#yeah i mean i have a display tablet for my computer but its huge so it isnt exactly the same experience as the ipad

[riveluart]

My cat knocked my ipad off a table and shattered the screen 💔

I at least have art scheduled through most of this month but I dont know when I'm going to be able to get my ipad fixed or replaced

So after that idk how much digital art I'll be doing for a while

[devildomimagines]

Levi’s Birthday Collab 2023

It was my honor to work with Kael for this collab event! Check out their Twitter page here and their Tumblr page here. If you love Levi, I promise you won’t be disappointed 🥰 They created a partnering piece of art for this fic!

I’m so excited to finally share this Spies AU Fic to honor the birthday boy Leviathan~

"Mammon, take the next left."  

"Yeah yeah, I know."  

"Jump over the infrared sensor in the next hallway."  

The white-haired agent effortlessly lept over the invisible trip line, "I told ya, I know!"  

"Watch out for the center display case."  

Mammon swiveled around the case with ease. "Dammit Levi, I know! We went over the blueprint again and again, I know this place like the back of my hand. So quit it!"  

"Is that so?" Levi spun in his computer chair, "Because last time you said that, Lucifer had to come bail you out."  

"Tch, that rich guy had too many gadgets," Mammon lowered his voice and came to a pause at the intersection of halls. He peeked around the corner to watch the pair of guards turn down another corridor.  

"And you've got a habit of getting distracted. Anyways, this museum is nothing to scoff at, it's got plenty of security. It's only been easy for you so far because you've got me, the genius hacker, working on it."  

As Mammon ran ahead, he smiled. He would never admit it aloud but Levi was good. It's been a breeze so far, at this rate they'd grab the painting and be home before sun up.

The painting in question was done by the mysterious artist M.C. Everyone wanted to get their hands on this work in particular as it was described to depict the human condition. Investors would pay a pretty penny to be the owner and the money was already burning a hole in Mammon's pocket. If they were going to finish the job early anyway, Mammon wondered if he could make away with a second prize. There was another work close by their goal that had piqued his interest when reviewing the building plans. The painting was owned by the old King Solomon. People debate whether he was strictly the owner or if he was possibly the painter. The painting would pair well with the work by M.C. and could potentially score the syndicate a huge bonus. The commissions the two of them could earn was making Mammon drool. He turned right for the section that held Solomon's painting.  

"Mammon, what are you doing?!" Levi shouted into their comm system.  

"You'll thank me for this," Mammon smirked.  

"No no no no, you idiot, don't!" Levi typed furiously to try to disable the security devices in front of Mammon as he ran. He was barely keeping up but so far he'd turned off the sensors, exchanged the camera feeds to run on a loop, and diverted guards' attention by signaling a trip of the alarms in a far part of the museum. That was as far as luck took them though.  

When Mammon entered the room for the ancient mural, the roll-down security gate came crashing down. "Levi, what the hell's going on?" There was only static on the line in response.  

Levi could hear Mammon through the camera feed in the room but the room seemed to be a dead spot for their comms. "That moron," Levi growled his frustration as he scanned the cameras throughout the facility. Someone must have brought those gates down. Then he saw him, it was tough to miss the bulky mass running through the halls, "Diavolo... which means," his thought was cut off.  

"That's right, Leviathan," a new voice entered his ear.  

"Barbatos..." Levi sighed. Another genius hacker enters the chat, Levi thought as he tried to free Mammon. Nothing that he attempted would get the gate up or restore the connection with his partner. Levi frustratedly ripped off his headset, grabbed a tablet from its dock, the extra painting canister, and rushed to the nearest entrance. He'd have to make the grab himself. "Damn you Mammon, you couldn't stick to the mission this one time." Levi tapped on his tablet as he ran, "You just had to be greedy and push for something more than we came for." In the distance a gate crashed shut, Levi smiled having used their tactics against them.  

Levi could hear the door rattle as Diavolo banged on it. It wouldn't completely stop him, just diverted him to a longer route. Diavolo was a professional that didn't wander into dead ends like the deadweight Levi was working with. Levi took a moment to crouch down near a safe wing. He scanned through the security cameras on his tablet. They were still on loop and the guards were addressing his false alarm. The main problem was Diavolo and Barbatos from Devil's Associates. "Why'd they have to be here tonight?" Levi grumbled and got back up to run toward the painting. It is a straight shot but once there, the room that stored the treasured piece would take time to navigate. At night there is a fingerprint scanner to open the room, of course, sensors at all different angles, and a wall trip that would alarm if the painting was removed.  

First up, is the fingerprint scanner. Levi held up the tablet to project the saved fingerprint that he and Mammon had gathered during their recon. The panel beeped and the gate lifted offering entry to the room. Next, Levi had to avoid the sensors. Unfortunately, there was no way to disable these infrared sensors. If he had turned them off, the night guards would get an alert. Levi pulled a pair of goggles out of his pocket that would allow him to see the infrared with ease. He shimmied and contorted to make his way around the beams and towards the painting. Levi was the most unfamiliar with the last security measure. To figure out what kind of mechanism hid behind the way, Levi pulled out his tablet and took a few x-ray images. The purple-haired agent frowned as he assessed the pulleys and possible ways to bypass the whole thing entirely. The only idea that came to him was what he went with. There was no sense in wasting time when the mission was already compromised. He might as well try to get out of the museum as soon as possible. While Levi pulled the framed photo from the wall, he kept his finger on the hanging nail to simulate the pressure of the painting. Once he placed the frame on the ground, Levi grabbed his tablet and chose to overload the mechanism's battery. If it fried itself while the pressure was adequate, he hoped that at the very least they would note to replace the battery without having the alarms activate. It seemed to do the trick! There weren't any guards rushing him or blaring noises so that had to be a good sign, right? Levi snapped the corners of the frame and freed the painting. Delicately, he rolled the paper and put it into the canister.  

"Levi," Diavolo entered the room but stayed by the entrance cutting off Levi's exit.  

He looked around the room, trying to figure out anything he could do but he was stuck. The infrared beams were the only things between them. Maybe Diavolo thought Levi had disabled them? "Diavolo, you're too late, I've already got the painting."  

"Hm," Diavolo scratched his chin and smiled, "That may be so but you're going to have to get past me if you want to leave with the painting."  

If it came down to a fight, there's no way Levi would come out the victor. Diavolo had muscles on muscles, Levi wouldn't stand a chance.  

By some miracle, the ventilation grate at the top corner of the room busted open. "Thought you were going to leave me behind?" Mammon smirked, propping himself up on the wall and hanging out of the vent.  

"Mammon!" Levi wouldn't admit it but he was thankful to have such a tenacious partner. "Take the painting!" He chucked the container up to the man in the corner.  

"Whoa!" Mammon caught the canister and saluted to the men standing in the room, "See you on the outside!"  

"Wait, you're not going to help me??" Levi whined as he watched white hair disappear back into the vents.  

"A shame," Diavolo shook his head. "Barbatos will probably trap him in the vents or intercept him outside. What are we going to do?"  

They were locked in a stalemate. Well, nothing to lose, Levi thought. "This," he shoved his hand out in front of him, triggering the infrared sensor.  

Diavolo and Levi covered their ears as the loud alarm bells rang throughout the museum.  

"Are you going to stay and get caught with me?" Levi provokes.  

Diavolo frowns but makes a quick exit.  

