Editing The Pen Addict 371/transcript (section)

== Highlighting Discussion Shift ==


'''Brad Dowdy:''' Japan does it better. Japan has ink windows or clear windows in their highlighters so you can actually see what you're highlighting. Now, I'll admit, as I was retesting this highlighter this morning, you kind of have to be, like, right over the top of the page to see through the window to actually read the text. Me, you know, I'm kind of leaned back, you know, my arms out ahead of me. I'm not sitting at, like, a school desk right over the top of my writing to get the benefit from that. But, you know, there's also things that Japan does, like the Kukugyo Beetle Tip highlighter.

'''Myke Hurley:''' But the Beetle Tip is one of my favorites.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' That's, yeah, that's my number one highlighter. But I grabbed this randomly out of a bag. Like, I have a bag full of pens, like, still in their packaging that I've never reviewed. And, you know, it's just, they kind of get pushed to the side. You know, I don't have a lot to say about highlighters. Hey, these are good highlighters. They're in good colors. They work well.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Yeah, it's not your area of expertise, is it really?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Right, right. And there's only so much you can say about a highlighter. But these are really good. The colors are light. The yellow, especially in this Propos lineup, is more of a banana yellow as opposed to, like, fluorescent yellow, like you think from a yellow highlighter. It's a really interesting color. The green is very light, which I like. And it has a really good purple that's not too, too bright. And too saturated. That's what I like about these Propos highlighters.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' And finally, Myke, if I'm going to do this game of Discovery, I don't have a name for this. The Closet of Doom Discovery game. I don't know. That's kind of bad. So Chad will come up with a better game name. I have to have paper to write on, right? So I got to pick all these things out. If I'm going to pick all this stuff out, I might as well pick out a new paper, notebook, pad, whatever I have. You'd be wild not to, Brad. It would be just ridiculous. It wouldn't fulfill the needs of this game that I'm playing. So I picked out the Midori MD notebook. They have one called the Light A5 gridded notebook. This is their A5 48-sheet notebooks that are sold in a three-pack.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' They're spectacular. I mean, these get so much love in our community, and I never use them. As I was using this, I realized the primary reason I don't use them is because they're a little bit too yellow of a page. Right? I generally like white background pages. Or if it's ivory or cream, I like them to be light. Like Moramun has an off-white background page, and it's nice. This one gets a little bit yellow for me, but the writing experience on the page is excellent. It handles all these pens I just talked about. The Pico, the Musgrave, the Pentel Energel, the highlighters. They all worked well. I used a fountain pen to write about the Midori. It handles fountain pen ink well. There's no bleed. You know, there's no feathering. It's just exceptionally well made. My problem with Midori MD is a problem that they have never really solved, and they just kind of lean into it. Back when the Traveler system was under Midori and not its own product lineup, it's hard to tell what is what in that product lineup because the scope is so huge, and they all look the same. So with the Traveler system, they ended up just numbering them. You know, notebook 01 was blank. Notebook 02 was grid. On and on to like notebook 20 was, you know, trip report agenda. You know, I may have these numbers wrong, but you get the point. They all look the same, and they were differentiated by the number. These Midori MD notebooks, if you pull up a page of Midori MD products, you'll be hit with like 50 of them that all look the same. They all have the same color, the same cover, the same logos, the same designs. And you're going, what is what, and how do I figure all this out? It's a little bit tough. So that's my only kind of takeaway with this Midori MD. It's spectacular, but you're making people work to figure out the product that's going to work best for them. So that was my discovery game, Myke. I enjoyed this. I'm going to do this more often. And I probably can't get to it every week, even though I should, like just for my own personal benefit, because I get to revisit things or I get to try things that I've skipped in the past. And I get to talk about things and share things, which is what I like to do the most. And I like to learn about these different products. And then I can, you know, look at the Pentel Energel Cleaner and say, boy, this is such a spectacular pen. Why don't they do more with this? And I can say, hey, Midori, you know, your paper is spectacular. Make it easier for me to pick out the one that I want. So that's kind of my kind of my jam, even if I only have to have these conversations with myself. So thank you for listening.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I should probably play this game at some point in the future, I think.

