In the epic conclusion to my lackluster announcement around a month ago, my drawing tablet is actually dead now. Me and my uncle got some soldering paste since the solder and iron tips he had were too big for those little port pins, and just earlier tonight we tried using that to solder a new port in place. It worked great and honestly if you ever need to solder something, getting soldering paste is the easy way to go as long as you have a heat gun, but in my tablet's case it just worked too good.

We soldered the pins first, and that was simply just slapping some paste on the trace and mount points where the board is supposed to connect to a port, settling the port down into position, and then hitting it with heat from below until the solder paste burned off it's flux and melted into nice and neat little beads that did all the work of connecting the pins to the trace with no cross-pin bridging. Once it had cooled down however, we started fucking around with it before applying more solder to securely anchor it to the mounting points, and when my uncle tried to plug the cord into the port it just snapped off, which I really can't blame him for because it had looked so stable and well moored that we both thought it was fine. At first we both thought that it had ripped the pins off the port until my uncle noticed that the port still had it's pins and I looked at the board with my nearsighted gremlin eyes and noticed that the trace circuitry for the three middle pins was just completely gone. In case this has all been confusing misuse of terms I don't understand very well, this is essentially like trying to dock a boat, tying all the knots right, and then watching as the boat gets hit by a wave and rips 60% of the dock off it's little dock pole support things as the whole mess drifts further out to sea and sinks.

If this kind of thing happened in a factory for just about any electronic, they would just scrap the board for parts. Trying to fix it at this point would be nigh impossible with my current resources and even with the tools, materials, and understanding to fix it, it wouldn't be worth it since it's just a $50 drawing tablet I got mildly sentimental for.

I should have a new one of the same model by the end of the week, and then I can once again curse the world with my lackluster artwork in digital form. I can do traditional style, I just prefer digital because of all the tricks and shortcuts it offers, that and the fact that I'm a recluse that can't get the nerve to draw traditional around other people because it's so much harder for me to hide how terrible my stuff is.

I should have mentioned earlier that my drawing tablet kicked the bucket, it was a cheap little Huion tablet and the USB mini B port on it broke. I've been screwing around trying to see if I can solder a new port in it's place and so far there have been issues with the type of solder I have melting at too high of a heat to flow easy instead of bridging contacts, points being to carboned/oxidized to have solder stick to them, and the replacement ports i bought being flat mount when the original was a through mount (and therefore half impossible to position on the board). There's some solder paste coming in the mail that melts lower and has mixed in flux so it should just be a matter of putting a little paste on the board, sticking a new port on it, and getting it hot enough for the flux to burn off while the solder melts and sticks to contacts. If i still can't get the old tablet to function, I'll just have to cave and buy a new one; either way I'm going to look into getting some magnetic breakaway connectors so that the cable will just disconnect instead of breaking a port if it gets tugged or pushed too far, i was really careful with my tablet so I don't think that's what happened to it, but the cable breaks aren't that expensive and not being able to draw digitally has been driving me up the fucking wall.

In other news, I'm further compounding my overcomplicated dead end of a lore universe by designing another race of sentient creatures that just exist there. That's right, Dumbass McParagraphreply has two weird OC races to sit in the corner with now, and I plan on slowly designing a whole universe ecosystem with even more weird things. Faelins are mercury based lifeforms that you've probably seen in my lackluster art, now there's another race you're going to see start cropping up that's copper based and works differently from those mercury weirdos. So far, these copper monsters look more like mammals, with cult classics like "shitty hellhound" and "what an opossum looks like when you're having a bad trip on some pills some guy gave you at a gas station". My working name for the species is "Cyufelk" and I plan on designing another form that's flight capable, but I don't want it to look boring so I have no idea when it will be a thing because I have to wait for good inspiration.

Lastly, until my tablet situation is resolved, I'm going to be doing stuff in traditional format when I can, which doesn't look as good and takes longer because I'm trash at art and less practiced with paper. I have a new thing that should show up as soon as I get good internet access though, so I guess there's that.