Well, as a small($200 is small?) gift to myself during this temp job, I went ahead and bought a Bamboo Fun! It's a Medium size, and WOW is it bigger than my original Graphire3(about the size of a Bamboo/Fun! Small). Uhm...I don't remember the exact measurements. Although it isn't exactly double the size of my original, it IS widescreen sized(finally), and just generally feels a lot better. It also included a mouse(only the Fun! versions do, and I needed that), four function buttons, and a throw-away "Touch Ring"(it's rarely useful in my experience, but the blue glow is neat).

Overall, it does seem like the larger size is doing okay for me. I was worried that since I typically plant my hand on the tablet and just draw within the area of my hand that I wouldn't use that extra space. But I think the textured surface helps me draw with my arm a little more, mostly during coloring, but a little with actual sketching/linearting too.


Problems encountered so far:

The tablet-properties program doesn't seem to care that I switched one of the function buttons to the keystroke-command Ctrl+Z. It defaults back to 'Show Desktop' for unexplained/random reasons, so now I really can't even rely on that unless I want to reassign buttons every time I boot back up. That's stupid. I wanted to use that feature, but not knowing what causes it to revert makes it impossible to really fix.

The 'eraser' end of the stylus, or rather, the texture on the tablet itself. A big feature of the bamboo series is 'it feels like you're drawing on real paper!'....big deal. The texture is kind of nice though. It's subtle, not too jarring or noticeable. But when I use the eraser, it SOUNDS like an eraser, physically making this loud 'WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP!' squeaking noise. That's all and fine, but seeing as how I draw mostly late at night, I wouldn't doubt if it woke someone up or at least annoyed them.

Probably the worst problem: GIMP runs fine with it, but so far there are some bad hiccups in Inkscape that I didn't notice right away(probably because I didn't use Inkscape until just today). It's weird. At first when the program loads and you're holding the pen, your cursor FREEZES until you use the mouse to move it instead. After a few seconds and/or minutes of using the mouse, suddenly the pen works. So it's not ALL bad, but it's entirely unpredictable, and something that never happened with my old tablet. I think there's supposed to be a new version of Inkscape soon, but I don't know if that'll cause more problems so I'm holding off for a little bit.

My "Vixie" scrap was the first finished piece made with this tablet(my last on my old tablet being that swimsuit-girl sketch). The first full project that I started on the day I got it will be that swimming pic of Option that's coming along rather quickly.

My old tablet's CD included Painter Essentials 2 and Photoshop Elements 2, but this version includes Painter Ess.4 and PSE6. PSE6 is front-loaded by this lame/pathetic 'retouch your photos and do silly things to them!' sort of interface, not even loading the full image-editing program(which you have to switch into in order to use). I tried both programs, but personally I think GIMP is much more stable and accessible than those two are.


Anyway, I mention Retro Game Master because I recently started watching some of it on Youtube, and then sooner than expected, I ran out of subbed episodes to watch. :c It's a very interesting show when he's playing a game I like. I don't think I'll be able to afford them even if they did come out(I wonder why), but I would really like to have the DVDs if they ever got them published in North America. Really kinda disappointed not being able to continue with it....they seemed to have some interesting games on the way too.

On another tiny note, I can't believe Geocities is actually/finally being dismantled. Back when I cared, I had a Geocities site briefly, mostly to hold the MIDIs I wanted to hotlink to, or some of my own art, and at one time, an RPG-Maker-2000 game I made....it's all gone now(because I deleted it all years ago), but it just seems odd that Yahoo would get rid of Geocities. They actually have a PAY site in its place for 'Small Businesses' and such. Yeesh. And yet, the first webhosting I ever used, 'Crosswinds.net' actually came back this year with their free-site-hosting again, and they offer more features than Yahoo's cheapest package. XD Not that I'd need a website anyway. I kinda like having this sort of 'TinyWeb' of sites like Deviant/Sheezy-Art, PIXIV/Drawr, ImageShack, Youtube/Veoh/etc, and then just sort of linking between each one as I need to. If I was ever professional I might like to have a website of course, but...I'm not~~~..