The Great White APE -*UPDATED!*

or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying, and Love the Expo, as told in Three Parts.


My view for 2 days

APE was a blast, thanks to everyone who came out for it. I sold some shirts, made a lot of contacts, and bought some unbelievably weird/cool stuff. Some highlights:


I. 'Bot Building

I had decided about three weeks ago that I was going to build a robot to feature the new teeshirts I'd be selling, as well as show off some of the images from the comic. I'd made one right choice and one wrong choice in this endeavor: I was correct in enlisting Tim Lillis' help in engineering the structure. I was wrong in thinking that would take, like 2 hours, tops. D'oh.


Tim and the early structure.



Yes, that's a flowerpot for the head.



The only place I could actually paint the damn thing was in the bathroom, lest my cast chew the hell out of it. We still have red paint on the bathtub.



The final result. I like that in this picture, it looks like the robot is thoughtfully stroking his chin. I'll link to a Flickr set soon with more photos.

II. Dear Apple

In my hubris, I had assumed that the really tough part about this set was going to be the foamcore robot. How wrong I was.

Firstly, Mr. Senator, let me state I am, and have always have been, a member of the Apple Nerd set. Ever since Pop brought home the Apple IIC, I've been hooked. I admit that in the past few years, Apple's willingness to play ball with the copybarons by intergrating DRM into their iTunes files, as well as their Big Brother-like "ministore", has caused some the sheen to be lost off the Apple for me, so to speak. But it was this weekend that really made want to be more self-determinate than Apple would have me be.

I won't bore you with the technical details, but suffice to say, what would seem to be the relatively simple process of mirroring an external montior on an Apple laptop
was prohibitivly costly, aggravating, and unintuitive, mostly because Mac laptops of different models, and even different years, have different visual out-ports. Why? Because god forbid Apple uses the industry standard of a mini-VGA port. Because they're too busy Thinking Differently to actually be part of an industry standard. Heads up, Steve Jobs: if by next year I'm running Gimp on a Linux box built out of plywood, this will be a turning point. You have been warned.


III. Sketchblog - Special APE Edition
I'd love to tell you I was so busy all day long with people clamoring for my attention that I didn't have any time at all to draw, but I'd be lying.







*UPDATE!*

- Wow, I got linked to by Bonnie Grrl , of the famed Grrl.com, who called the robot "super-rad". Color me flattered and totally star struck. And here, I thought she was just a charming chick who was *very* excited about the teeshirts.

-I also got some supremely awesome link love at Suicide Bots. Wow, what a bunch of nice kids. Notice, in that picture, as well, that I'm being elbowed in the throat by my DisplayBot9000. Send help quick!