Honest question: what makes it a hobby and not just a collection?
I think of pens as tools for a hobby but not as a hobby itself, collecting pens I can consider a collection hobby though.
I get confused because I've seen this stated a few times and it does not make sense to me, there's no "power drill hobby" but one can have a hobby of collecting power drills.
Not the OP, but learning and practicing calligraphy is a hobby and is often associated with pen collecting. A pen hobby might also include maintainace, repair, and restoration of an often large collection of pens.
I suppose if you spend time researching, reading about, talking about (online fora etc.) the thing you collect then it starts to look more like a hobby.
Honestly a great way to have a self sustaining niche website.
Looking over the smaller communities I've been a part of over my internet adventures, nearly 25 years, that have disappeared due to costs or other commitments, I wish they all had stores to self sustain and grow their communities.
Now I wonder what the equivalent the online equivalent to cooperatives would be for the internet, and if there are any examples attempting this.
Jetpens is a known dealer of stationary crack - I love them. They also put out some great videos and articles about their products, on par with some of Ars' old Mac OS reviews.
The Safari changed my relationship with handwriting. My natural grip makes my hand cramp up after a couple paragraphs. The Safari’s triangular grip forces me to hold it the “right” way, and voila, no more writing pain. I can’t believe what a vast change that made.
Edit: Also, Noodler’s Baystate Blue. If your pinky isn’t stained afterward, have you even written?
I'm personally a Noodler's X-feather fan, but that's mostly because I usually found myself writing on bad paper back in my school days when I got it, and you just get so much of it too
I'm personally a Noodler's X-feather fan, but that's mostly because I usually found myself writing on bad paper back in my school days when I got it, and you just get so much of it too
My friend, you owe it to yourself to try Platinum Carbon Black ink. More permanent and waterproof than Noodlers, and a black so dark and dense you'll think you can see the end of the void in it.
Ignore the haters who claim pigmented ink wrecks your pens--both my wife and I have drawn miles of lines with it, and even leaving it sitting on the desk unused for weeks, we never have a problem with it.
Also, in fountain pen terms, Safaris are so reasonably priced that you can dedicate one to a specific ink. I mention using Baystate Blue. I might not put that in the same pen where I'd later use, say, yellow ink, but I don't have to.
Jetpens is fantastic. I've found the best combo for me: a metal Parker Jotter pen with an Ohto refil, but it's nice seeing some new options from time to time.
I agree for the opposite reason. I have one of them that I've used for daily journaling and note taking for ten years with no maintenance other than rinsing the guts twice a year.
That's awesome and really impressive. The pen is a real workhorse. I will say the Vanishing Point LS or something, the more expensive variant, is not as reliable, as my twist mechanism on that gradually got stuck.
I liked mine a lot, but I got it in extra fine which was a real mistake. It's like scratching which makes inky marks, not writing. I should have gone with a fine or even medium nib.
I now use a Pilot Custom 823 which is always going to be less sturdy than the Vanishing Point and my guess is it's always living on borrowed time. I'll replace it with a fine/medium VP when I eventually break it somehow.
Ah, yea I had a similar experience with Extra Fine. Now I buy them through Nibs.com which does some custom grinding, also they take into account my Leftyness, which makes for an extremely smooth and wet write.
The Moonman A2 is my current favorite pen. Though it's a knock-off, the out-of-box nib smoothness was better than that of the Vanishing Point that I ended up returning.
The fact that it's only $15 on AliExpress makes it a steal. No pun intended.
One thing about gel pens, and other 'fancy' ink, is that it tends to be quite runny and can take a while to dry on 'waxy' papers (many index cards, shipping labels).
Not sure which listed category of ink/pen would work best on those (besides a plain old, cheap Bic® pen, which works fine.)
I believe Uni-ball Jetstream ink pushes this Pareto frontier. It provides the low-fatigue, low-drag experience of water-based gel ink, but dries instantly and is waterproof like oil-based ballpoint ink.
I think that your writing has to evolve into the best answer, which is very fine tips so that the ink is limited enough to dry quickly. Initially, you're probably still pressing down on the page, so the fine tips feel scratchy, but eventually you can use 0.3mm with no problem.
