Things I've learned from my laptop

No sketches in this post. Sorry. I had made sketches, but I decided they destroyed all that was good and pure in the universe. Don't worry too much, as the sketches themselves were fairly benign. I'm either holding onto the idea for later use, or burying it and rejoicing in artistic purity. Instead, let me share some revelations that caught me by surprise.

The subtle difference between how a monitor is calibrated can have dramatic results. For instance, BUD IS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE PINK! He is buff-colored, which is not the same as flesh-colored! Pink implies lack of hair, which would be awkward as Bud's figure clearly includes the cheek fluff bumps. That one degree shift away from the yellow side of things hurts me deeply. He looked appropriate on my desktop monitor! Jacob has a similar fate on my laptop, in which he is more purple than the, uh, smoky cream I imagined for him. This doesn't offend me as much, but I'll still compensate for it when I go back to do coloring.

Another fun factor: The laptop's monitor is in HD! It's more sensitive! When I am getting a strip ready for production, I clean up the excess gray from the scan by selecting and deleting a color range. This leaves the white space in a strip in a strange transparent state, as the gray was deleted and pure white remained. The next step would be doing the same color range thing to delete all but the black. I rarely bothered with this step, as I like the transparency effect when I was lining up strips in my web template. Besides, on my desktop's old monitor, it all came out as white. In HD? Not so much. If viewed from a weird angle on the laptop, I can see all the artifacts that come from when a scanner ignores no-copy blue. This is HORRIFYING! It's good that I see this now, but it means almost all of my online archive isn't CLEAN. Argh.

On the lighter side, being on the laptop has allowed me to start an iTunes experiment. To keep myself in sound, I brought a pile of CDs to DC a while back, which eventually ended up in iTunes. As there's really not enough to make custom playlists, when it comes to music time I just set the library to play at random. The playlist is long enough that it never wraps around, so I've been tracking which songs the random play likes the best. Most popular: "Ride a White Horse" by Goldfrapp and "Joining You" by Alanis Morissette. Those are two of my favorite songs, so yay! Least popular: The unfortunately named, "I am Trying to Break Your Heart" by Wilco. It finally got played last night, and then only because I had left music playing for so long the playlist did eventually wrap around. I don't know why I get such amusement from that, but there you go. I'll also note that random LOVES R.E.M.'s best of CD. Hey, who doesn't?

Finally, updating a website from a different IP has confused Google Analytics. My Falls Church hits have gone from one to five, and the avergage visit lasts 15 minutes! Man, whoever is there must LOVE my strip! Most people only stay for the 10 seconds it takes to read the current strip, but this dude is PERSISTENT.