Good morning! This past week was a bit of a mess, so if you were wondering why there was no author’s note attached to last week’s page, it was the first day of summer vacation for BB and I spent most of it cleaning up the metric ton of lose papers she brought home and dumped all over the kitchen table. It’s so weird to think that a kid whose birth we announced in an author’s note will be going into grade five next fall, time is incomprehensible to me.
As such, I spent most of this past week trying to get Cory to find the time to sit down and rewrite something on one of the pages in the batch I finished today that indirectly contradicted something two pages later. I also spend no small amount of time pacing a hole in my living room and hoping a gamble I took on an ebay listing got here in one piece. Context: I had a situation last month where my yiynova stylus was broken, and the replacement one a friend mailed me was slightly less broken, but deteriorated really quickly. I looked everywhere online for a replacement, but quickly discovered that it kiiind of looks like The Panda City may be a victim of the pandemic–every single yiynova item on their Amazon store is delisted, gone and the pen I had on a wishlist is marked as being out of stock with no estimate on when they will be back in stock again. Their non-Amazon storefront is also broken, the ability to register a new account with them has been removed and when you do look at their amazon listing, their store is now full of children’s games apps, and literally nothing else.
So I tore my house apart while rapidly cycling through the seven stages of grief (the extra two stages are Denial II and The Scream By Edvard Munch) on the vague and distant remembrance that like a decade ago when I was still using an older model yiynova, I ordered a couple of spare pens and they sent me one that worked and one that was a newer model that was incompatible with my old tablet. I wouldn’t throw something like that away, especially since I planned to upgrade eventually, so in theory there was a pristine, never used stylus somewhere in my house if I was a cool enough dude to put it somewhere where it would be safe and also findable, eventually. tl;dr– not only did I find it, I found a mystery SECOND pen with it. At this point I have to assume that the second one came with my newer model of Yiynova when I upgraded, and I set it aside because my old stylus still worked with the new tablet and there was no point in using the second one. My old stylus lasted like half a decade, so if I am careful with these two, I won’t have to think about switching to a different brand for at least a decade.
So with that problem solved, I sat back down at my desk and flipped through all the ebay listings I had opened and discovered a tab with a used, usb, portable yiynova lcd digitizer for only $40 (price new if they were available anywhere is around $300usd). I’d initially discounted it because the pen that came with it was listed as being in really poor shape, but my two brand new pens are compatible with it, so that wouldn’t be an issue. If it was a dud, then that was $40+shipping down the drain, but if it wasn’t…well, I have always wanted an easily portable yiynova I could sit with on the couch or take with me up to the inlaw’s cottage where I could draw out on the deck.
It got here on Monday, and while the pen was indeed busted (the casing was uniformly cracked on both sides and it was mysteriously sticky, I threw it in the garbage immediately), I plugged it in and setting it up took exactly 3 seconds. It works great with my stylus, and it super cute, especially when you put it next to my gigantic 27 inch yiynova, like this:
I still need to program half of the hotkeys and figure out why it hates being an extension of my desktop (I’ll figure that out eventually, I remember it was an issue with my big yiynova, too, I just don’t remember what I did to fix it), but otherwise I’m pretty psyched to have this as an option to change up the pace in my workflow if sitting in my desk chair is being particularly brutal on my back.
Aaaanyhow, we will see you all next week! I’m just finishing queueing up the last 5 pages in this chapter after this one, and then I’ll be finishing the cover for the next chapter and spending at least a week remastering older pages before I start in on chapter 22 properly. Cheers!