I find that Pentel Energel ink dries quite a bit faster than other gel ink (Pilot and Uniball). But for glossy surfaces, consider Uni-ball Jetstream ink.
After discovering Muji Gel pens a decade ago I just buy them tens at a time (pens or refill sticks). They feel absolutely perfect and are very easy to obtain in Europe. It's a great feeling to find a product that works so well you can free your mind from the burden of search forever
Seconded. I buy 2 varieties of Muji pens -- 0.38 and 0.5 Gel Ballpoint -- and stash them everywhere.
A while back I heard the phrase "If you ask 'where is the good XYZ' it means you have a 'bad' XYZ". I was inspired to throw out all of my cheapo pens and always have a good one nearby.
Same with power cables, scissors, tape, and other small household accessories. They're too cheap to have to worry about 1. where they are and 2. where the "good" one is.
I cannot endorse Muji enough. They are also easy to obtain in the US. I save my empty pens so I can refill them. I just got a full color set to use as well.
The ink flow levels are always balanced, never too much or too little. It's hard to explain but it also has a good "feel" when writing that I do not find in many other pens.
I recently went down the pen rabbit hole after starting a daily journal. I eventually settled on 0.38mm uni refills (UMR-83 gel and SXR-38 ballpoint) on energel infree bodies (metal clip plus you get to see the click mechanism at work).
At first glance, it seems like another AI-generated page full of Amazon referral links. But looking closer, that's their shop site: mimicking Amazon's web interface pleasantly welcomes the user. That's a well thought UI/UX!
I ignored fountain pens for a long time because I'm not a calligrapher or artist and I mostly want writing to be easy and convenient.
On a whim, I finally ordered a LAMY Safari and was really surprised at how much better the writing experience was. I noticed my penmanship improved and I was able to write more easily on parts of the page that I normally struggle with, such as near the binding in some notebooks.
I attribute most of this to how easily the ink flows compared to other types of pens, although I'm sure the pen shape is also a factor.
Anyway, if you write a lot and just want to write more easily and a little better, I'd recommend giving a fountain pen a try, and I think the LAMY Safari is a great place to start (it is relatively cheap and the cartridges are convenient).
I also love JetPens and order most of my pens and stationary from them.
Among the obituaries of a former Conservative Minister a few years ago, there was one delightful snippet. A line in The Daily Telegraph described how, when she received the letter from Mrs Thatcher appointing her to the Lords, Lady Blatch initially believed it to be a hoax, because the letter was signed in Biro and she had been ‘brought up to believe that nobody who matters uses a Biro’.
The thing I really noticed is that I could write for much longer with far less wrist fatigue. They are just incredible and underappreciated pens. If you write a lot, then they are really worth it. I also suggest not buying cartridges but refillers. Bulletproof inks are just superior to anything else I've used in even fancy pens, where the ink won't bleed or go away until basically the paper does too. It's also nice to have some unique colors, not to mention saves on a lot of plastic (and ink can be useful for other things).
I'm surprised there's a market for budget foutain pens. We mostly don't write by hand anymore and if we do, it's to jolt down notes.
One chooses to use a fountain pen for the thrill of it, or for love of tradition. In those cases, money is no object. A budget fountain pen is like a budget race car.
The nature of the pen makes writing not hurt your hand. More precisely, it reawakens a painless way to write that was put off-limits by ballpoint pens. That is, write in mostly cursive, direct the tip across the paper and never press down.
Gel pens also support this, if you have a heavy pen body.
Budget fountain pens fill a niche of “spend a little more for something nice, but not so much I’ll worry about losing or wrecking it.”
Fountain pens that work well without fuss, like Lamy Safari, or Pilot Metropolitan, really are nicer to use than ballpoint or gel pens, and the slight extra effort to using ink in cartridges or from a bottle adds familiarity and comfort to it. It’s not a pen, it’s your pen, and the longer you have it, the more attached you are to it. The more attached you are to it, the better the act of using it feels. It makes your world feel less disposable.
I use fountain pens and take notes at work with fountain pens. But not budget ones -- not luxury ones either, but in the range of €100-150. Part of the pleasure is the nib, sure, but also the body and the metal cap and the weight. I doubt I would derive the same enjoyment from a Lamy Safari but I must admit I never tried it.
