Editing The Pen Addict 323/transcript (section)

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'''Brad Dowdy:''' So, yeah. We'll work on that. We'll see. Soon. Soon. Yeah. I wanted to make one specific note from my good friend, our good friend in front of the podcast, Franz Dimson of the Hand Over That Pen blog. He texted me. So, I wake up at 6 o'clock every weekday. And Franz, as many of you know, is a West Coaster. So, about 6.20, my phone goes off. I was like, that can't be a real text at this hour. And sure enough, it was Franz. So, Franz said, hey, I know you probably won't talk a lot about San Francisco since you weren't there and won't do like a recap, but I did this quick post. I wanted to make sure to give a bunch of people thanks. And if you will read this, you know, on the podcast, I'd super appreciate it. So, he wrote a quick post, not his review of the show, which he said he's got coming later, but we'll have a link in the show notes to his post on the Pay It Forward table and the Pen Dash Mixer. And he wanted to make sure that everyone saw that and everyone that was involved in those things got thanked and got credit for doing such great work at the show. You know, the Pay It Forward table with the helping new people get into the hobby and all the volunteers that helped run it. And then the Pen Dash, which it's not a Pen Dash unless there's a picture of Lisa Van Es standing on a chair because she barely cracks the height of a sitting human being. So, she has to stand on a chair to be seen. And he has a wonderful picture of her in there and a video of all the people that were involved. They had like 120 people this year. And I think last year was the first year we did it. We had about 90 people in two rooms. They expanded all the way out to three rooms. This year, huge, huge success. So, he wanted to make sure everyone that was involved gets a shout out. And I'm not going to read all the names, but he has all the links in the show notes. And I couldn't agree with Franz more that these are the people, and not just the people that are named here, but these are the type of events that makes these Pen Shows worth going to and worth continuing to support, you know, all the extra after-hour stuff and all the volunteer work that goes into it. So, I thought this was a wonderful post. So, go check it out. And, you know, we would, hopefully we can be involved in this in the near future ourselves, Myke.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I would love that. Yep. Yep. All right. Our first sponsor today is our friends over at Blue Apron. Skip meal planning and get straight to cooking with Blue Apron. Experience the joy of summer with mouth-watering grilling options like chicken with barbecue sauce and juicy cheeseburgers with spicy slaw. With chef-designed recipes and ingredients delivered right to your door, Blue Apron makes dinner quick, easy, and insanely tasty. Blue Apron will deliver to you fresh, pre-portioned ingredients with step-by-step recipes, and they will arrive right to your door. Every single meal can be cooked in under 45 minutes, and they offer 12 new recipes every single week. And you can choose two, three, or four recipes based on what fits your schedule. And you can count on Blue Apron for the very best ingredients and meat with no added hormones. The Blue Apron menu changes every week based on what's in season. You can check out their menu for chef-designed recipes with exciting partnerships like with Bob's Burgers and MasterChef. Now just imagine what kind of incredible food you can get there. You can cook recipes like MasterChef seared steak over goat's cheese polenta with jalapenos peach salsa, or crispy cheese quesadillas with poblano pepper and queso blanco. Oh my god. Blue Apron. Man, this is... Look, this food sounds incredible, right? And it's gonna be. It's gonna taste amazing because they only send the best. But the very most valuable thing that you will get out of this is learning to cook. By practice, you learn better knife skills and stuff like that, but you also start to just, over time, with osmosis, learn how long it takes to cook a sweet potato, right? You learn how long you want to be boiling water for pasta. Like, you get all of this stuff that you can then apply to whenever you're standing in the kitchen. Check out this week's menu and get three meals for free at blueapron.com slash penaddict. That's blueapron.com slash penaddict to get your first three meals free. Blue Apron, a better way to cook.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' It's funny you said that about the sweet potatoes because that's legitimately something I learned from the Blue Apron meals that I've cooked because we eat them a lot and that is a difficult thing to cook.

