1616 Only When She’s Drunk.

Jo sometimes can’t help herself.
We haven’t had cats in the house since Claws died. I always sort of liked when he would do the kneading thing on me, even though he got too into it sometimes and would claw me a little. It’s weirdly calming. Apparently for both parties. Claws did it a lot more than is usual apparently. He was from a very inbred family of cats but he lived a really long time. His sister Snooks, who we had at the same time, died much earlier than him. She was kitten sized her whole life. He was a little big for a cat. Not like the feral ones that live around here. they’re mostly smaller. Regular cat sized except for a few who get pretty big.

Okay, so I got StarCraft running on the surface with a little help. The only way I can play it for more than a few minutes is if there is a fan blowing directly across the back of the surface. It just doesn’t have the ability to cool itself well enough apparently. I got it used, which is how I afforded it in the first place, and there were signs that it had overheated to the point of total failure before it was refurbished. There was some sort of scorching near some of the exhaust ports. I assume that’s why it was originally returned. I don’t know what the previous owner was trying to do, but it must have been impressive, and beyond the capabilities of the system. I’ve never had a problem with it overheating unless I use tumblr, or Deviantart. Apart from those it can run a lot of things at once seemingly with no effort. It can run starcraft easily too, you just have to put the fan near it. It’s not like I intedn to sit around playing it all the time anyway. I just like to play a round occasionally for whatever reason. It wasn’t designed with a touch screen in mind so I have to stick on the keys and use the wireless mouse I have for various other programs.

My actual PC can only barely run starcraft 2. It was the first system I had that could actually play a PC game that new the day it came out. At the time the system was new and designed specifically for my art programs. Photoshop used to really strain my systems, of course now I use Manga Studio and it barely requires any resources at all in comparison. Photoshop priced me out of its market. Once CS1 stoped working reliably I had no other options. Manga Studio was something like $50 when I got the older version compared to $700 and up for PS at the time. They do a subscription service now that really annoys me, so I’m glad someone came along that could do what I needed so much cheaper. Although I do miss the little script thingy I had for shading. That really made it harder to do that again. If there’s a way to do it in Managa Studio nobody I’ve asked knows it.

My old drawscreen still works, but it doesn’t have certain features that the surface does, like touch controls. It’s amazing how much just being able to zoom in with your fingers improves things. Of course the Surface is much more floaty when you draw on it. Even with a scratch protector it glides a lot more than on a Wacom. The controls aren’t as precise either. Well, they weren’t before they dropped support for my ancient one. Now it’s much less precise than the surface and the control setting interface doesn’t work. It stopped working properly with 7 and windows ten essentially killed it. Wacom no longer supports my version either. even the legacy drivers won’t work properly. In fact I researched my exact model a while back and apparently it was mostly sold in Asia. I’ve tried to use the corresponding drivers from the Asian language version of the site, but they don’t change anything, although there were two or three versions you could try in addition to the English ones at the time. Windows tries to make it work with their drivers automatically and they sort of do, but I’m pretty sure it thinks it’s supposed to be a touch screen and I can’t convince it otherwise.

Honestly I miss using it sometimes because it had a really good swing arm that I could rest my hand on to stabilize it. The surface can’t be mounted on it unless I were to make some kind of holder for it. I’ve looked for a dock for it but if there ios one out there I haven’t found it yet.

When I upgraded the PC to windows 10 it also forgot how to have two screens at the same time. One day the bigger screen just turned off and wouldn’t turn back on. Never could figure it out. It was a real shame too because it was way bigger than the surfaces screen and I liked looking at the internet with it. I never had time to try and fix it what with getting sick and everything. Maybe one of these days I’ll get it back out and try again.