Wacom Mobile Studio: initial impressions

Peggy
December 9, 2016

First off, the most important question: Does it work properly with Adobe Illustrator? Yes. Stylus response with the pencil tool is just as smooth and instantaneous as it is with an external Intuos on my Air.

So I get to decide how I feel about the other things:

* it’s big. Too wide for my favorite, very minimal bag – it’s as tall as a 13” laptop, but as wide as a 15” one. Mostly this is due to the row of keys and adjustment dial going down one side. Maybe I’ll actually end up finally using these, I dunno. I’m a keyboard shortcut kinda girl.
* it’s heavy. Man is it ever heavy. Holding it up at an angle gets very fatiguing, very quickly, and it doesn’t have a kickstand like the Surface does. I’m really hoping someone makes a lightweight case for it that adds one; until then I’m gonna be carrying around one of the wire stands I use for displaying books at cons. Add in a keyboard and it still weighs less than the Air + Intuos, but only by about 20%.
* it’s gonna need a screen protector to make it a really pleasant surface to draw on, it’s glass, glass has no tooth.

Right now the weight and lack of a kickstand feels like the biggest potential issue. And battery life is a big question mark; it’s down to 50% right now after a full charge, and a while doing initial configuration off the charger. It claims this is gonna be good for about two hours. We shall see if this holds up under normal use; I’m going to have a shower, then take it out on a shakedown cruise.

(Also it ain’t cheap, it cost me like $500 more than a similarly-specced Surface 4 Pro did.)

Other little things:

* yes the stupid “pen flicks” are on by default, I think this is just a Windows 10 Stupidity.
* the default power management settings are nowhere near enough aggressive for me; I set it to sleep after 1 minute idle on battery, hibernate after 2, and hibernate whenever I press the power button on battery.
* Illustrator still refuses to rotate to portrait mode, but that’s really on Adobe, not on Wacom or anyone else. I’m just noting it. I’m not sure using this wide-ass thing in portrait would really be very pleasant anyway.
* The pen that comes with it is not compatible with the spring-loaded nibs. Which are the best Wacom nibs IMHO, I bought like five of them a while back, seriously if you have a Wacom tablet and haven’t tried it with the spring-loaded nib, try it. But it is happy to talk to the stylus from my Intuos 4, which has a spring-loaded nib in it.

Edit. Okay so I left around 2:00, had lunch, walked to Big Time Brewery, and worked on stuff in Illustrator until 4:30, when it started whimpering about being almost out of power. Its estimate was accurate, which means its battery is about on par with the 4h I’d get from the Surface 4 Pro. Like the Surface, I will probably keep this charging overnight so it’s at 100% when I leave the house.

A wire display holder sort of worked to substitute for the Surface’s kickstand. I’ll probably end up duct-taping one to the back if I decide to keep it and don’t find a case that provides one. I really felt the lack of that kickstand.

Honestly, I prefer the Surface 4 Pro in almost every respect, except for the all-important “actually works with the program I got the thing to run” factor. Half the weight, lower price, integrated kickstand, fits in the same bag my 13″ Air normally lives in. If I used one of the 90% of all art programs that works fine with the NTrig drivers, I would have stuck with the Surface and put a plastic squishy grip on its stylus; this is what I recommend if your favorite art tool is not Illustrator (or Flash or maybe some other apps, ask google how your favorite program works with it).

the dream of the impossible printing error

Peggy
December 7, 2016

I dreamed that my books had come in! The Rita omnibus was printed, huzzah!

But the body of the book was just big dark grey spaces. After a moment the images would slowly load in. Somehow I had sent the printers an InDesign file that linked to images on my website instead of having them embedded in the file, and somehow they had managed to print books that loaded the images off the net. Slowly.

Charlie Stross had a copy and tried to console me, saying it looked wonderful anyway, but I knew he was wrong. “It does when the net dies,” I moaned. “I've got to come up with $10,000 to reprint it. Oh god.” And then I flipped forwards onto the ground, miserable, and woke up in exactly the same position.

