QTMarx

I’ve had a few days now to think about Taral’s passing. It’s still kind of hard to make it real. Not for the reason you’d expect—that he was always around and now he’s gone—but essentially the opposite. I saw so little of him in the past several years that his being gone is still pretty much just a conceptual thing. I guess that’s just how it’s going to be for me. It’s not that it doesn’t sadden me. It sure does. ‘Unique’ is an overused word… it needs to be held in reserve for moments like this. Taral really was unique in my experience. He really wasn’t like anyone else I’ve ever known. That the option to tap him here on FurAffinity, ask if he’s available on an upcoming Saturday and get myself down to Parkdale is now gone forever is finally really beginning to settle in. That comfortable forever-mañana, no longer a tomorrow, has become the forever-yesterday. I wish now that I’d availed myself of it at least a little more often. So why didn’t I? I had a long absence from

I've never liked the remote controller that came with the Cintiq Pro 24 I got last year. It never acted like part of the tablet, unlike the ones built into my old Cintiq 24 HDT. You have to turn it on separately even when it's USB connected; it shuts itself off if you don't use it frequently enough (and you can't turn that off or change the latency period), and I was forever forgetting what function I'd paired to which button. Essentially the only use I had for it was varying my brush size. Well, I've been looking on and off for a replacement for it and I finally found one, the Xencelabs Quick Keys. (One-minute video the company made introducing it: (https://youtu.be/6LUAa_ZXT_E).) This thing is really impressive. You can either use the Bluetooth dongle with it, or connect it by USB—where it will turn on with either the computer, or the Cintiq if it's plugged into that. It has a dial with a button in the middle that can be set to four different uses (I'll be mainly using it

About four years ago now, I managed to get up and running on a second-hand Cintiq 24 Touch. I, and a couple of friends of mine, have noticed a marked uptick in the quality of what I've been producing since then. Having this kind of space to work and create in really has improved what I do. A little background, if you'll indulge me. I started drawing and working digitally in a half-serious way around 2010, when I found a guy locally who was reselling refurb Toshiba M400s. These were little laptops with a pressure-sensitive capacitive screen you could draw on with a hideaway pen. PaintTool SAI was making the rounds and I got a hold of it and started. But something I felt I really wanted was the ability to zoom, pan, and rotate with finger gestures, and the M400s were not touchscreens. Enter the ASUS EP121. This was a tablet computer with a Bluetooth keyboard (which had a terrible propensity to disconnect from the computer). This computer also had a pressure-sensitive hideaway pen you