Editing The Pen Addict 264/transcript (section)

== Community Awareness ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' All right. So this next topic is an interesting one and I want to bring it up. And I think everyone in the community is aware, but our good, good friends at CW pencils are having building issues where their retail shop is in New York city. And it's not just them. It's like the whole strip of shops that are in this one particular building. They don't have the specifics, but they put a note out. Let me read this real quick. If you're not familiar, it says, dear friends and neighbors, we have temporary closed due to a serious safety issue with our building. We're working with our landlord to get this resolved as soon as possible. In the meantime, we'll hope you'll continue to support us online at CW pencils.com where we'll be operating as usual. We'll post update on social media as needed. Please get in touch. If we can help you with anything, thank you for your love and support. Finally, your friends at CWPE. This is where I think our community thrives and does great work when there's people that support us, support bloggers, support, you know, customers run amazing shops, do wonderful curated work. When we can go out and help them when they're probably getting hammered by not having this retail storefront open because I know it's a popular destination. It's summertime. There's a lot of people vacationing. I don't know that it hurts the bottom line, but I, my guess is that it would greatly. And it sounds kind of open-ended, like they don't know exactly what's going on. So all I can say is I'm not telling you to go spend money. I don't like telling people to do that. But if there's an opportunity for you to support CW pencils online, if you're needing something, if there's something you've been looking at it now might be the time to pull the trigger. Like if you have, you know, a wishlist or a cart or something filled, you know, it's, it'd be nice to make sure that they get through this A-OK. I have every feeling that they will. I hope so. I hope it's not too big and I hope it gets resolved quickly. But that's got to be scary. As someone who owns a small business, I don't know if I would be able to sleep at night. I would be scared, quite honestly. This is a scary thing to have a retail shop where you cannot go physically, open the door and let people come in and purchase things because your expenses are not going away while this is happening. So anything anyone can do to support them, I hope you do. You know, it's a, it's a good thing to look at, you know, if you're shopping for any new stationery, especially pencils. I think it'd be pretty cool to support them any way we can and, you know, and hopefully they'll get through this and come out on the other side here unscathed. But yeah, it's, it's, it's scary. Yeah.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I hope that it's, it's whilst serious, not so serious that it is disruptive to them in the long term. And I hope that they're able to get out of it and get things taken care of shortly. Um, and I hope that they will be back somewhere and then I can go visit them when I'm in New York in August. I hope that it's all resolved for them before then.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. Yeah. So I'm sure they'll let everyone know, um, you know, as soon as possible.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Mm-hmm.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So I'm going, I'm going to go shop there. I think we got to. Yep. All right. So we had another list, um, that appeared in our inboxes and our, our Twitter feeds. You know, when you threw up that Buzzfeed one, I was like, well, I guess everyone's not very busy this summer because Wired did an article for, uh, it's titled, oh, it's a fountain pen buying guy, but it's called ink different with these seven sensibly priced fountain pens. This is kind of a weird article. Um, and Wired has always been very good on the stationary front. Like I remember, I still follow, um, Adam Rogers who still works at Wired, you know, years and years ago, I worked with him when I was at jet pens to put together, you know, like products and articles and, and things like that. He's a really good follow on Twitter at jet Jocko. If you ever want to follow him, he's a good guy. Um, he didn't put together this list, but, um, it's decent. Like I like, I like, you know, the platinum preppy is number one and I can't really argue with that. It's like three, four bucks.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Well, there, there, there, so there are a bunch of answers on this list, which are mine and your answers to the question, right?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. Yeah. I just wouldn't include things that are, well, that are the, the numesine for one and the Parker urban for two wouldn't make any of our lists just because they're a little bit odd. They're a little bit more expensive. They're not in the case of the numesine. I don't think their quality control is up to par. The Parker I think is more expensive. You know, there's not a TWSBI eco on here, which is my glaring omission. I do like the fact that they included the Muji fountain pen because it's very popular. I don't have one or use one. Actually, I think I do have one. I don't use one, but I think it's fair because everyone really likes the Muji brand and they do some, some good quality stuff. And the Kaweco classic sports on there, which I think is a great pen. So I don't know that I would change a lot, but there are a couple of questionable, questionable entries on here that I think could have been like, if you see a TWSBI eco in this roundup, it's going to really stand out. You know, I think that would be a strong choice.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I think I would struggle to get seven though, right? Like I can see how pens like the Muji and the, the Nemecine get in here because I don't know. I mean, you know, I would agree. I would swap out one of them, but I think I'd start to struggle.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Well, then I'd swap out, I'd put the pilot Kakuno in there would be my other one. Oh, that's a good one. I would put out the eco. I put the eco and the Kakuno in there. That's kind of like, and I think that would be a pretty good top seven. I actually wouldn't have been opposed to seeing the pilot varsity in there, which is their disposable fountain pen. It's not a great pen, but it's kind of a good gateway pen for people who've never used a fountain pen. They're about three or four bucks. You can get them, you know, at office supply stores. I wouldn't have been opposed to seeing that in there. If you're going to put the preppy in there, I think the varsity is a good choice. Even though I would, I would pick the preppy first. I would have the varsity in there as another really, really low cost option. If you weren't going to do the eco or the Kakuno, but it's a good list. It's cool to see this on wired. You know, I like, you know, the seeing stationary, you know, out there in the bigger picture kind of way. So it's very cool.