Luckily I am pretty sure this is not a problem that is physically possible to have.

Bugs For The Bug God

Peggy
December 6, 2016

I decided to turn the doodle I made to show how to do symmetry into something like a full drawing.

Here’s a screengrab of the stuff I actually drew. This would have taken so much more time if I’d done it all by hand.

Symmetry

Peggy
December 6, 2016

Tonight’s Illustrator how-to: drawing symmetrically.

Draw a big rectangle, centered where you want the center of rotation to be. Far bigger than you anticipate ever drawing in. Like ‘3x as wide as the entire canvas’ big. Give it no stroke and no fill; it’ll become invisible when it’s not selected.
Layers panel: click on the dot to the right of the name of the layer.
effect>distort and transform>transform
in the angle box, type 360/x; in the copies box, type x-1 (where ‘x’ is however many copies of the stuff you draw you want to see – for instance if you wanted to see 15 total copies of your stuff it’d be 360/15 and 14. Illustrator can do simple math in all its numeric input boxes!)
effect>distort and transform>transform – yes, a second one, this time check ‘reflect X’, make one copy, and leave everything else alone.
maybe open up the layer and lock the invisible rectangle so you don’t select it by accident while moving stuff around.
hit up the appearance palette’s dropdown menu, ‘clear appearance’
start drawing shapes
if you want to edit the symmetry, then click on the dot you clicked in step 2, then go to the appearance palette and click on the ‘transform’ entry.

It sounds complicated but it took me like a minute to set up at most, then I doodled this in like another minute or two by drawing a few black and white shapes with the pencil tool.

And here’s a screengrab of the outline view that shows you just how little stuff I actually drew. That little dot near the middle of everything is the center of the big invisible rectangle I drew in step 1.

If at some point you want to tweak individual instances of your symmetric stuff, then click on the dot next to the layer’s name and do object>expand appearance. If ‘expand appearance’ is ghosted then go unlock the invisible rectangle you drew in step 1.

You could also go pay money for Astute Graphics’ MirrorMe plugin, but that tends to not play well with wanting to have symmetry happening across multiple layers, plus I can never remember how to use the damn thing because they only provide documentation in the form of frickin’ youtube videos. This way is covered by what’s already part of AI, and you can do stuff like have, oh, 14 copies of what you draw on one layer, and 11 on another, and expect that to stay consistent across closing and re-opening the file.

And here’s a thing I did elaborating on the insectoid mandala I drew for this post.

my music taste is old

Peggy
December 6, 2016

As I stood there lipsyncing to Oingo Boingo's “Fill The Void”, I realized I've been listening to this band for most of my life. I'm not burnt out on them like I am the Beatles – seriously I think the Beatles may have the highest skip count of any artist in my library, I started listening to them in single digit years and I've heard all their songs so many times – but geeze, I've been listening to Danny Elfman's smirking lyrics for longer than some people I know have been alive.

Maybe it's time for another dose of only listening to music made in the past decade. Or I might experiment with “nothing with a play count greater than, I dunno, 12 or something”. I'll have to look at the spread of that statistic.

Peggy
November 30, 2016

that horrible moment when it strikes you

when you do the math

and realize that you are more than likely past the halfway point of your entire life

I am 45. My father died at 42. My mother at 71. My grandmothers both held on closer to their nineties. Depending on who you use as a benchmark, I have anywhere from -3 to 40ish years left.

I came to this realization in a discussion on Reddit, where someone asked “what’s most badly written SF/F book you’ve ever read, and why”, and I included a snarky aside at the expense of /r/fantasy favorite “Malazan; Book of the Fallen” along with “Battlefield Earth”, which is literally the first book I ever stopped reading because it was too bad for me to bother finishing.

But, you know, I tried reading Lord of the Rings three or four times in my life, and I never liked it, and I don’t care how wonderful the series may get; when an author spends the first half hour of the time I’m spending with them excitedly bouncing up and down telling me how much he loved everything I hated about Tolkien’s writing… yeah, I don’t think I’m gonna see if your ten-volume epic really does get better in book 2 or 3 or 6 or whatever the consensus is. A half hour is all you get before I close your book forever.

the hoard grows

Peggy
November 25, 2016

A week or so ago, I mentioned that ➊ my birthday was coming up soon, and ➋ that I planned to purchase some doubloons to add to the modest pile of them I’d gotten a while back.

