laminated white cardboard and dry erase markers for older children
I can't trace it exactly, but I feel like it gave me permission to create my own version of a lot of things that we usually just have to live with.
Mr Pine lives on a street where all the houses are white with white picket fences, and he can never find his own damn house. (The book didn't say "damn".) One day he decides to bust loose and paint it purple. I remembered this as a crypto-anarchistic 60s radical "do your own thing" kind of thing. It stuck in my mind as a subversive influence.
Years later I discovered that a fan group devoted to this book had formed on the internet and persuaded the now 80-year old author to republish it. I mentioned this randomly one day and months later my son cleverly gave it to me as a birthday present. The whole thing turned out to be far tamer than I remembered! Either it was extremely gentle crypto-anarchism or I totally read that into it. I'm not sure which explanation is better.
Unfortunately, I see technology as less inviting to young tinkering as it once was. The command line is obscured away in modern operating systems. Mobile devices are locked down, and impossible to create new programs with anyway. If this trend continues, I fear the programming will be less accessible to young people than ever before. In the UK, the number of students studying computer science is already dramatically down from its peak.
I also want to mention that Crockett Johnson also did a comic strip called Barnaby, which Fantagraphics will be republishing in May.
> "Coding democratized how we can solve our own problems, regardless of age."
Well said. I'd add that very few old men are innovators, especially when it comes to CS or the like.
What I'm glad to see is more folks in this generation learning how to create their own channels, sell what they make and not depend on larger entities for their survival.
I don't remember the story by heart but I don't think the crayon was named Harold. But I never obsessed over the story so I could be wrong. Was the crayon named harold?
