Ch20 25
Hey all! According to my productivity tracker that I’m trying to remind myself to use, I’ve been working for almost 9 hours straight, and that’s if I don’t include the two hours or file re-arrangement I did beforehand to free up some space on my art-only internal hard drive. I know I said that I’d have some news on what I planned to be doing with Patreon and some other projects with today’s update, but I’m setting myself a new deadline for NEXT Friday–I’ve got the next batch of pages ready to colour, and I’ll be doing that for essentially all of today when I wake up, but getting to this point was a total slog.
A couple years ago, I started having some weird issues with my tablet. The Yiynova MSP19U has been a cherished tool that has done wonders for my productivity in the 6 years I’ve been using it, but it’s design has a bit of an unfortunate oversight–the AVG cable that connects to my laptop is permanently affixed to the tablet itself as opposed to being detachable, and that means that it was probably only a matter of time until the cord hit the wear-and-tear threshold for what it could tolerate and started having connectivity issues. It wasn’t too bad at first, and didn’t happen as often, and I think I managed to extend its life for two whole years after this started happening by being extremely gentle with it. It also started experiencing some slight overheating issues at the time, but I managed to mostly resolve that by putting a box fan on my desk directly behind it.
Anyhow, it looks like when I was using it in bed during recovery, trying not to go crazy from boredom, it jumpstarted the beginning of the end. It quickly went from flickering and bleeding the image on the screen and taking on a weird grey-yellow look about half of the time that I moved the arm or physically rotated it to today, where it was doing that EVERY time I moved the arm or physically rotated it while inking. It’s making work slow and very irritating because I constantly have to stop and jiggle the cable where it connects to the tablet like it’s 1990 and I’m trying to get the sound in both ears of my walkman’s headphones to work–unpredictable and with mixed results.
The good news is that thanks to Grandma Brown’s generosity, I’ve got a newer model ordered! A newer model that has a detachable AVG cable, too, so hopefully this won’t be an issue and this one will last longer (not saying the MSP19U didn’t last long, I’m actually really impressed it lasted as many years as it did before running into issues!). The new one should be here mid-next week. I’m gonna keep on chugging and get these pages coloured, of course, but right now I’m a little concerned that the MSP19U might bite the dust before it gets here. I’ll certainly keep you all updated!
Anyhow, I’ll sit down and plot out what’s going on with other projects and bonus content as soon as next week’s pages are done, but I kind of feel like I’m racing against the clock until the new tablet gets here, so I’m going to prioritize that so there are hopefully no delays with both of next week’s updates.
See you all on Tuesday!