Editing The Pen Addict 521/transcript (section)

== Field Notes Discussion ==


'''Brad:''' Yeah. So yeah, you're pretty much right. Like excluding the Great Lakes piece out of it for a second. I always try to look at like the technical aspects of it, right? Yeah. And the cover and the paper and the add-ons and the extras.

'''Myke:''' With the cover printing. I don't know how they're doing it. And it's incredible. So the cover.

'''Brad:''' It's a huge highlight.

'''Myke:''' Is, what do they call it? It is Cobalt Tech Weave Cover Stock. And it basically, it makes these little triangles on the cover.

'''Brad:''' Yeah.

'''Myke:''' Isometric. And it looks like they have found a way. I mean, I have no idea if this is actually the case and you get it, but it looks like it. That it inspired their design and they have filled in the triangles on the cover. I don't know if it's actually going to be like that when you get one. Yeah.

'''Brad:''' It's not like a match. Like it's an overlay and they complement each other. Yeah. I think it's really cool. It's not an exact match.

'''Myke:''' And I bet these will feel great in the hand with the texture on the cover. And I like, they've got like the little pullout map tells you a little bit about each lake. Yeah. But it's just one of those things where it's like, this means nothing to me. Right. At all. Like I get no, like, you know, it's not like national crop, right? I could feel something there. Sure. I can, you know, I like crops as much as the next guy. You know what I mean? But this is like, it's, I don't even, I didn't even know there were five Great Lakes. You know what I'm saying? Right, right, right. It just doesn't, it doesn't mean to me.

'''Brad:''' Yeah. We have to do the whole thing like in elementary school where we have to like color the Great Lakes and know all the names and all that stuff. So this is an addition that I imagine has been in their pocket for 10 years, right? Like it's, this is literally in their town. They're off of Lake Michigan. And it was obvious, like anytime people would guess, I guess the next edition, Great Lakes, right? It's, it was going to happen. There's more pressure on doing the easy thing sometimes. Yeah. Because you know you can't screw it up. Yeah. And they didn't. Like the color's beautiful. The print is beautiful. I like, like you pointed out, it's a five pack. Yeah. But the subscribers, they always, subscribers in general, it's a two, three pack thing. I don't even know if they've changed the terminology on that because they kind of mix and match. So they have created like a, the six notebook is the subscriber only notebook. Like, I don't know. It's just like an all around like top tier field notes edition. Like again, field notes doing what they do best and doing it really exceptionally well. So it's interesting. Every time I see them, Myke, every time I see like the field notes release, like I'm not using any right now. I always get a bug to like, okay, I should just throw one in my pocket as I'm walking around the house. Right. I work from home. So like, I'm not out and about. I don't need like a pocket notebook to go from the living room to the desk, you know, but I kind of miss like, like thinking about having those notes like available. I know I wouldn't use it. I would use like two pages and I'd be like, yeah, I'm just going to leave this on my desk and go to my desk when I use it. Do you ever have those types of thoughts for like, let me ask you this. Like if you're traveling from home to work, do you ever have the urge to take out a notebook or you're just, you know, maybe typing things on your phone or taking a break, you know, listening to music, podcasts, whatever. It goes on my phone. Yeah. Yeah.

'''Myke:''' Notes, like handwritten notes. They are a stationary on the desk, like not moving on the desk, not stationary, stationary. Right. It's a stationary, stationary activity. Right. Right. Right. That, that, that, cause that's when I'm going to, when I'm going to do that kind of stuff. If I'm out and about like this idea capture in my notes app or my to-do app or whatever, you know?

'''Brad:''' Yeah. I think we've talked about this, like for the entire existence of the podcast, like capturing things and like this always, like I always get kind of the, kind of the bug to just, you know, shove one in my pocket and then I'll go the entire day. And I was like, yeah, that was in my pocket the entire day and I didn't use it. So I don't know. I think about it a lot and never action on it. So who knows? I thought about something else recently that I did action on Myke. I went through my personal Black Wings volume subscription, you know, related to the field notes. Like I don't have a field note subscription or a Black Wings subscription, but I've had both of them since the beginning and I had all these Black Wings pencils just sitting there, Myke. So you know what I did? I went through, I, reviewed, you know, mentally reviewed, which sets were my favorite out of all of these Black Wing pencils. And I kept three volumes and you know what? I've decided to sell the rest. So it was a big audit of my pencil collection. And you know what? If I wasn't going to use them, they just need to be sold and go to someone else who might use them. So yeah. So what do you, what do you think about this whole madness that I'm actually using eBay for? Which is, that's a whole another topic we can, we can approach as we go through this.

'''Myke:''' I mean, eBay is fine if you know how to use it. And I think this is good. I've done this a bunch of times with Field Notes. We've put Field Notes notebooks on eBay a bunch of times to clear out some of my collection. I think I might do it again because I've been holding on to some, but I don't need to. Actually, I think, I think the ones I have now, like in my kind of, in the drawer where keep this stuff, they've all been opened. So we probably wouldn't do that because that's just like a whole other kettle of fish. But I think this is a great thing to do. I mean, looking at the page, I am really surprised about some of the prices that, that you've gotten to. Like there's one volume 211. It's up to $157 in bits. That's, that's really expensive. Yeah.

