[080323]
WELL. Spring break time again; time to try to do a significant amount of drawing while I still can. Honestly, I’m surprised I’m still a good seventeen comics ahead of the site; it implies that after my september rush I’ve been able to keep drawing an average of one comic a week, which, historically, seems to be pretty amazing. Then again, I did put up illustrations and stuff on the weeks that I did those, so the actual number should probably be closer to twelve or thirteen.
The pages near the end of part five turned out to be pretty crappy; I think I was probably just rushing to get ‘em done. I tried to start doing all the comics by tablet, but it turned out to be too difficult and/or too time consuming. There have already been two examples posted and there will be two more (slightly better?) examples coming along down the pipe. It might just be that I’m trying too hard to keep things clean on the tablet; I should conceivably be trying to aim for paintchat quality rather than anything significantly higher.
But let’s save that ’til the actual comics come up.
SO most of the anime I’m watching is actually wrapping up now. In fact I don’t think that anything I’m watching this season is going to carry on into the next season. This is the first time such a thing is happening since Hayate started airing a full freaking year ago; I will actually have ten series ending at once which is pretty insane. H2O actually ended with episode twelve just this week; I think Aria the Origination or Hayate is the furthest behind.
Subseqeuntly I took the time to do some electronic spring cleaning. I already deleted a whole ton of stuff about a week ago, so now it’s just a matter of archiving files onto my 500GB archive drive. Loaded about 3GB of data on there today. It used to be that I’d take these breaks to do a reformat, but with XP you really don’t need to clean out the crap too often. Once a year is probably good enough; my D830 has been clean since July. It’s getting a bit slower but there’s only another quarter to go.
I take a special effort not to do anything queer with the D830 since it’s my main machine at least 75% of the time (Colette and the 500m probably share the other 25% equally) and I don’t have the utilities to bring the system back up if anything super-bad were to happen while I’m working at my dorm. It’s good that it’s a pretty new machine as I can put a lot of crap on it without it bogging down too much.
Speaking of bogging down, I got to try using an X41T the other day. The actual tablet part is really nice; there’s actually a noticeably greater amount of feedback than on my Intuos3 which I think will be really good for drawing. The only problem is that the hard drive really does make it slow as hell. On a relatively old 40GB/5400RPM drive I can get boot times under a minute on my 500m; the X41T takes more than twice the time. And I could upgrade that 40GB/5400RPM unit if I wanted to which isn’t possible with the X41T.
Sadly the 500m may finally be seeing the end of its days; I finally bit the bullet and purchased a tablet PC from ebay last week. It’s not a TC1100 or an X41T, but a TC4200. At $450 I honestly think it’s a steal; the C840 I sold recently netted $350 so I’m essentially getting this thing for $100. Plus shipping of course. With all this ebay stuff, the postal services are the real winners.
Sadly, it’s shipping from Nova Scotia, so it probably won’t be here ’til the end of the week. That’s rather unfortunate as I’d like a bit more time to play with it before going back to school; if it’s a satisfactory unit, I’ll probably retire the 500m. I honestly hope that’ll be the case; I think having a screen to write on will help transition to tablet drawing in the longer run…
Anyways, that’s all for now. Tired and going to bed.
