The Pen Addict 552/transcript
| The Pen Addict Podcast Transcript | |
|---|---|
| Episode: | 552 |
| Title: | Where's the Margarita Version? |
| Release Date: | February 22nd, 2023 |
| Hosts: | Brad Dowdy |
| Guests: | No guests this episode |
| Additional Information | |
| Official page: | Episode 552 |
| Audio File: | Audio Episode 552 |
| Podcast page: | The Pen Addict 552 |
| Length: | 5858 min <br />0.967 h <br /> minutes |
| Previous Transcript | Next Transcript |
Myke Hurley: From RelayFM, this is The Pen Addict, episode 552. Today's show is brought to you by Squarespace and Pen Chalet. My name is Myke Hurley and I'm joined by Brad Dowdy. Hi Brad. Hey Myke, how's it going? Good, good. I was saying to you before we started, I was feeling a little tired today, but I'm doing good.
Brad Dowdy: Good, good. I'm glad you're doing good. This always manages to lift you up a little bit. Like I'm saying that from personal experience, you know, you could be doing them with, you know, bummer work, like before we get on and do this. But it's always fun to get on here and talk about pens. And what I was going to say is like, is this turning into the Erasable podcast? Because we have a lot of Erasable type follow-up this week, Myke. Boy, do we.
Feedback from listeners via the new feedback form
Myke Hurley: We got a lot of great follow-up sent in to us via the new feedback form, which is at penaddictfeedback.com. And these are all three of these, the three pieces that we got, all about pilot friction. So use cases that people have of the pilot friction. Susan says, you're saying you don't see a point in the friction pens.
Brad Dowdy: Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Settle down, Susan.
Myke Hurley: Let's just say Susan paraphrased. It's more just like, you know, why this over anything else? I think we did have this conversation a bunch, right?
Brad Dowdy: No, I think I said I don't see a point in the friction pen for me. But I absolutely see a huge point in friction pens for a very specific reason.
Myke Hurley: That's fair to what Susan's saying. Like we don't see a point in them, right? Like for us. For my personal uses, yes. So we don't know about the thing, for example, that Susan's about to tell us.
Brad Dowdy: Well, except I do. That's one of the hugest things about it. So yes, I'm very aware of this.
Myke Hurley: Well, we didn't talk about it. So we didn't do our job very well. Susan says, they got introduced to me by my mom, who's a long arm quilter. I don't know what that means, but I like the thought. It sounds awesome though. Not short arm. Let's not be ridiculous. People in the quilting community use them to mark spots on fabric. They can then iron away those marks. I started using a friction pen because I'm a piping designer and I have to check drawings. Before this, this had always been done in red, blue and green pencil, but I always hated these pencils. These pens allow for a nice crisp line and erasure. Now I see most of my co-workers using them. That makes a lot of sense for textiles, right? That you can iron them off because we know that from the incredible notebook, putting these things in the microwave will get rid of them. It's just heat, right? It's just heat that gets rid of the ink. It's why the erasing works. It's creating friction, which creates heat, removes the...
Brad Dowdy: Yeah, I think one of the very early comments I got on the friction over a decade ago was how useful these were for knitters and pattern makers and people who could mark down their work and have a heat sensitive ink to erase when they're going through that. So yeah, this was a huge hit with the knitting, quilting community right when they launched. It was one of the most popular uses, so absolutely great for that.
Myke Hurley: Similarly, Lisa says, a unique use for the pilot friction is in the sewing community. The friction pen marks disappear under the heat of an iron, so indicate marks stay clean, unlike chalk, until you're ready to remove them. The markers, my favorite, are also easier on fabric. Most sewing shops carry pilot friction pens because they are that useful to the sewing community. That was an interesting part, right? That like sewing shops have kind of like caught wind of this.
Brad Dowdy: Exactly, exactly. And one of the products we didn't mention when we were talking about the friction in general is they do make a marker tip style, right? I didn't even know this. A more highlightery type of felt looking tip. I had no idea. Yep, so it's great.
Myke Hurley: That is a cooler product to me in general than the kind of the gel ink pen.
Brad Dowdy: Yeah, yeah. So yeah, it's great.
Myke Hurley: Garth says, one pilot friction use case. My daughter is a committed violinist and her teacher recommended a set of friction pens because they allow her to mark her sheet music with different colors for different types of notes, but also to erase a particular reminder when she no longer needs it. So planners and calendars are the obvious area that erasable pens are useful, but I imagine there are also dozens of niches like this where they really do work better than a pencil. Yeah, that's awesome. And I think all of this counts to this idea of like, why are these pens so popular? I mean, I feel like I asked that question of like, look, I get the gimmick, right? But like, how needed is it? Like, you can just put a line through it and start again. These are areas where there is no ability to put a line through it. Like, you just then create more lines. So these are all areas that make a lot of sense for a pen that is easily erasable, right? And it's, you know, we all know pens are better than pencils in general. So, you know, this is a much better option for a lot of these people.
Brad Dowdy: Yeah, no, I think definitely. Pens are better than pencils. This is no longer the erasable podcast because they would not have that take. Yeah, students, student usage of the friction is huge, you know, especially like in math, engineering, that type of thing. I get a lot of feedback on that for, hey, friction is a good use case for math. I just, I get tired of using pencil. Pencil is always the same. And with the friction, you know, can get purple and teal and these, all these neat colors to do my math in. Oh, and have the ability to erase my work or change things that I need to change. So, yeah, it's great for students. I haven't heard like the sheet music aspect of it, but I think that's fantastic. Like, I love that. But any type of note taking or annotation type of work that a pencil would normally do in the past, I think the friction is a great option for. The thing about like you and me is like I'm generally just writing, right? So, like I would just, if I want to use the friction, it's because I want to use, you know, like a nice gel ink pen. And I don't necessarily need the erasing, but I do get all of the wonderful reasons why it's a popular pen.
Myke Hurley: Yep. So, there you go. There's your feedback. All right. Good feedback. If a Brad likes it or not.
Brad Dowdy: Oh, goodness. I know. I love all the feedback. I love the feedback. I love being held to task. Held to task. Okay. All right, Myke. So, this next link here, we're going to talk about a few new products that crossed my desk this week. Well, not physically, but crossed my screen, if you will. The first link is to a set of Sailor Cocktail Series pens. Now, unfortunately, I can't deliver the joke I want because you have actually physically seen this. But if I just pop this in here and show this to you today, would you have said this is a new set of pens or this is an old set of pens?
