Editing The Pen Addict 235/transcript (section)

== Kickstarter Pens ==


'''Myke Dudek:''' Oh, yeah, you bet, man. Yeah. So anyway, like totally Kickstarter seems to be in kind of a peak right now. Like, I don't know, with with pens, like it there's it seems like it goes in these ebbs and flows. But like right now, it just seems that like Kickstarter pens are like all over the place at, you know. So anyway, I don't know with Kickstarter. It's really interesting. Maybe before heading into what this pen is. I don't know, kind of thinking about like maybe maybe referencing a couple like another Kickstarter pen. And this is not definitely to like throw a throw a pen under the bus or anything like that. But I'm good. You let me. That's my gig. You don't have to do that. Just tell me to do it. And then we're good. Yeah, it's well, it's there. There are times and instances where, you know, hopefully the Kickstarter project works out. And there are times when it doesn't really work out super well, or maybe as it goes to plan, you know, you know, being a Kickstarter guy, like, right, sometimes delays can happen. Or, you know, unfortunately, with some of them, like they just sort of disappear, or they go completely dark forever. Well, this pen is is one of those. So I like just to preface, like, I just got this pen in the mail, about two weeks ago. And I but I backed the project in I think it was June of 2014. So we're talking, you know, Well, no, no, no, no, no, no, I see estimated deliveries. Oh, yeah. June 2014. Oh, that's true. This thing launched. So it might have been like January or something like that. Like, literally, literally crazy, right? So this pen is called the Na. It's like N a but the a has a little sort of circle over it. It's a Norwegian maker. And what it is, is it's this really wild, like bolt action is kind of what I would call it. But it's like a two sided bolt action. So it has in the middle, this little lever type thing that goes in the middle spring loaded on both sides and one side opens, you push it, it opens and it extends a Fisher space pen. And then the other side extends a stylus tip. So it's this kind of like back and forth, like analog digital, like, we all know what we think about stylus pens, right? Like, I mean, they're usually pretty, pretty much worthless. And I honestly, I don't really think that I'm going to probably use the stylus pen on this. But I just thought the design of it was so interesting that I'm like, yeah, I'll throw throw a couple bucks at it. But so anyway, so like, this pen, you know, I backed it probably literally, we're going on, you know, two over pushing three years, almost three years on this pen. And, you know, initially, things seem to be humming, things seem to be going good. The maker, though, like, you know, I don't know, again, this is where it's like, you don't really want to throw like Kickstarter projects necessarily under the bus. Because like, there's lots of lots of things that happen. And, you know, I'll call out the Apollo pen, you know, as another one that had a lot of hype and maybe a lot of excitement around it. And then things just really, really went south. Well, with this one, the creator of it, you know, things, he was kind of given some updates randomly, randomly, you know, things are okay, things are in production, you know, and then like, literally, it would go dark for like six months at a time. And so if you ever go look at the comments, it's usually not a very pretty place at that point, you know, but, you know, this guy, like, I have to give him some serious props and some serious credit. Because I mean, I don't think the project's not even that big. You know, I mean, it's like, from a Kickstarter pen standpoint, you know, 32,000 bucks was what he backed or what you know, what the pledges got to him.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Right.

'''Myke Dudek:''' And, you know, three years later, if you're running into that type of delay, or that type of manufacturing issues, or shipping issues, or whatever it is, like, this would be something I would think very reasonably, somebody could just walk away from, you know,

'''Brad Dowdy:''' You know, you got, at some point, you're throwing operation shutdown on this thing.

'''Myke Dudek:''' Oh, yeah, yeah. And so like, I, like, this is one of those instances where I'm like, okay, like a year in two years in whatever I'm like, I will, I'm not really holding on, you know, I'm not losing sleep over this thing, coming to me or not. And so but sure enough, like, you know, the thing shows up literally in the mail. And I'm like, what the heck is this, you know, and then I pull it out. And I'm like, holy crap, like, the dude, like, he just went for it, you know, and I don't know if he had to put a bunch of his own money into it, or whatever. But it's just like, for all this, all the grief and the comments, and like, just, it could be so easy for someone just to bail on this. But, you know, I give the guy some serious props and commendation to just like, sticking through it, you know, nearly three years in. But anyway, yeah, super, super weird, super random. But I just thought it was such a clever design, that I knew, like, I just got to back one of these. And so are the springs exposed? Is that what I'm looking at in this picture? Yeah, so like, you can see inside, like the bolt mechanism. So there's these big long springs in there. And then inside are these like, brass tubes, you know, that hook into it. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Like, what I'll do is I'll, I'll, I'll try and commit to putting a video together for a review on the clicky post. Just just to kind of get get some more I, if you are in love with this pen, after seeing it, I would say, like, just go take a cold shower. Because like, there is a strong likelihood that this is not going to ever come into production. So anyway, it's just it's one of those weird oddities of Kickstarter that ended up sort of coming about.