The smell of technology

This is the first colouring job done on my new Mac. Thank goodness my graphics tablet still runs on it! I've been running an old Power PC iMac for the last eight years and I was starting to find I was no longer able to update my software or run anything over the web any more. GoComics had even started to refuse to upload my comics. So it was time to get a new iMac. I've suddenly leapt four systems and five versions of Photoshop.

The irony is I'm having to keep my old Mac going just as a scanning machine, as Canon can't be bothered to update the drivers for their scanners any more.

Can I say the new Photoshop interface is going to take a bit of getting used to - I can't put two cartoons next to one another and use the eye dropper tool to copy colours from one to the other - I now have to toggle between two tabs. It's like working in MS windows 20 years ago - I am not impressed.

It smells nice, though.

Millie week 55: Monday 23 - Saturday 28 1991

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I was once involved in a school band. It was called Gnomefumbler. No-one can remember why it got that name - we think it was the result of an exercise in finding two incongruous words in a dictionary and sticking them together, though I did later find a character in a book of Round the Horne scripts called Ramsden Gnomefumbler, but this was probably coincidence.

The band played one disastrous gig at St Mark's Hall, Tunbridge Wells, but somehow managed to produce a string of albums on cassette and even sold a few through the fabled music magazine ZigZag.

Its origins were very much as you see here - a bunch of school kids with no real musical ability banding together in a bedroom with as many noise making items as they could find (not all of them musical instruments) and seeing what came out.

We produced several albums of chaotic improvised prog in the space of one year before splitting due to musical differences (one was moving on to proper noodly prog, one became half of a synthpop duo, one just sort of stopped, and I found that doing musical theatre meant I didn't have to pretend to play an instrument). The band reformed for three further cassette albums after we all left school, but they had proper songs and the musicians were a bit too proficient for my liking, so they're not really Gnomefumbler albums - more like albums by a band calling itself Gnomefumbler made by some people with the same names, but older.

I'll post some early tracks on here to give you a flavour of what DEF sound like, as soon as I work out how to digitise cassettes using my new Mac. All the old recording software I had doesn't work any more. Mutter mutter mutter.

DEF is an awful name for a band. It's a bad joke too. I think 'def', meaning 'definitive' or 'good', was in use on 'the streets' for about three minutes in 1983, and was about as hip as the Rock Steady Crew. The three letter acronym observation still holds, though - JLS being the latest example.

As for the last strip, I'd like to remind everyone that the Spice Girls didn't form until 1994, so I'm claiming this as comic prophesy.

UPDATE:

From Gnomefumbler's 1980 album 'Deckchair', here's Perhaps (Six Plastic Flasks).

The percussion you can hear is Tupperware. And the horn section is a length of aluminium tubing.
Guitars: Ian Tapp & Chris Tampsett. Percussion: Andrew Pilcher (assisted by Chris and Ian in the middle section) Monologue: Ian Tapp. Written: Tampsett/Tapp/Pilcher.

In contrast, from 1986's 'The Price of Fish', this is The Celery.

What a difference six years makes, eh? This is a riotous trawl through the musical fads of the time, listen carefully and you'll hear shades of The Smiths, Frankie goes to Hollywood and U2 in there.

Vocals: Andrew Pilcher, Guitar, Bass, Celery sample: Ian Tapp, Simmons Drums (how 80s can you get?): Austen LeGassic. Written: Pilcher/Tapp.

Kitsch

Yeah, but no, but yeah... Actually it's an incisive subversion of the Japanese Maneki Neko 'lucky cat' custom - would we accept it if it were real cats posed in shop doorways, forever forced to beckon customers over the threshold? Yeah. Right on.

Jocasta and Henry are typical metropolitan PIB's* down for the weekend in Hastings to look at the art and the poverty ("Gosh, it's terribly authentic here, isn't it, Jocasta?"). On the Jedward's opening night the town was full of art beings like these two, eating fish and chips out of newspapers and kidding themselves they were doing it ironically.

*Persons in black.

Parp!

The sculpture isn't actually based on anything - it's a sort of tromboney stainless steel thing of my own devising, possibly inspired by Anish Kapoor's Orbit sculpture in the Olympic Park. (Sorry, Mr Kapoor, your stuff is normally excellent but this is a bit of a dud, I'm afraid. I can see what you meant but the execution of those smooth curves in straight structural steel sections just makes it look awkward.) Or maybe the fantasy organ on the cover of Pink Floyd's 'Relics' album.

Spark

No, it's not a lack of inspiration - it's a series. Jones is going through her 'identical pictures of cats' period, and each one is subtly different, tackling aspects of catdom that the lumpen proletariat just wouldn't be capable of understanding. Or something like that.

But its essentially a set-up strip for the next fortnight, spent at the gallery. Sorry, all those fans of Jones' beret, this is the last time you'll see it for a bit. But who knows, it may return...

Millie Week 54: Mon 16 Sept - Sat 21 Sept

First of all, hello. This is my first post with my new computer. I've been running the same iMac G4 since 2004, and while it's still going strong, it's going very very s l o w l y as well. Not only that, it's reached the point where I can't upgrade it any more, the CPU inside the computer is no longer supported. So it's time to make the change.

I'm still setting things up at the moment, but hope to have everything at the point where I can start posting new strips before the ones already up on the GoComics system run out. Now all my old apps have to be upgraded (thank you Adobe for your licencing system that allows you to install your aps at work and at home simultaneously). Now all I have to do is find some drivers for my scanner...

This continues the guitar storyline that started last week. I don't know how to play the guitar at all. I was once shown how to play two chords on a mandolin, but I don't know what they were.

Smith rampant, argent.

Smith is posed in the 'rampant' fashioned so loved by heraldic artists. Lions have a tendency to take up this position on shields, as do Kentish horses. However it's a really awkward pose to keep up.

The only animal I've ever seen which makes anything like this pose naturally in the wild is, of all things, the humble black-tailed prairie dog. It's a territorial display known as the jump-yip, and it's exactly what it sounds like. I've seen them in the Prairie Dog Town in Lubbock, Texas, and its fascinating to see one dog jump-yip and set off a chain reaction of other jump-yippers through the rest of the colony.