You wouldn't, the Safari is too light and plasticky feeling. But the Pilot Metropolitan has a metal body that gives it a comparable heft to more expensive pens, and writes beautifully.
You might look at TWSBI fountain pens. They're still cheaper than your normal range, but very good quality, and offer some of the more fun mechanisms, like the pump pistons that fill the body itself with ink--in a clear body, it looks cool.
I use a cheap-ish fountain pen regularly, and I think in some ways the fact that nobody "needs" a fountain pen (or any pen) much anymore is actually a contributing factor to this, for a few reasons.
1. Status symbols are frequently every-day objects elevated in some way. Montblanc pens were good status symbols to have on your desk when everyone used pens all the time, now they're anachronistic. So the upper end of the market shrinks as the item becomes less necessary.
2. Pens becoming less necessary for daily life makes them more of a hobby, and while people pretty much by definition are spending disposable income on a hobby they probably still have a budget in mind. Also, a lot of hobbies get kind of fuzzy between the hobby itself and collecting-as-a-hobby (is the hobby writing or is the hobby collecting pens?). A lot of people would rather own a small collection of affordable "pretty good" fountain pens with some differences between them instead of one really excellent pen.
3. The usual march of progress means a very good fountain pen can be manufactured for a lot less money than it could a few decades ago. That means businesses can serve that hobbyist market, and satisfy the craving for variety.
Same process that happens with lots of goods. Watches of any description used to be a luxury good, then cheap quartz movements were invented: the luxury market for Rolexes never went away, but a lot more people bought Timexes, and nobody really needs a watch anymore because we have cell phones, but there's still a hobbyist market. Nobody needs a turntable to play LPs anymore, but vinyl is a big hobby for probably a lot of the same nostalgia/"physical is good" reasons pens are a hobby, and you can get a very good sounding turntable today for a lot less money than you could 40 years ago.
Pilot Varsity disposable fountain pens are ridiculously good for their price, and if you leave one out on your desk and someone comes along and damages the nib trying to write with it, you just throw the whole thing away. On top of that I haven't had one leak and they very rarely dry out or get clogged.
When I was in school in the UK, we were only allowed to write with fountain pens. My guess is that learning to handwrite properly is easier with them; I certainly write much more legibly with one today (now I'm 40).
The performance parts of a pen are the nib, ink, and hand feel. All of which are cheap to make to a high standard unlike a race car with hundreds of parts made with extreme precision.
The flashy bits of an expensive fountain pen are just there to attract people. Rare wood, expensive metal accents, exclusive brand names don't do anything to add to the writing experience as a whole. Sure they make you feel good cause your in an exclusive club, and that is something, but that doesn't effect the way it writes.
I bought a budget fountain pen as an experiment - can I reduce waste and potentially save money? It has been a complete success, with the side effect that writing has become much more enjoyable. I ended up getting my kids the Pilot Kakuno - they have also found writing to be more enjoyable and their penmanship has improved dramatically as a result.
Expensive pens don't have any allure to me. I'm sure they're nice, and many of them write better than a budget pen, but... I wouldn't turn one down as a gift, but I'm not interested at all in buying one.
Luxury fountain pens rarely provide a better writing experience than a budget one. Montblancs had a reputation (don't know about the present) for fragile pens that wrote like every other fountain pen. You're paying for the white blob in the cap. Many luxury pens use very similar nibs as the cheaper pens, just adorned with gold and engraving that doesn't add to the writing experience.
If you want tradition, you can buy vintage pens - they work great. The Parker 51 is usually claimed to be the epitome of fountain pens. They aren't luxury in any way - they don't even look like fountain pens, but they just write and write. Vintage Esterbrook pens have replaceable nib options that put any modern pen to shame.
I switched to a fountain pen because I heard that they required less effort to write with, and the amount of writing I was doing for my studies was starting to cause RSI issues in my hand. In that context, as a student, finding a budget-friendly pen was a concern.
I recently found these erasable pens and they are incredible tech. The friction of rubbing the rubber eraser on the ink heats up the ink and causes the ink to turn invisible. It leaves no ink residue on the eraser.
