PEN 15 club: pen CIL club OR "clutch" and "hold" are synonyms, that's weird

My endless onward march of consumption / acquisition ... marches ... onward, I guess: I have copped a new special friend! It is a Caran d'Ache Fixpenci 884. It is another 2mm lead holder, clutch pencil style (so when you—or, I suppose, I—advance the lead, you're harnessing the awesome power of gravity, not limited by the throw of the lead provided by a click of the button). This is a style well represented in my art supplies box, so not exactly a patch for a major hole. But it's been a minor grail pen(cil) for me since I discovered both my thick thirst for lead holders (see above) and also my steep affection for the Caran d'Ache 849 ballpoint form factor, which latter discovery took place in a two-step process: first, I saw one on The Gentleman Stationer, and mentioned it to Noodles, who, second, got me one, whereupon I fell in love with it immediately, and have been with only very rare exceptions not without it ever since.

So, when my pal took me to The Vancouver Pen Shop, and I saw one, I thought, well as well here as another, and I moved to have it, with money.

Eagle-eyed observers might note that this Caran d'Ache Fixpencil 884 is red, a perfect color for a writing instrument, and a good match for the 849, a beautiful shape for one. One might surmise that it is aluminum, the correct material, and I believe this surmise to be fact.

I pressed into service this pencil immediately, and have found it well-suited for all normal tasks: whether deployed for list-making, sketching*, or putting in a shirt pocket to look impressive / fancy, the Fixpencil 884 is fit for purpose!

(List.)

A couple things that I found surprising. First, the name seems different everywhere I look. Here, I'm deferring to what's written on the barrel. I don't know what a 884 is. I don't know why half the pictures I see of what looks like the samefa king thing say "2mm" and mine doesn't. I don't know! Second, I don't know what kind or grade of lead is in there, but I know I think it's nice, whatever it is. Third, please enjoy another picture.

(Another picture.)

Bask in its glory. Its sleek, appealing form, as though streamlined for efficient speed. Its potent color, strong in any and all lighting conditions. All this I understood, immediately. What I did not know, did not clock or comprehend, until I put these two beautiful objects together, is that my Caran d'Ache Fixpencil 884 and my Caran d'Ache 849 ballpoint may be sisters ... but they are not twins.

(Nestled. Snuggly. Similar, but NOT the same.)

This is a strange and confounding fact to me. But not one that doesn't delight.

* Also doodles both erotic and non-

Reunited and It Feels So Good AKA What To Do When You Lose Your Bullet Journal

(Look what they did to my beautiful boy (they sent him back to me, safe and sound and with a fast, simple process))

And but so but I've done some ~Bullet Journaling~ for the past decade or so*, and for the first time I've recently had to confront a new to me problem: What do you do when your "put everything here" repository ... isn't ... here?

The premise of the Bullet Journal for me is that the one notebook is where I can, should, and do put everything.  As Darren Bauler once said to me, "I just want to put everything in one place, if I have too many projects, I spend too much time worrying about what thing I make goes in what bucket, which distracts me from making things."  Or as the book has it: "The idea is to be consistently unburdening your mind.  It will be able to rest assured, knowing that everything is safely recorded in your notebook." (Carroll 86)

I use most of the canonical collections: daily log; monthly log; future log.  Mostly I use these in the absolutely stock version from the original videos and book. Even that version had a little too much "mindfulness" and process for me,so I have mostly not followed the more recent iterations, which seem to be first evolving into a (n even) more self-helpy place, with "write your life" (?) replacing "your life's operating system" (???) and subsquently offending some folks by pulling a lot of material down and stashing it securely behind a paywall.

I mention these core collections and the way I use them to highlight two things:

1. I use this 'sucker every single day (the daily log), and
2. I put basically all of my scheduling thoughts into it (this month's monthly log or the future log); and

It turns out that those two things combine to mean that the absence of the physical journal was nearly paralyzing.  I didn't want to plan, or to think about planning, my days, weeks, months or year for the first couple days.

Eventually I grabbed an old Field Notes and at least got back to daily logging, which had the desired effect of "unburden"ing my mind a bit and helping me hold the day-to-day more or less steadily on course.  But still I noticed a kind of stasis, an unwillingness to cut bait and start a new notebook; I ended up holding in a sort of abeyance any and all plans more than a couple days out.  I felt like I was a little bit in limbo, and it didn't feel great.

As I draft this, it's June 30, and the great folks at Alaska Airlines have, as of yesterday, reunited me with the Traveler's I'd left on an airplane some two weeks before!**  I plan to spend a chunk of my evening patching the holes in it left by my couple weeks without it and un-stuck-ing myself by doing some planning; making my monthly log for July and updating the future log as needed.

But I think it's also going to be worth reflecting a bit on the not-great quality of dependence I feel about this tool.  After all, the point of a tool is to increase capacity when you use it, not to remove capacity when you can't use it.

I will also be thinking a bit about NOT LEAVING MY FUCKING NOTEBOOK AND TWO FAVORITE PENS ON THE GOD DAMNED AIR PLANE.***

* It would take some digging to figure out exactly when. Certainly I had adopted the notions of collections by early 2019, and I read the early round of publicity the method got, even tho at the time I was more a hipster PDA guy, due mainly to my depraved lust enthusiasm for binder clips.

What I can't immediately determine is when I started daily logging. It's at least possible that I actually started daily logging as a work thing (thus, in notebooks that are jobs ago and long gone) and only later brought it home. Hard to say and boy do I not feel like going through that shelf just at the moment to figure it out.

** Perhaps more importantly, Alaska lost and found has reunited me with all the stuff that was crammed into the notebook, especially and most notably two of my very favorite pens, both gifts from Noodles, my beloved Caran d'Ache 849 and Kaweco Liliput. The lost and found crew—or the journey the notebook went on—did break one pen, but I think I managed to glue it back together, so that's a small price to pay. That they used the built-in elastic band to close the notebook up—vertically, not horizontally—I will forgive, even though I never, ever use the band, either properly or, as they did, improperly, because it's a good sign that there's something lightly wrong with the cueing the tool gives you, if you can put it on wrong and are led to do so. It's a lesson, you see.

