Editing The Pen Addict 375/transcript (section)

== Inkvent Calendar ==


'''Myke Hurley:''' So, that wasn't the only new thing I had to talk about this week. I have to talk about the Diamine Inkvent calendar. Mm-hmm. Did you get a chance to look at this link before the show today?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' No. I don't know why I missed this one. I feel like I looked at everything else except this.

'''Myke Hurley:''' And I'm very intrigued. Right. That's how I was. So, you know, a lot of people are familiar with an Advent calendar around Christmas where you basically have a 25-door envelope portal into one a day, you know, as, you know, throughout the month of December from the 1st to the 25th. And it's supposed to be, you know, I don't, I don't, won't profess to know the whole story why these exist. But, you know, every day, you know, like the kids would always enjoy, like, opening up the door and getting a piece of candy or whatever it is on the lead up to Christmas. And Diamine this year made an Inkvent calendar where you get an ink sample for every day leading up to Christmas for 25 days. So, behind every door on this Inkvent calendar, and we'll have the link in the show notes. I got this one from Cult Pens. They wanted to send this over to me to take a look at it because I was talking to them. They are so excited about this thing. They're like, we have to send you one of these. Do you want one? I'm like, yeah, but I don't know what it is. And they're like, oh, just wait. And it is really, really cool because, Myke, as big of an ink portfolio Diamine has, they've made 25 new inks that are behind each door of this Inkvent calendar, right? So, and they all have, like, Christmas-themed names like Nutcracker and, you know. Jack Frost. Ho, ho, ho. Yeah, Jack Frost is one. Fire Ember. And just on and on and on. So, each one of them has a specific name. So, the small vials, every day is a 7-milliliter vial. So, they're, like, you know, small, like, basically like a double your sample size, you know, whatever, you know, sample vials you get. So, there's definitely enough to play around with. And 25 of those. And the last day is a special 30-milliliter, you know, in the calendar with a bang type of thing. So, yeah, I went through this on Twitch yesterday. We went through all the inks. I didn't sample the colors, but we looked at all the names and everything. And that brings me to my new Twitch stream schedule. I was anxious to get back in September. I had to get through the summer, get through all the travels. And I'm back on Twitch now. And I'll break out this video. Like, I'll be able to go clip just the Diamine Inkvent calendar discussion. I'll throw that over on YouTube. And it's mostly unedited form soon. But every Tuesday, Thursday, I'm going to try. I'm planning on it. It's on my schedule. So, 10 a.m. Eastern till, you know, maybe as late as 2. So, maybe a four-hour stream twice a week. And then maybe a little extra fun time on Sundays. And what I do on Twitch, if you haven't seen one of the streams, is we... I'll generally talk about, like, a stationary topic for the first hour, hour and a half of the stream. And after that, like, the stationary talk just kind of ends. Like, you can't go on and on and on forever about stationary. And then I'll pop in a game. Recently, like, yesterday, I played No Man's Sky, which I love. So, it's usually something like that or Destiny. I'll be playing. But it's really... I'm not playing those games to, like, necessarily talk about the games. We do just to chat. But it's really just an open platform for us to talk about pens, stationary, life, whatever we want to talk about. And it's just kind of my idea of office hours while having a little bit of entertainment going on in the background. So, I'll be working on that going forward. So, that's my ink vent and Twitch discussion that I wanted to have. But this ink vent thing, it's going to go on sale October 1st, I believe. So, check your favorite pen retailer. And thanks to Colt Pens for sending me this to check out. And I bet this vanishes off the sites really quickly. It's not cheap. I think it's around 90 bucks US.

