much of a fan I was. Bill then drew Calvin on a napkin for me. And... I can’t find that sketch! Each time I visit my parents I spend half the visit digging through boxes for it.
There are plenty of C&H strips that show his parents love him. This one comes to mind, but there are many others: https://i.redd.it/wgwm23u9k4sx.png
Kids are not stupid and you don't need to insulate them from everything that isn't 100% happy, fluffy and wonderful. As a former kid who had loving parents and loved C&H, the only message I remember taking from the strip in this regard was that parents are people too and that things I do might annoy them.
I love how in the middle few panels, just 2 little dots for eyes are able to convey the frustration about "why am I wasting my life on paperwork when my real life is waiting for me?"
This strip is beautiful. As a parent living with snow on the ground in Ohio, I just lived this experience when my children asked me to go sled riding. Work will be there after they go to bed, but these years will be gone before I know it.
As a kid in Texas reading Calvin and Hobbes, the snow aspect always seemed so magical. I know as an adult it is probably a beating most times, but still fun to think about.
We actually got snow in DFW this year and my first actions were to have my kids build a snowman, and then find the steepest hill we could to sled down :)
Sure, but we started reading them to my daughter when she was about 20 months old. I don’t think it’s being over-protective to gloss over the dozens and dozens of times (to every one happy moment like the one you chose) when the parents express regrets at choosing to have a kid. They didn’t even go to his school play!
I mean, I loved it, too, growing up. I still think it’s great. But some things ring differently as an adult with a kid. And I can wait a bit to expose my kid to that.
I guess if your daughter isn’t yet old enough to realize how infuriating and exasperating Calvin is for his parents, maybe the strip isn’t for her yet.
Good guess. But I’m afraid you’re wrong. She loves the strip. And she doesn’t notice this behavior by the parents. I was only expressing how my own perception of the comic has changed now that I’m an adult.
Keeping it real with Biological kids is important.
Adopted kids basically dont feel loved no matter how much you do or say. Although one day it will start to click.
Sure it varied a lot. But I learned quickly that I had to really certain kinds of jokes.
I get the sense that Watterson is sharing his own childhood relationships with adults and author figures. And by and large they aren’t happy, healthy relationships.
His parents regularly debate whose choice it was to have a kid, and despite the exceptional strip shared by another reply to me, for the most part his dad seems happier working than being with Calvin. I definitely didn’t notice or care about this dynamic when I read these as a kid. And I don’t think my daughter will notice or care. But she’s only 3, and I’m cool with sheltering her a bit.
Watterson stated many times that he was nothing like Calvin and his parents were nothing like that either. He just built the characters and then progressively explored their relationships as a way of reflecting on the pressures of modern society. It just so happened that he was exceedingly good at building realistic personalities.
Personally, C&H probably kept me alive as a teenager. When I was questioning the point of it all, Calvin’s sense of wonder and fearlessness injected some happiness into me, and I wished so hard that I could have been more like him growing up. I read a lot of it with my kids when they were very small, and then let them alone with it as they started reading on their own. They embraced the methods of Calvinball, which melts my heart when I watch them play. To them Calvin’s parents are silly in their worrying about worthless stuff like “washing”. If you didn’t notice certain things while reading it as a kid, chances are your child won’t either; that’s one of the marvels of this strip, like the best art it speaks in different ways to different people at different stages of their lives.
Thanks. Yes, I definitely agree that my daughter will likewise not notice what I didn’t notice. And I continue to read it a lot because we both love it.
In the Anniversary collection, Watterson notes things like “this is basically an exact quote from my dad.” (For example, in the strip where good dad says they should put the Christmas tree in the garage and not decorate it.) So I don’t think they are totally divorced from each other.
Our 5yo daughter loves looking through our old paperback versions, but we generally won't read them to her yet as the story and comedy is way over her head in most cases. She can grow up reading them over time as I did daily in the paper growing up.
One day we'll let her read our first edition color hardcover boxed set. But she probably should start acting a little less like Calvin first.
My daughter loves pretending she has a transmogrifier. She ZAPS us into different creatures.
We read a ton of Get Fuzzy right now. And she’s turning into Bucky. Yesterday while doing yard work she said to me, “hey Pinky, put me in the hammock.”
>It looks like it was written yesterday, but it's 30 years old.
