Agreed, I did a month long cultural homestay in northern Japan and got to deal with a bunch of mundane bits like laundry, grocery shopping, and trash day.
320 karma · joined March 14, 2011
There needs to be a minimum amount of content that has materially changed in order to call it a new edition. Moving questions around and adding a word here or there is not cool.
Went to a new city, one place out of the four I visited required a signature, the rest were fine with tap to pay/chip+Pin. Some places are fine until some arbitrary limit, etc. The place that made me sign? The purchases were $5-$6.
Diagrams get inserted as an image as-is and can be tagged with pertinent info. I do have the benefit of having decent handwriting that most can read as is or be OCR'd.
Just went to the Bullet Journal site, wow, there's an app now? There is so much going on there. It's too much. I'm also team fountain pen.
The only thing that pushed me from Spacemacs, which is a nice distro, to doom was Spacemacs instability. I needed some things from the beta channel and it lived up to its name.
I did go through an experimentation phase trying to do what the "official" bullet journal people and the bujo "influencers" suggested. Instead of having to restart and adapt to a new app, I could try a little bit and discard what didn't work or I didn't like.
To the point that grandparent made about:
> A paper journal is almost always impossible to search, easily damaged, easily lost, and easily customized with stickers, different pens and pencils, and other decor.
I can't run a grep on a notebook, no, but I often know about when I took a note on something to find it quickly. I usually run through a single notebook for a bullet journal per year. I started with fountain pens the same time I shifted back to analog. I have a little fun with colored ink, changing colors at most once a week. I tend towards waterproof/water-resistant inks that can weather some random wetness and still be fine. Some of them are even UV-resistant/forgery proof. I'm not taking hours upon hours to create the perfect spread.
I'm not writing outside in the rain. I've misplaced my phone more than my notebook. With the way that many are paper phobic these days, I'm not in real fear that my book would grow legs and walk off.
Re: obsession/cost, it is what you make it.
I know folks who won't buy a pen over $5, others who think nothing of dropping $200-$1000. I know pen folks that have a single bottle of ink and a single pen or two. Others that have dozens of pens and shelves of inks. Ink is relatively cheap. I have a bottle that cost me $20, came with a free pen, is waterproof ink and will last me about 130-200 refills. Another one was $5 for like 60-100.
How long a refill will last depends on a lot of variables(ink qualities, paper absorbency, flow, nib size) but it is possible to do this hobby for the same amount or cheaper than buying single use pens. For example,
The cheapest good pen you can buy without waiting for a month for it to come from China is a Platinum Preppy for $4. You can buy a pack of 10 cartridge refills for 6.75. That brings the price per use down to $0.97, comparable to what it would cost for a low to mid-grade ballpoint. If you instead decide to go for the real amortized savings and buy a bottle and either refill the cartridge via syringe/get a converter, you could reasonably get down to $0.50 per refill.
Even cheaper are the pen brands from abroad that have some models that cost a dollar for the pen and the converter(converter alone can be up to $8 if bought separately with some pens). You could even beat Bic prices. Priced out to as low as 7 cents per refill if you get cartridges in bulk and don't care what the ink is(1USD for pen + ~7USD for 100 cartridges).
It doesn't have to be this bespoke money pit hobby. One thing I have noticed is that zero people borrow pens from me now so I don't have to replace the pens that used to grow legs and walk off.
I've even found a bunch of other inks that aren't advertised as waterproof/resistant that ended up to be waterproof depending on the paper. For example J. Herbin Perle Noire on meh paper.
I do fine with them as an everyday carry, my gripe is mainly when I get a new pen, paper or ink knowing that a paper might not like a certain pen or ink.
I got the TWSBI Go first before the Eco, because of the push the plunger to fill with ink, I would put it high for beginners also at a $19 price point and holds a lot of ink.
The only problem with that is the original creator preferred a h-system (ĉ becomes ch) despite h existing in the language.
Combined with the other things you mentioned like lack of original and compelling media, I dropped it and went back to French.
It's a great concept but it's missing all the things that keep me hooked on a language.
It's a thing that makes ride share a bit maddening because it's clear when folks can't reason about their situation versus blindly following the GPS instructions.
Edit: Riding public transit to middle and high school helped a lot too.
Both are fair use. I think it might be lobby stuff and how they are consumed. Great music can transform / enhance a pivotal moment in a movie whereas the presence of an Apple logo or Mickey Mouse shirt, not so much.
Companies can and have sued for licensing fees or if they feel their product logo was shown and misrepresented in film.
Back to the t-shirt example, on the movie/funded production scale, a lot of this is prevented by the wardrobe department making sure extras are not clothed in licensed stuff.
I never liked pure cursive and do a mix, it's more of a print-sive where some letters are always print (F, J, G, Q, a couple others) and others are cursive depending on flow, speed, etc.
I have a bit more practice because I also sketchnote.
Here in the US, we go hard on repeated rote memorization and mastery of minute things that don't matter as much.
The vintage P51s are priced all over the place from $60-7500 depending on the features of that pen....$7500 was a pen that Cartier commisioned to sell in their stores.
Their past popularity makes supplies of low to mid ranged models pretty plentiful.
P51 is "out of print." I find reliable P51-inspired writers for $2-4 a pen so I have no desire to try and buy a vintage one that might not work.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Jinhao-51A-Acrylic-Wood-Fountain-Pe...
Youtube can do some automated transcription but it can be buggy.
For funsies, I recently did the transcription of a video for a creator I enjoy. There was a blog post based on the video but it wasn't a 1:1 match so it had to be tweaked by hand. It was time consuming.
The most important thing is to travel with them nib up because the change in pressure can force air out if they aren't full. I used to bag them in mini-sandwich bags too to be safe but found that to not be necessary.
I don't get as OCD but I know of some who match their FP to what they are wearing and/or the color of ink to the color of pen.
From this list, I can personally vouch for the Platinum Preppy and Pilot Metropolitan. Though the Preppy is a disposable, the catridges from the non-disposable Platinum pens fit it. You could could even get an eyedropper and refill the cartridge from a bottle of ink.
https://www.jetpens.com/blog/great-beginner-fountain-pens-th...
Most of my collection is in the under $20 range, most under $2.50 and the worst I've had is the ink had dried, which took some soaking in water for a bit to get out, but this was from letting a pen sit unused for months.
Recapping and uncapping can be distracting to others. There are some pens that have a click action like a regular pen but they are SPENDY.
Some of the paper quality issues can be mitigated by the ink choice and/or nib size.
https://www.jetpens.com/blog/great-beginner-fountain-pens-th...
I'm 2 years in and I think I'd just designate a pen to be dedicated to the known Noodler's "problematic" colors(BSB and Mass 54th). I just cleaned out 4 pens, some of which had dried ink in them, all of them were fine.
I'm partial to Noodler's Heart of Darkness and X-Feather.
I can refill a pen in less than 30 secs if using a converter, 5 secs if I'm popping in a new cartridge. For those that want to go the disposable route, there are several options.
The guy is making it sound more involved than it is for 99% of the FP using community.
The only gripes I have about Noodler's is that it isn't as vivid in EF or F, they beg to be in M nibs. Also the Charlie eyedropper pen burped A LOT.