'''Myke Hurley:''' But I was impressed with the thought that went into it. Like, I didn't think I was going to totally get it. You know, like, oh, okay. Like, it's this real kitschy niche, not a big deal thing. But they did a good job with this whole setup. Especially, you know, building new ink colors and names just for this. So, it's great.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' This is a good idea. I think it's fun.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah. And we're going to review all the ink colors on the Pen Addict. So, that's one thing I'm working on. So, I'm going to work with Susan and do, like, an entire... So, her schedule day is Fridays. So, we're trying to figure out how we're going to do it. And when we're going to do it, right? Like, do we do it, wait and do it in December? But then everyone's already bought them and knows what they all are? Or do we do it, like, in October to kind of preview, like, what's coming? Or is that, like, spoiling it? So, we're having those discussions.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Basically, see what happens about the... Like, about how popular they are. Like, if it sells out, then there's no point doing it beforehand because nobody can buy it. So, emails are there and just do it every day.

'''Myke Hurley:''' True. True, true, true. So, we're working on that. But I'm going to send this off to Susan. She does a real good job with the ink reviews. So, and she'll enjoy it. And I'm anxious to see what she does.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Sounds good. Yep. All right, cool. Should we take our final break and then do some hashtag Ask TPA?

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah, I think we can get to some of them. I have one, two, three, four pages of Ask TPA. Yeah, yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' We're going to do a small handful today. And then we've got more for later on. Yep. All right. Our final sponsor of this episode is Eero. Eero is a game changer because it means actually being able to access internet from anywhere in the house. There's always that one room that has the unreliable Wi-Fi connection. And nothing is more irritating than watching your favorite show and just seeing it buffer and buffer and buffer. Eero will blanket your home with fast, reliable Wi-Fi. So, you'll constantly have strong signal wherever you need it. It takes minutes to set up. You just plug it straight into your modem or router box. And you can manage everything from a super simple app which lets you do cool stuff like pausing the Wi-Fi while everybody's eating dinner. And you'll even get alerts if any device tries to join your network during that time which is really useful and kind of funny to me. Eero has fixed all of the Wi-Fi problems that you're going to experience at home. No more dead spots and no more buffering. Mr. Brad Dowdy, tell me something about your Eero setup at home.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Well, I was giggling like the shutting off the Wi-Fi at dinner time. We don't do that. But you can make these rules where at a certain amount, at a certain time of the day, like in a time window, these certain devices don't get access to the internet. I'm like, yeah, I have two kids. This is going to be fantastic. So you can build like these whole rule systems inside Eero and these little buckets to like sort out the devices and restrict the 9 p.m. to 7 a.m. time frame from your teenage daughter from accessing the Wi-Fi. So yeah, not only that, it just blasts the internet through my house which I really need. My normal modem doesn't cover my entire house, but with the Eero plugged in, it's from wall to wall, corner to corner. So yeah, it's perfect.