*** In the spirit of full disclosure: This only occurred to me at 8:30 p.m. on July 2.

Pen15 Club: Making a Pen Loop for Your Crummy Work Steno Pad

At work, I generally carry a steno pad, one of those top-bound bad-paper, 6" by 9" jobs that most office supply closets seem to be full of (except at my office, the last couple years, during which stretch admin has refused to buy these anymore for some reason). They are the platonic ideal of a thing to use at work that's ... fine. Basically fine. They take a bit of a beating and tend to get used up before they get worn out, they're easy to hold and use one-handed, standing, etc., they're ... fine.

One lackful area, howevs, is that they're not THAT that easy to attach a pen to. Some folk'll stuff one into the spiral ring binding up top, but I don't, and won't. But what I will do is mess around with duct tape to make a satisfactory-to-me solution, which I shall detail below.

A Process for Creating a Pen Loop

1. First, gather your tools. You will need:
1. A steno pad
2. A roll of duct tape
3. A scissors
4. The pens you will want to use with that steno pad—I show here three favorite work pens: Bic Re'Nu; Zebra bLen 3C; Pilot Precise V5

5. A binder clip
6. A clean, well-lighted place and a flat surface on which to work (with enough gravity to hold your items on the surface without you having to worry about it)
2. Second, select the girthiest pen you will use with this notebook—in my case, this will be the bLen, but if you want to futureproof this part, a Sharpie or MarksALot might be the thing to reach for
3. Third, get yourself a length of duct tape and wrap it sticky side out around the pen a couple times and cut it off cleanly, using a scissors

4. Fourth, put the pen in the binder clip and set it aside. This is so the sticky tube of duct tape doesn't touch anything and therefore doesn't stick to anything you don't want it to stick to
5. Fifth, starting on the inside back cover of the steno pad, about where you'd like the pen loop to be, run a single strip of duct tape horizontally across the inside, then the outside, of the cover, leaving enough of a strip to not quite make it all the way across the inside cover a second time

6. Sixth: the tricky part. With the strip of duct tape lying sticky-side up, carefully line up the sticky-side-out tube of duct tape you made earlier with that strip, and place it about a pen width away from the edge of the back cover of the steno pad
   This is tricky, because the stickiest substances in the world are the two pieces of sticky-side duct tape, when they contact each other, and if the two pieces touch when they are in the wrong spot or orientation, you will be irritated and may have to make another tube
   Leaving the pen in the tube will help you manipulate and position it

7. Seventh: Cut off the strip of tape, if you have not already, leaving enough to cover all the sticky-side tape remaining, and smooth out any bubbles or wrinkles or w/e
8. You now have a duct tape pen loop that will not leave (much) duct tape residue on your pen! Great job!

NOTE: This will only work with pens that have clips. If you have a pen without a clip and want to try this approach it won't work. I don't know of an approach that WILL work. Maybe there's a way to attach a clipless pen to a work steno pad; I don't know. Frankly, I don't want to know. It's a market we could do without.

Pen15 Club: On the Tip Tip

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a straight-up great pen for using is the Caran d'Ache 849. A couple of years back, I had casually mentioned this well-understood fact to Noodles, even going so far as to show a photograph of a particularly handsome model I had seen, and then roughly June 1, 2022 I was presented with one! It's a great writer, it looks super cool, it fits my hands well, and its "Goliath"* refill (a) seems to be willing to last forever and (b) puts down my current favorite shade of blue. None of that is what I'm here to talk about today.

What I'm here to talk about today is the fact that the Caran d'Ache 849 is a retractable ballpoint, a retractable ballpoint that will will, in my experience, on occasion "stick" a bit when being activated, such that the tip sticks out a tiny bit farther than normal.

(A close-up shot showing the Caran d'Ache 849 tip extruded extraly.)

The reason this is to me notable is that I think this— what, perhaps just over 2 millimeter—difference actually improves the way the pen writes, noticeably! Having that extra bit of tip length is just a tiny bit more comfortable for me, given the way I hold my pen, where my notebook usually is (lap more often than desk), and probably other factors I have not yet identified. At this point, when I click it and it sticks like that, I try not to retract the tip, because I prefer it like this.

Anyway, I love this pen inordinately, and hope every reader will enjoy my small contribution to its lore. You can find more lore at The Gentleman Stationer, and even buy yourself one there if you dare want to be as cool as Noodles.

* lol

Pen 15 Club: Is This Loss? OR When Hobbies Collide

AKA: How To Deal With Fucking Up

One area of conflict that obtains when a Bag Person (cf: Toward a Total Theory of the Messenger Bag: An Previous Series, et al) gets into pens is the issue of: What pen goes in what bag? What pen to walk around with? As the pens get fancier, this gets more complex and complicado, given that fountain pens are at the best of times and under the most controlled conditions slightly fiddly, fragile items. (And items that don't necessarily love uncontrolled, random conditions, meaning there's always a chance the pen you're carrying around won't actually work well if you pull whip it out.)

So were these the considerations the other day that led me to conclude, "To the basketball game, I should carry my still quite new Lamy Safari, along with a tiny notebook, and of course no bag, because basketball arenae are panicky control freaks w slash r slash t bags. Now, since the arena is in San Francisco and I shall need to walk more than a bit to it, I should wear a Pendleton Board Shirt, for layering." All these conclusions were, so far as they went, more or less correct:

• The Safari I carried was the Strawberry colorway, which is made of tough plastic and, crucially, has a matte finish, so it is not prone to scratching—it is a pen I liked; it is not a pen I loved
• a Pendleton Board Shirt is the correct layer for most purposes

Where I got into trouble is, as clever lede readers will no doubt have predicted, is in the overlap between two preferences:

1. To wear a Pendleton, with only a flap pocket (no button)
   
   
2. To avoid the use of most pens' clips, even the Safari's clip, which is, like, its main feature
   
   

And that is how the Safari, I concluded later, must have escaped my shirt pocket when I bent over to swoop up my hat after a blustery San Franciscan wind took it from my head and into a filthy crosswalk.

