Little Girl

David said, since I'm not feeling well and have to be up early for work tomorrow and am feeling tired, I can write my rant about my new iPod Nano, so here it is:

I'd asked my parents for a Nano (or video iPod, whichever) for Christmas way back around my birthday, dropping gentle reminders all during October and November and into the first week of December, after which I was sure they'd have purchased it for me if they intended to get one. The week of Christmas, my dad says to me, "That iPod thing you wanted is really popular. I went to the store and they said they were sold out and back ordered, but they've got a lot of other models by other companies that are better because they're not made by Apple, so if you want, we can go to Best Buy, and you can pick out a nice MPIO or Iriver or..."

"Sorry Dad," I said, "but if you can't get an iPod, then I'll take the cash to put toward one or some alternate, non-MP3-playing present. I've had a non-iPod MP3 player by MPIO and it sucks. Do not be fooled by anti-Apple, Linux geeks who'd also tell you to buy a more expensive Linux box if they sold such a thing over a PC with Windows on it because Microsoft is evil. Yes, iPods are made by Apple, and Apple sucked in the 80s, but this isn't a computer and this isn't 1984 and Rios, MPIOs and iRivers suck hard."

So Christmas came and went, and today, armed with $100 cash from my dad, $40 from my aunt and grandparents, $25 Best Buy gift card, and $50 Best Buy gift card from someone my Dad knows (Dad didn't want it for some reason), I bought myself my iPod Nano.

Does it scratch easily, as critics say? Depends. If by easily you mean after dropping it three times from about three feet onto the floor it had a small, barely-noticible scratch on the shiny back, then yes. It does scratch after you drop it. But I bought a nice case to protect it, so that solves that problem.

Do the annoying white earbuds make you look like a techno-yuppie? Why yes, yes they do.

Does it kick the competition's ass? Oh yes. Yes it does.

I like everything about it: the navigation, the small but cool features like showing the album cover with the song playing, lyrics display, photo storage, playlists, and shuffle features. I like having multiple playlists, being able to add and subtract individual files without having to wipe and format the disk and reload all the songs onto it (as I had to with the piece of shit MPIO player I owned.) It's small, it's cute, and it comes in black plus is quite functional.

And there are cute accessories that make my pseudo-techno-geek heart leap for joy. Even the packaging rocks.

However, I still think Apple computers are overpriced and refuse to buy one until they do a laptop that's $750 or less and comparably equipted to a similar PC, can handle all the programs and filetypes a PC can, and doesn't lose any of the functionality or style that make Apples at all attractive.

I mean, I'll shell out $200 for a music player, but $2K for a desktop? As Gob Bluth says, "COME ON!"

I have a list of things that I do not like drawing. On this list are Crowd Scenes (along with most other artists, I think -- crowd scenes are always awkward because you can either spend ages drawing a scene people will take two seconds to look at and not notice, or you can take a few minutes doing a generic crowd scene that everyone instantly notices is crap) and Vehicles. Now added to this list is Umbrellas. I actually annotated the script with 'If you make me draw any more umbrellas I will cut your face off'. Mary might well think this is a joke, but it isn't. Oh no.

This strip also feels like the first time in a long time that I've managed to draw three strips in the same week and had them update on time. (Or, at the very least, relatively on time. I think Wednesdays may have been over the line in some time zones, but as long as I'm getting it right in at least one time zone, I'm happy.) Amazing, isn't it? I'm writing about how pleased I am that I managed to do my damn job and update on time. Ignoring the people like John Allison who update five days a week, or the mentally ill people like Randy Milholland who update seven days a week.
Of course, now I've managed three strips in a week, the next step is managing to get ahead of myself, so if I have bad weeks I don't have to fall behind because of it.

The red-faced bloke in the crowd scene is meant to be Phil bastard Collins from the Russian bar scene sometime last year, though I didn't make him short or fat enough to be Phil bastard Collins. He seems to have ended up a little more like Jason Statham in the Transporter movies. Which is odd, because I haven't seen either of them.

Anyone who's read Dave Sim's 'Cerebus' might recognise a very similar doll from that. I love 'Cerebus' as a pure form of some kind of creator's mental illness in which about twelve issues into a Conan spoof, Dave Sim got whacked out of his gourd on acid and decided to make it a three-hundred issue series with some story arcs hitting the 1,000 page mark. He is my mentally ill hero in the comic-drawing stakes, and the Missy-ish doll is my tribute to that. Or something.