'''Myke Hurley:''' You gotta get just the right time, right? Because otherwise they're too smushy and that's not nice.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' The way they had it with the sweet potato fries, I literally said, there's no way this is gonna work. What they were having me do and it came out perfectly. So yeah, I learned something about sweet potatoes from there. I also learned something, Myke, about elemental paper. So I got these notebooks in a few weeks ago. This is from a Kickstarter project we covered earlier in the year that we were kind of fascinated with. I thought from the jump they did a good job. They got a lot of good hype from the crowd, good hype from Kickstarter just because it was a really neat idea. And you always...

'''Myke Hurley:''' It was interestingly executed. We were... I remember at the time that we were wondering about price and stuff like that because it was a brand new thing and the prices were premium priced for a lot of their stuff. So it was just a really interesting project overall from a marketing perspective and a product idea perspective. And so it was pretty fascinating to see how it unfolded. And like you, I'm really happy that it has become a thing.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. So one of the things I wanted to point out was that the execution and fulfillment of the product was perfect. It was flawless. Like it's not without... Like these projects aren't without mistakes and errors and things falling through the cracks. But the way you handle it and then the delivery on the end of the project was just... And the communication throughout the project, it was just exceptional.

'''Myke Hurley:''' That speaks volumes.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. That speaks volumes for how their company is going to be set up going forward because that's what this was about. Now you can go to elementalpaper.com, pick up some notebooks there if you like what they're doing. Um, I have not reviewed mine yet. I don't know if I will, but Kelly at Mountain of Ink did. And she found that they're not really fountain pen friendly. Um, this first batch of paper that they use, I don't know if they're going to take this feedback and try to adjust that or not. I don't know what their thing is for that, but looking at her posts, you can definitely kind of see they're not fountain pen friendly.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah. I mean, kind of in every imaginable way, right? Like it's right. The bleed is there. Feathering is there. Like, yeah, this is not, this is like ballpoint and pencil pretty much. Right.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So I didn't even consider, I, but I started using mine before even reading her post, but I wasn't going to use it for fountain pens. Anyway, I've started to make like a creative journal. Like I used to do like years and years ago, I'd cut out pictures and do drawings. And those I use, mostly use pencils and markers.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I'll just pause for a second on this because I read about this in refill. What is a creative journal? I've, I'd never heard of this before.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I don't know if that's the name of it. That's just the name I give it. It's like, I don't keep a traditional journal in the way that you think of it. Like most people would think of it as, let me write what my day was like, or, you know, let me put down tasks that I need to do, or let me, you know, work on part of a story, or just a lot of writing stuff. I use it as like a visual inspiration book. Like when I do this and I don't do this all the time and I actually got out of the habit of doing it, but looking at how pretty these notebooks were, I wanted to do something that kind of justified using it. Cause I knew I would, if I broke out one of these notebooks to use, I was not going to use it on a daily basis because most of my notebooks, I don't that are that size. I use them for quick notes, jotting, jotting down lists, you know, maybe a quick sketch here and there, but I wanted a place to put more like visual inspiration. And that's how I get, that's how I'm the most motivated to be creative is seeing other people doing creative things. So like I get a magazine, I'll cut out pictures, I'll mimic the drawing and the picture with like a pencil. I'll tape them up using like washi tape. And sometimes I'll manipulate the pictures to how I want.

'''Myke Hurley:''' It feels like a little collage-y. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. Like that kind of idea.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. So, you know, that's, that's how I use it. But I thought this was kind of the perfect journal for that since I'm using pencils and drawing pens anyway. So, yeah. So hopefully they'll, they'll fix some of the paper issues if that's something they want to focus on. But what they did with the brand and the execution of it, I thought it was great. So, you know, hopefully they'll can continue on and be successful with it.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' One pen, Myke, that I would like to use in it that I might have to break down and get because this one set something off in me that I haven't seen in a long time. The Pentel B100 is like this 1970s looking Pentel that I remember from when I was a kid and in school, not in the colors that were seen them from President Incorrect. That's where I put this link from. They always have the coolest stuff. And, you know, they, I don't know where this set came from. I've looked for it in other places. I've looked to see if I can get the standard pen because honestly, back in the day, it wasn't that good a pen. It has this weird tip that's not like a fiber. It's a roller pen. Yeah.

'''Myke Hurley:''' But it's like hard plastic.