A good note, I guess: If you want to keep your stuff, use the elements of them designed to help you do that. Or at least pay attention when you're doing things. And maybe, for extra credit, notice when your preferences are in conflict and are laying traps for you.

Anyway, I'm pretty mad that I lost the Lamy I had gotten deliberately to solve the issue of "What pen to walk around with?". It was far from my nicest writer, but it was supposed to be something I liked but didn't really care about, which is the right mix, I think, for something to carry around all the time.

Since I am superstitious about objects and bad things happening to them, I now regard the Strawberry Safari as possessed of energies inimical to my possession*, simply replacing the Safari is out of the question, I decided to ask The Pen Addict Podcast about it, which you can listen to at the link linked.

Anyway, since hobbies can involve gear and gear are things, the wise hobbiest will prepare herself to encounter and move through loss, and think well through the soaring heights of using items of pleasure versus the fatality of engaging with alienable objects.

*This goes back to Grade 8, when my copy of Blue Öyster Cult's Secret Treaties tape was stolen along with my Walkman three times. My love for "Career of Evil" and the lyric "I choose to steal what you choose to show / and you know / I will not / apologize", I believed, and believe, opened me up to be the victim of theft. I am not sure what the deal with the Safari is, but I'm taking no chances.

Currently Inked: 30jul2025

(Mostly what's inked and being carried around by me.)

Okay, from left to right, what we've got here is (are?):

1. Lamy AL-Star, Fine nib*, inked with a Lamy Pink Cliff cartridge
   The nib is a replacement, after I dropped this on Redfield's concrete floor on the way to a Casey Johnston book reading, followed by a day of assiduous "adjustment" and "repair" eventuating in the total cessation of that nib's capacity to conduct ink from pen to paper.
   This is my anointed pen for testing new inks in first, and is my current pen for daily writing in my bullet journal because (a) I need to get through this ink (which is QUITE nice), and (b) I lost #7, my previous daily writer.
   This one is a solid writer, even with the replacement nib, and I enjoy this ink quite a lot. It's dark, but not black, and has some nice, subtle shading.
2. TWSBI Eco, Fine nib, inked with Backpack Ink's Dublin Green
   At the moment, I'm struggling to fully love this pen, though I'm not sure why. It's a very good writer, but I don't find myself excited to reach for it. It's undoubtedly cool to see the ink slosh around in there, but it's not as comfortable in the hand as other options I have, being both girthier and heavier than I prefer.
   This green ink rules quite a bit, tho. Clean, clear color with some fun blacker shading here and there.
3. Bic Cristal Re'New, with ... uh, a Bic Medium 1.0 mm ... refill? Refill, it's refillable!
   This was a gift brought back from Paris by the incomparable Noodles! Hilariously, the "Bic Crystal but it's made out of aluminum not plastic" was one of my few Grail pens left, but I wasn't willing to hand Amazon any coin for it, so I had to wait a few years to get my hands on one. I'm mostly using this at work right now, and it makes me smile consistently, as a perfect writer of my favorite blue ink, and something that isn't plastic. I have the custom silver-colored cap at home, because I don't want to chew or lose it, and I do want to chew the average Bic Crystal cap. Luckily, I had some Crystals around to strip for parts.
4. Zebra bLen, .7 gel, Zebra JNC refill
   My previous work pen, probably my favorite gel of all time. Fast, fluid, comfortable writer, inexpensive, looks cool.
5. Prismacolor Ebony Jet Black 14420
   What I reach for first when I reach for something to draw with.
6. Pentel P205, .5 mm, some super-light lead that I can barely see on the page anymore
   I just carry this one around, I haven't used it in years. Stripped the eraser for a Conte Criterium lead holder (2 mm) a long time ago.
7. .
8. Zebra V-301, Fine nib, inked with a Zebra black ink cartridge
   Another one I reach for come sketching time. Not a writer, but a fun, sturdy pen with a nice thin line for erotic doodles my artistic pursuits.

Please join me in pouring one out at this time for ol' No. 7 above, a Lamy Safari (Strawberry colorway, Extra-Fine nib) that became one with the infinite due to Fat error one evening on the way to a basketball game. Seveny, you'll be missed.

(What they look like on a Traveler's graph insert.)

I Have a New Hobby :)

I suppose I have two new hobbies, where "new" has some relationship with "haven't really appeared on the blog yet". The first is running, about which the less said the better (if you've been in person with me since about the middle of 2022, I haven't had much to say about anything else, for which I am sorry). The second is a twist on my longstanding fixation with office supplies, including notebooks and pens, my interest in journaling, and even my experiments with drawing.

(Current Status of The Collection)

What we've got here is:

1. Unbranded Wooden Pen
   A gift from a few years back! Writes nicely, now that I finally got it cleaned properly.
2. Zebra V-301, Fine Nib
   Picked this up at a drugstore during the height of my Zebra fixation a few years ago. It doesn't write very well comfortably—it's VERY scratchy—but is fun to draw with, for some reason?
3. Lamy AL-Star, Blue, Fine Nib
   Another gift! This is really the one that got me fired up about this stuff.
4. Kaweco Sport, Red, Fine Nib
   Bought this one from Flax, a local pen shop because I needed a pen in red. Unfortunately, in person, it's very orange, but it's also a pen I truly love, that writes beautifully in my current notebook (Traveler's, because now I'm That Guy).
5. Kaweco Liliput, Brass, Medium Nib
   A gift from Noodles for my bday! A beautiful object, that writes like a dream (on almost everything), fits my hand, fits my pocket, fits my life.
6. Lamy Safari, Cherry Blossom, Extra-Fine Nib
   I bought this one, haven't inked it up yet. I love the way this one looks, and am excited to try a different size of Lamy nib one of these days.
7. TWSBI Eco, Heat, Fine Nib
   My friends Abe & Sarah gave me a gift card to the local art supply store (hi again, Flax!) and so I treated myself to another orange pen, because ... I wanted a red pen and wanted to try a TWSBI, and for some reason, they just do not make a red pen?? Come ON TWSBI, make a dang red pen! Anyway, this one is fun af, because you can see the ink sloshing around in there, and it writes nicely and feels great in the hand.