Levi leaves next. He pulls out his tablet to find where the guards are coming from. Since they were previously on the other side of the building, the majority are running together in a large group. Levi pulled up the blueprint to find the closest exit, "Mammon you better make it out," he huffed and packed in his tablet. There was only one exit at the rear of the museum that didn't have a guard posted. Levi already unlocked it and it would get him close to their rendezvous spot. Just as he began running toward freedom, Levi could hear the sounds of the guards shouting. "Mammon, you better make it out so I can kill you myself." He barely made it through the doors and into the cover of night but he made it nonetheless.

~~~~~

Also posted on AO3 here 😎 Check out the other written works from the collaboration under the AO3 Collection at LeviBdayCollab or search #leviathanbday2023 here and on Twitter!

[bynkii]

Right Idea, Wrong Company

Why did the creator of Glass have to be Google?

Because when I look at Glass, I see something that could have been amazing being controlled by a company that uses “build it and they will come, and if not, bin it quick” as its primary development/marketing method. I mean it worked once, with Gmail. But Gmail was…well the Angry Birds of email apps. Gmail also was developed at a time when Yahoo! mail was an “industry leader” as was Hotmail. There was also .Mac, but yeah. The state of public, web-based email was a major factor for Gmail. It wasn’t all timing, but timing was a huge factor.

As well, the early “invite-only” nature of Gmail was an amazing marketing campaign, albeit somewhat unintentional. People love to be elite. So Google didn’t really have to do a lot of deliberate marketing with Gmail.

That’s going to work once, maybe twice. Apple didn’t even get that with the iMac. Contrary to popular belief, they marketed the *heck* out of the iMac. And the iPhone. And the iPad. Really, every product Apple considers important gets marketed to hell and gone.

But more importantly, Apple thought about the iMac and the iPhone and the iPad.

Why should home computers be ugly beige boxes that you hide from view? Why do they need to support a lot of legacy stuff?

Do phones really need a hardware keyboard? If they don’t, how do you build one in software that works well? Why can’t we put a “real” web browser in a phone, wouldn’t that be awesome?

Why should tablet users have software that is only “sort of” designed for them?

On and on.

With Glass, the thinking seems to have been “A COMPUTER YOU WEAR ON YOUR HEAD! THIS IS SO COOL”, and then Google figured everyone would want one, every dev on the planet would fight to the death to be able to develop for it, it would take the world by storm, because magic.

How’s that working out?

Outside of a small number of technorati in a handful of places, no one seems to really care about Glass.

It’s a pity, because some deeper thought could have made this more than just a way to creep on people and get ads from stores you’re walking by. For example, why didn’t Google do a deal with movie theaters? AMC, Regal, and all the rest? Really, think about how awesome this could be for the hearing impaired. Instead of having to borrow things like this: http://www.syracuse.com/entertainment/index.ssf/2013/06/closed_caption_glasses_movies_regal_theaters_deaf.html

…(which of course are different for every theater chain, if your local theater even supports them.) Instead of all that rigamarole, you walk into the theater wearing Glass. You’ve already downloaded the app, so you just sit down, activate it on Glass, and watch the movie. When the movie’s done, you leave…just like everyone else. You don’t have some rent-a-specs on your face, you don’t have some external control unit silliness.

You walked in, enjoyed the movie, and left…just like everyone else.

Google has the money and the human capital to do this deal across theater chains. They could have created an open standard for this. They could have, on day one, had a product that would legitimately help people. It could have been extended to all kinds of media.

Seriously, read this review of the Regal system:

“I went to see “Star Trek Into Darkness” with the new closed captioning glasses, and was happy to finally enjoy every aspect of the experience. Able to relax instead of exhausting my senses to understand what I could, I actually understood every plot twist, chuckled at Captain Kirk’s quips and read descriptions of non-verbal audio, such as “(heavy breathing, panting)” as he’s chased through a red jungle by a planet’s primitive inhabitants.”

Instead, we have well-heeled hipsters being creepy in bars. Awesome.

Even worse, Glass is still “in beta”. We don’t even know what it will cost when it’s “done”.

Same thing with the watches. I’ve yet to see a single one of those things that is materially better than the old square iPod Nano with a band. They’re ugly, they don’t work that well, and their battery life blows oscillating, scintillating chunks.

And the shame of it is, good wearables are needed. Also from the Regal article:

“The devices work best if you’re sitting in the middle of the theater, so get there early. The following day, I saw the fantastic new “Man of Steel” on Destiny’s IMAX screen, but didn’t make any arrangements ahead of time. I arrived half an hour before the Superman film started, but it took 20 minutes to get the glasses — you have to ask the ticket-taker, who calls a supervisor to retrieve them and set them up — so I ended up sitting on the end of a row, viewing the text at a slightly awkward angle compared to the screen.

Also, if you’re going with a group of friends or planning to see a movie on a busy Friday or Saturday night, call ahead to make sure you can get the glasses. They’re available for every movie (look for “accessibility devices available” on Fandango’s website) but Great Northern Mall, Shoppingtown and the former Carousel Center each have just 10 sets. Regal Destiny USA Stadium 19 General Manager Bruce Livingston said he expects to get more to accommodate the brand-new IMAX and RPX screens.”

That’s not a huge problem, but imagine if you didn’t need that. If you walked in, wearing your glasses, sat down and watched the damned movie just like everyone else. No assistance from the theater needed. No calling ahead. No caring about where you sit. You just watch the movie. Heck, put an interlock on the app so the camera turns off when the app is running.

This would help millions. Instead, we get rich hipsters creeping in bars.

My wife works for our community theater. They have people they rely on to provide sign language services for the hearing impaired. But that means the person needing it has to arrange it ahead of time, they have to sit where they can see both the person signing and the play, the person signing is distracting to everyone else…

Wouldn’t it be awesome to have a Glass-compatible captioning system for theaters too? Again, the Glass wearer walks in, sits down, activates the app, and enjoys the play without having to care where they sit. They don’t need any special support. They can buy tickets five minutes before the curtain rises if they’re available.

Just like everyone else.

If Google licensed this technology, it could be huge for motorcycle riders, who are a primary audience for heads up tech. It’s not just a convenience, it’s a safety issue. The less a rider has to take their eyes off the road, the safer they are. At a reasonable price, this would be a fantastic helmet option. Yes, I know a few companies are working on this, but with a bit more thought and work, we could have had this already. Google has the resources to have done this on day one of Glass being available in public.

Instead, we get rich hipsters being annoying in restaurants.

On and on, if you really think about it, the tech introduced in Glass could have been huge, helpful, affordable and available on day 1. EMS services being able to broadcast live video of what they’re seeing to doctors in the nearest hospital. Telemedicine uses, enabling doctors to consult on operations from wherever they can get internet access while seeing what the operating surgeon is seeing, from the same angle and distance. Heck, being able to give surgeons a heads-up display with patient vitals. GPS assisted information for people with varying degrees of visual impairments.

Instead, Google, through shallow thinking, has managed to create a toy for overprivileged prats to be creepy with, (seriously, just put an LED on the front of Glass for when it’s recording and so many problems go away), that has bad battery life, and is designed so that people can shove more ads at you and Google can collect more data on you so that people can shove more ads at you.

I’ve nothing against ads, heck, they, in a way, used to pay my mortgage. But shouldn’t have Glass been much more than…what it is? Shouldn’t my most…enduring…mental image of a Glass user be something that isn’t Robert Scoble wearing one in a shower? Shouldn’t Glass be a name for something that is helping out thousands, if not millions of people by removing no-longer-necessary barriers between them and their lives?

It could have been…had some other company created it.

[shycollectorconnoisseurstuf-blog]

Interactive Studying To De

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[wooderon]

So I went to EGX again this year. This would be the point in the article where, if I’d have been a real journalist, I’d have given a brief background into EGX. But I honestly can’t be bothered to make that kind of effort right now. All you need to know is that it’s a big video gaming and culture convention that take place in the West Midlands of the U.K. for 4 days a year.

It’s the third time I’ve gone in as many years and it’s pretty standard fare as far as these type of conventions go. A bunch of developers, large and small, show up and pedal their wares, so to speak. On top of that there are plenty of other attractions. People selling niche and retro merchandise based on video games, or other things the type of people who go to this type of event will probably like.

What I’m going to do it basically break down my day as it went and talk about the things worth noting at EGX and of course, what I saw in terms of upcoming releases and what I’m looking forward to.

The first thing I spent any major time at was the Virgin Media presents the Destiny 2 booth. Which was, quite frankly, hilarious. It’s not as funny as last year where Virgin had obviously also paid for a huge space to push Destiny, except Destiny was a two year old game at that point and why they needed to be there with such aggressive force was beyond me. The fact that it seemed to work and was a very busy booth was beyond me.

