Editing The Pen Addict 546/transcript (section)

== Thermo-sensitive ink and erasable notebooks. ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' What's it called? Thermo-sensitive ink. Yeah. So, it's basically a heat eraser.

'''Myke Hurley:''' This was the one where that company made a notebook, which they said to put in the microwave, and it would erase your notes, but would only let you use the power friction.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I have lots of thoughts on that, as you can imagine. So, anyway, I was like, well, I need to pick up some new frictions and get some new thoughts, because they did improve the ink. So, they're doing the ink color saturation is supposedly 30% greater now, right? So, that's always been a knock on the friction, pun intended, to where if you had a black gel ink friction, and you just put it up against a black gel ink G2, like the black gel ink 2 is so much darker, right? The ink is just much darker. So, the friction is working on that. So, I was like, okay, let me pick up a couple. And I started, what happened was, so I clicked on one of these $7 ones, and I started scrolling through, and I was like, why did this pen all of a sudden go to $41? And I was like, taken aback, and I was like, what is going on here? It's like, okay, I see the swirly grip. What they did is took like some of the acrylics that they've used recently, like these acrylics look very familiar. They took some of these acrylic spare parts, like from some of the Pilot Custom fountain pens that we've seen, and made resin grips for the friction. And I absolutely ordered one of them. This is obscenely ridiculous. And I'm in, like, it's dumb. Like, I don't, like, when I saw this, I was like, $41? What is happening? Well, they took these same materials, like the blue swirl, the green swirl, the gray swirl, the red swirl. These swirls, if you're familiar with Pilot's fountain pen lineup, these look exceedingly familiar. And they should be. Why didn't they just do the whole pen, man? It's essentially off the chopping block, right? And then you go down even further, and they do something that they have traditionally done, is have the wood grips. Did you even make it that far? Yeah, yeah. So they have the wood grips, which that's a classic Pilot thing. They've done that for decades, right? Have a pen barrel style, and then they'll have, like, the wood grip section style, right? I have a bunch of old pens that way. They've been doing that for a long time. That's to be expected. But then they dropped these acrylic parts on there. I totally ordered one to see what this is about. It's ridiculous. So I wanted to point that out because I had the same exact reaction to you. I'm clicking through, looking at the colors, looking at the colors. Why did the price change to $41? Oh, my God. It's in, like, a fountain pen acrylic grip section.

'''Myke Hurley:''' It just really bugs me that they only did the grip section. Yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yep, yep. So it's super strange. So I'm in. If you look even closer on this, Myke, so what Pilot has done, and this is another reason I ordered it. I ordered some of the $7 models, too. They're doing something different in their design, and they're putting a clutch in the tip of these pens. And I'm going to have some real thoughts about this design when I get it. I want to see how it works. So they're marketing it as, you know, to prevent, like, tip rattle, which we talk about as, like, a big detractor. Pilots never had, traditionally not had a problem with that. But I saw this close-up of the nose cone and the refill. I was like, what is this sticking out of here? And then I looked at the marketing, and there is an actual clutch mechanism to tighten the grip on the tip. And, like, that's fine. I just, we'll see. We'll see. Like, it seems like an overkill situation. But it's just kind of randomly popped up. It's like, not only are they doing these weird grip sections, they added a clutch mechanism into this model. So we'll see what it looks like. So I am very anxious to get these. I have ordered them, so I'll have them next week or so. So I'll be talking about them soon.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' One thing I did talk about recently, Myke, was my love for ink cartridges. I feel like we need to have the talk. It's like the ink cartridges are, like, the talk you need to have with, like, fountain pen friends. Because traditionally, cartridges are thought of for beginners, right? They ship with your pen. The first time you get the pen, you know, you pop in an ink cartridge. They're very easy to use. They're portable. There's lots of positive things about ink cartridges. I love ink cartridges. But in moderation, right? I don't want a million little plastic ink cartridges littering my desk or littering my storage area. They generally, over the past few years, they've started to have more variety. Like, Diamine is making, you know, a wide range of colors for them. But the key with cartridges is you just, you don't want to go overboard. I mean, that's for anything. I mean, that's common sense on anything. But cartridges are a poor value, right? They're poor cost per milliliter ink value. That's why people buy ink bottles. If they write a lot with fountain pens, they're filling them up from ink bottles. Because it's more cost effective. You know, it's more environmentally effective, right? Not a lot as much plastic waste. And then you have something like the Pilot Orochizuku ink cartridge, which kind of blows every other ink cartridge that has come before of it out of the water in every aspect. Number one, it's amazing ink, right? The Orochizuku lineup is at the top of everyone's, like, favorite ink list. It's also obscenely priced. Like, a six-cartridge pack of Orochizuku ink cartridges is $12.50. And that accounts for, what did I say, 4.8 milliliters of ink? 4.8 milliliters of ink for $12.50. You can get 50 milliliters of ink in a bottle for $25, right? Like, it's bad. It's bad. That is egregious. It is egregious. That's the correct word.