Myke Hurley: Brad, genuinely, I looked at these images. I'm still not sure. That's a great answer. I can read what they are telling me, that this is a new cocktail set by Sailor around tequila. However, I feel like I've seen at least four of these before in their entirety. So, I'm not sure if they're trying to play like a Jedi mind trick on me, to be honest.
Discussion of a new pen model, Cyclamen
Brad Dowdy: So, we're on the same page in that there's one new looking pen in here. It's called Cyclamen. We'll have a link to the show notes in here, which is like someone called it Strawberry Lemonade. And it's fantastic. Like, it's easily the best looking. But is it the best looking because we've seen all the other ones before, especially the orange? Oh, my gosh. This orange color is in every single release they do. So, this is a new set.
Myke Hurley: They're calling it Mexican Screwdriver, right? Which I'm just sure this is, and I don't understand. It just looks the same as the Tequila Sunrise one, to my memory.
Brad Dowdy: I'm sure there's some, like, different layout of the finial or something. Like, I called it in the show notes. This is, if you went to ChatGPT, the AI creator, and said, ChatGPT, design a sailor pen in the style of the sailor cocktail series. This is the answer that would have come up with. It would have spit this out, right?
Myke Hurley: I just found the Tequila Sunrise review that Susan did on the blog. And to my eyes, the difference is just the finials. Everything else looks exactly the same.
Myke Hurley: It's just the finial, like, on this one orange one. Just the finial is different.
Brad Dowdy: You now have the option to buy it all over again.
Myke Hurley: Oh, incredible. I do love tequila.
Overview of the cocktail-themed pen set
Brad Dowdy: So, yeah, this is actually, this is a new set to actually seal the deal on this. This is the cocktail exclusive. Shake it up this season again. I like that there's at least an again here. Five colorful tequila-based cocktails to choose from, which they've done tequila drinks before, but whatever. So, we have, I also enjoyed the naming of these, Myke. So, we have Mexican Screwdriver. We have Cyclamen. Then we just get into Lavender Margarita, Blue Margarita. And then the, it's like, come on, man. And then the last, the green one's called Mockingbird. It's like, we could have just called them Orange Margarita, Pink Margarita, Lavender Margarita.
Myke Hurley: I'm going to take some serious umbrage here, Brad. All right. To me or to this. There is no just Margarita. Where's the Margarita version?
Brad Dowdy: Yeah. Right? Yeah. We could have done something with the green one and at least, you know, but some mixture of the Cyclamen and the Mockingbird could have been Margarita, right? Yeah.
Myke Hurley: They're nice colors, right? Like, they look nice. They're attractive. Like, it's fine.
Brad Dowdy: That's literally what I was getting into. These are awesome looking, right? I mean, they look great.
Myke Hurley: They just don't have to make it like such a thing. Don't make it such a thing. It doesn't need to be a thing. It's fine.
Brad Dowdy: I literally, like, you had to go decipher if this was new or old. I really did. I was like, I'm pretty sure this Cyclamen is giving it away that it's new. But all of these other ones, I'm like, okay, Sailor. I see you, Sailor. This just, like, come on.
Myke Hurley: This just, like, to me really, like, speaks to that idea that someone just goes down to the basement and just, like, oh, gets this part and this part and this part and just puts them together. Like, this isn't particularly... No, it's not. It isn't exciting to me. And this isn't particularly creative. I feel like just doing now, like, a different cocktail, a different, like, alcohol base for all of your cocktails. It's like, whatever, man. Like, fine. Whatever. So, what's...
Brad Dowdy: Okay. So, in that vein, what's next? So, they've done gin recently, tequila.
Brad Dowdy: They can't really do much with vodka.
Myke Hurley: Well, they do vodka and they're all demonstrators. They do whiskey and they're all brown.
Brad Dowdy: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Like, I'm trying to figure out, like, what else they could do here. They've done, like, all the, like, the tropical type of cocktails. Yeah. I don't know. It'll probably just be... They'll probably just do the Hall of Fame cocktail series to bring back the five most popular of the five previous cocktail series ones and just sell them all again. I think that's the move next, Sailor. I think that's your move is just bring back the Hall of Fame cocktail series. So, there you go. All right. Are we ready to play Brad Becomes a Hypocrite?
Myke Hurley: Yeah. I've seen this in the show notes. It says Brad Becomes a Hypocrite and there's a link to an Instagram image. And I've looked at the image. I've read those words and I, as of yet, cannot work out where this is going.
Brad Dowdy: Okay. So, I found this link in my Instagram feed from Ink House Hong Kong. And it is a... For everything that I can find, this is a store exclusive to Ink House, which is a shop in Hong Kong of a matte green...
Myke Hurley: Brad, can I just interrupt you for one moment? Of course. Just because it will tie into our previous conversation before we go on the next one. So, I've opened this image here. And it's got suggested posts from Ink House Hong Kong. And there is a Sailor pen here, which is stunning. It's stunning. It's part of their four-season series. It's called Snowy Flurry. And it is just a blue demonstrator with white... Like a white finial, silver furniture, and it's got snowflakes printed all over the body. They're like a good-looking pen.
Brad Dowdy: Yeah. So, this shop gets a lot of those store exclusives. They get to work with a lot of manufacturers. They got the Pokemon stuff. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So, they're a big enough deal to get their own Lamy Safari, right? Their own in-house Lamy Safari. As best as I can tell, this is not any type of universal release outside of Ink House Hong Kong, which we've talked like a month ago. Like a Toya, like the biggest stationary retailer in Japan, has their own all-star, right? Like it was this very neat-looking item. But this just popped up. It's a matte green Lamy Safari. And I mean like I want it. I love it. Okay. And it makes me a complete hypocrite about everything I just said about the Sailor Cocktails. It's like this has been done like a thousand times before. It's like two shades of green different than the Savannah Green that they just released two years ago.
Myke Hurley: Let me tell you why I think this is different to what we were just talking about. Okay. They have just called this the matte green Lamy Safari. They're not making a big thing out of it.
