Editing The Pen Addict 434/transcript (section)

== Notes Presentation ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yes. Yeah, very tired. So let's dig into the notes today and see if we can get me on track. And the first one is a really cool project done by my friends Kat Palmisano and Michael Harris. So y'all know Kat from the Bent Tines podcast. Y'all know Michael Harris from the Temp Track. Or what you really know them both from is the Slack channel. So they approached me, I don't know, a month or two ago. And they had been talking about, hey, could we just, there's a lot of interesting people in the pen addict Slack. And we're just kind of curious, you know, could we put together a survey of the pen addict Slack room and just kind of get an idea for our own, you know, discussion purposes. On, you know, what, you know, people's ages and people's backgrounds and people's collection size, lots of things. And the results are in. Number one, however they built the results PDF, we'll have this linked in the show. It's fantastic, right? I think they did an awesome job.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I do have a couple of criticisms over the presentation, but overall, it's beautiful.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' It reminds me of one of those infographics, right? One of those cool infographics pages. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

'''Myke Hurley:''' This is good for like, it's got that look to it for sure.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, yeah. So, and then Michael has an addendum video where he walks through and provides a lot of context to, okay, we understand, you know, we're essentially shooting fish in a barrel, right? In the pen addict Slack room, there's going to be leans to certain things. It's like, you know, Myke, when you go to the furry convention, there's going to be a lot of My Little Pony merchandise there. There just is, right? That's the way it's going to be. So, a lot of it's going to be biased in the directions of the people that are in the room. So, Michael does a good job with that context in going through this. So, I don't want to go through the entire thing, but I have a few points I wanted to break up and point out specifically. Is that okay by you?

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah, let me just say that because I don't want Kat and Michael to be listening to this and thinking about it like I'm going to rip them. The only thing I would like to have seen different on this is in one of the pages, it's called Pen Hobby. It's a bunch of pie charts that are breaking up the answers. I would have liked to have seen trying to see them label these segments with the corresponding answers in text, not just in color. Like one of them, the fountain pen collection one, does have it, but the other ones don't. You see what I'm saying? It's like you have to correspond the color because when you see like time spent on Slack per day, it's not 38% of your time in the day spent on it. You see what I mean? So, that's the one. That is the only thing, which is a super nitpicky thing, but everything else is great. I do have, we can go through this, but I also do have a very serious question for the people who undertook this survey. I wonder if you know what that question is going to be, but we'll get to that, I guess, as we go through some of this.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Okay. So, I think that's good feedback because there will be another one of these. So, they might make this an annual thing. I know they've been talking about it. Because I think it's valuable. Like, this is valuable data.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Well, also, so there was 154 people that undertook it. If they did it again, I guarantee they would get more people. Because that's just how these things go. Yes.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. Once people see what it is, I wouldn't be surprised if it was double that next year easily. Like, I feel like 154 is short.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Well, especially now because we could mention it on the show instead of it just being the Slack if they wanted us to do that. Yes.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' We could broaden the scope of the answers. So, the first one, the question I wanted to point out or discuss was the year collecting began. Yes. Because it is very much a Slack-centric answer in that the bulk, 34, well, the two largest answers were 37% for 2011 to 2015 and 34% for 2016 to present. Like, that fills my heart. Like, that fills my heart. But it's also, that's the group of people that are in this room too, right?

'''Myke Hurley:''' It's the best part of three quarters of people have started their collecting whilst we have been producing the show. Mm-hmm. Which makes sense.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, but I do think you can extrapolate that a little bit outside of our world because those are the customers now to all of the stores and all the retailers and all the vendors and all of the pen shows. And that shows that, you know, there is a more current interest in this hobby has grown and has continued to grow over the past decade.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Which is definitely something we have seen, right? Like, me and you have made many comments on this and that the time that we have been involved in it, and I'm not trying to say that we are related to it by any stretch of the imagination. Oh, yeah. But just over the time that me and Brad have been producing this show and have been really looking at this stuff in more detail together, there has been a shift in makers, small companies, and the purchasers, the collectors, has trended to start to be younger, but also newer. Like, people that are newer to the hobby who haven't been collecting for 30 years or whatever.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Right. Which is beautiful to see. Like, even though I know, like, in context, like, that's who should be answering this question, right? Like, I get that. But to see, like, this past decade of new people coming in and to have played a little role in just kind of the uprising of this community, like you said, the vendors around the community, the makers in this community, the content creators in this community, it's pretty cool. Like, I was very happy to see that. But turning the corner a little bit, the nib preferences chart, I have never had a better answer for this question for my uses than this chart right here because I'm actually surprised at the answer. So, the question is favorite nib size and it's your, and out of the basics, right? Extra fine, fine, medium, broad, double broad. What would you, if you did this, like, what's your favorite nib size? I guess it's probably medium, but that's Japanese, right?

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah, I'd probably say medium. I mean, I really like broader nibs, like broad music stuff, right? I love those. But if I had to, if, you know, someone said to me, you can have, you can choose one. I'm going to go with medium because I know I'm going to get a result that I enjoy in both European and Japanese sizing, which is, I don't know, would necessarily be the same for any other. But like medium, I know I can always be happy with that.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, so maybe that's why medium is not quite an outlier, but it's at 36% of the chart. And that, to be honest, surprised me. I thought it would be fine by an, at least a reversed margin, which fine was 26%, medium was 36%. And I thought it would be fine by a wider margin. And then I thought, honestly, like, maybe not broad, but maybe double broad might have had, double broad at 10%, I think is pretty good. Like, I thought that might even be a little bit bigger because I just find a lot of extremes. And that's my own bias of what I use, right, in nib sizes. So I just thought it was interesting that medium was a pretty decisive vote for there. And I think about this a lot because when I do fountain pen projects, I have to order nib sizes, right? And that's always a challenge. And medium is usually my third or fourth quantity size. It's usually fine, extra fine, stub, like 1.1. And then I get to medium. That's weird. Like if I'm ordering 50 pens. If I'm ordering 50 pens.

'''Myke Hurley:''' See, I'm not surprised by this answer at all, you know.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' The more I think about it, I'm not because like Japanese medium nibs and things like that are really popular, right? It's the same. You can answer medium whether you're a Japanese nib fan or a German nib fan and have a completely different writing experience, right? So anyway, I thought that was cool. And then there's a chart in here, which I don't know that we'll break down further, but it's the more specific grind on the nib, right? This is the group of people that you can ask this to.