This year was a little different. There were loud and obnoxious, but strangely non visible, commentators hyping up the two groups of people who were playing both crucible and strikes, (using characters pre generated mind you, not their own.(For a game that’s already out.)) competing for the best time for some ill described grand prize. It was cool getting to see real life recreations of guardian armour and certain in game weapons though.

It was nice to see a game I am mostly enjoying being enjoyed by so many others though. Even if there two hours wait times to play it. (Again. A game that’s been out for three weeks already!)

That does bring me to my main sticking point with the day, just how long the waits were. The event was busy, but it was still a large enough space that I never felt cramped. But every single one of the big AAA or hotly anticipated games at the convention had a two to three hour wait to try them out. Maybe this is the old man in me, but I flat out refuse to wait two hours to play anything at an event like this, especially considering how much of a known quantity these games tend to be.

Let’s break down all the biggest queues of the day shall we. Assassin’s Creed Origins; Okay, it’s been a few years since the last one of these. But how different has one of these titles been from the next: Marginal at best. You mostly know what you’re going to get. If I could have waited 20 minutes and played it, sure I’d have done that. But when it comes to sacrificing a significant portion of your day I refuse on principal.

Oh yeah. Let's wait 2 hours to play destiny 2. A game already out.

A post shared by Richard Wood (@richs_real_snaps) on Sep 24, 2017 at 5:07am PDT

Then there’s Far Cry 5; again, it looks like more Far Cry, it’s hardly groundbreaking stuff. Call of Duty, Battlefront 2, Forza. They’re all games I feel I don’t need to put hands on to understand, and yet they were all amongst the longest queues of the day. There were a couple of games I am a little bummed I didn’t get the chance to try as a result of my self restriction though.

One of which was Mario Odyssey. I’m sure you can make the argument that Mario games are all essentially the same and it contradicts my prior argument. But there hasn’t been a true 3D Mario platformer since Mario Galaxy on the Wii, plus have you seen that thing? It looks nuts. I’d rather play a new Nintendo made Mario game than the biggest shooter of the year every time. I mean, have you seen that T-Rex with a moustache?

The other game I wanted to try was Sea of Thieves. The Xbox exclusive from Rare is something totally different and I was really curious to try it first hand. A multiplayer based game where you and other players work together to run a ship and complete other wacky assorted pirate based tasks. It looks like a really open and creative game. I was really surprised though that the game had a multiple hour wait to play it. I felt like most people would gravitate to the the big budget franchises, this game was getting a lot of attention and it makes me all the more excited to finally try it out upon release.

So if I would’t wait in any queues, what did I do with my day. Well having more time to explore meant I could spend more time discovering the lesser known and indie titles that were on display by the truckload. I ended up enjoying myself far more in the indie developer sections of the convention in comparison to the Ubisoft, Sony and Microsoft sections.

I got to try a number of little games, the standouts of which included an augmented reality tank game by the name of Smash Tanks, which was surprisingly really fun considering how early in development it was. It’s a game where you control a number of tanks on a surface in front of you, as seen through the lens of a tablet computer. You think it’s going to be a game similar to angry birds before you realise you’re flinging around the tanks themselves. It was good fun and I’ll keep an eye out in future.

The other game that really sticks out in my memory is called Phogs! I was drawn in straight away by the image above the single screen showing the game.

A strange game where two people share a side of a single controller, both moving one head of the.. uh. Phog. It’s a puzzle game where your verbs are biting things and making your body longer, or snapping it back to its original length. It was very charming, despite the small amount of time I spent with it and had me and my brother randomly saying Phogs! at one another for the rest of the day.

As well has having the large indie section, there were a lot of middle ground types of booths there too. Games that were much bigger than the tiny indie displays, but nowhere near big enough to get a giant stare of a drake made for them.

One of the main things I was real excited about at the con was that I finally got my hands on Dragonball Fighter Z. Dragonball fighting games have been a very mixed bag over the years and Fighter Z looks like it might be the best honest fighting game to come from the series. I’m sure the game is full of complexities that fighter experts could describe better than me. But as a total beginner I managed to pick it up and just mash it out. I was rewarded with a very pretty looking game doing very cool things on screen pretty consistently.

I tried to get hands on Cuphead, a game that has been shown at these events for years now and never seems to actually want to come out. There were only two screens playable and being lumped in with a lot of Microsoft’s other smaller titles, there was nobody to keep the queue moving along. The game looks like Contra, but has a very striking visual style. The game looks like a cartoon from the 1950s and draws your attention straight away. The game started out as a boss rush, but after demand to make it more of a platformer, the title was delayed for several years to meet that demand.

So after watching a couple of dudes die for the 5th time and not give the controllers up I decided to give it up. Because believe it or not the game is actually out this week. I’ve waited this long, what’s a couple days more.

After I managed to play most of the games I really wanted to try we stuck our heads in the retro arcade section that, once again, made an appearance.  It was pretty standard fare though as it was generally the same kind of stuff I’ve seen at events like these before. Filled with old consoles, arcade cabinets and pinball machines, they seem to serve the main purpose to show children how hard we had it before you could pal GTA on your phone. There were some cool things to take away for me though. I got to try an Afterburner arcade machine out, which was cool. Depite the fact that I had no idea how to not die straight away.

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Can’t get away from Sonic

No idea what this was, but the sounds coming out of it were amazing.

Outrun was there too

The machine was actually broken though, so I didn’t have the opportunity to be thrown out of it.

Afterburner is hard

The other cool story that came out of it was that I found myself playing Sonic 3 & Knuckles on an actual Mega Drive for the first time in my life. Considering I still own my old Sega Mega Drive and used to claim Sonic 3 & Knuckles was my favourite game of all time, I never played the game on its original platform before. I played it on the PC of all things. Weird. But after playing so much Sonic Mania these past few weeks, the original feels much more sluggish by comparison.

After we couldn’t get on a beanbag to play Micro Machines or Bomberman, we moved back to Sony’s stage to watch a guy from Capcom play the upcoming Monster Hunter World. I’m real excited to play this game, as are a lot of other people apparently. In Sony’s booth section there were only two screens playing Monster Hunter, and the queue was hilariously long compared to all of the others in the same section.

I got a bit fed up of playing Monster Hunter on a handheld, the game required more concentration and finesse than was easy on the small device. Plus, I couldn’t put the time I really wanted to in the device when it became painful to play after a time.

Monster Hunter World isn’t just coming to console, it’s coming to all consoles. I don’t think the series has seen a release on a non Nintendo console outside of Japan since the original game on the PS2. While it seems far more actiony and accessible than the series usually tends to be, I’m very much looking forward to trying it out. The game looks stunning and the new focus on accessibility might make it so the series finally gets as big here as it is in Japan.

It was getting towards the end of the day by this point. So we made our way to the rear theatre to catch a live orchestra playing video game music. It seemed like a cool thing to try and catch. It’s a shame the idea was far better than the execution. The theatre was a curtained off area towards the back of the hall, right next to the Cosplay stage, which was right next to the Street Fighter stage. So a lot of the quieter pieces were drowned out by cosplayers shouting at their audiences for them to cheer louder. They had to shout to be heard over the the guy getting real excited about his thousandth Street Fighter match of the weekend.

It was a real shame to be honest, and you could tell the orchestra themselves were pretty annoyed. They had to forgo the Ori and the Blind Forest section altogether because we would have had no chance in hell of hearing it. I had been looking forward to that as I always loved the music in Ori and the Blind forest. It’s probably for the best though as I would have been all the more annoyed by not being able to hear it. I’m not going to say anything was ruined here, but it felt like a bit of shortsightedness from the organisers.

By this point, the floor was only open for another hour and most of the big games had closed their lines to anyone new joining. So there wasn’t much more for us to play at this point, having missed our final chance at Sea of Thieves. So against my better judgement, I saw that the Sonic Forces booth was pretty empty and decided to give it a go.

Sonic Forces seems bad.

It feels really sad to admit that, but with what I’ve had to put up with as a Sonic the Hedgehog fan over the years, getting to play a really good Sonic game in Sonic Mania, following it up with this was somthing of a revelation.

The demo contained four stages; a classic Sonic stage and a modern Sonic stage, like we’ve seen before in Sonic Generations. It also had an “avatar” stage, the avatar being your self insert OC, and a team stage that included both Sonic and the avatar.

While the Sonic sections felt a lot like Generations, the stages involving the avatars were just plain bad. The action was much slower to make for use of the gadgets these characters revolve around, and the experience was not an enjoyable one. The platforming felt floaty and unresponsive. fighting enemies was tedious and required little effort behind pressing jump over and over.

