Editing The Pen Addict 371/transcript (section)

== Break Announcement ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' Well, let's hit our break and then we'll talk about some other things that I'm working on just in figuring out my stationary life.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Today's show is brought to you by Squarespace. Make your next move with Squarespace because they will let you easily create a website for your next idea or project. With Squarespace, you can get yourself a domain name. So your website will have its own little name and home on the internet. You can take advantage of and customize beautiful award-winning templates that will let you build any type of website that you want. If you want to create a blog or a portfolio, a site for a business, a band, maybe for an event, maybe for a social club or even an online store to sell physical or digital goods. It doesn't matter what type of website you want to make. Squarespace has all of the tools that you're going to need. There is nothing to install or patch or upgrade. It is an all-in-one platform that will let you take care of anything. You don't have to worry about this stuff because Squarespace have got you covered. They have award-winning 24-7 customer support as well, so they can back that up. If you need any help at all with anything to do with Squarespace, they have people there on hand to help you out. You can sign up for a free trial today and get started right now. Just go to squarespace.com slash penaddict. You can build your entire website. And then when you're ready to sign up for a plan to launch your site to the world, they just start at $12 a month. Now, if you go to squarespace.com slash penaddict and use the code penaddict at checkout, you will get 10% off your purchase of a website or domain and show you support for this show. That is squarespace.com slash penaddict. And the code penaddict to get 10% off your first purchase. Our thanks to Squarespace for their support of this show and all of RelayFM. Squarespace, make your next move, make your next website.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Can I elaborate on that real quick? Yeah. They pushed an update this morning. They do a lot of just behind the scenes updates, which is why I use them that I don't have to do updates for. So in your posting page now, they've added two completely new tabs to your post, to like your content post when you're editing and, you know, putting in all the words and images. They have a tab now for SEO, which gives you search results previews and you can do extra SEO titles and SEO descriptions. I don't do any of that. I never have. I've never written for like Google search purposes, like, you know, to my detriment, maybe who knows. But, you know, I don't I don't really I've never found the need to do that. But you can do that. And there's a complete new social tab, which gives you like the social preview and you can add extra images. So like the features that they add sometimes is just like really impressive. And it's just like, boom, they're there. And here you go. Start using the start using these new tools. And I was like, so I spent some time playing around with this with them this morning. It was really fun. So good job by you, Squarespace.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah. If you've got them, want to give it a go, right?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. Yeah, for sure. For sure. So I gave the closet of doom ago yesterday, Myke. So one of our recurring themes is how much stuff I have. And like, I like my stuff. I'm not going to lie. I'm not going to pretend I have too much stuff, even though I do. But I enjoy the stuff. Like, I'm happy to have the stuff. I'm a stuff guy. And my stuff happens to be stationary based. And I love it. The problem is I don't get to use all that stuff, which we've talked about for years and years and years. And how do you best do that? And, you know, what are ways you can rotate through your pens? And we've shared spreadsheets and databases and all of these things. And that's kind of not my jam and how I use pens and papers and pencils to make sure everything kind of gets gone through and gone through fairly and used regularly. It's just for me, it's not really possible.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' But that puts me in the position of kind of losing track of some of my favorites. So what I did yesterday when I was having this thought, it was actually while I was writing the Tuesday tool set post, which was completely unrelated. I wrote it about a backpack. And it just got me thinking, was like, what other stuff am I not using in my closet? So I went in the closet of doom. And I didn't go, like, with my eyes closed or in the dark because that could end up badly with all of these sharp objects in there. But I did kind of just, like, look around, reach around, and grab things randomly to use. I said, I'm going to go into the closet of doom. I'm going to grab five things. And I don't care what those things are. I'm going to take those five things and I'm going to use them. And I'm going to write down something about them. It could be good. It could be bad. It could be whatever. The impetus for this is the Lamy Pico stares at me every time I go into the closet of doom because on one of my shelves about eye level where I have one of Dudek's blocks, I have the white Lamy Pico just sitting there. And it stands out. It's a really, really uniquely designed pen. So I always see it and I never, ever use it. I bet I haven't used this pen in six months. And I love this pen, Myke. I love the Lamy Pico. It's just such a unique pen. It's extremely well designed. I don't know in retrospect that white was the best choice for the barrel design for reasons you can suss out when you look at pictures of this. This was your choice. With the Lamy. Yes.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah. I'm just saying like I wanted to just say like in case people thought you meant that that was the choice that Lamy made. But like a bunch of colors.