A slightly strange side effect of this hobby is that it has made me much more interested in novelty. For years, my usual preference was to find a pen a liked and just use it forever and ever. Now, though, I find myself halfway through an ink cartridge and thinking "I want to try something new".

Yes, "I want to try something new" IS code for "I bought a ton of inks too", and obviously I picked up that excellent pen tray (thanks again to Sarah and the White Elephant Sale), and some other knickknacks, geegaws, and foofaraw.

(I also made a special spreadsheet to track my pens and inks, which required me to learn about both VLOOKUP and QUERY, but, in honor of the reason I'm writing this blog post—to be impressive and cool, natch—I will hold off on describing this spreadsheet at this time.)

I'm trying to be a bit disciplined about what I have inked at any given time, because I don't want to carry THAT that many pens with me. I also haven't quite figured out how interested I am or am not in trying to do anything like pen / ink reviews. But this is where my thoughts about my hobbies get published, so here have been some of those about one of those.

Rats Live on No Evil Zebra: The Beast Who Shouted "WTF!?" at the Heart of the World

I like pens. :) Pens make for a pleasant, pleasing, low-key and low-stakes thing that is just easy to put attention into.

I've been using a new pen at work for a bit now. I wonder what other people who use pens have said about this pen!

Great pen. It does the job great!
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
Submitted 6 months ago
By Doctor Dick Thunderbush
From Royal Palm Beach Florida, 33411
The steel construction of the pen feels great in the hand. The tip pf the pen comes to a nice point that will penetrate the arteries on the right and left side of the neck. You can drive the pen all the way up to the clip of the pen with very little effort. This is one fantastic self defense tool. The price point is great! It's not too shabby to write letter.

(Thanks for weighing in, Doctor Dick Thunderbush.)

Is there not even one thing humans—and we could likely add some specifications to this identification—can not and will not ruin?

Anyway. Zebra F-701. Decent pen. All metal, should stay out of the landfill for the foreseeable. Comes with a metal refill, but more can't always be bought. F-301 refills fit inside it just fine, and those refills, as noted previously, are fine, not great. (One thing I don't love about them is that I think I can tell that they write less well once the ink level gets below the barrel's shoulder. I can imagine physical reasons for this, of course, but I'm not an hundo p. Convinced that my perception of this change to deficiency is correct.)

(How to tell the refills apart: the F-701 refills are all metal; the F-301s are plastic. How to tell they are the same: both fit in a F-701; both are extremely badly sketched.)

It's very heavy. This is a little bit of an issue at work, where it's not hugely uncommon for me to need to take a couple pages of notes in a single several-hour meeting. A pen of this weight doesn't exactly fly down the lines of my crummy work-issued steno pads the way a Bic Crystal—nor even a Zebra F-301—will.

(When I say it's heavy, I mean it. Also weighed: BP Helvetica; Bic Crystal; PaperMate Flair; knife; fire.)

Lastly, Zebra's ink doesn't bother me too much, but it is a little blobby on most of the papers I use, and somebody on YouTube—Unsharpen, maybe?—described the Zebra black as "grey" and, lately, that has super haunted me.

(Maybe a little grey, yeah?)

Write Down What You Need to Do: On a Calendar, Maybe

About a million years ago, before I listened to The Best Show, even, I read Tom Scharpling's rules for getting creative work done.

1. DO THE WORK. Can you look yourself in the mirror at the end of the day and say that you did the best you could?
2. BE THE BEST POSSIBLE VERSION OF YOURSELF. Don’t shortchange yourself or pull your punches because of some internal negative voice!
3. WRITE DOWN WHAT YOU NEED TO DO. It helps. Do those three things and you’ll be more alright than not.

These have stuck with me for a long time, perhaps none more than No. 3 there. (No. 1 and No. 3 jockey for the lead spot over time.) It occurs to me now that my interest in calendars, notebooks, and complicated to-do lists, automated computationally can all be seen as variations on Scharpling's Third Rule.

So's anyways, here is this year's spin on David Malki's devastatingly simple and useful "progressive calendar", a similarly break-free and formatting-light you can print out, look at, and use it as a place to write down what you need to do, along with when you need to do it.

• Fat Contradiction's Continuous Calendar for 2021

Pen 15 Club: For Tim Donaghy: On Changing a Zebra -- OR -- When the Record Isn't Spotty Nor Checkered but Striped -- AND -- Hot Zebra F-301 VERSUS F-701 Comparison

Pen 15 Club: For Tim Donaghy: On Changing a Zebra
-- OR --
When the Record Isn't Spotty Nor Checkered but Striped
-- AND --
Hot Zebra F-301 VERSUS F-701 Comparison

"Sadness." -Tinzeroes, texting me when New York City's cobblestones juddered his freakbike's DNA fork beyond cohesion or repair.

One of the reasons I have enjoyed using my (second) Zebra F-301 pen is that it's (mostly) metal, and promises to last a long time and keep stuff out of the landfill. However, it's not entirely metal, it's only mostly metal, metal joined to plastic, and where metal and plastic join, there you find weakness, with the unyielding weight and strength of metal able to stress the lighter, brittler plastic.

One easy way to verify this weakness is to drop your F-301 on the streets of San Francisco while trying to promote democracy. If a person needed to re-verify, a solid option would be drop the pen onto the mighty concrete of the Berkeley Bowl's floor. First time, the results were ... shattering. This time, a subtler damage obtained.

(The F-301's obtuse angle.)

The bend isn't something that makes the pen not work. The stability and solidity of the unit are substantially lessened, however, and the way it creaks and shimmies under pressure of writing make it very difficult for me to enjoy using.

(The Zebra F-701.)