I thought it was great but took me back to 30 years ago when magazines in the mail were the thing. I think I prefer the modern situation where at least you can go to sites like HN which are relatively non commercially biased. Back then there wasn't so much unbiased stuff available - maybe BBC programs and library books.
It's funny how everything looks so new and cool but when you do a little research, you find that it's not that new after all. Many things are just a rechew of something old.
Amazing to think they nailed that but also the consequence, which they couldn’t possibly have foreseen, that this mechanism would eventually undermine democracy.
Watterson could offer some biting social commentary, but towards the end of C&H's run he had also become a sort of curmudgeonly old man. For example, there are strips where he depicts modern art as being just as bunch of phoneys trying to hoodwink one another, but I know a few abstract artists personally and they are very sincere about the work they are creating (primarily for themselves, to scratch an inner itch), even if it isn't to everyone's taste.
It might be for the best that he retired near what everyone felt was a peak. Had he kept going, he could have even ended up like certain other long-running comic strips where the polemic takes over and the humor is an afterthought.
Yeah, I consider complaining about academic writing like this to be just as curmudgeonly. I remember when I first got access to a good university library and could read all the criticism written about books and authors I had read – knowing that people like Watterson, Gene Wolfe, or Victor Davis Hanson had tarred it – and I found the vast majority to actually be valid and insightful, giving me an expanded appreciation of the book or an understanding of its place in the greater social discourse.
Yes, literary criticism often focuses on highly specialized concerns and not everyone is interested in e.g. queer perspectives, but can't we be happy that it exists for those who do want to read it?
I took this as more as poking fun at Calvin's common theme of superficially imitating "high art", opaque writing styles, and so on, in a very self-aware or cynical way, as a grift, since that's just what Calvin always does -- E.g. in the comics where Calvin sets up a lemonade stand, it superficially imitates a business, but is really just a scam.
An alternative or additional interpretation of his "curmudgeonliness" would be these are intended to tie into his bigger theme of critiquing those who gate-keep "high art". It's been a long time since I read any of these, but I do remember his biggest bone to pick wasn't with abstract art or anything in particular, but with the perception that comics / "graphic novels" could never be considered "high art". So, having his kid scribble some nonsense and call it "high art" is a bit of a middle-finger to art critics who relegate his work to the "funny papers"
As bizarre as this sounds, I actually do think there are legitimate criticisms of the mid-century abstract art movement -- notably, the CIA's involvement. However, that is pretty off-topic here and I highly doubt that Watterson has ever made a reference to this!
Edit: I'm not necessarily even disagreeing you, I think all of this can be true at once
Do you have an example of that? It's a pretty niche topic to decide he was being curmudgeonly. A lot of people think that about modern art whether they're wrong or not they're usually pretty normal people.
I was asking for the ones he was thinking of when making his case about Waterson. The one you linked for example does not seem very harsh to me so I'd assume he wasn't referring to that one. I can't know that without him providing it directly.
That isn't one of the strips I was referring to, and that one is mid-period Watterson and not late-period Watterson anyway. But since my original post got the reception it did here, I am not going to dig through the archive to find the ones I meant.
Funky Winkerbean spent a couple decades being a humorous take on life in high school. Then it changed into a message strip about Important Issues, and I stopped reading it.
There's even a musical based on the high school version named "Funky Winkerbean's Homecoming" which probably would confuse readers of the current strip, as cancer, alcoholism, and suicide don't play a part.
I mean, to paraphrase the Big Lebowski, everyone is entitled to their opinion man. Banksy sort of rides the fine line of that deliniation as a legitimate critic of modern art phoney
and yet himself is modern art and sold out.
And Bill Waterson took two sabbaticals (May 5, 1991 to February 1, 1992 and April 3 to December 31, 1994), which Gocomics is filling up with repeats, too.
So true. So many stories of highly efficient spreadsheets being broken on purpose because it resulted in more work being assigned to everyone. Lots of people learn to keep the spreadsheet a secret so they can look like they're working hard.
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Here's my favorite little bit of Bill Watterson trivia.
He's from the Cleveland area. He attended Kenyon College in Ohio. As he arrived, another famous cartoonist Jim Borgman, who is from the Cincinnati area, was just graduating.
Borgman went on to work at the Cincinnati Enquirer and won a Pulitzer in '91. Watterson was inspired by Borgmam's political cartoons and worked at the Cincinnati Post for a while. The Post fired Watterson and eventually we got "Calvin and Hobbes."
