mike.whybark.com

(from a post I wrote for a friend on Facebook, regarding whether or not to buy a direct-display drawing tablet for her daughter as a school-gear investment.)

There are some potential tradeoffs to be aware of. First, what’s the hoped-for longterm goal here? Independent work as an illustrator, production art in a technology company, working as a cartoonist?

For independent work, non-Wacom products will be fine. In a studio setting, Wacom products will be the devices used.

Another point to consider is that non-direct display tablets are soooo cheap that probably you should just buy a small Bamboo anyway (what are they, $50?) and insist that it get used productively for a little while in order to be sure the $500-$1000 direct-display device being sought won’t just gather dust.

Additionally a point to consider is that non-direct display tablets can be extremely convenient for some uses. On a direct-display tablet, even though having the display under your hand is satisfying and less cognitively challenging (it’s weird to move your hand without staring carefully at it at first), using a direct display tablet actually GUARANTEES that you see less of the image while you work on it, since your hand is in the way. Additonally, no matter how carefully you calibrate, your stylus point is actually always slightly offset from the point on the display where the pixels are being shown in response to the stylus input.

Since an iPad costs as little as $200, it’s still a realistic option -AND- if it’s not getting use as a drawing tablet it WILL get used as an internet access device.

Wacom (and others) make bluetooth-enabled pressure sensitive stylii for the iPad that in combination with an app such as ProCreate provide easily 95% of the drawing functionality of a full-fledged tablet setup. I’ll post some 100% iPad work in thread here in a moment.

Microsoft’s also-ran tablet product, Surface, also has Wacom support built-in and iirc some models come with a pro stylus. I think there may be some limitations with regard to software selection but that applies to the iPad as well. The primary applications on either OS that are used with tablets are Photoshop and Manga Studio, with other more graphic-designy applications like Illustrator also working well on the tablet but not by any means requiring it or really offering an advantage.

The basic feature that Wacom’s products offer that is better (presumably) than competitors’ and definitely better than any iPad and stylus combo is levels of pressure sensitivity and the ability of the drawing surface to recognize and render the effects of stylus angle of contact. That plus speed equals shape of line, giving line dynamics and brushstroke tails and so forth. I can’t provide evaluative information about the non-Wacom products with regard to that.

To summarize:

non-direct-display tablets are more or less as useful as direct-display tablets and they cost less by an order of magnitude

iPad (and presumably Surface) can cost less than half as much as a comparable-size dedicated direct-display tablet and definitely do offer near-parity of potential quality of work. iPad does not offer parity of certain features or software, Surface definitely does.

non-Wacom direct draw tablets offer some level of feature parity with Wacom at roughly half the cost

Wacom tablets, direct or not, are the industry standard and no matter what product you settle on if it is not a Wacom the consumer will eventually want to at least try a Wacom

I should note that I have a Wacom Cintiq, a slightly older model than that currently available, the smaller size 12-inch or so model. It’s fine and I am glad I have it. I still use the iPad much more often.

I have just started the seventh and last season of Deep Space Nine as my time-and-motion entertainment while running on the treadmill. My runs fell off a bit the past couple weeks after a mild case of tendinosis, but I hope to be back up to thirty miles next week.

That said, I am glad to have taken the time to watch the show, which I basically eschewed while it was on, largely due to the inclusion of religious themes but also because the increasing use of multi-episode serialization made it hard to follow if you only caught a few episodes here and there.

I genuinely came to enjoy it by maybe a quarter into the sixth season, and there are a couple of truly outstanding episodes. But by the end of the sixth season, I found myself scoffing at plot events and yelling “bullshit!” at the screen at least once an episode, at character actions, at large-scale set-piece effects wankery, and at incredibly self-indulgent new elements introduced to the show.

The seventh season’s initial episodes have done nothing to assuage my growing skepticism about the show. Instead of the well-developed A-B plot mechanism introduced and perfected in American television by TNG, we appear to be in for the first stumbling gestures toward the current GoT-style merry-go-round of separate narrative threads, up to four per episode, parceled out in tiny snippets of plot simulacrum. These short clips of dialog and posturing are occasionally leadened by entire three minute Las Vegas standards performed by an actual member of the Rat Pack whose addition to the show exceeds my desire to appreciate his work in this context.