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'''Myke Hurley:''' I've been holding this first question, Myke, for about a month now. So I want to apologize to Sydney right out the gate. But it was such a cool, short, direct email that I had to read it. So the title of this email I receive in the pen addict email box is just the beginning. And I'm like, okay, where is this going? And what we're going to read is literally the entirety of the email. And it begins, I'm sorry, this isn't formal. I'll improve in the future for now, starting my list of questions. And then Sydney proceeds to machine gun five questions, unrelated, related, whatever. And I find it kind of amazing that this was the thought process behind this. So I love this email. Thank you, Sydney. First one, what do you think about back to school season? I, of course, love it. Um, it's much better as an observer and then a participator. Um, what I mean is I have two kids in eighth grade and sixth grade and shopping for their back to school supplies is paramount to torture. Um, because you're very fixed on what you can and cannot buy. And it's usually a bunch of junk. And it's like, I would be, they would be better served if I just got to pick, like I had a general category of pens and I could buy them pens, but no, we can't have fun on that. So the general idea of back to school season was much more romantic when I was a kid. Like my kids still love picking out all this stuff, but I look at it and going, Hmm, we can do a lot better. So the idea of back to school season, lovely. The process of participating in it, participating in it, not as lovely. What do you think about that, Myke?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Well, I mean, I used to enjoy it very much as a kid. Back to school was awesome because I got to go and buy all of my new, uh, things, right? I have not had to see it from the other side yet.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Right, right. So just, I'll, I'll throw this out there for the collective listenership. Were there any new pens you found at back to school season this year? Because I didn't really see anything interesting.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Well, I don't pay attention to it now in that way.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah, no, I'm just talking about like the listeners who were out there. Like I was in the aisles for back to school season and there was no compelling pens. Like, or have we lost like pen release time being back to school season for like the store brands, um, you know, the things that end up on the store shelves. So that's just a general question. I'd like to explore a little more with the listeners. So give me some feedback on that. Next question. Could you consider doing an episode on binders and accessories? No.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I, I, I say that I'm, I'm being unfair, but there's just not enough to talk about. Like I have this disc bound system. Like that's the bindery and accessories we're playing with these days. From a back to school perspective, I don't think it would be really worthwhile for what this podcast is. Like, I, I think that would just not, there wouldn't be a lot to talk about because you know what the binders that you're getting for back to school time are generally poor in quality. Like it wouldn't be a fun type of thing unless we get into some of the Japanese stuff, which then of course those binders and accessories are rad. So maybe one day, but most likely not. Next question. Why haven't you turned the pen addict logo into a notebook yet? You see, do you like these questions, Myke? This is a really enjoyable list of questions.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I like the, the, uh, attitude.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I love every minute about it. Um, I'm thinking about it. We did one for a Kickstarter campaign that turned out nice. I have an idea for like a really out there notebook of something that I, I don't, uh, wouldn't normally do. And I just haven't pursued it yet. So yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll do something probably sometime with that. Next question. With your opinion on big box stores, what do you think the American stationary market to do to stand out or even get back to its former glory? I think that's kind of what I was talking about, uh, just a second ago without reading this question in advance is that there, there's just, there's no innovation in this market, right? It's just, you know, a race to the bottom for pricing and scale. Like how much, how many cheap products can we sell at once, right? There's no initiative for any retailer or any manufacturer to make specialty goods for the U.S. market based on how the U.S. consumer buys these goods, right? We don't have, we are more spread out in a wider geographic area to where we don't have like the specialty stores in general, like you would find like in big cities like New York, San Francisco, Chicago, you know, those areas can sustain smaller niche stores that other countries have at a greater frequency than the U.S. does. And I don't think we're ever going to get that back. So finally, Sydney, could you do a few posts on the classes available at pen shows?

'''Myke Hurley:''' I don't know.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Well, can you?

'''Myke Hurley:''' I don't do posts. So the question is for you. Technically, I could, but it wouldn't be more than like, I don't get to go to the classes, so I can't review them. But like, I could look at the, like something like the San Francisco pen show class list, which is amazing, but like, I'm not going to be able to say anything that's not like listed on the pen show websites. Like they did a great job detailing every class. Like look at the San Francisco pen show website and see how they describe and go into detail for each class. It's not just like a header, you know, of, you know, whatever the class is going to be. It's like a full detailed description. So until I go to classes myself, I can't review the specific classes. I don't know that I would. I don't know. That would be, I guess it would be beneficial. I could see that, but I don't know how that would work. In the big picture. So I just think that that's, that's actually a great question, but I just don't have that experience. So maybe I need someone who goes to a lot of classes to write like a series of guest posts about attending classes at pen shows. I think that's a pretty good idea.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Woo. Sydney, I hope you listened to this episode. I held your email for way too long. It's at least a month old, but I really wanted to get to it because I love how they put it together. So it's wonderful. Next up, Michael just picked up a sailor pro gear extra fine from Pen Saatchi and it's beautiful. And I was surprised that the EF doesn't seem that much different than my sailor pro gear medium. Do you find this to be the case too? In any case, it's freaking gorgeous. Have you seen what Michael is talking about or have you had any experience with this? Because I can speak on it a little bit, but I want to hear what you say first.