Editing The Pen Addict 65/transcript (section)

== The Pen Addict ==


'''Myke Hurley:''' Hello and welcome to The Pen Addict, episode 65 on the lovely 5x5 Network. The Pen Addict is a weekly show where we discuss pens, paper, and the analogue tools that we love so dearly. My name is Myke Hurley and I am joined by a man that, when he gets into bed every night, he has a big sheet of leather pulled over him and a huge elastic band pulled round just to make sure that he is securely held in place. Mr. Brad Dowdy. You lost your mind. You get where I'm going with that. I'm basically saying you sleep inside a mullskin.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yes, I do. Oh my gosh. That could go so many wrong ways. It's not even funny. But I appreciate that, I think. I'm not sure.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I don't even know how you come up with this.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel, folks. Basically, what I do is I just look around me at all of the pens and paper and notebooks. I used them for inspiration and I looked at one of those journalist mullskins, you know, the ones that they flip up.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yep. Well, then somehow that managed to end up in a bedroom type scene, so I'm not sure what your thought process is there.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I just assumed that the only time you would ever need to be closed is when you go and sleep at night.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I guess so. I guess so. I'll let you have that. But yeah, good grief, mate. Well, you guys probably heard – I think I heard another little giggle in the background. We've got a special guest on today, Myke. We have Mr. Ed Jelly with us from edjelly.com. How's it going, Ed? Hey, how's it going? Good to be here. Good, good. We're happy to have you. We're excited. I'm very excited about this show because I'm a big fan of yours and I want to talk a lot about your blog and your reviews and some of your pens and paper. And we're definitely going to get into that. And, you know, like we always do, we've got a little bit of follow-up. So Myke and I are going to go through this. We'll get you to chime in on a few things and we'll just let it roll and go from there. Sound good? Sounds good. I'll be here. All right. So, Myke. So, it caused a bit of a stir last week, which, you know, is to be expected with the Visionaire Kickstarter project. We had a little – kicked up the dust a little bit on that project. And, you know, if everyone – for some reason you're jumping in on this episode without listening to the previous episode, you definitely want to give last episode a listen. I think it actually turned out – I was a little bit nervous about it. I think it turned out better than expected. I don't know about you. I don't know if you got any feedback that I didn't get, Myke. But I got – it caught a lot of emails, tons of tweets and messages for that. And, you know, most people were interested to hear, you know, some of the comparisons I'm making. Some people – I think most of the feedback I got was positive. A little bit – I wouldn't say negative. No one was like, oh, you're completely wrong and you shouldn't be doing this or anything like that. But, you know, I had one or two, like maybe you're taking this a little bit too far thing or you're taking it personal. And I didn't think that was the case at all. I thought it was more of an education, right, for people who were not familiar with this product and kind of what my takeaways were on it. So during last week's episode, I had made contact with Morgan, the project founder of the Visionaire and the designer. I did air quotes there, Myke.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I'm just letting you go. Yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' And to Morgan's credit, he called me on Thursday and I was not available and the call went to voicemail. So I messaged him back and then I messaged him back again and then again and then I sent him another email and said, hey, can you respond to the questions? And since that last Thursday, it's been radio silence. He is not responding to me at all. I've got no answers to my questions. I've got no contact with him whatsoever. And, you know, I think I'm done with it. I mean, I don't care that much. You know, I don't want this to be, you know, CSI, Pentown on this Visionaire project. You know, I just wanted to be, you know, I wanted to leave some, give some people some information because I was getting asked about it so much. That I had to talk about it because it was just like a boulder rolling down the hill and there was no stopping it. So I think I've pretty much said my peace with it last week. Morgan is choosing not to communicate with me anymore and that's fine. He did make the effort to his credit. But he has a very, very short list of emails that I sent him that he could respond to at any time in about five minutes. And he's not taking the time to do so. Ever since he left me a voicemail, I have texted him several times and he has not responded to a single one of my texts. So, I mean, I don't want to spend any more time on this, to be quite honest, unless something crazy happens. It's like, I mean, you know, I think I've said my peace on it. So there you have it on that. So what do you think about that, Myke? Do you have any follow up on the Visionaire? Do you want to talk about it at all? I'll take that as a no.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Well, no, it's not that I don't want to talk about it.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I don't feel like we have a... I don't feel like we have an answer. Yeah. I mean, you can take silence as an answer, right? I mean, and I think that that's perfectly okay to do.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I don't think that, you know... Do you know what I mean? Like, I think you could take that. Easy, you could take that.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Right. And I don't want to be that finite and say, you know, or make it that final and say, well, he didn't respond. So it's clearly no good at all. I don't want to do that. But it's kind of telling. And you know what? It's been that way since the beginning of the project. He's been elusive and evasive, I guess is probably more the proper word. So, Ed, did you ever take a look at this Visionaire pen on Kickstarter? What do you think about that pen?

'''Ed Jelley:''' Yeah, I did. I came across it. I don't even remember where. Like, in the first few days, and I just kind of scrolled through it, there's a lot of fluff going on in the description of it. And, like, the marketing was great. Like, I think if he were selling anything with those, you know, putting in things about his firstborn son's birth certificate and, you know, whatever. But I think, like what you guys were saying last week, he's not entirely sure about fountain pens. It looks an awful lot like a couple of Chinese pens. And the IPG, the Iridium Point Germany nib, is kind of pretty much as generic as they come, which is never a great sign when you're, you know, paying more for something that you could definitely get for cheaper. Right. But, like you guys said, I don't think it's going to be a bad pen. I don't think it's going to, you know, people aren't going to be annoyed when they get it. It's just the uneducated in the pen world are, I think that's really who's buying it. Right, right.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' And I think the money that it's at now, the, I mean, $266,766, I think this guy is going to make an absolute killing on this. I mean, he is just going to, I mean, despite his comments, I am, whew, yeah. I don't see him, this costing him very much to get manufactured. And good on him, like you said and I said. Damn, he's good at marketing. Yeah.