Of note, any heat will erase these, even including leaving them in your car. For anything that you need to make sure that what you wrote is still there when it is next read, I wouldn't trust these. Also, IIRC, extreme cold can bring the ink back, so I also wouldn't trust these to hide sensitive information.
tl;dr only use erasable pens for the least important writing, never ever use them for signatures.
Good point, but I'll note that I actually use these for court stipulations (i.e. very important writing). My use case is for documents where the document will be photocopied after signed by all parties and the photocopy becomes the filed document so this alleviates the concern.
>Also, IIRC, extreme cold can bring the ink back, so I also wouldn't trust these to hide sensitive information.
Oh fun - I put an erased paper in the freezer and will report back!
Fair enough. I'll add the bit that they're fine if you don't need the ink to be anything more than short term. Excited to hear how the experiment goes!
these are a big deal in Japan - I found out about it through work and now I have my kids use them for homework instead of pencils or typical crappy american style erasable pens
but of course it confuses the teachers at the school and they insist my kids use pencils at school...
Yes - although these are easily available in the states, I found out about them while on vacation in Japan. I asked chatGPT what items were most sought after by visitors to Japan and pens were on that list.
Sakura figma series glide well, and are what I settled upon. But I needed to go down a few steps of tip size to 0.2mm to achieve the same line width as my previous favourite of pilot v5 hi-techpoint.
They were even better when they were first released, in the eighties if I remember correctly. I think they miss the top lists because they've been superseded by fancier Uni-ball pens.
Those used to be my favorites, but the quality seemed to have gone downhill and they started to come with less ink in them. I moved on to the Uni-Ball Deluxe, but then it seemed like the same thing happened. So I got a budget fountain pen - nobody can retroactively shaft me on ink quantity or build quality.
The TWSBI is a great fountain pen. I am disappointed to not find Muji 0.5mm capped rollerballs on there.
I ordered them on a whim but will likely never use another pen for note taking again. The feel of writing is much better than any Pilot or Pentel I've used.
I use a multipen, a pen with multiple ink cartridges that can switch on the fly. Just like the one you had as a kid! I use four colors plus black for my day-to-day engineering journal. I use the colors for semantic highlighting. By default, I write in black. People, teams, and customers are in blue. I also annotate some things with blue arrows and words. Dates and very important notes are in red. Projects and tickets are in green. Meetings are in purple (with blue attendees).
I also do some clever things like separating days with black lines and a little box for the date, but the first day of the week is red so I can easily see week boundaries. As a whole, it makes scanning for what I'm looking for very easy. Since I usually know at least what meeting a decision was made in. Or if I'm looking for my notes about a teammate, that's another color. I've been doing this for four years and have really refined my process.
My pen of choice is a Coleto 5-color multipen. They are a pretty cheap plastic and I'm not in love with it. It's just the best I've used with five colors. For ink cartridges I use Pilot Hi-Tec-C, 0.4 mm. I highly recommend it, but start with a day book to see if it's useful to you first.
I really wanted to get into fountain pens a while ago. I bought several different ones over the years and ultimately had roughly the same experience. In the end I didn't find them great for me, being a lefty in a right-to-left writing world. The main benefits of the fountain pen feel is when you're able to just lightly drag the pen across the paper, its nearly effortless to put down a good line. However, being a lefty, I'm often pushing the pen forward instead of dragging it across.
I just kind of feel like writing as a lefty in a right-to-left world is just pain.
If you think it's painful, why not write with your right hand instead? Just because you are a lefty that doesn't mean you have to artificially limit yourself into doing things a painful way.
Because writing with my right hand is even more painful. Trust me, if writing with my right hand was a pleasant experience, I'd do it in a heartbeat. This isn't just some "I identify as a lefty; therefore, I do things left-handed" kind of thing. In fact, most other activities I do, I do right-handed.
Swing a bat/club? Right-handed. Throw a ball? Right-handed. Use a computer mouse? Right-handed. Shoot a rifle? Right-handed. Write a note? Left-handed. Paint a picture? Left-handed.
In the mid-90s at work, I was known as that guy who used a left-handed mouse at all times (I am right-handed.)