There was one moment I couldn’t help but laugh at. As a team up attack occurred which had me mash a button for a while before the two characters started charging through the stage while some real old school cheesy rock started playing through the headphones like the Sonic Adventure era of games. It was the best thing I can say about the demo, and I only liked it ironically. I don’t have high hopes for Sonic Forces and I feel like the character might not have much of a life ahead of him outside of the retro throwbacks like Mania. Mania was both the best and worst thing that could have happened to that series.

Overall I enjoyed my day at EGX. While it would have been nice to go and play all the big AAA titles from the likes of Nintendo and Ubisoft, if you wanted to play three of them, then that’s almost your entire day gone. I can understand why some people make the full four days out of the event. But in the end I think I found a happy medium. Most of us know what these big games are going to be, and generally know if we’re going to buy them one way or the other.

The advice I’d give to someone if they’re thinking about going in the future is take your time. Absorb the atmosphere and strange costumed characters that show up to these things. Spend some money on stuff you’ll inevitably throw away. But mainly, stick to the indie sections. Chances are you’ll get to play dozens of games if you plan your day like this, and end up finding some little gems that will stay on your radar in the coming years. It’s what made me pick up Little Nightmares last year, as well as Snake Pass. And you can bet I’m going to be picking up Phogs! when it eventually gets a release too.

My time at EGX 2017 So I went to EGX again this year. This would be the point in the article where, if I’d have been a real journalist, I’d have given a brief background into EGX.

[sapphequinox]

Lunar Violet: Chapter 1

Content Warning and Foreword: Just don’t read this. Seriously. One night instead of venting into a journal nobody would ever read, I decided to channel my turmoil and restlessness into a work of fiction. The result we have here is the first chapter of a hopefully not ongoing series, which if I write another word of it will be an anthology of short stories chronicling the lives of the people that live in a small town with a population of exactly 26 people. I will repeat in clear terms that this is in no way autobiographical in any way. For realsies. Also this is my “After Hours” blog now, which means this is now the destination for everything I decide to put out on this site that I deem not suited for display on my main blog. You have been warned.

  Well, I guess it started that one night. Yeah, that was about the time, I’ll start there. I found myself hunched over my desk, passively scribbling away under the soft orange lamplight. Since my chair faced out the attic window, I always had a clear view of my muse at night: the bare neighborhood streets, free from the burden of its residents. Streetlights hummed and cicadas sang, providing the soundtrack to my work.

   I’m not sure why, but at approximately 10:33 that night I’d felt an incredibly strong urge to write. Just write. I hadn’t any particular ideas of what exactly I was to write, but I’d decided that I was indeed going to use a pen to create a story upon paper. And so far it was going spectacularly. I’d gotten off to a shaky beginning, testing out different ideas to see if any broad concepts could draw some inspiration out of me. A cyberpunk space romance, historical fiction comedy set in East Asia, so on and so forth. I’d eventually decided on “Effervescent Gamble: Furtive Adventures in Neo Tokyo”. I’ll be honest and tell you that I’d come up with the title before the concept, and at the moment was going through the tasking process of doing the name justice.

   Upon realizing that I’d been sitting and thinking about not being able to think about anything for quite awhile now, I decided to quit writing. Again. Defeated, yet still stirring with my lust for creativity and self-expression, my next course of action was to rise out from my slumped position out of my chair, and subsequently fall face first onto my bed. As I rolled over to examine my ceiling as I often do, I was once again prompted by a sheet of paper taped up there asking a question I’d mulled over many a night: “Should I masturbate?”

  I thought this through carefully, eventually coming to the logical conclusion that, since I had no desire to sleep or play video games or go find drugs, the best course of action would indeed be to masturbate. Yet the struggles of a young man such as myself are never so short lived, as I had no material with which to aid my impulses. You see, back in the early 2000’s, I did not have the infinite library of smut, filth and gratification that is instantly available to me today. The family computer was downstairs, and my mother was downstairs. You see the dilemma.

   Anyways, my first course of action was to sit back up and crouch down at the bottom of my desk, sliding open the black square drawer containing my magazines and graphic novels. I pulled out all the novels that were especially more graphic than the others, and laid them out on my bed.

   I picked up the leftmost one I’d put down after sliding the drawer back closed with my foot. Izuremata’s Muffin Appreciation Club. This copy actually had a signature on the inner cover from the author, which upon opening the book I rediscovered alongside the slip of paper that fluttered out of the pages. I examined the paper.

Main chick’s got huge tits, lots of sexy stuff. Got this signed by the legend himself at L.A., enjoy. ~ Dad

What the fuck. I decided to put the note back and pick up the next book. It was one of my old favorites, Danger Squid Girl 32. I flipped to the folded page and sank into the bed, sliding my sweatpants down to my ankles.

My door flung open, the knob kicking up dust and fragments of drywall as it crashed against the wall. My mom, Eliana stood in the doorway, panting.

I set down the book on my stomach. “I’m looking at porn, what do you want?”

“Keith, there’s been an accident, down the street.” She looked out the window nervously. “Your dad went out earlier, and he hasn’t come back, and…”

“If you’re scared that it’s him, just go yourself already. You’ll have more time to pay your respects that way before they drag him to the station and beat him to death.”

This visibly upset her. “Keith, that’s not how it works, and you know I don’t do well with this sort of thi…” As often happened, she wasn’t able to finish her sentence, the last few words painfully choked with pain and fear, frustrated tears building up behind her innocent amber eyes. Giving up all semblance of authority, she slowly walked over and fell onto my bed, exploding into a fit of rattling sobs.

This made me feel awkward with my Pokemon boxers bulging with the power of my raw, unbridled cock, so I stood up and pulled my pants back up to my waist before sitting back down and offering a confused, reluctant arm around her shoulder. “I’m sure dad isn’t dead, Mom.”

This did not seem to stop her incessant crying.

“Would it make you feel better if I went down the street and checked by myself?”

She collected enough of herself to tone the hysterics down to a helpless whimpering, punctuated by the occasional heavy sob, just long enough to give a simple nod and look of thanks. The facade collapsed immediately as I rose to adorn my silk, velvet bathrobe, adorned in gold on the back with the text “If You’re Reading This, Take Me Now”.

“It’s your dad, alright.” The officer took an apathetic glance at the smouldering wreckage before going back to scribbling in his notepad.

“What?!” You stare into the flames, eyes widening with confusion and disbelief. “How?! Look at it! Have you even checked?!”

He put his notepad into his pocket before turning to face me, leaning against the trunk of the police car. “I mean, I’m not about to just go in and check myself kid, fire is hot.”

“Then how can you know?”

“Keith, come on. There’s like twenty people in town, I checked and all of them are accounted for except your pops. And if we had a visitor,” he he said, pointing his pen at his badge, “I’d have noticed them.”

I cursed the abnormal population density. “I can’t believe it…” I slowly sank to the gravelly street, coming to a rest with my arms around my knees. “I knew my dad would die before I moved out of the house, but… I never thought about how I’d have to actually be there for it.”

“Let me tell you, kid, that really sucks.” He took a sip of his Red Bull and wiped his nose with the mittened hand holding it. “You’re an unlucky boy. My dad died from overdosing on tapeworm tablets while I was fucking a sixty year old prostitute in Indonesia during a college trip. I didn’t even have to deal with the guilt I would have had if cell phones had existed back then, as I would have no doubt received a text or call notifying me of my father’s death either while I was fucking her, or while I was sneaking out of the brothel.”

I ignored his words of comfort, staring deeply into the ember-lit tar of the street, blackened by the ash of the man who never taught me how to play baseball, which I used often to lie to myself that he was the sole reason I never got into sports.

The officer slowly eased off the trunk and crushed the can of Red Bull against his flat forehead, wiping the sugary nectar off his pornstache before tossing the can into the enormous fire, which persisted without anyone seemingly giving a shit. “Well, It’s getting late, it’s about time I was off.”

I finally looked up, catching his retreating gaze. “Wait, you’re leaving? You’re not going to call in anybody to put out the fire, or try and search for clues to make sure nothing weird happened?” I pointed to his coat pocket, rising to my feet. “I saw you writing in that notepad earlier, is that just for show?”

“I’m just the guy that makes sure we don’t have to get insurance involved.” With that word, he turned around and hopped into the driver’s seat before silently drifting away, out of my life forever.

I thundered up the porch steps, every essence of my being brimming with bitter, misguided determination. After flinging the heavy oak door open and storming down the entrance hallway, I turned to walk through the kitchen and sat down in the chair in front of the family computer, entering the password all in one swift motion.

Password123