Luckily, I have options. I swiftly yoinked from my quiver a pen I've used only occasionally thus far, another Zebra model, the all-metal F-701. I bought it in a frenzy of anxious need a couple months back, along with some F-301 refills, and several—nearly multiple—instances of graph paper. I was very anxious that day. I haven't used the F-701 too much. It is very heavy. I think the ink might be the slightest bit different than the F-301 inserts, and the tip is listed as .8 mm, as opposed to the .7 mm of the F-301, and the writing seems a little smoother, lighter, waterier, and blobbier (at least in the notebook I'm currently using).

Fiddling with the F-701 initially, I discovered that F-301 refills seem to work in it, but F-701 refills do not seem to fit into an F-301. I also discovered that the spring in the F-701 is very stiff, and (thus) incredibly satisfying (to click). A weird fillip: post-click, when the tip is deployed into Writing Mode, there is apparently a secondary spring holding the plunger erect. The F-301, in Writing Mode, offers no (such) support to the plunger. I go back and forth on this. I'm not used to it, on the bad side (I do loathe change). It's quiet, when waving the pen around, and allows a second stage of fiddling—pushing the plunger down, but not enough to engage the tip-retraction mechanism—both of which are on the good side, indeed, on the side of good.

(Note the variance: tip out, plunger down vs. tip out, plunger up. Intriguing.)

The aforementioned ink issues aside, the F-701 isn't the easiest thing in the world to write with. It's heavy as all hell, and it's noticeably thicker than the F-301, which is a bit of an issue for my small hands and extraordinarily short fingers.

• F-701: 24 grams on the digital scale
• F-301: 11 grams on the digital scale

It may well be worth trading away lightness and overall ease of use for incredible durability—which I do expect a fully metal pen to embody—and just that much less waste. But if the use of, the writing with, will be slower, more awkward, more tiring, perhaps I should explore other channels of less waste.

Let's take a little break to listen to some great new French prog-metal.

I have two main tracks of writing by hand: work, and not-work. For work writing, please see the recent approach to writing less by hand and more by computer I pioneered in the following effort: Vim (for non-programmers) Section DCLXVI: Automating Making a To-Do List and Crossing Off Make a To-Do List on Your To-Do List Automatically. Work writing is usually notes, from a meeting or interview, or lists. Not-work writing, like, not to put to fine a point on it, this thing that I'm writing now, tends to be much more connected, and extended, which is to say that the writing tends to go on longer and have fewer breaks. This all means that a less wieldy pen, a heavier pen, is less desirable. And that all means...maybe I should investigate one last option for keeping my F-301 in my hand and out of the landfill.

You see, something you likely don't know about me, unless you're reading this, in which case you almost certainly do know me and thus know or can predict the following about me, is that I throw...little away. When my last F-301 died, I actually saved its busted guts, in case its parts might come in handy. I dug it out recently to see if I could kit-bash the situation together into something fitter, happier, more productive. It appears, though, unfortunately, that what I have here is two broken pens, with three pieces apiece, that share a broken piece.

(Two Donaghys, artist's rendering.)

It should maybe not surprise me that the critical flaw of the F-301 is a piece of plastic: a critical flaw of our civilization itself is dependence on plastic (and other petroleum products) and often can the part reveal and replicate the whole. But even if it's no surprise, it can still be a stone bummer, and indeed and in fact I am bummed, a little, that I can't cobble together one satisfactorily operational F-301 from two broken ones. I can, more or less, use the more recently and less severely damaged model, with...some psychic discomfort (and a likely physical failure impending, as my heavy hand imposes more pressure on the compromised plastic piece.

I find it difficult to disprove my assessment that what I should do is:

1. Use the F-701 at work, where its durability will be great and its drains on my stamina will be less of a problem
2. Deploy another new F-301 for my personal uses, hoping that if—when?—it fails, a different part will be the problem, and I can join fragments of three to make one, where I now can't make a broken two into a one entire

(Two Donaghys, documentary evidence.)

Or maybe I should learn to throw things away, when they're broken?

—Fat, pondering abandonment

Pen 15 Club: On the Bic Clic

When a good pen comes around
You must clic it!
—Fat, after Devo

Two things. One: In New Orleans last year, a hotel we stayed in gave me a branded Bic Clic pen. I naturally yoinked it, and over a couple of days used it, and actually loved it. I thought it would make a good promotional item for the podcast, so I ordered a bunch, and if you would like a couple, drop me a line (cfcollision @ google's mail service, dontcha know) and I'll mail you some. They really are good pens.

(Impossible to look at one of these and not pop a bit of a smile. Ah, lil' Bic Clic, you're the inspiration! )

Two: Using both the freebie and one from my big batch, I have come to realize how spectacularly and unequivocally superior Bic's ballpoint pen ink is to Zebra's ink, which I have previously given at least some praise to. There really is no comparison. I sill like my Zebra okay, but the skipping and blobbing is intensely noticeable versus the Bic ink. Accept, I guess, no substitute!

(Check out the new hotness! Logo, slogan, blood-red barrel, shiny-butt clip, need I say more. Need I say more.)

(Ink fight! These are scribblings on your average el cheapo index card, but, I assure you, the results are quite typical and repeatable.)

—Fat, who will never need to buy another pen.

Just Another Calendarman-ic Monday

(Your author, coming at you with all the powers he gained after being bitten by a radioactive page-a-day Far Side calendar in middle school.)

I've been thinking on and off about calendars since about 2015. That was a busy year. I needed to juggle two big projects: one usually on alternate Sundays, one roughly every 10 days, all year long, these alongside all the other normal activities constituting everyday life (food, work, family, art, uprising, etc.), and it was difficult to do such juggling. What worked for me that year was to: print out Bram Moolenaar's fold-and-stand-up desk calendar and

1. Circle my alternating-Sunday deadlines in red
2. Circle the every-10-day deadlines in green
3. Put it on my desk where I could see it

(Bram's yearly calendar. I recently discovered that this is pretty much the output of the Unix utility ncal with the -w flag! Unix can be pretty cool.)

It worked well for me! Obviously, this is not a tool that accepts a great deal of information, but for helping visualize a cadence of more or less regularly occurring events, it served effectively.