'''Brad:''' And it's only, yeah. And it's only eight pencils, right? Like it's not even like the whole dozen. So it's eight pencils. Yeah. That was one of the rare additions. Okay. I mean, there's a bunch like from the beginning. It's just like, you know, in the beginning of Field Notes, there's just less availability of these products, right? Because, you know, people weren't, you know, really ahead of the game necessarily. Not that I was trying to be ahead of the game or at all. Not that I buy these to sell them, which we'll talk about that in a minute. It's just like, yeah, I like Black Wings. I'm going to do the subscription. And it turns out like, okay, well, there's four pencils missing out of here. So I've used something from it, right?

'''Myke:''' I think that's actually really nice that you can, you can do this. Yeah.

'''Brad:''' Yeah. But it was just, I was, every time I'd go into the closet of Doom, which is what I refer to is like my big stationary stash closet. Like I just see all these boxes sitting here and I was like, you know what? Like they're going to come out with a new one that I enjoy using, or I can pick one of my old favorites that I love. So I kept three volume editions. I kept the two baseball editions, which was 56 and 42. And I kept the exquisite corpse edition, which is 54, the pink one, which I think is good. And they, they just are all really, really cool. So like I have dozens of Black Wings still. So there was, I didn't need to keep all these and I chose to do it on eBay. To be quite honest, I didn't know how to price them. Right. So like, this is just a good place. I just threw them all up there. 99 cent bid go. And whatever they sell for, they sell for, I really don't care. Right. So it was just an interesting thing to get back on eBay. I haven't sold anything on eBay in, I don't know how long. It's been quite a long time. You were making fun of my account name. Yeah. Not just you, but a lot of people.

'''Brad:''' This account is from 1998. It's a very, very old eBay account, older than maybe some of the listeners of this podcast. And I just wasn't compelled to change the name at all. It's an old Bell and Sebastian song. I used to use, this is Listen Up Kids. This is back before streaming services and you had to buy music. So I would buy import music off of eBay was how I would get a lot of my music because I'm a huge, big music fan, as a lot of y'all know. So that's how you could get the cool stuff. We're talking CDs? Yeah. Cassettes. Singles, Myke. Limited ca-singles. Yep. And CDs.

'''Myke:''' Surely you weren't buying cassettes in 2009 or whatever.

'''Brad:''' I would buy, I had a bunch of singles that I did buy, but no, mostly I would buy CD singles as well. But yeah. So yeah, that's the name of the account. And I just really don't use eBay enough to care about changing it. Right. Like it's a 24-year-old account that has 149 like ratings on it. So you can tell like it's, I'm not hanging out on eBay very much. I have bought pins from eBay before. I just can't believe that you've had an eBay account for 24 years.

'''Myke:''' That just doesn't seem, it just doesn't seem possible. Right?

'''Brad:''' Yeah. Yeah. My math's right. Yeah. 98. Yeah. That's right. Right. So my eBay anniversary is coming up next month. It'll be 25 years. No, it'll be 24 years next month. Unbelievable. Crazy. So yeah. Pencils, they're there. If you are like a super Blackwing collector or missed out like a favorite edition, I've got 21 listings. I think there's some duplicates on there. So there's three, six, five, four. So I think 17 unique volumes are listed on here. So yeah. Check it out. It's just a fun thing. It'll close next week before the show, which I didn't even think about that. Didn't plan on that. But we'll audit some of the pricing afterwards. But yeah, there's some over $100 bids on three different ones right now.

'''Myke:''' So you can look forward to next week's episode. We marvel in Brad's riches.

'''Brad:''' Nah. Like I said, I don't even care. Like whatever they go for, they go for it. And just, you know, whatever. And then I'm going to do some more stuff. You know, I've got a bunch of Retro 51 stuff that I'm going to put up there eventually. I'm actually going to do some of that.

'''Myke:''' I might do that. Charity related.

'''Brad:''' Like I get all their Christmas editions. They send me all the Christmas ones. Well, I don't want to sell those.

'''Myke:''' I don't have the tubes though. Do you still have the tubes? Yeah. See, I don't keep that stuff.

'''Brad:''' Yeah. Yeah. So like I'm thinking about doing like charity ones. Like this is before St. Jude's. We're going to do a bunch of stuff for St. Jude's. I got cooking already.

'''Myke:''' You know we're going to go all out again in September.

'''Brad:''' But like, yeah, I'll have some. I have like all the Christmas editions. And it's super nice that they send me that. But like they're just sitting there. So like I don't sell things that I didn't pay for myself. Right. So like I can put them on eBay and donate like 100% of that to charity kind of thing. So we'll do that kind of stuff later.