Myke Hurley: Right? Right? It's not like Lamy Safari Matcha Green series. And here's all the different matcha desserts that we're emulating. You know what I mean? Like I'd be down for that too. Yeah, but then if they do it one time, like, oh, but then they're like, and here's the Yuzu series. Like, you know, it would just be like that. I think that's the issue with the Sailor Cocktail thing of just like, well, we're just doing Greatest Hits now. Like what is going on? Like, right. You know, but this Lamy Safari, it's like, well, we expect colors in the same way that we expect colors from Sailor. But like here, like the snowy one that I just showed you, that feels to me more like the kind of thing I want to see and expect to see. And you get it. Like the North America exclusives, you know, they'll do one every few months. And it's like, like, you know, like the Habanero one or whatever it was called. Like, it was just like, oh, this is fun and interesting. And it's different.
Brad Dowdy: Which I happily own. So not to be a complete hypocrite.
Myke Hurley: And you're going down like a creative route with it. But there's just something about that. And like, you know, like obviously those cocktail ones are not for us, right? They have obviously been very successful for them. So they keep doing them. But we still can just take a critical eye on the product offering and be like, this is not exciting. Where this matte green Safari, it's kind of like, well, this is what we expect. There's the one pen. They do these colors every now and again. It's a nice color. And they're not over-hyping it.
Brad Dowdy: Right. Right. It's just a very like, hey, this is the house Lamy Safari, which is pretty neat because not a lot of people get it. And I think that's why I'm more attracted to something like this. Because this isn't the North American exclusive release, right? This is not the wide release. This is the in-house for Ink House. They're releasing. It's more, I don't know, it's more interesting to me than like another wide releasing cocktail series that we've seen for probably going on a decade now of different options of the cocktail series. So, okay. So I'm not completely crazy. And like, I love the Sailors. Like, don't get me wrong. I think they're just beautiful. I'm just not interested in it where I'm completely interested in this option. And I felt kind of weird like saying one, like I'm talking out of both sides out of my mouth here. Maybe I am a little bit, but I don't know. I found like the juxtaposition of those two product releases like very interesting to think about from like a stationary fan perspective. So, yeah. Yeah. It made me also think when I was trying to sort out this Matt Green, are they telling me this is their store brand or is this what we're getting for the 2023 Safari release, Myke? Because we haven't seen it yet. No. I've seen unconfirmed pictures of pastel safaris, but they're not worth linking to because I don't, I didn't feel like the sources were that good. And like if they're these pastels that I see out there in these teased images, which I think have already been like, I don't know, like discounted is not real, but I'm not sure. I will be super sad because they've done that a lot, right? That would be the cocktail series of the Lamy Safari. If I will go and state it now and I will go on record that if Lamy comes out with three pastel Lamy Safaris, I will put them in the same category as the Sailor Cocktail Series. Try harder, Lamy.
Myke Hurley: Are you thinking like Easter colors or whatever?
Brad Dowdy: Yep. Okay. Because it's always this time of year, right? This early spring in the Northern Hemisphere type of year. And it tends to be like the, sometimes, you know, the brighter pastels, which they've done before. And Lamy is not above reissuing, you know, similar colors that they've done in the past. Just like I gave them a real hard time late in 2022. They did the blue with the red clip and the white with the black clip as a, it was kind of their follow up to the success of the re-release of the Terracotta and Savannah Green. It's like, oh, people really like those. It's like, yeah, we did love those. That was the first Lamy and no one gets to own, no one has ever owned those before, you know, that are modern Lamy lovers. So, okay, let's re-release these. We did in the 90s and it's the same exact blue barrel that they use currently and the same exact white barrel that they use currently. They just changed the clips on them and it's just like a big womp womp. I was like, come on, like, that's, that's bad. So, I will go on record. I will, I will take the loss for Lamy Safari if they come out with pastels this year and it'll be the same, same feeling I have about the Cocktail Sillers series. They're perfectly fine. They're beautiful, but man, do something different. Try harder.
Brad Dowdy: Like the Pilot Juice, Myke. What do you think about the Pilot Juice sweet milk? I am just really having a tough time with this.
Myke Hurley: The name. I can't do it. I can't do it. Like, split it in half and we're good. Right. Pilot Juice, fine. Sweet milk, fine. Juice sweet milk, can't do it.
Brad Dowdy: Juice sweet milk. Pilot is on one right now. They are on one right now.
Myke Hurley: But these pens, though, look amazing to me.
Brad Dowdy: They are awesome. I will get these pens.
Myke Hurley: Brad, I just had a mind-blown moment. Sorry, I keep interrupting you today and I can only apologize, but these things keep happening to me and I have to share them with you. So I'm in Safari, right? I'm using Safari. And I've used the translate button. And it's translating some of the text in the images.
Brad Dowdy: Yep. It started to do that with whatever new OS we're on. What's it called?
Myke Hurley: I've seen that before. Like, I used the images. Sorry, I used the translation for just, like, to get the text, right? But, like, some of the color names are being translated on the boxes in the imagery. How cool is that?
Brad Dowdy: Yep. So, like, I'm looking at one of the boxes. It says, I'm happy. Yeah.
Myke Hurley: I can see, on Sunday, I'm happy.
Brad Dowdy: It says. Yeah. One of them says, Saturday is something. I don't get read.
Myke Hurley: The sun on Saturdays and Sundays. I mean, that must be the name of the collection of colors, right? Because they're clearly going for, like, vibes with these ones. Yeah. But Juice Sweet Milk is not. Yeah. It's not for me, man. Although, these look fun.
Brad Dowdy: Yeah. So, where Pilot loses me a little bit, and, you know, I sing the praises constantly of them, just like all these other brands we talk about, is that they have the I Love Me, I Love You series, right? That I bang on. And, like, how is this different? Like, to me, it's not, right? This should be all kind of together. This looks like either part of that series or that series looks like part of this release. Yeah. And there's just, like, this, like, they're, like, very much, like, Venn diagramming, like, 100% right here between, like, the two product lineups. And I'm wondering, is, like, that, like, do these people, do these groups talk to each other about what they're releasing and things like that? I also had to make my Bantha Milk joke because that's what these pastel colors look like. They're really hard to use. And that's the first thing I thought of was Luke drinking the milk, you know, from Uncle Owen and what Ann Beru or whatever her name is, like, you know, in Star Wars. That's, like, a defining thing in young Brad's life is seeing Luke Skywalker drinking that nasty blue milk. And that's all I can think of with this sweet milk and these blue pastelly inks. And, like, I'm going to have a hard time not seeing that, but also at the same, by the same token like you, I think these are just fascinating looking. I think these look fantastic.