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. I picked this one on purpose because I really like white pens. In retrospect, this one's a little interesting in white. But the other colors look great. And the mechanism to where it retracts and extends is very unique to this pen. And the refill is proprietary to this pen. And I have a fine blue ballpoint refill for this. It's called the M22 is their refill. And it's a really good ballpoint. Like I talk about Lamy's ballpoints. You know, they're not the best. They're not jet streams or anything like that. But they're pretty darn good for what they are. So I want to use the Lamy Pico. So I grabbed it as part of this group. And now it's in my hand right now. And I just adore this pen. So I have to figure out ways to use things that I like this much on a more regular basis. So trying to figure that out. And this little discovery game I'm playing is kind of forcing me to do that. And hopefully that leads to other things and other thoughts and other ideas. That's what I'm looking for here, right? You know, we get, or I say we, me, I get stuck sometimes with, you know, two or three fountain pens, use them until the ink's gone and not making room for other stationery in my life. This is my idea on how to kind of freshen up the stationery rotation on my desk. Like once a week, I would like to do this once a week, play with these new toys and then put them back up. And, you know, maybe some will stick around longer. Some just go back away because they're not that useful. And then I get a new batch of goods. So the second one, I have two gigantic pencil cups in the closet of doom. So I just reached in, grabbed out a singular pencil. This time it was the Musgrave test scoring pencil. I remember receiving this pencil. I think I got it in a CW Pencils subscription box, like their quarterly subscription. And I was like, oh, this is a cool pencil. And then it just gets set to the side. Like I didn't have time to use it then. And at some point it just got cleaned up off of my desk and put in with all the rest of the pencils. Well, what I got to learn about this in this little discovery process, I grabbed the test scoring pencil, sharpened it up, looked at it online, and learned that this is made from artificial graphite. I didn't know that was such a thing. I mean, like I've seen like the Wopax and those fake plastic kind of pencils that are awful. But this one's obviously made for like computer score testing. You know, we call them in the U.S. Scantrons. I don't know what they were called in the U.K. If there was a particular system where you, you know, basically fill in the bubbles or squares and those sheets get run through a computer and graded. But this pencil was made specifically for that because it has a reflectiveness. Like you can't see it with your naked eye. Like to me, it just looks like a dark pencil, right? I'm not looking at it like, hey, there's a runner's reflective outfit running down the street reflectiveness. But it makes it easier for those test scoring systems. And therefore, it's the test scoring pencil. It's really, really dark. It feels completely like graphite. Like you wouldn't think it was some artificial graphite, which is what the description on CW Pencils said. And it's really nice. Like I love this pencil. It's cool. It's silver. It looks like it's from someone's desk in the 1970s, right? It looks like it's like out of the IBM labs in the 1970s, you know, and there's probably like a coffee stain probably somewhere on this pencil from, you know, probably a cigarette burn maybe underlying this silver thing. Like it just looks like a super old classic pencil. It's kind of kind of my jam. I really like it. So these are the things that I enjoy. As you can tell, I get a lot out of this, right? I'm sitting here like giddy telling you about my Lamy Pico and my stupid Musgrave test scoring pencil. And I don't do this enough. Like I really need to do this enough or do it more. And that's when I get to yell about the Pentel Energel Clean-A. Clean-A? Clean-A? Fountain. A fountain pen. Gel ink pen.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' This pen, Myke, is so good. And Pentel is doing the thing that they do with their secondary Energel products and that is not pushing them hard enough. The Pentel Energel is a spectacular gel ink pen. There's no doubt about it. It writes wonderfully. The colors are great. People love them for their smoothness. So they have their base Energel line and they have like 10 colors in that. And then they do some randomness. Like they did the Pentel Euro needle tip. Which I find to be one of their best pens. Because it's a needle tip and they go down to 0.3 millimeters and 0.4 millimeters. The Pentel Energel Clean-A is the same idea.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' And they're just doing kind of different barrel colors. And going down to like 0.3, 0.4. And black and blue and blue black maybe. But what happens here is they don't go all out and use all the ink colors in their main lineup. When I think that would actually make these products more successful. Because they're really good. This Clean-A lineup needs to be the Zebra Sarasa Clip lineup or the Pilot Juice lineup. Something right under their main lineup like the Pilot G2. Or this mainline Zebra Sarasa that are the most popular products. The most sold products. And then they have the sub-brand like the Pilot Juice. That just takes that and just runs with it on colors and tip sizes and barrel styles. I just think they get lost in the shuffle. Like I don't know why Pentel makes these pens. And then they just kind of exist for a minute. And they're hot because they're really good. And then they just kind of go away. They don't ever expand on them or put anything behind them. Like Pilot really put a push behind the juice. Right? I remember, you know, they had that whole website that we played around with. With all the different juice colors and things like that. The Zebra Sarasa Clip. Zebra did like a whole campaign where you could like vote for all these colors. And neither of these are their mainline products. And I just think Pentel is kind of dropping the ball here with the Energel. Although, if you remember back to, I don't know, a couple months ago, Kukuyo bought a stake in Pentel. So, I wonder if maybe things will change. Get at me, Kukuyo. We'll see if I can help you out.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Hired gun here for all your product ideas. Kukuyo. Lamy. Still waiting on your call, Lamy. Where you at?

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yep. What were you going to be? Creative director or something? Creative director. Yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Creative director. Yeah. Yeah. Not CEO. I don't need to run the business. But, man, they could just do products so much better. Like the Uni Propos double-sided highlighter, Myke. You know you were waiting for this. Like, this is the highlight, get it, of this entire podcast. Just to have you sit there and listen to me talk about highlighters. Highlighters don't get enough love, Myke. But Japan does highlighters better than anyone else. All you Statler highlighter folks, you can get at me. I understand, like, the Statler highlighters are awesome and they're refillable and have, you know, all kinds of cool stuff. I like me a Statler highlighter. They're classics. I like me a Statler highlighter.