personal

Last month, I ended up buying a bunch of fountain pens and ink bottles. While I can clearly see the rabbit hole that is /r/fountainpens, I still needed to revisit The Worst by Moxie to get a grip on my spending. After an initial rush, the left overs include a functional understanding of various components in a fountain pen, ways of tweaking the mechanisms and a more balanced love for beautiful inks1.

While I might have gone overboard, there are a lot of nice side effects. The variety of experiences possible in fountain pen world are really enticing. All those are making me work more on paper which has a calming effect on me. And I am putting more value on words that go down.2

flex.jpg
Figure 1: A nice shading ink with flex nib is actually pretty fun to work with. Pardon the ghosting in background.

I might still not really stop spending, but I am looking at these as equivalents of things like a cozy sitting place which invite and assist you in doing a more important task like reading a book.

Footnotes:

1

I will put up some information about my explorations in my wiki later.

2

And my handwriting is improving from the earlier shoddy crap.