I would swap L/R button functions on the Sun4 3-button optical mouse and set it to the left of the keyboard. This is a comfortable and natural position, especially considering the placement of the numpad.
Very soon, the word was out in the office, and NOBODY attempted to borrow my workstation!
Yes, I have and for cursive, which is relevant when not picking up a pen, it is not that hard since you don't have to worry about precision of where exactly you place down the pen.
I doubt they mean literal pain. Writing with your non-dominant hand is an exercise in frustration and futility unless you're really dedicated to it. I find the inability to make my hand do what I'm thinking very stressful.
Hey man, I feel like your comment came from a good place and this might be something that you don't know, but asking lefties to switch hands is a pretty emotionally sensitive topic. In modern society (as recently as 2007) left-handers had strong negative perceptions and left handed children were often forced to write right handed [1]. Forcing people to change has also had effects on their brain structure and chemistry [2].
Personally, my grandmother was forced to switch from left handed to right handed! In those days (early 1900s) the forced switch often came under threat of violence. Yes, they beat children to make them write "right". So this is a sensitive topic for a lot of people!
The article linked here has a section with the best pens for lefties.
You should be grateful that you have not been born a century earlier. When my father, who was also left-handed, was in elementary school (almost 90 years ago), it was still a practice to persuade the left-handed to write using their right hand by beatings.
Recently got a LAMY Safari and it's been really great (coming from 0.5mm Uniball Signo DX). Got an ultra-fine nib and black ink for it and it's my daily driver pen now. Also tried the aluminum LAMY AL-Star and was surprised I liked the Safari better. The AL-Star is slightly heavier with a less-ideal weight distribution for me and is also slightly thicker.
Bought a Fisher Millennium Space Pen in 2000 which came with a lifetime guarantee for the Pen AND the Ink. Here it is 2024 and it still writes just fine. Have not had to get a refill yet (though not sure if they would honor it still).
So I'd argue that might be the "Best Pen" for at least some of us :-)
They're really fantastic for people who don't write often (stick one in your bag and it'll definitely still work when you need it), but I don't love the writing experience. They take more force than many other pens, and put down a pretty thick line of ink. Which I suppose is to say that I agree with their recommendation of the Space Pen as an EDC pen.
That’s my take. I wanted to love it, but found it writes extremely reliably mediocrely. It’s always there and working when I need it, which is great for EDC! I just wouldn’t want to use it for more than a grocery list.
My files are a jig to cut the kurutoga and an adapter that needs to be glued that allows the twist-erase to spin. It’s somewhat less elegant than I would like but is durable and has lasted me one semester worth of a masters degree so it works.
I used to be a pencil guy. Then I got older, and found that low contrast between the pencil lead and the paper made it harder for me to read. Been using black ink every since, both the Uni Jetstream 0.38 and the Hi-Tec C Coleto 0.3.
Pilot Juice's have gotten me through my later highschool years and my entire undergrad. Highly recommend those. The uniball signo's listed in the article are also quite nice!
Started using fountain pens a few years back. Started with thr Lamy Safari, a really great pen for the price. Then I got the TWSBI Eco and it's the only one I use now. Great ink capacity and the writing is Nice and smooth. For the price. It's really hard to beat.
I second the TWSBI though I had a crack that I’m not sure I made and the replacement wasn’t flowing but the third has been amazing! Dromgoolies pen shop here in Houston replaced no questions asked both times
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 213 ms ] threadI think of pens as tools for a hobby but not as a hobby itself, collecting pens I can consider a collection hobby though.
I get confused because I've seen this stated a few times and it does not make sense to me, there's no "power drill hobby" but one can have a hobby of collecting power drills.
A well presented book of stamps that is taken to shows, shown, discussed, etc. That person is a hobbiest.
Looking over the smaller communities I've been a part of over my internet adventures, nearly 25 years, that have disappeared due to costs or other commitments, I wish they all had stores to self sustain and grow their communities.
Now I wonder what the equivalent the online equivalent to cooperatives would be for the internet, and if there are any examples attempting this.
Oh wait, this is a $20 bottle of whiskey.
Edit: Also, Noodler’s Baystate Blue. If your pinky isn’t stained afterward, have you even written?
