I recently purchased a Wacom Intuos 3 6×8 tablet. It was probably a bit overkill for my art-skill level. I am loving it though. It was worth every penny, compared to the benefits I’d get from say, a new video card. Here is one of the drawings I’ve made with it. I’m getting better at drawing through owning it. It does take some getting used to, however. I like using it with pictionary games like isketch especially.
One thing I’m hoping to use it for is game design, I’d like to draw some of the art for a game I create using it. I have to get further along in a game first, but it would certainly be useful if I did. For some reason, I don’t really like flash compared to java for game development, and I’m looking at what I need to know to program a java2d game.

There are a lot of java books on game design. Killer game programming in java isn’t that bad, but it maybe focuses too much on java3d than I’d like or need. I should probably look for something a little more focused on the latest java2d. I wish wikibooks was a little more professional and complete. I think the incentive to add information to wikibooks is less than for wikipedia, which explains why it has a tendency to suck. Knowledge seems like something that’d be good to keep free. I was trying to learn ruby on rails the other day, and I feel like a lot of that community basically forces you to buy the pragmatic programming books. I guess I understand, it is a pretty good book, but the thing is, there are all these people spending so much time working on open sources libraries for interfaces in ruby, you’d think someone would have the time to write an open source book.

I just updated my old random generator. It now has a bit cleaner interface, and generates numbers as well as roleplaying names, first person shooter names, and some more silly generators as well.