Myke Hurley: I've had blue milk.
Brad Dowdy: Yes, because you are a big Disney Star Wars go to the parks and do all the things and they have the blue milk and the green milk at the parks. How was it? How was it?
Myke Hurley: I genuinely don't remember, which means it was probably just fine.
Brad Dowdy: Yeah. It was probably like, I'm really doing this. Oh, nice. And you have the picture here in the show. I'll put a picture.
Myke Hurley: Yeah. I'll put it in the show notes. It's me and Adina inside of the cantina. I've got my lightsaber on the desk. Yep. On the table. That is. Actually, I think that might be David's lightsaber. I made my lightsaber later on that day. That was a big day.
Brad Dowdy: So that is the color of these. These pens remind me of, like, instantly that's the color I saw out of these. And so, like, they're just not going to be usable for, like, a lot of handwriting, but for, like, drawing, artwork, you know, different things like that. They're going to be fun. I'm totally getting them. I also saw, and I didn't follow up to go get the link to this, which I need to add, Uniball 1, which is a gel ink pen that I've reviewed in the past. And it's Uniball's newish, highly saturated gel ink. They're also doing, like, a pastel series of ink. So pastel is big hot right now. Mm-hmm. So I'll be, you know, like, I'll get them. I'll try them. And, you know, maybe I'll have my mind changed. That's kind of one of the reasons why I like testing out some of these products, like the Juice Sweet Milk, right? Maybe my initial reaction is different from the actual, you know, performance of the pen when I get them in hand. So I love proving myself wrong on things like this. So it's going to be fun. I will be looking forward to testing them out.
Myke Hurley: All right. Do you want to take a break? Yeah, let's do that. This episode is brought to you by our friends over at Pen Chalet. They sell the products you're looking for from the brands that you love. Pen Chalet believe in fast and reliable customer service and the best prices around, which is why they run special discounts twice a month, closeout specials every two weeks. And they're always adding new stuff, too. Every month, you'll be able to go to Pen Chalet and find all of the things that you're looking for. Whether you want a new fountain pen, a new rollerball, mechanical pencil, maybe you're looking for some ink or you want some accessories. You know, you want some pen holders, some cartridge converters, all that kind of stuff. Maybe you're going to a pen show and you want a nice case to put your pens in. It doesn't matter what it is, whether it's the pens themselves or everything else, the accoutrement that goes with them. Pen Chalet's got it and they give the best quality pens and offer a 100% satisfaction guarantee on the low prices that they offer. They sell internationally with very reasonable shipping rates. And if you're in the US, you'll get free shipping on orders of over $75. So don't delay. Go to Pen Chalet. Oh, that was nice. I was starting to giggle. You can add that one, Ron. That's a free one for you. Don't delay. Go to PenCalet.com and click the podcast link at the top of the website. Enter the password PenAddict for this week's special offer. And to get the code that you need to save 10% on anything at Pen Chalet.
Brad Dowdy: So this list does not end. Like I was just barely getting to the bottom of the list as you were wrapping up the ad because we don't look at this beforehand. So I can kind of investigate what we have going on here. The very first thing, number one, there are a bunch of gift sets ready to roll this year. So if you are thinking about like upcoming events like graduation in a couple months or things like that, there are a bunch of pen and ink gift sets. There's a Monteverde Ritma gift set. Right now there's a Diplomat gift set with the Elox rings. There's a Diplomat Aero set that are all just like extraordinarily priced. Like way less than just the pen itself. Oh, yeah. And you get things like a carrying case and a bottle of ink. Like the Ritma, I'm trying to decide. It looks like it comes with like some different like parts you can interchange into the different pen barrels, which I haven't explored that set at all right now. And it's very, very reasonably priced. So if you're looking for those type of purchases and want to plan ahead, there's a several that Ron has listed this week. Aside from that, the standard Diplomat Traveler is just one of those basic fountain pens. That's a really good entry level tester pen for a lot of people.
Brad Dowdy: It's like less than 40 bucks. And it's just kind of a good aluminum barrel. You know, not too wide, not too thin. A very classic fountain pen for someone wanting to try a fountain pen. That's a great choice. And then as I continue to scroll in here, there's something that caught my eye personally that I don't know if I could pull the trigger on, but I'm kind of fascinated, Myke. And it's a rollerball. And I say this all the time with the ballpoints and rollerballs. The Visconti Opera Demo Carousel rollerball pen is like crazy cool. It's this blue demonstrator or there's a blue one and there's a red one. And they're these demonstrators that I haven't seen them do the rollerball version. I mean, obviously they do and they probably do it for a lot of pens. I've just never noticed them. And this one has caught my eye. So that's pretty neat. So there's a ton of other inks. There's a ton of other pens. This is a very, very lengthy list of awesomeness over at Pen Chalet. So go check these out. You, I am, I'm still kind of, I'm still kind of taking it all in. There's so much listed on here. So yeah, this is fantastic. Thank you, Ron, for putting this together.
Myke Hurley: Something I wanted to call attention to, like I went to the page and there's a really nice new Winnie the Pooh Retro 51. I don't know if you've seen this. I think Winnie the Pooh just came out of copyright. There's all kinds of stuff flying all over the place. Are you aware of this? I am. I am. That's why there's a Winnie the Pooh horror movie coming. Oh, no. Have you heard about this?
Brad Dowdy: I saw that. I think I saw like just maybe like the headline or maybe like a meme image of like Winnie the Pooh, like in an evil type of sense. So no, but I didn't realize that was like a thing.
Myke Hurley: It's called Blood and Honey, which is just like fantastic. I bet it's disgusting because I think that's kind of the point. Not like in a despicable way, but in like a really gory, like that's what they're going for. Yeah. But yeah, there's like the keycap set recently that's made a big splash, which I think called like 100 Acres. Yeah. So there's a lot of Winnie the Pooh stuff flying around now. Not the Disney version though. The A.M. Milne version. Right.
