Weekend Reads (Sep 23): “Calvin and Hobbes,” Toronto International Film Festival, “The Brady Bunch,” Lemuria
Recommended weekend reading September 23, 2023.
Calvin and Hobbes is one of the most beloved comic strips of all time. However, its creator, Bill Watterson, had a conflicted relationship with his famous creation.
By the time Watterson secured syndication for the strip (it debuted in thirty-five newspapers), he had devised a system of work that he describes as “pathologically antisocial.” His editor advised him at the outset not to quit his day job immediately; strips often fail within the first year, and it would be discouraging for him to leave one gig only to lose another. But Watterson didn’t listen. He decided that he would rather be destitute than ever do anything besides Calvin and Hobbes. As the years rolled on and the strip grew in its popularity, his wish was granted.
“Work and home were so intermingled that I had no refuge from the strip when I needed a break,” Watterson recalls. “Day or night, the work was always right there, and the book-publishing schedule was as relentless as the newspaper deadlines. Having certain perfectionist and maniacal tendencies, I was consumed by Calvin and Hobbes.”
Given the amount of delight that Calvin and Hobbes has brought me and my family over the years, I’m thankful that Watterson stuck with the series for as long as he did even as it’s disheartening to read how much its creation and production weighed on him.
Rachel Darnall reviews Counting the Cost, the recently released memoir by Jill Duggar of 19 Kids and Counting fame.
In her book, Jill Duggar tells her side of the story about growing up in a strict, IBLP-influenced home, and doing it in front of TV cameras for nine years of her life. There were “perks” to being on TV, she writes. There were all-expense-paid, televised grocery runs, international travel, and the network even helped pay for a 7,000 square foot, new construction home, since it doubled as the show’s primary set. But as the Duggar children’s lives became more and more public, Jill learned to keep one thing private: any discomfort that might reflect poorly on her family or the television show that funded their lives.
The Duggar party line on the reality show that dictated their lives for almost a decade has always been, “It’s a family ministry.” The narrative that opening their lives up to the public was a family decision was a fiction that audiences were happy to believe, but it was just that: a fiction.
Earlier this year, my wife and I watched Amazon’s Shiny Happy People, a four-part documentary series about the Duggars and the Institute in Basic Life Principles: “the extensive interviews with Duggar family members and friends, as well as former IBLP members, combined with archival IBLP footage, makes for a very compelling, and at times, horrifying watch — especially if, like my wife and I, you grew up in a conservative Christian environment.”
This year’s Toronto International Film Festival concluded on Sunday, and various critics have released their festival wrap-ups, including David Fear, Alissa Wilkinson, and the staffs from Deadline, ScreenAnarchy, and Vulture.
This year’s winners included Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction, which won the “People’s Choice” award and Robert McCallum’s Mr. Dressup: The Magic of Make-Believe, which won the “People's Choice Award: Documentaries” award.
Related: I’ve been to TIFF several times, and they were all deeply memorable experiences. Standing in line and chatting with strangers about film, attending crazy Midnight Madness screenings, seeing some of my favorite filmmakers in the flesh… the festival was always a blast. Here’s my recap of the 2006 festival.
Nostalgia can be a helluva drug. Case in point: Tina Trahan spent $3.2 million to buy the house used for The Brady Bunch.
“It was like, ‘I need this house. I have to have the house,’” she explains. “I loved the movie… and I watched the show growing up after school. I just felt like it was just part of America and the culture.”
“None of the appliances work,” she said with a laugh. “The range doesn’t work, the stove doesn’t work, the oven doesn’t work. There’s literally nothing.” In a separate interview with Wall Street Journal, Trahan explained that any changes made to make the house “livable” would “take away from what I consider artwork.”
You know, I actually kind of admire her dedication to keeping the house locked in time. The Brady Bunch house certainly doesn’t need a flatscreen TV in and amongst decor this glorious.
The Treble staff do love their lists, and this one makes my Gen X heart leap for joy: 91 Essential Alternative Rock Albums of the ’90s.
“Alternative,” much like “indie rock” (which both overlaps and is somehow its own discrete thing) is a nebulous, difficult to define sphere of music. Ostensibly it’s the cooler, younger counterpart to mainstream rock, but that doesn’t quite cover it. Put another way, it’s where indie culture meets the mainstream—many of the MVPs of alt-rock in the ’90s, including Nirvana and Sonic Youth, began in the underground. But for the sake of not inviting the entirety of independent music into one too-limited list, we narrowed our parameters a bit. Eligibility consideration includes but isn’t limited to: albums that produced radio hits, 120 Minutes regulars, major label albums from once-indie bands, critical darlings in mainstream publications, Lollapalooza headliners and so on.