Without a moment’s hesitation, I dramatically drove the cursor over the closest word processing application, double clicking and immediately doubling down over the keyboard as the document opened up, furiously drumming my sweaty fingers against the keys, the covers for some flying off in fragments as I channeled my overwhelming resentment into every word I recklessly strummed out. My hatred and remorse quickly began to weave an immense, artful tapestry of contempt for everything ever conceived or heard of. The computer began to levitate from the clock speeds of the CPU, struggling to keep up with the rapid output of pure, disgusting rage as I indented paragraph after paragraph of my deepest, darkest true emotions.

After I’d hit the 10,000 word mark after about three minutes, I minimized the window and opened up the web browser, navigating to the first hardcore porn site I could think of and smashing my head into the keyboard, and then clicking on the first thing my headbanging conjured up in the site’s search engine.

My senses were blinded by foul darkness and corruption, I channeled the dark lord himself through my numb lust as I ripped my pants off, gripping my member with the strength of a billion suns as I rubbed myself like a piston on steroids and coke to the senseless kaleidoscope of colors and moaning that my distorted state of mind perceived the smut as. Inside my brain towers collapsed, universes imploded, nebulae died. For that brief moment, I was a god. I looked over my vast domain, effortlessly comprehending and calculating every galaxy I cast my all-knowing gaze over. I witnessed civilizations rise, empires fall. I clipped my toenails and hurled them into the ether, my tremendous, ethereal biceps rippling with holy power.  Distant solar systems exploded as I rubbed myself under my billowing toga, crying tears of blood and liquid gold, each droplet creating a universe as they fell to the bottom of the void.

   At least, that’s what I felt like should have happened.

  I solemnly trudged up the cement stairs, limply gripping the door handle as I pushed into the entrance hallway. I was going to go back up to my room to write some more, but my mother encountered me before I even made it to the staircase.

   “What happened, Keithy?” She looked down at me with her innocent, hopeful eyes, soon to be weighed down by the weight of my next sentence. I could barely manage.

  “Yeah it’s him. His charred corpse is probably still somewhere in the burning wreckage out there. I doubt they’re going to stomp it out anytime tonight.” Unexpectedly, I began to choke on my words as I struggled to get them out, tears welling in my eyes both from the weight of what I was saying, and the realization that I was in fact my mother’s child. Potent, fermented tears began to stream down my hot cheeks, and I backed against the front door, sliding to a sitting position as my arms went limp at my sides, allowing myself to finally dissipate my supply of all the built up tears from years of anguish and depression.

   My keen mother Eliana noticed this, and walked down to the front door, crouching down to my position and ruffling my hair. “There there, Keith. It’s okay, I’m still here.”

   This didn’t make me feel much better. In fact, I felt worse upon remembering that my father was actually the parent I liked more, or resented less. In a sudden burst of sad, angry and weirdly sexual passion I launched off down the hallway, pushing my mother aside as I ran up the staircase, going off to sulk and be edgy in my room as I often did. Granted, this time I had a really good reason to do so, which I often use to convince myself that I’m not a terrible person, even though deep down I know that I hated my father almost as much as my mother, and really just hated my entire fucking life in general but was too afraid of pain to just end it all and jam a kitchen knife into my fucking throat and die.

[davidegbert]

Wacom MobileStudio Pro 13 Review

I got to try out the new Wacom MobileStudio Pro for a little while back in October of 2016, but now that I’ve been using it for some real work, it’s time for a full review. I’ll start off right away with letting you know that if your career has anything to do with visual creativity, this is the tool you need. Notice I said tool instead of tablet. That’s because the Wacom MobileStudio Pro is almost entirely designed for creating all the things that everyone else uses in their daily lives. This tablet PC is made for professionals. The “Pro” in this tablet’s name isn’t just tacked on to make it sound better like some other electronic gadget manufacturers do. It is genuinely deserving of the “Pro” moniker.

This tablet isn’t for people who play cartoony games that everyone loves to play on their iPads, it’s for people who create those games. This tablet isn’t for handing to your kids to watch an animated movie in the back seat on a long drive, it’s for the people who create those animated movies. It’s not for taking selfie videos with cute cartoon filter overlays, it’s for the people who design those filters. If you’re a comic book artist, architect, 3D texture artist, video editor, story board artist, sculptor, fashion designer, animator, engineer, photographer, retoucher, graphic designer, illustrator, or a student trying to learn any of those disciplines, the Wacom MobileStudio Pro is what you’re looking for.

It sounds like the Wacom MobileStudio Pro is a lot like Microsoft’s Surface Pro 4 or Surface Studio, both of which are drewl-worthy products aimed at creative professionals as well. Keep reading to find out why the MobileStudio Pro is a much better choice for digital artists. With all this praise right up front in the intro paragraph, some of you might be ready to find the order button on Wacom’s website, but despite all the power of Wacom’s MobileStudio Pro, there are a few drawbacks that you’ll want to know about, too.

Specs

The version in this review is the DTHW 1320H model which has the 13.3″ screen, Intel Core i7 CPU, Intel Iris Graphics 550, 512Gb SSD, 16Gb of RAM, and the Intel RealSense 3D model scanning hardware. The is number 4 out of 6 on the scale from cheapest to most expensive in terms of your model choices for the Wacom MobileStudio Pro. If you want to spend less money, the cheapest model has a 13.3″ screen, Core i5 processor with 4Gb RAM, 64Gb SSD, and a regular 8Mp camera. If you want even more power & want to spend more money, there are two models of the larger Wacom MobileStudio Pro 16 which include NVIDIA Quadro GPU hardware. The top of the line model has a Core i7 processor, Nvidia Quadro M1000M 4Gb GPU, 512 Gb SSD, 16Gb RAM, and Intel RealSense 3D scanning camera. Also, the larger 16″ models have 8 programmable hardware buttons in the bezel as opposed to 6 in the smaller 13″ model.

Screen and Pen

If you’re thinking about the Wacom MobileStudio Pro, the biggest selling point is going to be its screen and pen interface. I was fully converted when I first got a Wacom graphics tablet back in the mid 90’s and today using a mouse or trackpad to interact with a computer feels like using a hammer to put together a watch (especially when it comes to design work). The pen-to-screen interface gives you a direct connection for manipulating computer controls. It’s not disconnected like a mouse or trackpad. Furthermore, you can build motor-memory since the location where you place the pen tip is always going to have the same relationship to the dimensions of the screen you’re looking at. That’s never true with a mouse or trackpad so often you’ve got to spend a couple seconds looking at the screen and moving the pointer around to figure out where it is. With a Wacom pen, you place it and it’s there. I can even do this without looking at the screen and have accurate cursor control.

A touch screen also gives you direct interactivity with graphic user interface controls, but fingers are big. Each finger is going to cover from 100-300^2 pixels worth of data and buttons need to be that big to be activated. That’s a huge waste of space and a huge crutch for efficiency.

The Wacom MobileStudio Pro 13 includes the new Wacom Pro Pen 2 and its digitizer supports 8,000 levels of pressure sensitivity, plus pen tilt sensitivity, and pixel level pointing accuracy. You may remember in my Surface Pro 3 review where I compared the pressure sensitivity to the Surface Pro 2 which used Wacom’s digitizer technology as opposed to Microsoft’s new N-Trig based digitizer technology. I said that the Surface Pro 3’s 256 levels of pressure sensitivity wasn’t noticeably different from the Surface Pro 2’s 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity. The Surface Pro 2 used some of Wacom’s older & cheaper digitizer tech, and I have to say that the digitizer tech in the MobileStudio Pro 13 is far superior! Noticeably far superior!

Wacom’s Pro Pen 2 doesn’t require batteries at all. It has two buttons on the side and an eraser. Yes, the buttons are customizable too though they need to be within an inch of the screen to function (no auto-launching OneNote from afar like the Surface Pro 3 can do). It also includes interchangeable pen nibs if you want to change the feel a bit or you wear one out. The pen is so comfortable to hold. The buttons are easy to feel and find. The pen feels like the perfect weight. It makes the Surface Pen feel clunky and cold.

Putting the pen to the screen feels like coming home. The display is so close to the surface, it’s almost like you’re touching the pixels directly. If you look really really closely, yes there’s a bit of space between the top layer and the pixels, but in normal use it’s going to feel like you’re drawing directly to the software’s graphical user interface. The accuracy is excellent as well. Older pen computers often don’t place the pointer quite as precisely on the screen as you would want. Many have digitizers that calculate the positioning in clumps and that’s why some will have a jiggle to the line strokes if you move the pen too slowly. The Wacom MobileStudio Pro actually has pixel-level positioning accuracy and it is awesome. You can hold the pen still on the screen, move it as slightly as you possibly can, and you’ll see the cursor move one pixel in that direction. You are not going to get this level of precision control on any other pen computing device. What about the corners, you say? Yes, it’s true there is often fall-off of pen accuracy in the corners of the display for many pen digitizers. Wacom solves this by extending the digitizer beyond the display area and deep into the bezel. That brush cursor or pointer is going to remain pixel accurate all along the edges.

Your pointer appears on the screen when the pen tip gets to a little less than an inch from the surface of the screen. At that point, the touch screen is disabled and you can rest your hand on the screen for a stable platform. If your touch screen is not responding to your fingers, that might be why. This range is a lot greater than the vertical range before palm rejection in Microsoft Surface N-Trig technology and that means you’re less likely to invoke touch screen actions accidentally.