Over the next few years, unfortunately, the events to coordinate got less regular, less predictable, and probably more numerous. Bram Moolenaar's calendar stopped helping me organize things. That's whenDavid Malki stepped up. He has several long, interesting posts on calendars, and the high-end calendar he makes he is a beautiful, funny, and probably useful object. But what really fired my soul was his devastatingly simple "continuous calendar" idea¹, just a year's worth of boxes organized by month, fitting on six pages of printer paper.

(Malki's simple calendar.)

One reason for my soul's resonance with this object is context: at my work, a very common activity to to grab a blank piece of butcher paper, sketch out a grid representing a month or so, and calendar out some events in / for / of / constituting a campaign. This simple template of Malki's saved the drawing-and-adding-dates steps, and I used it a few times in different campaigns to help visualize timelines, deadlines, and possible conflicts. It worked well.

What didn't work well was trying to use the template to help organize my life. I had a couple problems with what he had made:

1. Squares too small to add significant information (70 squares on one 8.5x11 piece of paper is a lot)
2. Shading to indicate a month makes it hard to to write on with, say, a black ballpoint pen, or a Sharpie®|Pen., or whatever
3. I really hated having Saturday and Sunday at the end of the week: this was confusing because it meant that this calendar didn't match any other calendar I'd look at ever

So eventually I decided to stop being frustrated with a tool that didn't work for me. I decided to try to brew my own. I wanted bigger squares, I wanted weeks to start with Sundays, and I didn't want any shading. The best way to attain bigger squares seemed to be to move from portrait to landscape. I really liked Malki's insight about making the months flow into each other, so I kept that layout. I made a couple three-month templates and tested them, and they seemed to work the way I want them to work.

(My calendar looks like this. I like to mark it up with bill due-dates in red, and other notable things in black.)

If you would like to see if this tool will serve your purposes, you can download it and print it out and play with it. (Right now it runs from October 2019 through February 2021, so I recommend judicious use of the "print selected pages" function so as to save our mother the Earth from additional abuse.) If you find that you like using this tool, why not send David Malki a couple bucks: it was all his idea anyway! If you find that this tool doesn't work well for you, why not spend a little time figuring out why not, thinking about what you need, and go try to make something that will help you?

¹ What's hilarious is that Malki uses a different term, not "continuous calendar":

progressive calendar

By that, I mean a calendar that doesn’t have any breaks between months. I think I invented the term? By that, I mean “nobody else has ever used this term.”

Evidently, he IS the only one to use the term. Since I use a different term, perhaps I ... invented the idea? (No, no clearly I didn't.) Anyway, this is a long digression prompted by my inability to remember what words he actually used.

(Your author's ambitions when it comes to calendars.)

(Bonus Venture Brothers content re: calendars.)

Pen 15 Club: Just (Broke) the Tip: All Good Things (& All Other Things) Will Come to an End -- OR -- Rest in Peace, Zebra

I have been happy with my Zebra ballpoint for a while now. The ink is okay, a bit blobby on some paper, and it's maybe a little too heavy for seriously extended writing sessions, but it's a solid pen. Maybe too solid, I discovered tonight, doing some precinct walking in San Francisco.

(Pictured: a so sadly fucked friend, one who served not long but stoutly and well, before a moment of (my) failure cost it any chance of future success.)

Struggling up a hill, marking up the sheet of turf I'd been cut, I dropped the Zebra. I guess it landed more or less point-down, because the tip broke clean off, probably due to the stainless steel's shaft's weight. (The shaft and tip are steel, each screwing onto the black plastic grip. It's frustrating, when you buy something with a lot of metal parts in part assuming it will last longer and be less disposable than an all-plastic something, and then find that it is no more durable; annoying to have a single drop reduce a tool to no more than spare parts. ((My thinking right now is that I'll keep it around in case I need for kit-bashing or whatever. Probably that's just a rationalization for having trouble with the idea of loss.))) It's maybe worth noting that this is the second time a night of politics work has cost me a Zebra. I'm not certain what this could mean.

Nor am I certain what comes next. I sorta feel like blue ink is better for me than black: but all my Zebra refills are black, and Zebra blue gets worse reviews than either Zebra black or, importantly, than Bic Crystal; blue. But I'm burnt out on the Bic Crystal right now (been using it too much at work) and I just don't have any other ballpoint ideas. Or any other ideas.

Pen 15 Club: A Big Pen 15 Club Day

Crossed a personal Rubicon last night, as I became, officially, the sort of person who speaks angrily at a City Council meeting. Entering that new phase of my life may have been the worst part of my day, but the most upsetting part of my day was surely missing National Ballpoint Pen Day! Luckily, sterner minds than mine were thoroughly on the case:

To mark National Ballpoint Pen Day , U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal made an appearance at BIC headquarters in Shelton Monday morning to meet and greet employees and thank BIC for its efforts in sponsoring educational programs as well as creating the writing utensil people have come to know and love.
[...]
"The ballpoint pen, what it means, is so important," said Blumenthal.

Bummer to have missed it, of course, but my day was not however entirely free of marking the occasion, nor did I fail to enact a rich celebration of ballpoints: viz., I actually finally killed my Zebra F-301's first load-out of ink! Perhaps predictably, I did so while taking jaw-clench-inducing notes on somebody or other's pusillanimous ditherings, forcing me to swop pens on the very fly.

Luckily, I had a pen to swop to.

Anyway, the Zebra F-301 is a good lil' pen! I always like a refillable option, the ink is decent, if not quite Bic Crystal (thinner line, maybe a little less blobby?), it's maybe a little too heavy, but there's just something enjoyable about a stainless steel tool, the fact of it. If you are interesting in throwing away fewer things, maybe give one a try! Or do something else, but whatever you do, please: A Merry Ballpoint Pen Day to us all; Pens bless us, every one!

Pen 15 Club: I Bought Some New Pens :)

(This afternoon's haul: couple more of those neato Sharpie®\Pen. ones, a new Flair pen in an appealing and appropriate color, and a new clicky ballpoint option, a pack of Zebra F 301 units.)