Brad Dowdy: So I know Kimberly picked up some of the Winnie the Pooh stuff at the California pen show. Retro 51 was there and I know she came home with that. And, you know, they're doing a few things. They have like a pen and a pencil set, which is really cool. One random thing since we're going through like the header images now, the Lamy Zivo is a pen that I've reviewed in the past. And this is not something Ron asked me to ask us to cover at all, which he never asked us to cover anything. But the Lamy Zivo, they came out with this basic ballpoint pen design last year and I reviewed the first model and I loved it. So now they have, honestly, I guess it's gone well enough for Lamy that they've come out with a second version. So now they have a blue and like a burgundy one. And they're like, they're eight bucks, right? Like it's just, it's Lamy's entry level ballpoint pen. If you're ever looking for like a cart filler or like a shipping filler, get the Zivo. You won't be disappointed. It does have a triangular grip shape. It's not like a fully molded, but it is a triangular grip shape. But we'll put a link in the show notes to my initial review. I found it to be just an excellent, excellent pen. And now they're coming out with some new colors, which I'm glad to see, which means it's gone well for them. So there you go.
Myke Hurley: You can get 80 cents off of Zivo.
Myke Hurley: If you just buy that on its own. So maybe add some other things to your cart at pensolet.com. Our thanks to Pensolet for the support of this show.
Planner check-in for 2023
Brad Dowdy: All right. So I was asked to do a quick planner check-in for 2023 so far. And I have to say, Myke, things are going swimmingly. So I have two main products that I'm using. The Plotter Nero. The very specific, unique, non-standard size notebook, which I can't unsee now since you called me out so beautifully in a recent podcast.
Myke Hurley: One of my honestly crowning achievements of this show was playing the long game on that one.
Brad Dowdy: Yeah. I'm usually prepared or ahead of you a little bit. Like I know what's coming. You got me there. Like that rarely happens. Like it rarely happens. You got me and I deserved every bit of that because I'm loving it. I'm still loving it. Every week I sit down and lay out my week in the weekly pages, which is kind of what I wanted out of a planner for this year is moving to a two page per week layout from a one page per day layout. So it's basically I've gone back to a previous style that I've loved before in different planners. Um, the William Hannah I've used it in, I've used it in the traveler style and it, I guess I'm just going to have to stick with this forever. Like this is the, the layout I keep going back to, to where I have seven days on the left hand side of the page and then open on the right hand side of the page. And it just really works for how I think about my weeks and how I want to see things because I don't need the singular page per day because I'm not, I don't really like use my planners in that way to where like, if I had like a more traditional job and I was like, you know, in a traditional office job or like even my old it job, it would be great. It's like, Hey, today, let's just like hammer out all the things, keep notes as I'm actively going. And I really don't use a planner in that way for my current job. So it's more of, Hey, I need to see big picture layout of what the week looks like. And then I just kind of go to town on all these individual tasks, like on their own. So that's worked out well for me. The regular blank pages in there also work well. That's just kind of my note taking pages. They're generally more work planning type of pages, right? It's, I don't use those pages for journaling, right? They're for ideas or for followup or for tasks. It's generally work related, you know, for different projects I have going on. Right. And if I want to do some separate journaling, like, well, I have a regular A5 notebook for that. That's separate from, you know, this. The new thing I added this year, that was a new layout for me in the plotter. But I had used that style before, just not last year. A completely new product was the five-year planner that I bought. Such a beautiful thing. Yeah. So I have an A6 Hobonichi five-year planner starts in 2023. I have, I am, I was unsure going into this and I spent, you know, months and months thinking about, should I do this for 2023 and beyond, right? Because it's five-year commitment at least. And I was like, nah, I won't do it. Yeah, maybe I'll do it. No, I won't do it. I've been in it since January 1st and I haven't missed a day yet. And I actively enjoy filling out that little block of time for each day because it is so short. And, you know, it's not time consuming at all. It takes you about one minute a day, maybe two minutes if you have to like think about what you're going to write. But you could write nothing there. It's like, hey, cook dinner tonight. It was, it was pretty sweet, you know, like stuff like that. Here's what we had. You know, it's, there is for a broad, big commitment, hey, five-year journal, it's almost no commitment on a daily basis. And that's the goal here, right? Take this teeny tiny little commitment every day, spend a minute doing it. And then five years from now, you'll have this, like this notebook full of like your, your past five years. And it's like, dang, that's kind of cool. So like I'm into it and I'll admit that I wasn't sure I was going to be into it, but I'm very into it. And so far so good. I am, I'm digging it. It doesn't hurt that this is, and one of the reasons that pushed me over and which I mentioned this before is this is the last edition with the traditional 52 GSM Tomoe River paper. So that didn't hurt me purchasing this, but even if they didn't, I think I still would have gotten this or a Midori one with the great Midori paper or any kind of layout of a five-year journal, I think it's, it's been a good thing for me to just capture some little detail or two every day. And I usually do it the next day, right? Like the next morning I'll, I'll write yesterday's event. I don't say like at five o'clock I'll write about the day because my day doesn't end then. So it might be something else going on that day. So I found it to be useful and enjoyable and I can't recommend it enough. So I, you know, if you're interested in that more of that long form or long timeframe product, you know, that's something pretty neat.
Myke Hurley: Do you gratitude journal? Like what is going in there?
Brad Dowdy: I don't gratitude journal.
Myke Hurley: Was it just like his little thing that happened today? Like it's just a time capsule?
Brad Dowdy: It's more time capsule-y. Like there might be like random acts of gratitude in there, right? But it's not like the gratitude journal to where today, you know, I'm thankful for this or today I appreciated that. I don't have a space for that. What I will generally do if I have a broader thing, like say like a gratitude that it's a little bit broader topic to write on, I will get my standard journal out and just write, you know, maybe a half a page, a five page and just say, Hey, this is what happened today. I really appreciated this. This is, you know, something that, you know, that was meaningful to me and that will go in my A5 notebook, which I keep separately. So I really kind of have three active products, but I don't count that A5, my everything notebook is what I call it, my everything journal. I don't count that in like these planner type of things. So that's just more of an unscheduled events go in there whenever I feel like writing or doing something broader or sketch or draw or something like that. So yeah, I don't have like, I'm not taking these daily entries as a one specific thing that I talk about every day. It's just whatever I want to talk about. I would fail if I gave myself the one thing today you have to put in this and you have to do that for the next 365 days. Like I would fail at that and I've proven to fail at that before. Right. So it has to be more open, more open-ended ideas to go in there. So yeah, it could be, it could be work related. It could be family related. It could be, you know, whatever hobby related. It could be absolutely anything. It could be nothing. Like if I, if I get, if I get stuck, I'll say the weather.