The exterior layer of the screen is actually a matte material too. This is much better than those glossy glass screens that you see on things like the Microsoft Surface devices, iPad Pro, Macbook Pro, etc. The matte material doesn’t give off nearly as much glare, which can interfere with your ability to see your work properly. Often you see professional photographers with Macbook Pros covered in a black hood to reduce the glare on those terribly shiny screens. This doesn’t require that kind of work-around as much. The matte finish also reduces the fingerprint grease problem. Yes, you’re still going to get fingerprint grease on the screen when you touch it, but the interference and notice-ability is greatly reduced compared to a glossy glass screen. By the way, you get a nice screen cleaning cloth in the box.

The screen actually subtly flexes when you apply pressure. You might think that would be a durability problem, but bendable things are less breakable. So I’m imagining this won’t shatter as easily as a glass screen. It also feels much more natural to interact with and that’s a huge plus. If you’ve used a Microsoft Surface Pro/Book/Studio or an iPad Pro with Apple Pencil… yeah, they have great pressure sensitivity and you can write on the screen and accurately control the thickness of the stroke, but it still feels like plastic on glass. The Surface Pen variable texture nibs help improve that feeling to some degree, but the Wacom MobileStudio Pro brings the feeling of drawing on a computer to a higher level. It doesn’t feel exactly like writing with a pencil on paper, but the matte screen texture, the flexing, and the practically perfect pen easily offer the best pen interface on the market.

While a precise pen interface is very important to anyone in the visual creative fields, so is color accuracy. The Wacom MobileStudio Pro’s screen does not disappoint. It actually supports 96% of the Adobe RGB 1998 color gamut. That’s a much wider color gamut than the usual sRGB that most computer screens display. Most photographers and print designers are going to want to use this color gamut. For video, the new color gamut standard is heading towards DCI-P3 which extends more into the reds & purple ranges while Adobe RGB extends into the greens & blues. Unfortunately, the Wacom MobileStudio Pro does not have a quick-action button for switching between color gamuts like the Microsoft Surface Studio does.

Hardware & Tactile Buttons

We’ll start with the big silver-rimmed hardware buttons in the side bezel. On the 13″ model, you have 6 flat black buttons while on the 16″ model, you have 8. There’s also a 4 way circular button in the middle that also has a center button and the circle is touch sensitive for scrolling through functions. One some models, the center button within the circle doubles as a fingerprint scanner compatible with Windows Hello. The fingerprint scanner didn’t work at all on my first MobileStudio Pro. Windows 10 kept waiting for a finger appear, but the scanner just wasn’t sensing anything. A replacement MobileStudio Pro fixed that minor issue.

At first I thought that these would be a usability issue since none of these buttons are labelled and I had no clue what any of them would do. However, the Wacom MobileStudio Pro is a device for professionals and as it turns out the unlabelled buttons are much more powerful than first glance. They are all customizable! And the capabilities that you can program into these buttons is practically limitless. You’ll see a lot more info about this below in the software section, so keep reading.

In terms of tactile usability, these hardware buttons are very good. You can see the center button has a small nub on it so that you can easily find it without using your eyes.

The side edges of the tablet PC house some other buttons. Here you see the power switch. It’s not a button that you press but a spring loaded switch that you hold down to power on or off. This slight complexity to the switch makes it difficult to accidentally put the tablet to sleep mode while you’re working, and that’s a very good thing.

On one end of this edge there’s a volume toggle button and another spring-loaded switch. This switch toggles the screen rotation lock on and off. Also notice that all of these buttons on the edge are in a concave recessed area. This makes it difficult to accidentally press them while you’re holding the tablet, and again that’s a very good thing.

Still on this same edge, we’ve also got a 3.5mm audio port, and a full-sized SD card slot. Having the full-sized SD card slot here is fantastic since you can easily start working with photos or videos just shot on a high-end camera without any dongles or adapters.

On the opposite edge you’ve got 3 USB-C ports for peripherals and charging along with a Kensington Security slot for locking the device down. In the above photo, I have the included pen holder mounted inside the Kensington Security slot. Most laptops and tablets that have USB-C ports these days only have one, so it’s great to have 3 here. Everyone says it’s going to be the new standard, but personally I don’t think USB-C is nearly as forward-thinking as it should have been. There are no full USB-A ports on the device and that’s unfortunate since USB-A is still very widely used. You’ll need a USB-A to USB-C adapter (or three) to use most peripherals. The long top & bottom edges simply taper smoothly to a rounded edge. You can also see the 5 Megapixel front-facing HD camera in the middle of the bezel above.

The pen holder is surprisingly well designed. It can hold the pen either vertically for easy access while you’re working, or the pen can be attached horizontally parallel to the edge of the tablet for transport.

On the back you’ll see two big rubber ledges on the sides. Both of these have a tilted lip to them that raises off the back. This lip is inset from the edges so there’s a bit of space there, and the rubber acts as a little foot to set the tablet flat on a table. What’s really genius about this rubber lip is that it also hides vents for the fans. The raised lip keeps the fan airflow going out the sides while it’s sitting on a table and the fact that theses are slightly inset from the edges of the device means your hands aren’t going to cover the vents if you’re holding it. There’s no heat in the middle of the back either, so you can safely keep it on your lap while you draw.

You can also see two big slots on the back here with four screws. Those are for mounting the tablet to a stand that will let you set it up on your desk and tilt it at different angles. Wacom will have a special stand sold separately that should be available in February of 2017.

Also on the back of this model is an Intel RealSense 8 Megapixel 3D scanner and camera. Only two of the MobileStudio Pro models include this 3D scanner while the others have a normal 8 Mp camera. You’ll read more about how this works a little further down the page.

The pen also comes with a heavy duty protective case. The flat end slides out and there’s form-fit padding to hold the Pro Pen 2 securely. On the flat end there’s also a cap that contains replacement pen tips and part of the sliding mechanism has a hole that you can use to remove the pen tip.

Incidentally, Wacom does not include a special keyboard for the MobileStudio Pro. There’s no detachable keyboard case option either. They do make a wireless keyboard for the older Cintiq Companion, but there’s nothing particularly special about it. You can use any Windows-compatible keyboard that you may already have or might like to buy (that includes pretty much all keyboards, even Mac keyboards). Above you see it works fine with Microsoft’s Universal folding keyboard connected via Bluetooth. Wired keyboards would need either a USB-C interface or a USB-C adapter/port-expander.

Software

First of all, the Wacom MobileStudio Pro runs Windows 10 as the operating system. The four most-expensive models come with Windows 10 Professional while the two least-expensive models come with Windows 10 Home edition. Windows 10 is really the only choice for a high-end pen-computer with a touch screen. MacOS has pretty poor support for touch interaction and Apple doesn’t allow anyone else to license the operating system for use on 3rd party hardware anyway. You might be able to “hackintosh” macOS onto the MobileStudio Pro if you’ve got the skills, but Windows 10 has a much better tablet UI and much better handwriting recognition so I wouldn’t recommend that. It’s not really worth it and there isn’t any real advantage.

By default, the MobileStudio Pro loads Windows 10’s desktop mode even though there’s no keyboard or mouse attached. That’s good for people who are familiar with the Windows 95 through Windows 7 style user interface, but personally I highly recommend switching into the Windows 10 tablet mode UI using the quick action center in the bottom right corner button. It’s much more touch-friendly and enables some nice snapping and application closing gestures. I even set the bottom taskbar to auto-hide to make more room for the real programs.

For the most part, the MobileStudio Pro includes generic Windows 10 with no bloatware. There are some default games pinned to the start menu, but those are easy to uninstall. There’s also an “Intel RealSense Camera Calibration Notifier that loads on startup, and if you’re in Tablet Mode, that shows as a big blank white window which is pretty annoying and useless. I disabled it by going to the Task Manager > Startup tab > selecting and and pressing disable. Wacom also included a Wacom Desktop Center app, Wacom control panel, and a first-run experience to introduce you to everything. This is where it gets pretty interesting and if you’ve used professional Wacom pen tablets or pen displays in the past, you probably already know what you’re in for.

Above is the Wacom welcome screen which introduces you to the “ExpressKeys” hardware buttons in the bezel as well as setting up a Wacom Account (not necessary) and calibrating the screen digitizer. It’s not hugely necessary to run the calibration since it’s pretty accurate out of the box, but people often hold the pen differently so it’s good to get it set up for the way you work.

The Wacom Desktop software is basically a dashboard with links to the Wacom Driver control panel, but it also has an interface for checking for driver updates as well as a method of backing up all of your custom settings. That’s going to be important because as you’ll see below, there is a lot that you can do in terms of customizing the Wacom driver software.