'''Myke Hurley:''' That is so bad.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' It's like $2.50 a milliliter.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Someone's sitting there just rubbing their hands at Pilot Corporate, right? Yeah. Yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' It's ridiculous. Like, if you took, yeah, it's really, really bad math. But I really like these. It's like the cartridge tax or something, you know? It's a huge premium tax.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' But I'm good with the one box that I have, right? There's a specific color I wanted for a specific pen, and I don't mind using cartridges. So, like, I bought the one box, and I'm very happy with it. But, like, under no circumstances do I need more of these. And that's the point I wanted to kind of get across with cartridges. There's a lot of great reasons to use cartridges, right? They're portable. Again, like I said, they're just easy to use. Now you can get some fun colors. But, yeah, a lot of times, and I've done this in the past, and I'll do it in the future. You know, if you have a cartridge, you can refill it with a syringe from an ink bottle, right? If you want to continue to use a cartridge. Because a lot of times, a cartridge will have more ink capacity. Let's take Pilot, for example. Some of their converters are half the capacity of these ink cartridges, right? So, you can reuse cartridges by filling them with ink. So, yeah, it's interesting. So, this was a good, like, conversational review. Not necessarily reviewing the ink, per se, but more just having, hey, let's talk about ink cartridges. And, like, why they're good. Like, there's a lot of positives. But, boy, these are the most outrageously priced, one of the most outrageously priced products I've seen. And it's a little bit ridiculous. So, I'm good with my one ink. I will use all of these ink cartridges. I don't know if I would buy another pack of them. You know, I might just go back to refilling it from the bottle because I have a bottle of this ink as well. So, yeah, but a one-time purchase, cool. But, like, I don't need all the colors of this, nor should anyone for that price. So, there you go.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Man, that math is just wild. But I understand where you're coming from, right? And that's probably something that they're betting on. It allows for people to be more flexible. It's easier. But, look, I have no doubt that it costs more to do the packaging. 100%. But not this much, surely. Yeah. It's crazy. Crazy. All right. This episode is also brought to you by our friends at Squarespace, the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. With Squarespace, you'll be able to stand out with a beautiful website, engage directly with your audience on your terms, and sell anything. Your products, services, and even the content that you create. Because Squarespace has got you covered. It is so easy to get started on Squarespace. You just choose from their beautiful portfolio, their, like, gallery of wonderful templates. You just pick the one that you want that best suits the type of website that you're looking for or your business. It's very easy to, like, separate them out like that. But you can choose any, and you can customize it to fit your needs. You can change the colors. You can change the layout. You can change the fonts. You can change the sizing of elements. And this is all done just in the web browser, or you can also do it in the app, too. And it's very easy to do. It's what we... I don't know if they mention it this way so much anymore, but it used to be the way we'd talk about it, which is WYSIWYG, which is a style of, like, design. What you see is what you get. So you actually, the way that you design it, you're designing it live, and that is how it's going to look. If you drag, you can just click on an element and drag it, and it will move. It's fantastic, and it is, for me, the way I always want to build websites. It's how I have built websites for over a decade now because I have been a, you know, I am all in on Squarespace, and always have been. And they continue to expand their offerings over time, which is awesome. You know, we mentioned the store. You can sell physical or digital goods. They've got all of that. If you want to send out emails, you can do all of that because they have an email campaign system. You can encourage your visitors to sign up as email subscribers, and then you can start them on the journey to becoming loyal customers, loyal readers. You just start, again, with an email template. You customize it to suit the way that you want it to look. Then you're able to send everything out, and you get built-in analytics as well to measure how they're being received by your audience. Squarespace is the best around. Go and check it out for yourself. Go to squarespace.com slash penaddict, and you can sign up for a free trial with no credit card required. Then when you're ready to launch, use the offer code penaddict. You'll save 10% of your first purchase of a website or domain. That is squarespace.com slash penaddict. And then when you sign up, use the offer code penaddict to get 10% off your first purchase to show your support for this show. A thanks to Squarespace for their continued support of the Penaddict and RelayFM.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So last week in our outro, we're not ready to outro yet. No. You quickly stumbled over some changes. Oh, I'm such a disaster.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Every show that I'm trying to finish right now is just a nightmare for me.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So I said at the time, I said, okay, let's this week, let's at least put a link in the show notes and talk about some of our changes. Well, I'll talk about my changes. I don't know what your changes are. Because, you know, a lot of times we'll lead with like, hey, what's the Twitter address? And like, I'm still on Twitter. I'm using it very less frequently than I used to. I'm still answering messages and DMs and things like that. And I have a couple lists over there that have not translated to new services that I'm using, which I'll talk about momentarily. But like, I'm not deleting my Twitter account or anything like that. I'm hopeful in a year or two, the, you know, the funkiness that's happening now will go away. But that's been a good way for us to get feedback in the past. So we have a new feedback form, which we'll talk about momentarily. So I wanted to put in a link to my current social medias that I'm using and talk about like the frequency of things. More importantly, since I'm using Twitter less, I will see your message if you add me. But I'm usually not putting like fresh content on Twitter as much. But I'll reply and do things like that. I'm using micro.blog a lot, which has been a past subscriber. Excuse me, a past sponsor of us.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Just so you know, they're also like they are sponsoring next week's episode of the Panad. Oh, you didn't know this, but I'm just telling you just like so that is a thing.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Okay. Yeah. Well, that's good. That's good information. I was an original Kickstarter backer of micro.blog. So that tells you what I think about the service. I have been leaning into that. So I've created a page where I'm listing all these things that I'm about to tell you about. It's called penaddict.omg.lol, which Myke will talk about in a minute as well, I think. It lists all my social media sites. That's the quickest way. But I'm most active on micro.blog and Mastodon. So I have spent some time to get into the Mastodon ecosystem. I have found it very useful, very functional for what I need from my social media. Now, I'm not someone who like looks at Twitter or any other social media thing as a marketing tool. Right. If I did, I would have different answers for this. I would probably still be like hardcore on Twitter and, you know, doing other things. I just don't use social media for marketing much. Right. I use it for learning and for fun and for, you know, taking a break and just seeing interesting things. And, you know, you know, thinking about things differently and learning from different people and, you know, being silly. Right. All those types of things. I don't use it for marketing. So Mastodon I've been using a lot and micro.blog. So you will see how those services.