2014 -> 2025, The STW Calendar Revisited

January 1 - January 6

We made this STW calendar for the year 2014, and then because of how leap days just happened to hit, the sequence of days didn’t line up again until this year. But now it’s accurate once again for 2025! And since I have still a few collecting dust in the basement, I thought it might be interesting to go through the old calendar and provide some commentary on each page as those days come up. So that’s what I’ll be sharing here over the course of 2025.

This really only collects comics from the first half of STW’s existence, from 2008-2013, and I remember when making the book in 2018 just how many comics in the calendar that I couldn’t believe made the cut for the calendar, so this is probably an experiment in self-torture as much as anything else. Let’s go!

One thing I just remembered today was that I didn’t design anything with how the calendar was laid out. I designed the entire layout for the book, but Holly Rowland and Sara McHenry at Topatoco saw what I was trying to do with the calendar design, sent it over to David Malki! from Wondermark, and within a week I got the layout as it exists. That it looks good at all is thanks to Malki! in particular.

I’m not sure what my sisters made of this dedication or if they even saw it.

One of the things I wanted to do with the calendar was make it worth the while for the person who had it, so I added on all these extra elements to each page. Some of them were absolutely meant to make fun of the standard page-a-day calendars you’d see, particularly the word of the day and the fake holiday - although I don’t think I can describe just how much time I spent researching events and dates and actual events to come up with all those fake holidays, especially when no one was going to put in any real effort to figure out what inspired the fake holiday. I also can’t describe the crazy amount of time I put into coming up with 365 names for clouds and making sure that it represented different genders and the entire alphabet. All for a gag that I still think is pretty amusing even if it’s also entirely ridiculous and probably not worth the effort put in!

And then there’s the idea of a soundtrack for a calendar, which I repeated when I made the book. I bet most people threw this page out and forgot about the list, or didn’t even notice that line. Oh well! I made a spotify soundtrack playlist out of it, and it made for good random background noise when I was working in my office over the next few years.

That office this comic was taken in doesn’t exist anymore. My first office at Northeastern was in the emeritus faculty suite - so six older gentlemen, only two of whom I ever saw on campus, and 29-year-old-me. One day the older man next to me walked into my office, looked at the wall behind the chalkboard and said, “I don’t know what they’re going to do with this wall, it looks load-bearing!” And that’s how I found out we were all being moved out so they could turn it into grad student space. Worked out in the long run, as I didn’t have any windows in that old office. Anyway, I don’t have anything insightful about this comic - it’s fine, feels pretty middle-of-the-road, to be honest.

No one makes phone calls anymore so this one feels underrated now because of that? “Barry” seems like a very good name for clouds in the sky. Apparently the fake holiday (I looked it up) is because of Roger Miller’s birthday which I’m sure is totally obvious.

The amount of media that is based in multiverse theory now, so that the general public is suddenly far more educated in the idea of multiverses, makes me think this comic would actually be more understandable today than it was 14-15 years ago?

Leonardo daVinci unsuccessfully tested an airplane design on January 3, 1496. Hence, ‘Falling Turtle”. Like I said, way too much time and effort put into these.

The soundtrack song for this day, Sondre Lerche’s "To Be Surprised", is a pretty decent representation of a chunk of my musical tastes.

That comic message unfortunately feels like a good reminder. Also it definitely feels like poor grammar at the end there.

I like that there’s a clear food theme with this first run of word-of-the-day. Damien was an engineering classmate of theSwede and me who I think lives in the Houston area now and we haven’t seen in 20 years, but was (and hopefully still is) a very solid guy (and goofus). And I didn’t need to look up the holiday answer to know it referenced Edison there.

I saw last week that there were a bunch of people online praising Christopher Nolan when it was announced his next movie would be telling the Odyssey, saying things to the effect of ‘who even heard of a story like this before, that’s why this guy is so good at what he does’, and now I really do feel like you could indeed effectively pull off the Trojan horse tactic in the modern era.

“Fig” feels really funny to me. Much funnier than the comic itself.

The holiday references Nancy Kerrigan, apparently.
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Anyway, more of these reflections to come.