Here’s the real meat of Wacom’s software and it is extremely robust. Just about everything imaginable is customizable here. The first row at the top allows you to select which device you’re customizing. I only have the MobileStudio Pro 13 listed here, but if I had another Wacom device like a Cintiq pen display or an Intuos pen tablet plugged in, then it would show there. The 2nd row lists the tools associated with that device. The Wacom MobileStudio Pro has a series of tactile hardware function buttons, so that’s listed first, then touch is listed second, and “Pro Pen 2” is listed third. Selecting one of those will change the options below it for further customization. The third row is labelled “Application” and this is where you can customize the preferences and behavior based on which application is in the foreground. Yes, seriously. The little plus button on the right side of that row is where you can add whichever applications you want. Generally it’s easiest to add the preferences here based on running applications, but you can dig into the file system and select a specific executable if you need to.

So we’ve got customizable settings for the hardware buttons in the bezel, the touch screen gestures, and the pen with its pressure/tilt sensitive tip & eraser plus its dual hardware buttons… AND all of those can be further altered based on which program you’re working with. That’s pretty big, but how customizable are these functions? They are very customizable.

First you’ve got the hardware buttons in the bezel. They’re called “ExpressKeys” in the Wacom software. By default, these are generally assigned to modifier keys such as Alt, Ctrl, Shift, Spacebar, etc. The top button defaults to “Settings” which shows an overlay on the screen pointing out and labeling the functions you currently have assigned to each button. This is extremely useful if you’ve forgotten what you assigned to which button, but if you want to assign that settings button to something else, of course you can do that. By the way, it is possible to press more than one button at the same time, for example when you need to do Ctrl + Alt + Shift to invoke a modification for whatever tool you’re currently using.

The Touch Ring is next. That’s the big circle in the bezel and rubbing your finger around it in a clockwise or counter-clockwise motion will invoke whatever functions you want to assign to those gestures. The ring also has up/down/left/right buttons that can be pressed in order to change the touch ring’s functions on the go. In the above image, you can see that if I press the top of the touch ring, that will set it to scroll/zoom, the right side sets it to cycle between layers, the bottom sets it to change the brush size, and the left side sets it to rotation. All of those default functions don’t work the same way in all programs, so you’ll want to customize them based on your most-used software.

For example, my RAW photo organizational tool of choice is Adobe Bridge, so I customized one of the touch ring functions to increase or decrease the rating level depending on whether I rubbed it clockwise or counterclockwise. The default “speed” for this was too high, so I easily changed the interaction to a slower speed so that I could very accurately set rating levels on selected photos without having a keyboard attached and without having to open menus.

There’s also an “On Screen Controls” tab in the functions section, and this is pretty excellent as well. Basically you can set whatever you want, be it the pen’s hardware button, a bezel button, or a touch gesture… to invoke a radial menu on the screen. And yes, you guessed it, the radial menu can have buttons for whatever you want it to do, and you can make it have different buttons for whichever program you’re using.

That’s not all folks. You can also create any number of custom touch-screen panels with whatever buttons you want to create. Each of those panels can be activated using any of the other custom options in the Wacom Tablet Properties dialog box as well (and that’s a lot).

Next is the touch screen gestures. Naturally, you can disable this completely if you want to use only the system or application built-in touch screen gestures, but you can also add a few gestures here that aren’t commonly used in other programs. Above you can see a listing of all the touch screen gestures that are customizable. The “three finger swipe left/right to navigate” and “four finger swipe left/right to switch applications” gestures can only be enabled or disabled, while all of the others can be completely customized to activate whatever command you want. Again, the default functions are available in all applications until you add another application to the application listing in the 3rd row. Then with that application icon selected in the Wacom Tablet Properties dialog, you can choose completely different touch gesture functions for when that particular application is in use in the foreground. So for example, maybe you’ve written a script for InDesign CC that converts all text to outlines. You can assign a keyboard shortcut to that script in InDesign, and then assign the “Five Fingers Swipe Down” gesture to that keyboard shortcut when InDesign is active in order to run that script very easily. By the way, if you don’t have a keyboard connected, you can use the “Standard Layout” on-screen keyboard to specify or activate keyboard shortcuts (enabled in the keyboard settings).

The Pro Pen 2 customization options allow you to fine tune the pressure sensitivity as well as customize the two hardware buttons on the pen. There are sliders for most functions, but if you want more granular control over the tip feel, the “customize” button above will give you a pressure sensitivity curve graph. Again, all of this is customizable on both a system-wide and application-specific level.

3D Scanning Camera

Two of the high-end Wacom MobileStudio Pro models include an Intel RealSense 3D camera sensor on the back and they include a 1 year license for Artec Pro 3D model scanning software. This is high-end 3D scanning software that you’d normally use with dedicated handheld 3D scanners like the Eva or Space Spider to create 3D models of things like Arnold Schwarzenegger for Terminator movies, but the software also works with Kinect for Windows and, of course, the Intel Sense 3D camera built into certain Wacom MobileStudio Pro models.

Unfortunately, it is very difficult to get usable results from scanning 3D objects with the Intel Sense 3D camera set-up. It only works on objects between about the size of a basketball up to about the size of a couch. Anything with detail or gaps that are too small (baseball sized?), won’t render very well. You have to get the lighting just right, too. You might be able to get a nice model of relief sculptures on a wall, but a 360 degree view of a model is very tough to scan with this hardware.

The scanner does however automatically add RGB color texture mapping to the 3D object, which again requires your lighting to be just right. It’s not going to be a highly detailed image map though. The results might be good enough for a video game background that nobody’s going to look too closely at, but it’s hard to imagine what else this 3D scanner would be useful for.

Incidentally, the 1 year free subscription to Artec Pro 3D Ultimate Edition should activate automatically when you install the trial on a Wacom MobileStudio Pro who’s serial number indicates that it includes the Intel RealSense 3D camera hardware. This worked perfectly on my first MobileStudio Pro, but it did not recognize the hardware on the 2nd one, so Artec tech support had to enable a 1 year subscription manually.

Personally, I don’t think cameras belong on the back of tablets at all so if Wacom decides to do away with the camera completely on future versions, I don’t think anyone will mind. I know many people even put tape over the front facing cameras on their laptops too. Using a standalone camera or a dedicated 3D scanner would be a much better tool for the job.

Pro Graphics Software

The Wacom MobileStudio Pro doesn’t come with any professional graphics production software, but it’s clearly designed for use with many of them. Most of the default express key and touch ring functions are really made for Adobe Photoshop. So I installed a good number of my favorite graphics, photography, video, and 3D software to see how it worked and to actually use it for some content creation.

Firstly, just about all of the Adobe Creative Cloud 2017 applications work beautifully. GPU acceleration is flawless in Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Illustrator, Bridge, and Lightroom on the Wacom MobileStudio Pro 13’s Intel Iris 550 GPU. Adobe AfterEffects CC 2017 uses the GPU with OpenGL, but it cannot use the GPU for Ray-tracing. If you’re using AfterEffects, you’ll probably want a CUDA compatible GPU and for that, you’ll need the more-expensive Wacom MobileStudio Pro 16 which includes an NVIDIA Quadro M600M 2Gb GPU or a M1000M 4Gb GPU.

In terms of touch screen features, Adobe has made some huge improvements in the last few years to the touch support in many of their high-end Creative Cloud programs. Lightroom now has touch support that works pretty nicely for scrolling, panning, zooming, though you’ll still need the pen for some precision controls. InDesign and Illustrator both include their own full-touch workspaces which have a completely different UI design from the normal workspaces, although they do have many limitations due to their simplicity. Premiere Pro has some great touch gesture options integrated with the various panels. You can scrub playback in the Project panel for selected videos in thumbnail view, you can set in/out points, drag/drop, and even pinch to change the timeline view scale. Photoshop supports multi-touch zoom & panning as well, and they’ve got a new touch panel for modifier keys (though you won’t need that with the MobileStudio’s Express Keys). Of course, Photoshop supports tilt sensitive controls in the brushes as well as the pressure sensitive control it has supported via Wacom drivers for decades. Incidentally, the Adobe Character Animator CC 2017 Preview does not currently work with any of the hardware cameras on the Wacom MobileStudio Pro 13 at this time, so watch out for that if you like to do real-time character animation.

Capture One is not touch friendly in terms of UI design, but multi-touch panning & zooming works beautifully, as does the Wacom Pro Pen 2 and wow… my photographs look great on this screen!

Corel Painter 2017 is another program that really shines on the Wacome MobileStudio Pro. I’ve been using this paint simulation software since it was Fractal Design Painter 4 back in the mid 1990’s, and it is extremely comprehensive. It’s got some a lot of excruciatingly complicated natural media simulation tools that interact with your chosen paper textures, wet/dry status, brush tilt angle, pressure, bearing, etc. Corel Painter’s multi-touch panning & zooming could use some speed optimization, but the Wacom Pro Pen support is excellent. This program is very powerful though, so it’s easy to get some lag to happen with a complicated brush and a high resolution canvas.