The contrast between the smug self satisfaction that underlies the introduction of this character and the delusional lack of dramatic acuity that led the production team to kill off the single most effective female lead in any Star Trek property does not fill me with a desire to justify the team’s further creative endeavors over the final season. I fully expect them to be bloated, indulgent, and nonsensical, and that’s a darn shame. I suppose I’ll have to review the production gossip to make sense of it. You would think that if the producers of the show would have preferred to make a show about Las Vegas, they should have made a show about Las Vegas and let us fucking nerds have our FTL and particle weapons and cashless utopias in peace. But no, they have to introduce religion and gambling and shit.

I have to wonder if I’m gonna stick to my plan of giving Voyager another shake. When that show aired I nearly immediately HATED it because the writing was so cynical and stupid and lazy and disrespectful of itself. I mean, those are for sure legitimate themes in nerd culture. But Voyager always felt like it was being written by people who couldn’t WAIT to get off the show and go write something they cared about. Right now, in my seventh season of DS9, it feels to me like the show is being written primarily to please the people that run the show and who like Las Vegas better than the stars. I suppose that’s a creative orientation, just not one I’m interested in.

Finally got the video card up for a workout under Win7 via Bootcamp on the Mac Pro. Still some major issues, like apparently there’s a long-standing no-audio-out bug associated with correctly installed Win7 under Bootcamp, for example. I was able to work around that by using an external USB audio module I had to hand, but come on.

I still don’t think my objective of a true single-box dual boot device is gonna work out here. With the stock card installed, the new card won’t work at all in Windows. With the stock card removed, there’s no boot screen, so you can’t option-key at startup to select the boot volume. With both cards seated, Mac OS 10.9 won’t boot at all, so even if I commit to a dual-boot machine, I have lost my standardized local OS setup, and will likely cave and go to 10.10 on all the machines, inevitably compromising performance and breaking software.

Anyway, so next week will be more banging on the actual Windows machine to try to bring the card up. The conventional opinion seems to be that the card and machine combo needs a 750w power supply. I’m gonna have to do the math myself, because the card actually seems to be designed and marketed with a lower power draw than the card it will replace on the Dell. If it’s not power, the next most favored choice is the BIOS, which is both only editable in limited ways on the Dell and quite possibly the source of the issue. I don’t have a definitive answer from either Dell or the card manufacturer about the compatibility of the devices, so I need to initiate that again.

I have been posting here and there about this and have a long narrative document written which I used to clarify the issues I was addressing. I should add more explicit technical detail to the doc and round up all the links to post here so I can refer back to it, including, one hopes a calendar and hour-budget timeline. That way, the next time I want to buy hardware, I can remind myself TO NOT DO IT.

I use a drawing and painting app called procreate on the ipad that is really by far the best in its class in terms of offering brush config and reasonable layering and media effects on the tablet. one of the reasons the app is the best is that it doesn’t waste time trying to emulate non-digital tools, which is great.

unfortunately, the dev team also uses this digital-centric design orientation to exclude crucial digital image-work features, such as crop, and to consistently rely on a user-interface philosophy which is grounded in minimalism, in removing discoverability wherever possible. combine the two tendencies, exclusion of standard digital graphics features and hiding access to others, and it produces a near-canonical user-punishment experience. the end result? i hate the developers and designers of the app, and opening it to do some work is an experience i dread and loathe.

It’s been historically hot here the past few weeks, most days easily topping ninety, and it’s miserable. I have a skin allergy that worsens in sustained direct sun, so as you might imagine I have been doing my best to ignore the weather, impossible though that is.

In mid-June I bought a new PCIe video card naively assuming that it, as a PCIe card, would work with the PCIe systems I have in house, and since then I have been engaged in a delightful (well, no, that’s more or less the opposite) self-education odyssey.

The upshot is that *probably* if I roughly double the potential power output of my actual-built-that-way PC I might be able to get the card to boot, or maybe, *maybe*, I can get it to work under Bootcamp Windows on a Mac Pro. Today, after being quite directly informed by the manufacturer that the card is unsupported on a Bootcamp Mac Pro, I was able to bring it up on that system.