'''Myke Hurley:''' What do you think?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' It's yeah, it's refreshing, right? It's like I have all these things and I have these things because I like them. Um, and you get to just kind of mess around with like just different, different things. Like the Pico is an enjoyable pen to write with. Like it's a small pen. It looks like it might be weird or funky, but it's actually a very traditional feeling pen when you write with it. And it's enjoyable and it looks cool and it's fun to click. And, you know, just every little pen. The reason why I have this blog called The Pen Addict, I'm not sure if you've heard of it, is because I obsess over the little things that these little one and two dollar products do that are different. Like this Musgrave pencil is a 45 cent pencil, but I could sit here and talk for five minutes about it because that's how I think about these types of products. And it's fun to me to do this kind of thing. So I need to do it more.

'''Myke Hurley:''' So at this point in the episode, we'd usually kind of stop to take an ad before we do. So I'm asked TPA. But today we have something different. We do this every year. It is August, right? So there's a lot of stuff going on. We spoke about like the fifth anniversary show and stuff like that. But that also means that it is RelayFM membership time. We have membership running the whole year. We very, very seldom talk about it. But we do in August. RelayFM memberships start at $5 a month. As a RelayFM member, you get access to a bunch of members on the content, including a monthly behind the scenes newsletter and RelayFM host crossover show, which you can only get as a RelayFM member. You can also get access to some wonderful 5K desktop wallpapers of all of the RelayFM shows. You can get some beautiful wallpapers of your favorite shows. And you get access to a feed full of bonus episodes of RelayFM shows that are published throughout August and September. We do fun things every single year. And last year, we did something a little bit weird and wonderful that was recommended to us by Jeff to try out where I built a Lego set, but Brad had the instructions and we recorded that in real time and it ran for about three hours. Me and Brad were terrified about the response to this or what people might think, but people seemed to love it. So we're doing it again. This time, Brad is going to be building the San Francisco architecture set. I will have the instructions and will be guiding Brad on how to do it. We are recording this tomorrow. It will be out as the first members bonus episode this year on Friday, August 9th. So if you sign up to become a RelayFM member now or at any point in the future, you can get that episode along with every other bonus episode that we've ever published. If you want to go back and listen to last year's Pen Addict special, you can. But if you sign up to become a member of this show or any show, you get access to all of these perks. So you can show your support for this show and RelayFM by going to relay.fm slash Pen Addict and you can see the buttons there are even easier in the show notes. It says support this show. You click that link and you'll be able to sign up immediately and become a member supporting the Pen Addict. But if you want to learn more or support other shows, go to relay.fm slash membership.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' I don't know if I'm going to be able to sleep tonight. I'm really nervous. I'm really excited. I know because you've done it and now you're on the delivery end and I'm on the execution end. I have the hardest job. It's frightening.

'''Myke Hurley:''' I have the hardest job. I know that. You had the hardest job last year and I had the hardest job this year. Yeah.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. Because as the instruction holder, you're in charge, right? The builder can just say, well, you need to figure it out and tell me what to do. Yeah.

'''Myke Hurley:''' Or like describe that piece better.

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. But I'm actually more intimidated by being on the building side of it. Interesting. All right. Yeah. So like last year, I don't know that I was particularly nervous. I seem to be more nervous, even though we were taking a huge risk last year of whether it's going to be good or not, but the actual task itself, I wasn't nervous about. This year, I'm more nervous about the task itself. So we'll see how it goes. I don't know. I'm sitting here. My desk is surrounded by Legos because that's kind of the room I record where my kids kind of build their Lego sets and things like that. So yeah, don't get them mixed up. I already have a desk sort of cleared. So can I say one comment on membership and then we'll jump into some Ask TPA and get the show wrapped up?

'''Brad Dowdy:''' Yeah. Like I talked about like the Squarespace and like I don't use the SEO and worry about getting the traffic because the most important thing to me are direct support models like membership. Like you get to support the work we do directly. And that's where I want to put all my effort to, right? I don't worry necessarily about Google search terms because I'm not running Google ads on my blog because I want you to support the blog directly to me directly. Like I don't want to have to worry about metrics and things like that. I want you to enjoy the content we create, hopefully see some value in it, and maybe you want to support us with a membership. That's the model that I try to work with. So having Panatic memberships and Relay FM memberships go to support me and Myke and our families directly. Like this is the big ask that we ask from you guys. Like, you know, I appreciate you like supporting our ad sponsors and things like that. But to have a belief in the work that you do to offer up memberships for people to give you money, like that's a weird thing to me. And it's a big ask. And we try to deliver on that quality in everything that we make. And we just really appreciate y'all supporting us through memberships and buying merchandise and all of these things. So thank you very much. I just wanted to say that.