There were times that Dad

Someone posted that on MetaFilter (somewhat grungier), and everyone agreed that it was incredibly depressing. Of course, I thought I’d share it.

But to cheer you up, someone also posted this on MetaFilter, a link to a collection of online scans of all ten years of Calvin and Hobbes, the strip that entered syndication the day I turned five. Can you believe this December will mark the tenth year since Bill Watterson stopped drawing C&H?

Here’s a Torrent link to a PDF of all those strips (187 mb).

Soon, however, you won’t even have to turn to the glorious Intarweb to get your fix of Calvinball. The entire strip is being compiled into one giant collection, to be released in September.

A couple of years ago, an article appeared in The Cleveland Scene about Bill Watterson, his reclusiveness, his artistic integrity and his future plans. It was quite a good read (also discovered, I believe, via MetaFilter).

MetaFilter’s down at the moment I’m posting this, but when it comes back up, I’ll edit this entry.

As usual, when it comes to the Oscars, Fametracker’s got the goods:

• Rasco P. Soultrain Awards
• As usual, five Karl Malden clones choose the Oscar winners
• Oscar speeches we’d like to hear
• Best Picture nominees turned TV series

An interesting study from the Department of Defense (PDF). About 9,500 servicemembers have been “separated” from the U.S. military (read “discharged,” although that’s one of English’s Official Nastiest Words) in the past 10 years for being gay or lesbian. The D.O.D. commissioned this study to see how much their fear of the gay was costing them to recruit new servicefolks. For the Army, Navy and Air Force, the cost turned out to be about $95 million, over the past decade. (The total for the Marines couldn’t be counted.) Eh, not so much $$. Discriminate away!

OK, this Nick Denton blog may actually make it into my bookmarks. (Sorry, AMC … I love u but I don’t trust u.)

LivePlasma is a super-shiny recommendation engine. I tend to distrust these things, but then I entered “Rufus Wainwright,” and a cloud of fellow musical artists I’ve come to adore popped in and orbited his name. And the interface is Google-good (although not Google-fast).

Shorter Jay Rosen: NYT.com should have open archives. Shorter Jeff Jarvis: The NYT should bring bloggers in for bagels.

Agreed on both counts. I want bagels.

Every hour of every day for a year, this man filmed himself punching a time card. (AskMe.)

Aeons ago, Clive Thompson wrote up this humdinger about the economies of virtual worlds — MMORPGs and the like. Because people have begun assigning real-world monetary value to in-game items, the article explained, it’s possible to study these games as if they were real economies.

So we can, for example, calculate the Gross National Product of Everquest, as Thompson’s economist Edward Castronova decides to do — it’s $2,266 U.S. per capita. (“It was the 77th-richest country in the world,” Thompson writes. “And it didn’t even exist.”)

And of course, we can actually profit from our in-game activities, Thompson reports, enough to pull in a six-figure salary or even power a whole company, with 100 full-time staff members.

The 6,200-word article is somehow chock full of fascinating little revelations. My favorite moment is when Thompson points out that Everquest began as a perfect meritocracy, “the world’s first truly egalitarian polity,” making it the economist’s ideal social laboratory. That realization leads to this:

Read more…

Via MetaFilter, check out the cornucopia of Flashtasticness that is The Greatest Story Never Told digital storytelling contest. Including such greats as Craziest and Help.