Don't know necessarily if I need to talk about the replenishments, new versions of old faces, but I was inspired by old Twitter running (and funning) mate @mighty_flynn to revisit an old style I hadn't had my hands on in a long while: a retractable ballpoint.

Bic Clic is the only pen for me. Black ink ball point. @FieldNotesBrand #restocked https://t.co/lv7D6z7D44 pic.twitter.com/O2fu7GpZdJ

— It’s a long season. (@mighty_flynn) March 7, 2019

The appeal is pretty immediately obvious: the fidget potential and ability to make annoying noises of the G-2 plus the versatility and rock-like reliability of the Bic Crystal? Can you even imagine how good a pen that would be. Can you even imagine.

(Although...if I'd seen this back-of-package image, I would not have bought these obviously cursed and sinful objects.)

Good gravy what is with this pervert zebra, Zebra?? That's a yikes and a third, maybe a full yikes and a half.

More later, once I've had the opportunity to wrap my fingers around these new Pen 15es, rub 'em around, see what comes out of the tip.

NOTE: title / format drawn from this all-time great tweet.

Dalí: Surrealism is DESTRUCTIVE, but it DESTROYS only what it considers to be SHACKLES limiting our VISION.
Varo: I'm envisioning some cats right now :)
Dalí: That's not what I meant.
Varo: They have their own little castle and everything :) :) :) pic.twitter.com/n1gpv0gLDT

— Spoinky McPhee (@LHippopotamelan) August 15, 2018

Pen 15 Club: I DO like talking about my Flair

Pen 15 Club: I DO like talking about my Flair
OR
riding writing the underground (swimming in sweat te-xt)

(Jennifer Aniston wants no part of this blog post.)

Not sure how this has happened, but here at Reviewiera, we seem to have embarked upon what some sane observers have dubbed "The Pen Cycle"—whilst yet leaving some reliable options uninterrogated. About one of these the hue and cry is easily quelled: The Pentel 205 has been used (and mentioned) but not analyzed because It Is Not in Fact a Pen. It is, however, a persistent delight. Get one.

A more pressing¹ issue is that of the venerable Paper♥Mate® Flair. Its thus-far omission glares. I regret my failure; I resent it.

(A Paper♥Mate®Mate Flair pen resting comfortably, after use.)

There isn't a time I was aware but not aware of these pens. They were my dad's leisure-time go-to, first to be called come doodle time or in the face of writing his kid a letter. (Lot of overlap there, actually. His correspondence was usually pretty illustrated, if not illustrative, illuminated if not illuminating.) Later, the illustrious life model Blaster Al Ackerman⁵ made a positive genre out of his Flair-based portraiture. These pens are cemented into my understanding: an you should say "felt-tip pen" to me, these are what I will think of, 100% of the time⁴.

(One of Blaster Al Ackerman's "Are You Drunk" portraits, this one of "Some Old Goat".)

Perhaps intimidated by my progenitors⁶, I rarely used these. Maybe a red one for editing, here and there, but little else. Little else, that is, other than those times I want / need to write on graph paper.

One of our main discoveries seems thus far to have been that, penwise, paper and purpose matter. Daily notebook? I want to write small, so I need a fine, fine tip, and an ink that will last. To-do lists? Probably gonna ride around in pocket or rattle around in my bag, so I need dark lines that don't smudge, and something thick would do the trick. And when I see graph paper, what I want is a big, but tapered, shaft, a lightweight, easy-to-waggle body, and the flatly fun line left behind by the sizeable peak of the Flair. So when I seek to roll up a character, or make a list, or ... well, I don't use graph paper that that much anymore, but when I do, best believe, best beloved, what I want in my hand is one of those old Flair pens.

¹ In that it is more deserving of press^2
2 And also in that one could well be pressed against a permeable surface, thereby to activate capillary action³ extracting ink from reservoir onto and indeed into the permeable material—I shouldn't've said "surface", that was just wrong, as one of my chief plagues is over-coated glossy postcards on which basically no ink can be found that willn't smudge
³ Maybe? No idea, honestly
⁴ What I will then think of is this thing I read in Exquisite Corpse somewhere in the early/middle '90s, an extremely college-boy-humor riff using the tools of literary analysis to break down a piece of bathroom-wall graffiti, at one point noting "As this was written in marker, we can safely conclude of the author that he has, in fact, felt the tip"
...
Look, I'm not asking you to love the way my brain works. I certainly don't
⁵ More Ackerman here. His description of these, from The Blaster Al Omnibus: "I remember feeling seriously lightheaded as I sat at the table and did little Flair-pen drawings"
⁶ Also intimidated by this current user, because the second season of Love, which she wrote, was one of my favorite low-key watches of 2018

Pen 15 Club: Pen Is in My Hand (and I'm Rubbing It on My Notebook)

Years back, somewhere around 2004 or so, I lifted from Tinzeroes the idea and practice of carrying around a small notebook, where I'd put everything I'd write. (I haven't always been consistent about this, and have lost a few things over the years that I had scribbled on scrap paper or whatever. Bummer.) As years passed, I started to layer ideation atop that key central thought, not just "put everything in here", but "structure the notebook so it's easy to put things down in it, and find them later, and make the down-put things easy to jog up against one another, which is where ideas come from".¹ That is, one wants a system, one wants something working and workable.

Structuring the input requires a bit of attention to the notebook itself. Luckily, I used to do zines, so I have an amazing and incredibly high-tech way of mapping out how a notebook works. Basically, what I do is draw thumbnails of each page, then think about what might go on those pages.

The thumbnails look like so (diagrammatically, anyways: usually I just scribble on the back of an index card).

As I've worked on my notebooks, I've also worked on a few other things, like building good habits, keeping track of what I read and what I watch, making notes as the year grinds on of what HEAVY TUNES I may be particularly wallowing in, etc. So, for these stable projects, it makes some sense to devote specific areas of each notebook to them, after which I have blank pages to fill with what I will (which mainly turns into notes for episodes ofI Don't Even Own a Television: A Podcast About Bad Books, my current main artistic / productive activity, or notes for the renewed blogging activities you have no doubt noticed.

