Editing The Pen Addict 103/transcript (section)

== Top Five Pens List ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yep. Yep. One thing I try to do more than at least once a year is update my top five pins list. And it's been on the radar for a couple months now. And I finally got it mostly done. So, a bunch of people have been emailing me asking when my next update is going to be. And I'm hoping to post it Wednesday, if not Wednesday, Friday. So, it'll definitely be this week. But I just wanted to mention that to see if anyone had any top fives that I don't currently have listed. I don't want to mention any additions. Like, the last time I added fountain pen inks. And this time, someone wanted me, a few people wanted me to make a specific blue-black fountain pen ink. Since that's the ink color I use most. So, I'm adding in a top five blue-black inks list. And I'm adding in a top five multi-pens list. For some reason, I didn't have that on there. And I've had several people ask me for that. So, if anyone has any ideas or things they want to see on the top five list that I don't already do, let me know. But let me know soon because I'm working on it and I'm going to publish it this week for sure.

'''Myke Hurley:''' What about a sort of non-writing pen pens? So, like, highlighters, markers, brush pens.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' That's a good idea.

'''Myke Hurley:''' So, like, not gel ink, not rollable, not ballpoint, not fountain pen. That type of idea. I don't think you could have a list for all of the things. But maybe just, like, these are some pens that I really like that are none of the above.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yep.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Because I would like to see that, you know.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I like that because I do have a favorite highlighter. And I do have a couple of favorite brush-type pens. So, that aren't listed anywhere on that page. That's a good idea. Cool. So, let's say something like a non-standard pens or something.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Like a non-writing? I don't know. Like, not. I don't know what you'd call it because I guess all pens are writing. Yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Like, I couldn't have a full top five highlighter list or full top five brush pen list. Yeah.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I don't think anybody would necessarily need that anyway.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Nope. I know, right? Brush pens I could see. But I'm not an artist. And, you know, I use them to write with. So, I like the ones that are very specific, leaned more towards writing. But you could – someone could – some artist could definitely have a top five brush pens. But not me. Anything else you can think of? I think I've got it pretty well on lockdown.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I'm going to assume you're not ready for pencils.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' No. I thought about it this time, but not yet. I think I – right now, I think I have like a top two.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Right.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So, even though I've reviewed a couple more than that, there's two that I'm very confident in that I like better than anything else. But I need to give – I have a handful more I'm going to review before I do that. So, I will work on that maybe for the next update. But I think that's definitely on the radar.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So, I don't want to give too much away tomorrow or for whenever I post it. But I think there's not huge changes, but there's some good changes. And when I – it's been like six months since I've updated. I usually like to update it about every three. So, there's actually quite a bit of change in this one. So, we'll see. So, if anyone else has any suggestions, ideas for that, get in touch and we'll see what I can do.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Whenever you do this, this is one of those things where I both want to and do not want to read. Because I know that if you've got updates to the top five, then there's potentially going to be something expensive happening in my future.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. It's the let's yell at Brad list update.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah. Well, a lot of lists. Basically, a lot of the stuff you write is yell-worthy in a good way.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yep. Yep. But I've been happy, though, doing this top five since I've had like the top – just like the top overall pens like across all categories. People will go out and buy like all five of them or something or at least four out of the five because one of them is a fountain pen, the TWSBI 580. But the other four probably would cost you about $10 or $12 total. So people have been going out and buying all those and going, you know, telling, you know, thank you very much. This is great. I didn't realize, you know, there are things like this out there. I see why these pens are good, better than what I was using. So that makes me feel good. I'm at least able to help out a little bit like that for people that are trying to discover some new writing instruments. We've got a loaded up episode here today. I mean, doing it a little bit different than our normal format. So let's go ahead and talk about the pen blog of the week, and then we're going to get into listener tweets, which I put a call out last night, I think it was, yesterday afternoon. Because we just recorded last Thursday, and between last Thursday and today, I've worked like constantly. I haven't had time to put together necessarily segments for an episode. So I like to hear from the listeners and what they want to hear us talk about, and it jars my memory on some other topics that I've forgotten about. And just to answer some very specific questions that people have. So we're going to do that today. But real quick, the pen blog of the week is Kronikos Esteliographicos. How did I do?

'''Myke Hurley:''' I think that sounded pretty good to me. Yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So this is a website, if you're a reader of my blog, which I'm assuming you are, and a fan of my ink links, that you will see Mr. Bruno Tout's Kronikos Esteliographicos blog all throughout my blog. This is one of my favorite pen blogs ever. Because he focuses a lot on the Japanese pen market, a lot of the new pens, but a lot of the old pens, where I've been able to learn about the history of some of the favorite pens that I like. He's doing a whole series on the Pilot Vanishing Point and its origins. He's always talking about Sailor and Platinum, how some of their pen models came to be. So it's not necessarily a review site, but it's more of a historical look at a lot of these pens, how their design came to be, how they did in the market, why they're not on the market anymore. He's got some really rare and unique items on here. And if for some reason you've missed out on this blog, it's a must-add. This is one of my singular favorite blogs to read whenever Bruno makes a new post. It's usually the first one I go to because it really speaks to me in the things that I like. So it's always a good learning experience. And I've referenced it a lot. He's had some good reference posts that I've referred other people to to try to get answers about, I don't know, vanishing point nib units or some strange things like that. But it's very good. He's been very helpful over the years answering questions for me. So y'all should definitely check it out.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Good stuff. Good pick.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. Very good. Very good. All right. You want to dive into it?

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yes. Now, this is one of those things like these days. It used to be like when I'd see you say, oh, you know, we've got a, we want to do an episode on with your questions or whatever. I used to retweet the person, but I didn't do that anymore because it's that you get so many responses. It's kind of not worth it.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. So I've got like what? Four pages, four pages of tweets in here.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I kind of looked at the tweet. I was like, I wonder how many. And I saw like the number. I was like, I'm not going to do this. Brad can collect these because otherwise I'll just be doing it all day.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yep. Yep. So what I wanted to do is I copied pretty much everything that I saw. And if I miss you, I apologize. It was not on purpose. I might have just overlooked it. But there's some that are definitely worth answering and having a discussion about. There's some of these that are really good that I want to elaborate that I might push off into like a bigger topic in a future episode, if that makes sense. There were a couple of them that grabbed me that is like, you know, I want to expand on that more than, you know, the minute or two that I'm talking about most of these. But let's get into it. The first one, and I don't have a lot of experience with this, so I'm actually calling on the listeners for this. It's from Mina. She says, hi, can you recommend any pens for someone who has arthritis in their hands? And she, since I don't have a lot of experience with this, the only thing I can think of that's really made, what you're looking for in an ergonomic style pen is a wider barrel and a softer grip. Now, not having arthritis, I can't really speak to how that actually works in reality. But the theory is that you'll have the wider grip, so it's more comfortable, and a softer grip, so it's more comfortable to help alleviate some of that pain. So something like the Pilot Doctor grip is a good pen to look at. Also, any of the Uniball Alpha gel grip pens, they're a large barrel with an extra soft grip, and those are something that I would look at. So if anyone has any more specifics around this topic, shoot me an email or a tweet, and I will forward it on to Mina to see, to give some other ideas. But those are my suggestions right out the gate.