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Despite having the artistic talent of a rock (and that’s being generous), I wheedled my parents into buying me a Bamboo Fun tablet when I was in ninth grade, young, naive, and full of the belief that I was actually capable of drawing a straight line across a canvas. My delusions of artistic grandeur ended pretty quickly, but as I progressed through high school, I found other uses for my tablet as I became more and more involved in the school’s literary and arts magazine, which was put together entirely in Photoshop and InDesign. For those unfamiliar with tablets, or for those who are thinking of the even more modern versions that are essentially mini touchscreen computers, I’m talking about a device that, when hooked up to your computer, transmits what you draw on the “canvas” to the screen. Though it takes some time to get used to, it essentially lets you control your entire computer as if you were using a pen on a piece of paper. Given that I obviously can’t draw worth beans, this kind of tool hardly seems up my alley, but even after having left graphic design, I’ve found that tablets allow for a more interactive approach to laptop computing, allowing me to do things like handwrite notes on a blank Photoshop page or even just bypass having to scroll around with a mouse when I can instead use the pen to drag the screen around. When I was working on the litmag, I found myself bringing my personal tablet to school most days so that I could have a more tactile, precise experience with everything from formatting artwork to tricky text alignments. Obviously, the tablet’s real audience is still digital artists, but it’s still something I enjoy using.