Most of the albums on the list should come as no surprise, but it’s a nice trip down musical memory lane, nevertheless.
Microsoft accidentally released a bunch of sensitive internal documents highlighting their various video game strategies, including specs for the next Xbox that raise concerns for video game ownership and preservation.
It was just one of many details that came to light in the leaks, but maybe the most contentious because it signaled Microsoft might be moving away from physical game discs sooner than some players expected. “MS doesn’t care about preserving games at all,” tweeted YouTuber Mutahar “SomeOrdinaryGamers” Anas to his 800,000 followers after seeing the specs for Brooklin. “At this point you may as well get a PC and get access to every other storefront as well.” Game developer and YouTuber ModernVintageGamer chimed in as well. “You’ll never be able to convince me that Xbox cares about game preservation,” he tweeted.
I love this sort of web developer nerdery: Ahmad Shadeed does a deep dive into the HTML and CSS of Threads and makes some surprising discoveries re. the app’s use of CSS grid and flexbox for layout. Via Frontend Focus.
LastPass, a popular password management tool, recently announced that they now require master passwords to be at least 12 characters long. But what, exactly, are the benefits of having longer passwords, or passwords with a mix of letters, numbers, and special characters?
For starters, a 6-character password consisting of upper and lowercase letters can be cracked instantly. However, a 12-character password consisting of upper and lowercase letters will take 300 years to crack.
In addition to having better passwords, you should also enable two-factor authentication wherever possible.
It’s official: NFTs are worthless.
A report by dappGambl based on data provided by NFT Scan and CoinMarketCap showed that out of 73,257 NFT collections the researchers looked at, 69,795 of them, or slightly over 95%, had a market cap of zero ether.
By their estimates, almost 23 million people hold these worthless assets.
Who could’ve possibly seen this coming? Oh right… everyone.
Related: Dan Olson explains why NFTs and crypto are so bad.
As light pollution increases via factors like increased LED usage and a growing number of satellites, fewer and fewer people actually get to the see the night sky.
The loss of the night sky has several tangible and cultural impacts. We are losing a rich tradition of human cultural knowledge; cultures around the world and throughout history have used the sky as a springboard for the imagination, painting heroes, monsters and myths in the constellations. Nowadays, city dwellers are lucky to see even the brightest stars in the sky, let alone the faintest sketch of a familiar constellation.
These millennia-old sky traditions aren't just random stories meant to entertain around the fire; they are often cornerstones of entire cultures and societies. We all share the same sky, and anyone from the same culture can identify the same constellations night after night. The loss of that access and heritage is a loss of part of our humanity.
If you’ve never seen the night sky in all of its majesty, one solution is to see if there’s a dark sky place nearby. Also, I highly recommend a visit to any publicly accessible observatories in your area.
In 1864, zoologist Philip Sclater proposed the continent of Lemuria to explain why lemurs were found in both Madagascar and India, and in the process, unwittingly inspired all manner of conspiracy theories and cults.
In 1870, German biologist Ernst Haeckel suggested that Lemuria could be the ancestral home of humanity, as a way of explaining “missing links” in the fossil record of early humans. (Rejecting Darwin’s hypothesis of humanity’s African origin, Haeckel had initially favored India as the birthplace of humankind.)
In the 1880s, Lemuria graduated from scientific hypothesis to pseudoscientific fact when Helena Blavatsky, the founder of theosophy, integrated it into her esoteric, proto-New Age belief system. Building on Haeckel’s theory, she proposed that Lemurians were the third “root race” of humanity.
One fascinating detail: In the 1980s, the government of India’s Tamil Nadu state funded a documentary to defend Lemuria’s scientific validity as the cradle of Tamil civilization.
Finally, Nebraska doesn’t have a state religion, but if it did, it would be Husker Football. And Lincoln’s Memorial Stadium would the Holy of Holies — and it has plenty of quirks. Like a stairway that goes nowhere.
Climb to the top of Section 31, but not too far. This path runs into nothing but concrete.
Eight steps ascend to a short walkway that quickly runs into the underside of the stadium’s third level. A lone chain hangs off the ends of the metal railings, reminding anyone not on their knees or two feet tall not to venture farther into the inverted wall of stairs.
This West Stadium ramp and others were filled in during the 1990s as Nebraska put in club seats. Fans sitting on the third floor or higher exit through the new outer building by elevator or stairs. The athletic department in the spring began a similar project on the east side.
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