Myke Hurley: Do you ever expect to go back and read stuff?
Brad Dowdy: Um, yeah. So that's the beauty of these is once you get into year two and three, you're kind of thinking about the past a little bit. Hey, this is what I wrote that previous year. So they're all tracked on the singular page has five years of that day's entry. Right.
Myke Hurley: This is the interesting kind to me. This is how this product is structured. This is all the images. Cause I've seen some where it's like a really thick notebook and it's like a diary page and every page, you know, you just keep going on and on and on. Yeah. I like these kinds of, these kinds of journals where it makes you think back and like reminisce a little bit. Um, I think that they could be quite valuable. I've been, I've been looking at that as like, oh, this is an interesting like thing.
Brad Dowdy: Yeah. And once I understood that was the layout because I didn't think that was how they, these types of three year and five year journals worked. Right. I didn't know that it was the same day on the page for five years of entries. And once that kind of clicked in my head, I was like, okay, I think I can, I can probably make this work and, and enjoy it while doing it. And it's like, okay. And I can see how, you know, years from now it'll be valuable, um, to look back on those types of things and just kind of figure out like what the recurring themes are and the ideas are. So, and it's, again, it's just such a short entry. Like it's an ace, it's a half of an A6 page and then like six lines for like today's entry. Like, so it's really, really small, um, amount to write in. And sometimes like if I don't have much, like I'll just, I'll just say something nonsensical or do like an ink swatch or whatever. I was like, but I'm putting something in there every day. So it's been good.
Myke Hurley: Good. What about you? Do you have a task? No. So like for me, you've been, you've been on lock for years, obviously. Yes. Here's the thing for me with, with journaling, right? So obviously I'm daily without fail, things just in general. Like I do it when every day I'm working. That's kind of the way that I work. I have a task goes off at five o'clock. It's time to journal.
Myke Hurley: My, you know, I, I don't have an issue with this because I'm committed to the idea rather than the product. Right. So like I'm committed to the type of journaling around yearly themes that my, I'm committed to my theme, which means I'm committed to the act of reflecting on my theme on a daily basis, tracking how my life is going, giving myself a little space to write how I'm feeling, write what's going on. But then also do like the daily questions thing, which are all laddering up to my theme. And I mark those off to see if I'm continuing to move forward the things in my life that are important to me. I'm fixed on these ideas. You know, like these ideas came before the theme system journal, right? I was doing it in a Hobonichi for over a year. I developed this kind of, this way of journaling that made sense for me. So I'm just committed to that, right? And so it's very easy for me to do it every day because it's not about the products. It's about the idea. But then I have then went ahead and made the perfect product to match my idea of journaling and like a way of like a system of journaling that I think makes sense for people. So it's easy for me to keep track of it. I look at something like this five-year journal and I'm like, oh, that seems really nice. But as we were talking, I was kind of like, how will I, how would I commit myself to doing that? And I don't have any as easy an answer as I do for the theme system where like the commitment is the theme. That's the commitment. And then everything else from there is easy. But when it comes to the idea of like writing something down every day, like some piece of ephemera is something that's important to me. Like I don't know what, how I would stay committed to that for the time because I can't think of initially a thing that was going to push me to it. Yeah. Yeah.
Brad Dowdy: Right. Yeah. You're duplicating your ideas, which are really singular. Like what's the point of saying this again? You've already had say like in your theme system journal, like, you know, just your gratitude or your, your thought for the day or your recap of the day is like, well, why do I need to do that again? And that is my thing. And that's where people get in trouble.
Myke Hurley: I feel like I would be, I would be just, just repeating myself. Like, so I don't think that that for me is as useful. Like, but I want to think on it. I do want to think on it. Right.
Brad Dowdy: Right.
Myke Hurley: Because it seems really cool to have something like that because I don't keep my journals, right? Like not that they, they don't have a good way of like doing the prompting, like the, like the five and three year stuff do where you're going back every day. But I'm just not the kind of person that would ever go through an old journal. Like I fill it up and then it goes in recycling, you know? Yeah.
Brad Dowdy: I'm just kind of dumb of it. So like my notebooks and like journal types, I do keep my planners. I don't keep like anything that I've had like schedule stuff in. Like what I will do is sometime the following year, I will, if I have time on a weekend or like an hour or two to sit with it and I'll flip through it to see if there was anything interesting worth keeping and cut it out. And then just like attach it into like a notebook that I know I'm going to keep it and then chuck the rest of it. Like I don't, I don't need to keep those. So like the plotter, the plotter pages, like I, yeah, the plotter pages are removable, right? Like I'm not like if I find one or two things I need to keep in there for just reference purposes, like I'll save that, tape it into a notebook and they, I just throw them away. Like I don't have the plotter like archive thing to like keep all of my past pages. I'm not interested in that. It's not beneficial to me.
Brad Dowdy: So, yeah. So I would say our 22, 23 planners are going well.
Myke Hurley: Yeah. Very, very well. I'm happy that you found this, like these two things that are working for you.
Brad Dowdy: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And I literally like carry them together, even though like my five year, I'm only using once a day. They kind of like live in the same space. It's like they're both physically in my hand right now as I'm talking about them. So they just kind of go together. It's like I want the five year around, even though I know like I'm only going to write in it once today. It's kind of, it has the same space in my life as like the plotter, which I will use several times today. Right? Weird. Weird that way.
Myke Hurley: All right. This episode is also brought to you by our friends over at Squarespace, the all-in-one platform for building and growing your business online. With Squarespace, you can stand out with a beautiful website, engage directly with your audience and sell your products, your services, even the content that you create. Squarespace has you covered. You can get started with one of their beautiful templates and customize it very easily to fit your needs. It's just as easy as browsing their categories and finding the website that works for you. for what you're trying to put out there or that matches your business. And then you will get the perfect starting place to go in and customize things to really make it feel like it's your own. You can also do the same with their email campaigns. If you end up building a website and people are coming and reading your articles, maybe you want to send them to the, you know, maybe get sent out by email as well. So people can read them in a different way. You can directly build that relationship with your customers or your visitors. You can encourage your visitors to sign up as email subscribers and then start them on that journey. You start with an email template, just like the website, customize it by applying your logo, the colors of your brand, the fonts you want to use, and you can put the content in and send it out. And every single time you get built in analytics to impact, to measure the impact of every send. And analytics insights are a big part of the full Squarespace platform. If you want to know where your site visitors are coming from, where your sales are coming from, which channels are most effective for you, you can analyze all of this in Squarespace as well. So you can make informed decisions and smart choices about where your business is going. I've used Squarespace for nearly 15 years and it's easy for me. If I want to put something online, it's just where I go. At this point, it's what websites are to me. If I want to make a website, I go to Squarespace because they just make it easy. And over the years, the system just gets better and better and better and more features and better all the time. So go to squarespace.com slash penaddict and you can sign up for a free trial today with no credit card required. 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 when you sign up, use the offer code penaddict to get 10% of your first purchase and show your support for the show. Our thanks to Squarespace for their continued support of this show and RelayFM.