My friend Lewis saw this, and sent me a package. It sat around for a few days; I finally opened it today.

The note says “Dragon hoarde starter kit”. I would swear I had the whole thing in frame when I took the photograph.

There are only four doubloons in it. Not much for my hoard purposes, which are entirely about vast piles of coins underfoot. Or spread upon the bed. Still, the gesture is appreciated, especially given that he took the time to select doubloons from a krewe who chose an eminently pleasant theme of “Things with Wings” for this year. (And a Rex, hidden by the green Thoth.) Also, the bracelet included is a gorgeously tawdry affair made up of a bunch of gold-colored high-heeled shoes attached to a stretchy matrix of silver beads, which ends up looking more like some kind of merciless folding bladed affair than anything glamorous, and that more than makes up for the fact that it will never be comfortable beneath bare feet. It’s very thoughtful for a non-dragon, and the intent of Dr. Pinkerton’s gesture will be remembered should I ever hear of draconic plans to put New Orleans to the torch.

And thus four more coins are added to the modest majesty of my hoard.

Soon, it will grow more. I have twenty pounds of doubloons on the way, to join the ten you can see here…

a good holiday

Peggy
November 24, 2016

After getting those uploads started, I spent most of the day in the living room playing “Hell Yeah!”, a flawed French 2d platformer. Basically it’s a 2d Sonic tribute with guns and camera issues; you spend a lot of time shooting at aerial enemies somewhere off the edge of the screen because the camera always, always, always keeps your undead rabbit in the dead center of the screen, and is zoomed in way too close for the gameplay. I constantly wished for either a wider view, or a camera that moved around based on my direction of travel and/or aiming.

Still, I’d won it a few years ago, and finished a new game started from scratch today. It’s got a delightfully goofy story that revels in the thinness of its premise: paparazzi have photographed the skeletal rabbit who rules hell in the bath with a rubber duck, and posted this as news; now the rabbit wants to kill all hundred demons who saw it online.

It’s ten thirty and I think it’s bedtime. Looks like one of the files might be uploaded by the time I get up; the time estimate dropped a lot once I made Backblaze and Dropbox stop trying to upload the same zips while I’m FTPing them. And then Rita gets much closer to done; printing will happen, and then I need to figure out how to make Amazon deal with fulfilling the Kickstarter orders for me and selling the boom afterwards.

Rita: the home stretch.

Peggy
November 24, 2016

Half the money has been wired to the printer. The interior files are done. I’m uploading two zip files to the printer’s FTP site; they’re the compressed result of asking InDesign to “package” my files. Which means that it created a directory containing the 223 Illustrator files that make up the pages of the book, all the fonts used, a PDF export of the whole book, and a version of the InDesign file that has the proper path references to use all those files.

Four and a half years of work. Four and a half years of drawing, writing, thinking, and drawing. Each page is in there three times: the Illustrator-only representation in its .AI file, the larger PDF-compatible representation in the same file that InDesign can read, and a print-res image contained in the PDF. It’s a little under two gigabytes.

And somehow that doesn’t feel like very much data for four and a half years of work.

On the other hand book 3 is gonna take about three days to upload, and the omnibus is gonna take another three or four. So maybe that’s a hell of a lot of data. It’s certainly a hell of a lot of data to upload on my asymmetric consumer-level connection. Maybe I should see if I have a friend with a fast connection at home or work who’ll let me use it. Or just put these things on a USB key and FedEx that.

(It’s also a lot of data to be uploading three times, as Dropbox and Backblaze both try to synch it… pausing those sounds like a good idea.)

It is also Thanksgiving, which I have been spending very happily alone. And I suppose I should do the traditional listing of Things I’m Thankful For. Let’s see:

I’m thankful to my grandfather for taking advantage of a bank offering scandalously low interest rates on a loan, and leaving me a big enough pile of money that I haven’t had to worry about a day job for the time I spent drawing this comic.