So, two giants of cartooning in the 80's and 90's just missed each other at a small liberal arts school in the middle of Ohio, briefly worked at competing papers in the same city, then went on to reach the pinnacle of their craft, albeit quite differently.
Kids spending a lot of time outside was quite normal in the 1980s. There wasn't much to do inside. Even more so when Watterson was himself a child, which is probably what inspired a lot of his cartoons.
“The last few years of the strip, and especially the Sundays, are the work I am the most proud of. This was close as I could get to my vision of what a comic strip should be.”
I can strongly recommend buying the complete Calvin and Hobbes collection off of Amazon. Especially if you have kids.
I bought this when my son was around 7 and he absolutely devoured the books. He's older now but still goes back and reads them over again, giggling all the way. I love when he recites me his favorite strips, because they are all hilarious - usually involving interactions between Calvin and his dad.
I think Bill Watterson's comedy is completely on point and as relevant today as it was when he wrote the comics - providing insight into the interactions of family, school, and growing up while making you laugh. He's a comedic genius in my opinion.
Fans of Calvin and Hobbes might like the documentary “Dear Mr. Watterson”, which includes a lot of his art work and interviews with several cartoonists, (though not Watterson).
Addendum: my favorite part was Berkeley Breathed showing a letter he received from Watterson, which has a drawing of Breathed fueling his motorboat by pouring dollar bills into the gas tank. Breathed notes that it’s meant to be commentary on Breathed’s willingness to pursue merchandising to make more money.
I typed "pepermint" and got
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[shameless plug] I run a web comic newsletter (https://funnies.page) for anyone interested in comics from contemporary artists. I’m always in search of the next great comic strip (like C&H), so if anyone has any favorites, I’d love to hear about them!
Calvin and Hobbes is fine, but I think Peanuts was better in capturing and commenting on human experience of clueless people trying to make sense of a dysmal world.
I'm forever grateful that Calvin and Hobbes introduced me to Peanuts. I became curious about Schulz when I read the foreword he did for the first collection.
I've been a lifelong fan of Calvin & Hobbes, and I have all of the books, but I both don't have the time to revisit them, or when I do, I binge way too much.
Is there any way to get a personal, daily comic via RSS or similar that starts from the very beginning, without having to wait for one of the syndication sites like gocomics to wrap around back to the beginning?
I remember a comic strip I attribute to Calvin and Hobbes where Calvin basically adopts every world religion in order to take every day off of school. But I can't find it.. any one know which one I am thinking of? Or do I have it wrong?
I'm 90% confident that is not a Calvin & Hobbes strip.
I have not read all the bonus strips from the large anthologies, nor have I read the strips in the teacher's book Watterson contributed to. So, even if my memory is right, it might be one of those.
I actually ran into this problem recently, and this engine doesn’t solve it. The show and tell comic doesn’t come up when I search “boggle” or “boggle your minds”
I don't know if this explains all the duplicates, but at least that particular example is due to Bill Waterson's sabbaticals:
The last result from May 21, 1994 lies within the period of his second sabbatical – April 3 through December 31, 1994.
For those two periods, Gocomics is simply filling the gap by repeating earlier strips (and I think the same thing happened during the strip's original newspaper run, too). So if you didn’t knew about those sabbaticals (or forgot about them), it's easy to accidentally include those duplicate strips if you were to just blindly process everything between November 18, 1985 and December 31, 1995.
Edit: I think I see what you meant now. Looking at the search results one of them had a very different “script” text that was unrelated to the “description” text and the contents of the comic strip.
I noticed some weird results too. The first thing I searched was “dead bird”[1]. There are 2 results, one of which is correct, but the script and descriptions are flipped. The first result has the script for the correct strip but links to a different script which matches the description, and vice versa for the other result.
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I'm always curious why the default behavior of many server frameworks exposes so much information. I think it should just drop the connection by default for this error.
You can change that in the php.ini to set the levels of Warnings/Errors to show if you want to. (And also naturally the MySQL config, to allow more connections)
But if you were the developer of this code, it's useful to pinpoint what went wrong and where.
It's to aid the developer during development. All of them provide ways to hide this in production. But most developers remain ignorant or are lazy to bother about it.
I'd assume they're optimizing for beginner developer UX, and assuming that anyone using mysql for something important will know to customize the error handling.
> This page is strictly a tribute to Calvin & Hobbes, the best comic ever, and two of the best characters who have taught me so much over many years. It is meant for research purposes only.