Ask TPA segment begins
Brad Dowdy: All right. You want to hit some Ask TPA? I think we got some good ones this week. Do you want to do a shout out of the week? Oh, yeah. Let's do a shout out. Let's do a shout out. Oh, maybe I forgot that and wanted to jump right into the Ask TPA because I know this person so well and they've become a really good friend over the years. And that's David over at Fig Boot on Pens. The OG pen YouTuber, Myke. I don't know if we've ever given him a proper shout out. I'm pretty sure I gave him a shout out back in the day. But I was looking. I always check out David's videos. He does just such an exceptional job. I think he is the he's the bar that has been set on YouTube for pen reviews. And you have to you have to come at him if you're going to if you're going to step up your YouTube video review games. I think he's fantastic at what he does. He's very he puts out a lot of content like I don't know how he does it so well does so much so well. And I just appreciate it. David is a friend and I was checking out the Fig Boot on Pens channel. He is not that far from 50,000 subscribers on on the YouTube. So if you all aren't following Fig Boot on Pens, go over to YouTube. Hit that subscribe button. And yeah, let's get let's get across that 50,000 threshold here this first half of this year. I think that would be awesome to see. So he just did a rebranding. He's got a new logo up there on the site. So yeah, everything's coming up Fig Boot right now. So let's let's let's go give him some love. If you're not familiar with the channel on YouTube, go check it out.
Myke Hurley: I'll be in the show notes. Yep. All right. So we have some ask TPA questions. First one coming in from Stefan, who says, I've just started a master's degree in statistics, and obviously I'm only doing it as an excuse to use nice stationery. Obviously. Altogether, lectures, tutorials and assignments use quite a bit of paper. So my question is, is there paper that can handle reasonable fountain pen use, but gets you lots of sheets per dollar? I'm not concerned with super fancy inks here. I'm typically using a Kakuno with a fine or medium nib and a Roshizuku ink.
Brad Dowdy: Yeah. So this is a great question that comes up a lot. I'm a student. I like fountain pens. Basic paper doesn't really work so well with my fountain pens. Fancy fountain pen paper can be expensive. Where is my middle ground for this? You know, where can I get some great fountain pen paper? That will work with my pen. Like the Kakuno with a Roshizuku ink. What an awesome. That's a perfect combination. Like stick with that. Like that's a great combination. For the paper, the two items that come up immediately. And now you do have to make some sacrifices with this, but you can still get a good price per sheet type of thing. So the one sacrifice you will make with the Morimon Spiral Note Basic Notebook is in the name. It's Spiral Bound. If you're good with that as a student, you're going to love this paper. So you can get it in A5 or B6 size. And if you shop around, I would have to find you a link. There are actually some A4 versions of this exact notebook that I think it's so like the A5 version is less than $6 for 80 sheets. And the paper is awesome. It's as good as any fountain pen paper you use. Any Morimon paper is good. So that's my number one choice for like a student notebook where you want to use fountain pens, but you'll have to be okay with the Spiral Bound. The second choice is the Kukuyo Campus Notebook. Again, great paper. However, the issue with that one, the sacrifice you have to make is the capacity of each individual notebook is small, right? So you can buy a lot of sheets for a decent price, but they usually come in like a five pack of notebooks, right? So each notebook might only be like 48 sheets or something like that. And, you know, it depends like if you have a lot of subjects and want to separate subjects, like that's a really good way to do it. I highly recommend both of those papers. The third choice, which is an even more random thing and is something that Stephen would have to think about a little bit more how to use them is to buy the Kukuyo Business loose sheets printer paper, right? So you can buy Kukuyo printer paper, like in like the 500 sheet reams, like if you were buying them for like your home printer, that's actually fountain pen friendly, but they only come in blank and they only come in loose sheets. So if you need to find like a binding system to use or things like that, you could, you could kind of go all out and kind of create your own there. That's going to be your best cost per sheet, but you're going to have no built-in binding with that type of setup, but you're going to get, that's going to be your best bang for the buck for quality, but again, it's loose sheets and you'll have to figure out how to use them best with your, with your study. So yeah, I think this is a great question. I love, I love answering this. And I think if it's me, I'm going with the Morimon spiral note because you can get different layouts in there. I think they have grid and, and blank or lined. I think they have a few different options as far as layouts where the Kukuyo campus is, it's just their own proprietary kind of like dotted line type of setup. It's basically lined for all intents and purposes. And then, um, the Kukuyo business sheets are just blank, blank printer paper. So there you go.
Myke Hurley: Uh, Jason says no red ink. I get it referencing back to when we said we didn't like red ink, but I'm wondering, do you own any red pens? If so, what ink do you use in red pens?
Brad Dowdy: Blue, black, and bright blue. I am on record as red pens, red pen barrels, especially fountain pens are underrepresented. It's one of my favorite unique pen barrel colors, right? Like we've talked about, um, the Enigma, uh, Narwhal collaboration not long ago. One of my favorite, uh, Canalea pens is the, the Kona cherry, which is red. And you just don't see a ton of red barrel pens. I mean, you can get some classic Pelicans and things like that for sure. And a lot, a lot of product lines do have a red pen in there, but it's not a primary option. Whenever I ink up a red pen, it's either blue, black ink or like a bright blue, like a Con Pecky or like a Robert Oster blue lagoon or anything bright like that. Now there is one red ink that I will use. I just wanted to go on record as that. Jason is right. That guy, I'm not a red ink fan, but I don't use the red. I, I, you know, I take that back. I have used this ink in my Kona cherry before, but I didn't, I generally don't like red and red matchy matchy. I will use this red ink in a black pen or something like that. Uh, Robert Oster, um, red candy is kind of my favorite, mostly standard looking red ink, right? It's a very bright red, but it looks like your basic red inks, but it's got, it's got a good depth of color, good set color saturation. It's, it's a nice shade. Um, you know, it doesn't lean too bright or too light colored and it doesn't get into like the brick red range, which is too dark for me. The problem I have with red is I like pink a lot and that's just the choice. Like I love pink inks. I love any shade of pink. I love like when they get darker, like the magentas and the fuchsias and the purple on into purple. Like that's, it's nothing against red ink. It's that pink solves that for me. Right. So that's kind of my jam. So, but if I do use a red ink, it's a Robert Oster red candy.
