Editing The Pen Addict 154/transcript (section)

== Pen Blog ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' We will do that. We will do that. So, we'll get you back on, Myke. All right. So, let's jump to the pen blog of the week, Myke. And I'm going to fess up. I almost forgot it. And you reminded me. I'm out of my routine. I have a very strict blog planning routine. And I usually have like a spot built in for the regular segments like pen blog of the week. And since last week was the first reoccurrence after the reboot of the pen blog of the week, I didn't have it, you know, fixed into the show notes like I normally do. So, you reminded me right before the show. And luckily, I had a really good one, which I can't believe didn't make the first run of the pen blog of the week. And that's pen, paper, pencils from our good friend Ian Headley over there in your neck of the woods. Ian's an awesome guy. He's done three questions on Pen Addict. He's got a post up right now, Myke, that he will make you. He's a man after your own heart. He has a Rotor Fodden Toshen McGlider, which we haven't talked about in a while. He did a big review on that last week. And you'll have to see the pictures of this thing. It is packed to the hilt. I don't know that I've ever seen one packed so full before in my life. And I love every single thing about this. When you see a product being used to its fullest extent, and I have a hard time with allowing myself to, like, use items. And what I mean is, you know, getting them banged up, destroyed. I'm a bit of a neat freak, right? So, you know, taking care is one thing, but not worrying about what happens to these products is great. And it's awesome to see Ian carrying this book with just papers flying out of it, corners dinged up. And it's like, I'm jealous of that. It's like, that's not in my mental makeup to roll out a setup like this. And I just find it supremely fascinating. And it honestly makes me a little bit jealous that, you know, some of my own personal insecurities are going to get in the way of me just, like, throwing down in a wicked notebook like this. So, yeah, definitely check out what Ian's doing at penpaperpencil.net because he's awesome.

'''Myke Hurley:''' So I don't need that, and I won't use that rotavon anymore. Why? I've got something else.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Uh-oh. Uh-oh. Yeah. Is that for a future episode?

'''Myke Hurley:''' No. Well, I don't know. It's up to you.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I'd be very... Oh. I don't know if you know about that, but yeah, I have something else.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. Kind of related to something we were talking about earlier.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Uh-huh.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Gotcha. Gotcha. All right. Well, let's get to our final sponsor because I still got... I still have a bunch I want to talk about, including my personal top five pens update.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Awesome. This week's episode of the Pen Addict Podcast is also brought to you by MassDrop, an online community for enthusiasts of all kinds, from audio and electronics to quilting and cooking. It is a place for you to connect with people like you, to discuss your favorite products and activities, and buy them together. MassDrop represents a new type of online experience that combines community, content, and commerce. MassDrop offers its users a place where you can meet and connect over the products that you love. It's a forum where you can vote on and discuss the products that you're passionate about, and it also gives you a platform to connect directly with manufacturers and buy products together to get bulk pricing. They're not a flash sales website. They're not a deal site. The thing that is most important to the guys and girls over at MassDrop is that they want to be able to build communities around things that people love. That's what they're passionate about. Ultimately, they're here to help you by making the products that you care about more affordable and accessible and provide you with a platform to connect with other like-minded individuals. I know that group buys is something that's really important to this community. Some of the stuff that we buy can be really expensive, and buying in bulk can help you with that. And this is where a service like MassDrop can help. They can help facilitate it. They can help get the people together. And this is something that's really cool for the community. I've taken a look at MassDrop in the past. I was looking very recently as well. They have some awesome deals where you can get 20% to 30% off brands like Pelican and Franklin Kristoff. I've seen Retro 51 there. I've seen Lamy stuff there. I've seen Karis Custom stuff there as well in the past. If you're interested in buying yourself something nice, go over to dro.ps slash thepenaddict and sign up. This site's totally worth checking out. It's a great service. You know, not even just to buy things, you know, just to go and find people like you, you know, other pen addicts that you can connect with. They have that great forum that you can get involved with as well. It's not, you know, it's not just pens for focus on that, but it's all kinds of great things. So go check out mashdrop.com. But you want to sign up at dro.ps slash thepenaddict, dro.ps slash thepenaddict. And that will also help support this show. Thank you so much for MashDrop for helping out this week.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah, so I don't do a lot of email newsletters in my inbox, but I let the MashDrop one come through because there's usually something pretty cool in it. And I've found lots of neat stuff. And, you know, I'm looking at headphones and speakers and all kinds of crazy stuff. So yeah, thank you, MashDrop, for sponsoring. And they definitely keep all the cool stuff stocked. So I appreciate that.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah, talking about the newsletter, I saw a couple of things that came through for me the other day. The Pentel Graph Gear 500 drafting pencil in a four-pack. They have Rodeo Unlimited pocket notebooks. A company I've ever heard of, Bexley Phoenix.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Sure, yeah, Bexley. Bexley's an American fountain pen company.