What that ends up looking like is something like this, again, diagrammatically.

This takes a little getting used to. Particularly jarring is that looking at a "spread" requires you to look at a left page and a right page and set the beginning to the left page, where most books start things on the right page. Moving to the specifics:

1. Index: I number each page (by hand)^2,3. As I fill each page, I mark across the top what generic bucket this page's contents go into: #Reviewiera, #Vim, #IDEOTVPod, etc. Then, on the index, I mark what page I started on and what bucket it was. This is more or less an analog version of Evernote, or a stripped-down, not-that-fussy approach to so-called bullet journaling.
2. Habit Grid: every day, I'd like to do certain things: drink water; do pushups; read; drain the world's oceans to kill god; brush my teeth; and so on. A tool I have found useful is to make a list of those things, under a date, and mark them when I do them.
3. Workout Log: On the habit grid, I mark a simple X to indicate a workout of one or another kind; on the Workout Log, I note what I did: was it 5BX?, or did I go for a run, or did I do TRX?
4. Movie/Book Log: As I finish things, I write them down, with the date. Also shows go here, trips to the ballet, etc. I've recently been logging the Avs games I watch, but that's mostly just so I can shame myself for spending 25 yua a month to watch maybe one Avs game a week. (And as of tonight's 3-6 Columbus debacle, I suspect I will wean myself off this particular habit.)
5. HEAVY TUNES Log: As I recognize myself falling for something, I make a quick note of it, or anyway I try to. This is particularly interesting at the end of the year, as I start to work on my HEAVY TUNES of the year, because usually by then I've forgotten like half of what I listened to in any given year. Plus if I do a half-decent job, I get a little bit of insight into my year qua year, like a little diary!
6. First Free Page: Helpfully, this is a right-hand page, which keeps the cognitive dissonance (of starting something on a left-hand page) down. From here on to the end of the notebook, I can just use it as normal.

If I fill up one of those original pages I've set aside, I just go to the next blank page or spread and start again there, noting this in the index. This happens a lot when I'm not writing very much. During those times, the notebook is mostly just a set of various breadcrumb trails of long-term projects (the logs, the self-improvement, the sundry, the what have you), punctuated by notes for the podcast (which I record every two weeks).

This is pretty standardized for me now, and pretty polished. Which means, of course, that I am now completely bored with this as a format. I'm finishing the notebook I started January 5, and will do it again in a new Field Notes, but after that, I'm interested in trying something new in some new type of notebook, just for a change. I have a system, it's working, it's workable, but also one wants some novelty, for half the fun of working on a system is tweaking it. Thus I end up rotating new pens in and out, but now even that substantial jolt fails to thrill, and I'm going to need to seek out a new form factor, I fear. (All this, novelty and rotation and craving, I have touched on before.)

Also there are a few substantive reasons to seek improvement: First, the system described above was created and smoothed when I wasn't writing much, and in this system, I am reserving numbers of pages for month-plus spans of time: even in the as-streamlined-as-I-can-get-it version above, I'm reserving 7 out of my 48 pages, which is a lot to lose if I end up filling the other pages before I've filled those 7. (This was a worry, because this notebook was sketched to span 5jan2019 - 7feb2019, but by 27jan, I had only 2 pages left. Luckily (?) I didn't write anything for a few days, so the concern abated a bit, but not wholly. Second, as the year turned, I decided I wanted to knock out a few weekly goals. These will require their own charting system.

For weekly goals, I'm a huge fan of Bram Moolenaar's Vim desktop calendar. (It's how I scheduled Like a Shit Sandwich, and there's just something very congenial about it to me.) But Bram's calendar doesn't fit well in a Field Notes notebook, which makes it harder for me to chart the weekly blog / workout goals I've already identified as important for my 2019.

So what comes next: one more Field Notes, default writing implement my beloved Pentel 205 mechanical pencil. And after that? Something probably 6x9, that far I've gotten. But no farther. Yet.

¹ My "notebook" is one instantiation of the idea of maintaining a "file", as described in the great C. Wright Mills book The Sociological Imagination, in the chapter entitled "On Intellectual Craftsmanship", which, n.b. if you use a search engine you can find in the convenient Portable Document Format, an activity I suggest, because it's an interesting, exciting, inspiring read:

[Y]ou must set up a file, which is, I suppose, a sociologist's way of saying: keep a journal. Many creative writers keep journals; the sociologist's need for systematic reflection demands it.

In such a file as I am going to describe, there is joined personal experience and professional activities, studies under way and studies planned. In this file, you, as an intellectual craftsman, will try to get together what you are doing intellectually and what you experiencing as a person. [...]

Under various topics in your file there are ideas, personal notes, excerpts from books, bibliographical items and outlines of projects. It is, I suppose, a matter of arbitrary habit, but I think you will find it well to sort all these items into a master file of 'projects', with many subdivisions. [...]

After making my crude outline I examined my entire file, not only those parts of it that obviously bore on my topic, but also those which seemed to have no relevance whatsoever. Imagination is often successfully invited by putting together hitherto isolated items, by finding unsuspected connections.

² Yuck, yeah, for certain.

³ Mostly for the past couple years, I have used Field Notes notebooks. Their paper is pretty amazing, the size is good for most shirt pockets, for when it comes to that, and they're only 48 pages long, so the numbering process isn't too onerous. Plus, I was given a million of of them, and I love using them, so it's pretty much hustling from win to win fast and nimble and clean.

NOTE: this chronology is not comprehensive: I carried personal notebooks from probably Grade 7 on through the first couple years after high school; these are where I'd write my poetry, and the place I'd practice free-handing the AC/DC logo. At least one principle established all the way back then has carried through to present: a certain obsessive concern with chronological order. Also back then is when I discovered the problem where you jot something down on a page, but what do you do if you only have one line thus jotted, and no follow-ups emerge, did you just devote an entire page to this!? As so much Natalie Portman might chimeyelp, "CONUNDRUM!"