I’m thankful to all the people who now support me on Patreon; their small per-page donations add up to about a hundred bucks per page, and when I’m cranking out two pages a week that ends up paying a significant chunk of my rent every month. I’m thankful to the folks who built Patreon, too!

I’m thankful the three-way relationship that broke up not too long before starting Rita ended up with me having an ex-with-benefits who’s a great creative partner, as well as a source of, you know, regular, um, benefits.

Birthdays and other lies

Peggy
November 21, 2016

Well. That was a pretty good birthday. I sent off the signed contracts to print Rita, and went to the bank and wired off half the money. Now I just need to double check that the PDFs are the right sizes and send those off to the printer. I could have done that today, but instead I got together with the ex-with-benefits, went out to a cafe and worked on a short comic I've been fooling with, then went to a couple of places that have really nice cake and split a slice of it at each place.

I mean it was a good birthday aside from the fact that a literal neo-Nazi conference shouted “Heil Trump” today, and we got news headlines like “Alt-Right Leader Questions Whether Jews Are People”. Ugggghhh, what the fuck has gone wrong in this country, how do we fix it, I've been worrying about that a lot but today I just had some fucking cake.

And, well, aside from the fact that it's not anywhere near the date on my birth certificate…

A month and a half ago, a few people I follow on Facebook had birthdays at the same time. My feed there was full of reminders of this and messages other people wrote on their pages to wish them a happy birthday.

And I cringed inwardly, and went to make sure Facebook wasn't going to do that on my birthday. Because that's also the anniversary of the day my father died. Yeah, on my birthday. You couldn't do that to even the most miserable and beleaguered protagonist of a Roald Dahl tribute novel; it's just too perfectly horrid, isn't it? A day of cake and presents turned to a day of shock and horror at a sudden lack of a loving parent. Unsurprisingly my birthday celebrations have become rather minimal, to the point of barely existing at all – it's an excuse to maybe buy a couple big things I've been sitting on the desire for, and to have a nice meal with the ex-with-benefits, at most.

And then I wasn't sure if Facebook was going to do this or not despite me marking my birthday as hidden there. And I had a stoned idea: what if I replaced my birthday there with the creation date of the Furrymuck character whose name I ended up taking as mine, when I transitioned? Yes. I've had that date in my calendar for a while, so it was a simple matter to dig that up and put it in there. And to start trying to think of other social media that might have my birthday up, and change it there too. And put a post-it with the new date on the monitor so I'll hopefully remember to put it in the next time I create an account somewhere.

I originally wrote this the night I decided to do this, and scheduled it for the day after my new birthday. I wondered if by the time this comes up I'll have decided if I want to try to start using this as “my birthday” in social situations, tell people I'm a Scorpio when they ask my sign, and stop making jokes about the holiday near my actual birthday, or mention a few people I feel honored to share my birthday with. I think the answer is “yes”. Now I share it with Dr. John and Björk, not [redacted promoter], [redacted cartoonist], and [redacted cartoonist]. It'd be pretty cool if I can manage to get Wikipedia to have this date in it, should I become wiki-notable: I doubt anyone will bother researching the day beyond “what it says on her social media” unless someone reading it remembers this post and decides to doxx me to find it out. (Hi, future reader thinking of doing just that. Drop me a line and tell me why you want to do this, and maybe I'll just tell you. Oh wait I think you can find that out via public posts on this very blog, oh well.)

Maybe I'll even start to feel happy to get birthday wishes again now. That'd be nice. I could use a burst of happiness in the middle of winter. I kinda liked the pile of them I got this morning.

And: if you're seeing this after letting a machine urge you to wish me a happy birthday? Seriously, thanks for the birthday wishes. Please don't feel like a jerk for not knowing that my birthday is really another day, even if you've known me for years; I'm honestly not sure I'd know what my mother and father's birthdays were if they weren't both on holidays, never mind knowing the birthday of any of my friends.