Ignore the haters who claim pigmented ink wrecks your pens--both my wife and I have drawn miles of lines with it, and even leaving it sitting on the desk unused for weeks, we never have a problem with it.
[1] https://www.jetpens.com/Parker-Jotter-Ballpoint-Pen-Waterloo...
[2] https://www.jetpens.com/OHTO-Flash-Dry-Gel-Pen-Refill-Black/...
I now use a Pilot Custom 823 which is always going to be less sturdy than the Vanishing Point and my guess is it's always living on borrowed time. I'll replace it with a fine/medium VP when I eventually break it somehow.
The fact that it's only $15 on AliExpress makes it a steal. No pun intended.
Not sure which listed category of ink/pen would work best on those (besides a plain old, cheap Bic® pen, which works fine.)
A while back I heard the phrase "If you ask 'where is the good XYZ' it means you have a 'bad' XYZ". I was inspired to throw out all of my cheapo pens and always have a good one nearby.
Same with power cables, scissors, tape, and other small household accessories. They're too cheap to have to worry about 1. where they are and 2. where the "good" one is.
The ink flow levels are always balanced, never too much or too little. It's hard to explain but it also has a good "feel" when writing that I do not find in many other pens.
On a whim, I finally ordered a LAMY Safari and was really surprised at how much better the writing experience was. I noticed my penmanship improved and I was able to write more easily on parts of the page that I normally struggle with, such as near the binding in some notebooks.
I attribute most of this to how easily the ink flows compared to other types of pens, although I'm sure the pen shape is also a factor.
Anyway, if you write a lot and just want to write more easily and a little better, I'd recommend giving a fountain pen a try, and I think the LAMY Safari is a great place to start (it is relatively cheap and the cartridges are convenient).
I also love JetPens and order most of my pens and stationary from them.
https://www.countrylife.co.uk/luxury/style/unparalleled-joy-...
One chooses to use a fountain pen for the thrill of it, or for love of tradition. In those cases, money is no object. A budget fountain pen is like a budget race car.
Obviously I'm wrong, but I'm not sure why.
Gel pens also support this, if you have a heavy pen body.
Fountain pens that work well without fuss, like Lamy Safari, or Pilot Metropolitan, really are nicer to use than ballpoint or gel pens, and the slight extra effort to using ink in cartridges or from a bottle adds familiarity and comfort to it. It’s not a pen, it’s your pen, and the longer you have it, the more attached you are to it. The more attached you are to it, the better the act of using it feels. It makes your world feel less disposable.
You might look at TWSBI fountain pens. They're still cheaper than your normal range, but very good quality, and offer some of the more fun mechanisms, like the pump pistons that fill the body itself with ink--in a clear body, it looks cool.
1. Status symbols are frequently every-day objects elevated in some way. Montblanc pens were good status symbols to have on your desk when everyone used pens all the time, now they're anachronistic. So the upper end of the market shrinks as the item becomes less necessary.
2. Pens becoming less necessary for daily life makes them more of a hobby, and while people pretty much by definition are spending disposable income on a hobby they probably still have a budget in mind. Also, a lot of hobbies get kind of fuzzy between the hobby itself and collecting-as-a-hobby (is the hobby writing or is the hobby collecting pens?). A lot of people would rather own a small collection of affordable "pretty good" fountain pens with some differences between them instead of one really excellent pen.
3. The usual march of progress means a very good fountain pen can be manufactured for a lot less money than it could a few decades ago. That means businesses can serve that hobbyist market, and satisfy the craving for variety.
Same process that happens with lots of goods. Watches of any description used to be a luxury good, then cheap quartz movements were invented: the luxury market for Rolexes never went away, but a lot more people bought Timexes, and nobody really needs a watch anymore because we have cell phones, but there's still a hobbyist market. Nobody needs a turntable to play LPs anymore, but vinyl is a big hobby for probably a lot of the same nostalgia/"physical is good" reasons pens are a hobby, and you can get a very good sounding turntable today for a lot less money than you could 40 years ago.
Not sure but I wonder if there is some hipster youth trend where writing is making a comeback?
There is value in jotting down notes legibly :)
The flashy bits of an expensive fountain pen are just there to attract people. Rare wood, expensive metal accents, exclusive brand names don't do anything to add to the writing experience as a whole. Sure they make you feel good cause your in an exclusive club, and that is something, but that doesn't effect the way it writes.