Myke Hurley: Yeah. I don't, don't have any red inks and I don't think I have any red pens. Yeah.
Brad Dowdy: Red pens get blue inks. That's pretty consistent. I don't even know what else I don't. As many times as if I've inked up that cone of cherry, I think I've used red in it once and then it's usually a darker blue and then sometimes a lighter blue. So yeah, like I, it's almost always blues in red pens for whatever reason that works for me.
Myke Hurley: And Ivan asks, I'm looking for a blank lettering workbooks on notebooks that have fountain pen friendly paper. I'm learning Russian and need to practice my Russian alphabet, but I exclusively use fountain pens. I'm hoping you can help me out.
Brad Dowdy: So I think I probably have a follow-up question. In blank lettering workbooks, do you need any type of guides, like line guides? Like do you like legitimately want blank paper? Or do you need different line spacings for line heights? Because I would actually rewind up to the Kukuyo campus, the way that they space their lines. You could use one, two, or three lines, depending on if you're writing lowercase, capitalizing, you know, script, cursive, joined writing, print, anything. And to have like different letter heights. But if you're looking for just straight up blank lettering, lettering workbooks or notebooks, gosh, I would think I would still, this might be actually be the same answers as before. I think, can you get this Mormon spiral in blank? Because if you can get, see, it's ruled graph, it doesn't come in blank. Shoot.
Brad Dowdy: God, that's a surprisingly hard question. Blank.
Myke Hurley: Blank.
Brad Dowdy: Because the reason why I'm thinking, like you can get blank all day long in your standard A5 bound journals. I don't think that's a great solution for handwriting practice because the spine is going to get in the way. I'm generally going to want something to fold or flip over, right? Being a spiral bound. But then like, okay, what's the best spiral mound? Well, it's Morimon. Well, do they come in blank? Do the standard Nima scenes come in blank?
Myke Hurley: We're doing, doing live, uh, some live product research, live research right here.
Brad Dowdy: Unruled. What is unruled? Does that mean blank? Is that code for blank? Unruled.
Myke Hurley: Probably.
Brad Dowdy: Yeah, that's it. It's called unruled. So the Mormon, the Nemo scene, which is actually the more expensive version, um, compared to the one I was talking about earlier, the spiral, the other spiral bound, which is more of the student notebook. The Mormon Nemo scene unruled is their blank version. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Plus it comes in a four size. If you're practicing handwriting, you want the most space you can. A four blank spiral bound. That would be my answer. And that means Mormon Nemo scene. So I think, I think that's how I would go. But, uh, Yvonne, I would be willing to discuss this more and see if we can like nail it down even further.
Myke Hurley: But blank is weird to me if you're doing handwriting.
Brad Dowdy: Right. That's why I'm confused a little bit about the question because you generally want some type of guidelines. Maybe if you like, maybe you want something under the page, like maybe Yvonne has like something to place under the page, you know, like a, um, like a writing board or, or some type of guide sheet underneath, which is fine. So maybe blank is, is the need here, but yeah, generally speaking, um, I would want some, some kind of guidelines on the page or below the page if I'm practicing handwriting. But yeah, that's why I was, uh, I was thinking, you know, maybe there's some, some follow-up needed here. So Yvonne, if you have any questions, definitely reach out, um, with some follow-up on that and I'd be glad to help out.
Myke Hurley: All right. If you would like to send in questions of your own, you can go to upgrade and not upgrade, not upgrade. This is pen addict. I'm still getting used to the URLs. You know, you can go to upgradefeedback.com, but you won't get your answer.
Brad Dowdy: Yeah. That's what happens when you have a new host in there in the seat from you, like for the first time ever, you're all screwed up.
Closing remarks and listener engagement platforms
Myke Hurley: Yep. Penaddictfeedback.com is where you want to go and you can send in your feedback for pen addict. You can send in feedback for upgrade there if you want, but that won't be any good either. I'll give it a shot. You can give it a shot. Yes. Give it a go. You know, just see what happens. We'll, we can also send in via email to hello at penaddict.com and then go to penaddict.com where you can find many wonderful product reviews written by Brad and the crew. You can go to spokedesign.com. You've got some interesting stuff going on over there at Spoke Design. We'll talk about that next week. Yeah. Lots of fun stuff. People should head there right now. Some interesting, interesting goods.
Brad Dowdy: Yeah, we'll do, we'll do a full breakdown next week, but we've, we've implemented kind of a, a studio shop for our little laboratory playground area for products. So yeah, something we're testing out.
Myke Hurley: Twitch.tv slash penaddict. Penaddict on Instagram. What is your Mastodon?
Brad Dowdy: Penaddict at mastodon.social.
Myke Hurley: Penaddict at mastodon.social. Yeah.
Brad Dowdy: Yeah. I, I'm enjoying the, the Mastodon experience. Me too, actually. Micro.blog experience. You can find me at Brad over there. So like literally just go to penaddict.com. You find it over there. And I have a link to all the stuff there. So yeah. Good times.
Myke Hurley: I'm at imichaelmike.social. And I'm also, uh, we have decided on lead product designer at Cortex Brand. Oh, okay. Go to cortexbrand.com and you can take a look at the Sidekick notepad. Nice. Let's put out a YouTube video, kind of like a product video of the Sidekick notepad.
Brad Dowdy: I got to check it out. I saw that hit my feeds yesterday. So I have not watched it yet. I will do that. We will discuss that next week along with my spoke stuff. So there you go. Book it.
Myke Hurley: Booked. Thanks so much to Penn Chalet and Squarespace for their support of this week's episode. But most of all, as always, thank you for listening. We'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Brad.
Brad Dowdy: Goodbye, Brad.