'''Myke Hurley:''' There you go, Bexley. They have fountain pens. They have color bundles, the Pilot Friction, so much more. So, you know, just stuff to whet your appetite with.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yep, yep. All right, so we're going to wrap this up on a hopefully new feature on the blog, which is going to be my personal top five pens, which everyone was asking for after I readjusted the top five pens page. And someone already caught my fatal flaw in the comments section of this post. I named this post completely inaccurately. I said current top five pens, May 2015. That makes it sound like I'm doing a top five pens update instead of trying to do this personal list that people were asking for when I did the last one. So I think I need to change the name of the title. I don't know if it's too late for me to do that. I mean, I can always do it, but I don't know if I should bother this time. I may do that next time. So good catch. John Bemis, about an hour after I posted this, I realized that's not really a good title. And I apologize for that. But what I wanted to try to do is give a good representation of the products I've been using. I'm kind of using the last month as a timeframe for this post. And that's how it'll be going forward.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' So the five pens I've been using the most. Number one, and it's actually, well, I won't say it's far and away. I've been using the first three more than anything. Number one, it's the Franklin Kristoff Pocket 66 ice that I got at the pen show. And the reason why I'm enjoying it so much is not just of how cool it looks and how nice it feels.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' The needlepoint nib I got in there is ridiculous. It's so good. I write so small, so clean. It's really smooth. It's, you know, when I first started getting heavy into fountain pens, Myke, I wanted extra, extra, extra, extra, extra, extra, extra fine. Like as much as I could get, right? The finer, the better. Because I wanted to write like the fine gel ink pens, you know, that I like, like the Pilot High Tech C. And then I realized that if you're into fountain pens, you kind of miss out on the ink properties, if you will, of using a pen that fine. You know, if you're using a basic, if you're using like a really neat color, like an orange, it doesn't really pop in a pen that fine. So I morphed all the way to the other end into these wide stub nibs so I can get some ink expressiveness. Well, this needlepoint nib has pulled me back in to these extra, extra, extra fine nibs. And I love it. It writes so well. Every time I use it, I always look at my page afterwards and go, yeah, that looks good. So, you know, that's a, that's a quality pen and a quality nib. So that's, I'm a huge fan of. The second one is the Kuretake Zig Cartoonist Mangaka Outline Pen, size 01 in purple.