I bought a budget fountain pen as an experiment - can I reduce waste and potentially save money? It has been a complete success, with the side effect that writing has become much more enjoyable. I ended up getting my kids the Pilot Kakuno - they have also found writing to be more enjoyable and their penmanship has improved dramatically as a result.
Expensive pens don't have any allure to me. I'm sure they're nice, and many of them write better than a budget pen, but... I wouldn't turn one down as a gift, but I'm not interested at all in buying one.
If you want tradition, you can buy vintage pens - they work great. The Parker 51 is usually claimed to be the epitome of fountain pens. They aren't luxury in any way - they don't even look like fountain pens, but they just write and write. Vintage Esterbrook pens have replaceable nib options that put any modern pen to shame.
https://www.jetpens.com/blog/Pilot-FriXion-Erasable-Pens-A-C...
I recently found these erasable pens and they are incredible tech. The friction of rubbing the rubber eraser on the ink heats up the ink and causes the ink to turn invisible. It leaves no ink residue on the eraser.
tl;dr only use erasable pens for the least important writing, never ever use them for signatures.
>Also, IIRC, extreme cold can bring the ink back, so I also wouldn't trust these to hide sensitive information.
Oh fun - I put an erased paper in the freezer and will report back!
but of course it confuses the teachers at the school and they insist my kids use pencils at school...
https://www.officedepot.com/a/products/149765/uni-ball-Rolle...
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00006IE8P/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b...
Never see them on any of these top lists though =(
I ordered them on a whim but will likely never use another pen for note taking again. The feel of writing is much better than any Pilot or Pentel I've used.
I also do some clever things like separating days with black lines and a little box for the date, but the first day of the week is red so I can easily see week boundaries. As a whole, it makes scanning for what I'm looking for very easy. Since I usually know at least what meeting a decision was made in. Or if I'm looking for my notes about a teammate, that's another color. I've been doing this for four years and have really refined my process.
My pen of choice is a Coleto 5-color multipen. They are a pretty cheap plastic and I'm not in love with it. It's just the best I've used with five colors. For ink cartridges I use Pilot Hi-Tec-C, 0.4 mm. I highly recommend it, but start with a day book to see if it's useful to you first.
I just kind of feel like writing as a lefty in a right-to-left world is just pain.
Any other lefties have similar experiences?
There is some hope though, I've not found a nice fountain pen experience but there's some gel pens which are pretty hard to make smudge.
I use these:
Uni-Ball Jetstream Sport SXN-150S Ballpoint Gel Pens. Premium 1.0mm Rollerball Tip. https://amzn.eu/d/6mVJHLS
Swing a bat/club? Right-handed. Throw a ball? Right-handed. Use a computer mouse? Right-handed. Shoot a rifle? Right-handed. Write a note? Left-handed. Paint a picture? Left-handed.
I would swap L/R button functions on the Sun4 3-button optical mouse and set it to the left of the keyboard. This is a comfortable and natural position, especially considering the placement of the numpad.
Very soon, the word was out in the office, and NOBODY attempted to borrow my workstation!
Personally, my grandmother was forced to switch from left handed to right handed! In those days (early 1900s) the forced switch often came under threat of violence. Yes, they beat children to make them write "right". So this is a sensitive topic for a lot of people!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bias_against_left-handed_peopl... [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6758284/
Once you get it down it's no different than using a fine rollerball.
You should be grateful that you have not been born a century earlier. When my father, who was also left-handed, was in elementary school (almost 90 years ago), it was still a practice to persuade the left-handed to write using their right hand by beatings.
So I'd argue that might be the "Best Pen" for at least some of us :-)
I hacked together some prototypes of the two together using a pipe cutter and a 3d printer.
https://ruby.social/@Schneems/111115448981873661
My files are a jig to cut the kurutoga and an adapter that needs to be glued that allows the twist-erase to spin. It’s somewhat less elegant than I would like but is durable and has lasted me one semester worth of a masters degree so it works.
https://www.jetpens.com/Pilot-Juice-Gel-Pen-0.38-mm-Black/pd...