This is probably good news as it likely means I can dump the actual built-that-way PC. I still have a few days of tinkering to satisfy my curiosity but that does appear to be the resolution.

As I was going through this research process I was constantly running into end-of-life support issues directly tied to my determined insistence on doubling the active service life of my hardware. With luck, every unit in the house will see at least ten years of use and I don’t anticipate a main-unit refresh on any single device for another four years, cell phones possibly excepted.

One aspect of the rollover to shorter-life hardware in the industry is the shift away from flat-fee software to subscription-fee software. I’m just not gonna do that. Even seeing the pricing model makes me kind of angry at the business offering the terms. I suppose that one could make a case for per-use pricing but this in essence is nothing more than the traditional variable-pricing model, a model that actually actively locks out certain classes of buyer including the profoundly parsimonious and the low-information low-income buyer. It’s classist and exclusivist and I hate it with a bitter rage.

I suppose in the long run this shifts me completely off computer use. Not by any means a negative outcome.

An article in the New Yorker makes me think, sadly, of my late friend Caleb.

Yesterday was a hectic day, with several chores running concurrently in various locations around the house and record-breaking heat all day. the animals were whiny and uncomfortable and my sweat-slicked nose couldn’t hold my glasses in place. Often when I perform a task I need to take my glasses off in order to see detail over a larger area of my field of view. For example, attaching computer cables under a desk, or doing accounting data entry and record keeping.

Therefore, all day, in seven different areas of my house, I was taking off and putting on my glasses. When Viv arrived home, I believe I was wearing them, but by the time I served dinner, they were misplaced. Viv and I looked all over the house twice yesterday and in the end did not find them. All I want to do today is look for them, but I have several things I must do today and devoting time to looking for the specs is not on the list.

I am very irritated.

I have a ringlike swelling on my left achilles tendon, about an inch above my ankle. It hurts mildly. Looks like I’m off running for a while. Shit.

today I learned that Tolkien had an Elric analogue character in his mythos, in material only published posthumously.

Turin Turambar is described as a dark-complected man. So that’s not a join. But here, in number 12, his death is summarized as follows:

Túrin committed suicide by impaling himself on his sentient black sword, a sword forged from a meteorite by a Dark Elf. That is metal. He did so after killing the first dragon, Glaurung. That is really metal. Unfortunately, Túrin gets points docked since the main reason he killed himself was that he realized he’d married his own sister. Granted, he’d been tricked into marrying his own sister by a dragon, but still. Accidental incest is not metal.

I mean come on. A sentient black sword from another realm. Incest and traitorous woe! Granted, MM and JRRT are looking at common sources but MM is at pains to invert, flip, remix and otherwise FSU, and the dude claims to literally hate JRRT’s stuff. And certainly he didn’t see this until something like thirty earth-human years after our beloved albino first blinked up at the light falling onto him thru a filtered scrim of leadtype and newsprint.

Anyway, so that was my mindblow for the day.

DS9 sure is obsessed with Las Vegas. It’s weird. I wonder if it’s because of the Star Trek Experience going in during the show’s run, or if the Experience led to plot directives to the writer’s room to feature gambling, Vegas, and Vegas-like settings at least X times per season. I suppose it could just reflect the culture of the lot, too, like if the cast and crew spent time there frequently.

I guess knowing what we know about other Vegas-related Trek projects, like the never-realized full-size Enterprise hotel, that it’s likeliest to be some sort of crossmarketing campaign. But it sure is weird. Vegas is what it is, and I just don’t care for it – it just seems out of place in Trek.

This also seems to possibly stem from some of the Moore-Berman-Braga efforts to move Trek away from the famous Roddenberry dictums making human imperfection and foibles largely out of bounds for at least Starfleet personnel.

I’m glad to be finally watching the whole series through, but I think in the end I’m unlikely to alter my personal preference ranking of the series which places DS9 as third-best after TNG and TOS. So often in DS9 the proto-grimdark elements seem just as gimmicky as the comedy bits on the silly episodes.