3D animation software like Maya 3D, Lightwave 3D, ZBrush, etc. run pretty nicely, but programs like these are heavily dependent on keyboard shortcuts so the customizable express keys in the bezel may not be enough. The pen works beautifully however, and if you’re a Zbrush user, you’ll especially love the 8000 levels of pressure sensitivity support.

Wacom Link

So far you’ve read about how extremely powerful the Wacom MobileStudio Pro can be as a visual creative tool on its own and it is very powerful, but what if you’ve got a desktop workstation in your office that is just rediculously powerful? As it turns you, you can plug the MobileStudio Pro into another computer and use it as a pen display just like the other normal Cintiq Pen Displays that Wacom makes. You’ll need an accessory called the Wacom Link to do this though. Basically it has two ports on one side that get wired into your big computer, and one port on the other side that plugs into one of the MobileStudio’s USB-C ports. The accessory includes a USB-A cable to go to your PC/Mac, a Mini-DisplayPort to go to your PC/Mac’s GPU card, and a USB-C cable to go to the MobileStudio Pro.

This can come in very handy if you spend most of your time in an office in front of a powerful desktop computer. A few things you need to know however, you will need the Wacom software drivers installed on the PC or Mac that you’re plugging the Mobile Studio into. You’ll also need to plug the Wacom Link USB-C port into the center USB-C port on the MobileStudio Pro. Apparently that one is enabled for the special Pen Display conversion feature.

Incidentally, the Wacom Link also goes the other way, meaning you can plug the MiniDisplay port directly into an external Display if you want your Wacom MobileStudio Pro to drive another monitor. Unfortunately, the Wacom Link is not able to provide electrical power to the MobileStudio Pro at the same time. So you’ll need to connect one of the other USB-C ports on the MobileStudio to the AC adapter and plug that into an electrical outlet. By the way, the SD card reader in the MobileStudio Pro becomes readable on the desktop PC or Mac when connected via the Wacom Link. The MobileStudio Pro’s internet storage does not show up as another drive, but that’s understandable. Being able to access the SD card is still very useful.

Yes, the Wacom Link works fine with a Mac. Wacom’s drivers handle all the pen input capabilities and the MobileStudio Pro’s Express Keys, Touch Ring, and custom on-screen panels are all configurable here.

The Wacom drivers even add a little bit of touch screen support to a connected Mac. Don’t expect to move windows around, launch apps, or access menus with your finger though. You’ll need the pen for that.

You’ll have to tweak the resolution on the Wacom MobileStudio Pro when connected to a Mac as a secondary display too. By default everything shows up extremely tiny. The Mac OS automatic scaling features don’t seem to work very well either.

Of course the Wacom Link works on Windows 7, 8, and 10 as well. I connected it to my HP Z440 Workstation which has quite a few processing advantages over the MobileStudio Pro on it’s own, but obviously it’s not as portable. It took some work to get everything running though. The first 3 USB ports that I plugged the MobileStudio Pro’s Wacom Link into didn’t recognize the hardware quite right. The first 2 didn’t recognize it at all and the 3rd recognized the Express Keys but not the touch screen or pen digitizer. The 4th USB port I tried had everything working perfectly. I’m not sure if this is because I’ve used other Wacom hardware on those other USB ports in the past and didn’t clean out those drivers completely or I have some other USB host driver issues.

When you have the MobileStudio Pro plugged into a desktop PC, the Wacom Tablet Properties on the desktop also show a “Toggle Display” settings tab. You can set the “Toggle Display” command to just about any of the shortcuts, gestures, and hardware keys that are customizable on the Wacom MobileStudio Pro and the settings tab allows you to configure exactly how that behaves. One option toggles between using having the pen control only one display and then both displays via a stretched out pan. This option feels weird because it changes the aspect ratio of the pen digitizer to span two displays. It’s also strange that on my version it toggles between the desktop display and both displays, which is opposite of what I’d expect. I’d want the Wacom MobileStudio display to have a full 1 to 1 relationship. The second option toggles between each display, meaning that the pen can only control one full display at a time. This seems ideal to me, but it also makes it difficult to move windows between monitors. I wish the Windows 10 “Task View” had multiple monitors listed at the bottom like it does virtual desktops so you could very easily drag/drop windows onto different monitors instead of having to drag windows across the whole screen. Personally I’ve been using the Wacom Link and MobileStudio Pro as a duplicated display instead of an extended display. Yes, some would say that defeats the purpose of having two displays, but in my opinion in beats the learning curve awkwardness of the “toggle display” command in the Wacom software.

Interestingly, via Wacom Link there’s a special display control for specifying the color space and other settings for the MobileStudio while connected as a Pen Display.

Using a Windows 10 desktop tower with the MobileStudio Pro attached via the Wacom Link accessory is the same as if you were using the MobileStudio Pro as a stand-alone tablet. All of the same touch screen gestures work, Windows 10’s touch apps work the same, even the ink input panel shows up. The only difference is that you now have the full power of whatever high-end processors, tons of RAM, and many terabytes of storage you’ve packed into that desktop workstation. I really wish the backup/restore for customized settings would work between devices so that all my Express Keys were the same though!

Battery Life

Yep, this is one spot where the Wacom MobileStudio Pro needs a lot of improvements. With very light use, you could probably get it to last up to 6 hours, but really we’re talking about maybe 3 hours. All of this high-end hardware really eats up the battery, so be prepared to pack the charger or bring a big external battery or buy two MobileStudio Pros. Average phone USB-C chargers don’t work, by the way. You’ll need the big beefy USB-C charger that comes with it.

I really wish this could have had a user-removable battery. It seems like Wacom thought of everything to make this a genuinely useful tool for creative professionals, but its utility is decreased by its short battery life and when that internal battery starts to wear out, it’s going to be even worse. The ability to carry a spare battery and pop it into the tablet as soon as the first battery died would have been a great option.

Pricing and Availability

The Wacom MobileStudio Pro 13 and MobileStudio Pro 16 were released in the fall of 2016, but you may find that some models are still hard to come by. Keep an eye on the Wacom Online Store, Amazon, and high-end photography videography stores like B&H Photo and Adorama.

The DTHW1320T has an Intel Core i5 processor, 64Gb SSD, and 4Gb RAM for about $1500. The DTHW1320L has an Intel Core i5 processor, 128Gb SSD, and 8GB RAM for about $1800. The DTHW1320M has an Intel Core i7 processor with 256Gb SSD and 8Gb RAM for $2000. The DTHW1320H has an Intel Core i7 processor with 512Gb SSD, 16Gb RAM, and the Intel RealSense 3D scanner camera for $2500.

The larger 16″ versions are available in 2 pricing options. The DTHW1620M has an Intel Core i5 processor with NVIDIA Quadro M600M GPU, 256Gb SSD, and 8Gb RAM for $2400. The DTHW1620H has an Intel Core i7 processor with NVIDIA Quadro M1000M GPU, 512Gb SSD, and 16Gb RAM for $3000.

The Wacom Link accessory for plugging the MobileStudio Pro into a desktop computer costs an extra $70 and can be found on the Wacom online store.

Conclusion

There are some good reasons that this review of the Wacom MobileStudio Pro 13 didn’t get published as soon as the tablet was released. First of all, this is a real digital creative’s tool and its extensive set of features requires some time to learn and really understand. Secondly, the first model I got had a couple minor defects. The fingerprint scanner didn’t work and its center USB-C port didn’t work with the Wacom Link hardware. If you look at the reviews on Amazon, you might see some other minor defects noticed by early adopters. For example, some of the hardware buttons may not have activated properly. The dedicated stand still isn’t available either, so there may be some things Wacom is working on. The second device I got fixed all of the fingerprint scanner and Wacom Link problems, but the free year of Artec Studio Ultimate Edition didn’t activate properly. That was fixed pretty easily by Artec tech support though.

The 3D scanner software and fingerprint reader aren’t really integral to what the Wacom MobileStudio Pro is made for though. The real reason for buying a Wacom MobileStudio Pro is its amazing pen interface and screen along with the ability to plug into a high-end workstation while you’re in the office, and throw it in a bag when you’re on the go. The extremely customizable software combined with the hardware express keys interface is another huge selling point. Wacom’s method of making the hardware keys, touch ring, and screen gestures capable of activating any keyboard shortcut in any program is far superior than what Microsoft has done with the Surface Studio and Surface Dial which requires each software developer to add specific controls to the dial. With Wacom’s touch ring (etc.), all I have to do is tell it which keyboard shortcuts to run. Most professional programs have customizable keyboard shortcuts, so the possibilities are really endless. Apple’s MacBook Pro touch bar has the same limitations whereas each developer needs to actively add support. Wacom’s hardware & touch software already supports everything.

The amazing pen interface, gorgeous screen, and immensely customizable software interface are probably enough to make this tablet worth the price of admission, but for an extra $70, you can plug it into a tower PC (or Mac) and give that premium pen & touch interface an extra boost of let’s say… 44 Intel vPro Xenon cores, a terabyte of RAM, multiple 12Gb GPU’s, or whatever else you want to throw at it.

The Wacom MobileStudio Pro is truely the most professional quality tablet computer on the market today.

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