'''Myke Hurley:''' That's a bit of a mouthful.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. So this is the drawing pen that I love. And I'm keeping a Field Notes Roastery Edition with a bunch of baseball stats, tracking, planning. You know, I do lots of fantasy baseball stuff. So that's my baseball pen right now until I got this, I got my real Retro 51 baseball pen in. This is the pen I use for that. It's the firmest drawing pen tip I've ever used. It's very sturdy. It's very clean, sharp lines, and it holds up really well. I mean, I've probably filled 20 pages full of notes in this Field Notes so far, and that's a little larger size. You know, the Roastery Edition is like 4x6 or whatever it is. And that pen hasn't broken down at all. And, you know, those, that's just part of, part of the deal with drawing pens is the tips break down. You know, they're the plastic or felt tip pens, and they just break down. This one holds up extremely well. The TI2 Tech Liner rounds out really the top three. Those three, the Pocket 66 fountain pen, the Kuretake drawing pen, and the TI2 Tech Liner for a gel ink pen, that's kind of my triumvirate right now. That's the three most used pens that I have right now. I use the Tech Liner for everything. I carry it with me everywhere I go. People were asking about the Gonzo Dyes Edition that I mentioned. That's a finish that was only available for Kickstarter backers. They don't, Myke Bond doesn't make that finish anymore. That's my favorite finish. I have two other ones. I keep one on my desk at work, a third one on my desk at home. I just love everything about that pen. You can use the Signo 207 refills, work on that, and the RT1, the Signo RT1 refills work in that, which I like the .38 blue-black refills. You can get other colors in that. Myke Bond has started making new magnets for the TI2 Tech Liner. I don't have any of those handy, but the camo versions that he makes for Nock, we have the new magnets in them that allow you to use the Uniball Jetstream refills because they weren't compatible before. All those refills were good in it. Then I have two more fountain pens that round out the top five. One of them I can't seem to ever un-ink, and that's the Pilot Custom Heritage 92. It's a blue demonstrator. I ordered it from Japan. It's not in the U.S. market yet. You can get the clear barrel in the U.S. market. It's a piston filler. I ordered it with a broad nib. I got Myke Masayama to put a cursive italic grind on it. And one of the things we skipped over today, which we're going to talk about, I had a lot of people in the Slack channel ask me more about grinds and writing with certain types of nibs. We'll do a whole segment on that in an upcoming episode on that. I had to cut some things out for time reasons today. But there's just something about this pen. I'm a big fan of Pilot nibs. Their gold nibs are fantastic. This piston model works really well. I love the blue demonstrator look, and the nib is straight-up killer. And if you couldn't tell by now, the third fountain pen I have is another demonstrator. I like demonstrator fountain pens, unlike you, Myke. You're anti-demonstrator. I'm a demonstrator. It's Edison Menlo. And this is a custom job I had done. Well, I didn't have done. Jeff, Brooke Wiki, had this done for me as a gift. And it's a really, really special pen to me, not just because of the gift part of it, but it's straight-out awesome. It's a Menlo. It's in a colorway that I love with the red and blue. I call it the 3D Menlo. It looks awesome. The nib's killer. It's really sharp, really clean. I love my handwriting. If you can't tell in the picture that I put in this post, you can see how clean my handwriting looks with all these pens. I think that's what sells me on a pen the most, is what does my output look like on the page? And there's things to consider, especially with fountain pens, what ink are you using, what paper are you using? But how does my output look on the page? This is my preferred style of pen. You can see what all this writing looks like. You can tell how clean and crisp and clear it is. They're very enjoyable pens. And that's kind of the group that has really been in heavy rotation here recently. You'll notice there's not a Nakaya in the list. I have three Nakayas inked right now, but I'm about to clean them out just to kind of give them a break because I've been using this group of pens more than any here recently, which doesn't surprise me. I have a lot of pens to go through, and I like to mix it up like I hadn't had the Menlo inked up for months and months and months. And now that I have it back in the rotation, I don't ever want to take it back out again. It's that great of a pen. So I'm going to try to do this every month, and I think after this one, I'm going to start incorporating other products as well, not just my top five pens, but maybe my top five products I'm using. You know, add in paper, add in whatever I might be using, just not always straight pens every time. So if you have any feedback on this list and how I'm doing it and, you know, what my personal tastes are and things like that, just definitely get in touch. So what do you think about this type of post, you know, to recur frequently on the pen addict?

'''Myke Hurley:''' I think it's worthwhile as long as it changes.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Like if June is the same, then there might not be too much point in posting it, you know?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yep. So it may not end up being monthly, so we'll just have to see how it goes. And that's why I want to add in other products as well. Just things that I'm more of a things I've used over the past month in like all of stationary type stuff. So, yeah. I think there's some adjustments to be done going forward, and we'll kind of see how it plays out. But I've had so many requests for it, I wanted to do kind of a what's Brad carrying right now these days. So I think that's the tact I'll take going forward.

'''Myke Hurley:''' So I've been using my Sailor Pro gear just like constant. It's just constant. Like I've already had to refill it. It's the pen I'm using right now, but I did want to mention that you sent me that whatever it's called. What is it called?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' The micro mesh.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah, the micro mesh stuff. And it has perfected this fragment crystal stuff. I'm not having any problems with it anymore, and it is a dream. I'm using it right now. I might actually have this on my desk in a couple of days because that blood red just looks so sweet.