(no subject)

[daidoji_gisei]

Yesterday I came home tired and weary and discovered a box from yhlee on my porch. In it were three boxes of various teas, which I was expecting; three intriging fountain pens, and a lot of ink. I think now I have figured out Yoon's fiendishly clever master plan to get me to write more by indunating me with ink. (It's so crazy it just might work!) :-)

I'm going to work more on my rpg game (now titled Judgement Night) tonight, and then tomorrow I have to put it aside for L5R. Duty calls, etc etc. I'll probably ink up one of the pens--the E M Wheatcroft is calling me; I can't get past it's odd and compelling grainlines. How do you even get plastic to do that? I'll have to think about the ink choice: I had been planning on using Scabiosa next, but it's an iron gall and I don't want to put it in just any pen. (Indeed, I'm thinking of dedicating the AL-Star to iron gall inks. As a Safari-clone it ought to be indestructible, and this would make it easy for me to remember which pen has iron gall in it now.) Maybe now is the time to bust out my Black Roses...

Walking home from work today I realized that the PDQ System makes building demons trivially easy. All I need to do is define a Quality (like, say, Demonic Nature) to have the things I intend all demons to have (unnatural strength, super speed, resistance to getting killed, killing frenzy, etc) and then the Quality Rank (Average, Good, Expert, Master) will correspond to how powerful the demon is. If I want a demon to have a special ability, say, the ability to spit streams of cream cheese at a target, I just need to define the Quality: Cream Cheese Projector. Done! (Note: I do not plan on having cream-cheese-spitting demons in my game. That would be weird.)

But all my hopes of gaming make cleaning my living room all the more urgent a task. I hope to get to bed at a reasonable hour tonight, so I can be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed (or at least mobile) tomorrow morning. I can't keep laying around in bed until 9 am; nothing gets done in a day when I do.

Comments

[yhlee]

Knowing the ink is going to you motivates me to use my half of the ink samples so they clear out of my house. *g*

[daidoji_gisei]

So it's a win-win for you. Your secret chessmaster nature revealed!!!11!!!

Also, how does one get the cap of of the pretty copper-and-black pen? I've made several attempts and have only managed to completely disassemble the back end. (So embarrassing.)

[yhlee]

It's a screw-on cap, but yeah, the back end has a tendency to come off. I had mixed success in mastering the trick. You have to grip it rather carefully to get the cap instead of the back. At least you can have a look at the innards?

[daidoji_gisei]

Got it! Wow, what a pretty nib. Thank you!

If this keeps up, I'm going to need a fountain pen icon! Though the Queen of Swords is not wholly inappropriate...

Did you notice that Nemosine has a new pen out? The Fission? It's got a review on FPN.

[yhlee]

I saw! Isn't that the metal one? I'm a little nervous about metal pens because I prefer very light pens. Also, I just bought this pen off FPN Classifieds, although who knows when it will arrive! I saw it and fell in love. I need a fountain pen icon myself, but I cannot figure out how to get my camera to do close-ups.

[yhlee]

Oh--this is the frankenpen you saw at Gencon. :-) It came to me without nib or feed (I bought it looking for something to fix up), so I purchased a likely feed from someone on FPN, and that nib is...I can look it up if you're curious, it's a steel semiflex. I thought it wrote pretty smoothly, so you'll have to let me know how you like it. But taking it apart to put in a new nib (if you don't like that one) is probably not difficult.

[yhlee]

Oh--the E M Wheatcroft is a Webster that I bought off eBay. It's a twist-filler (the arrow will tell you what to do, I'm sure!), and I've smoothed the nib, although I suspect I did it to an oblique because I was learning on it. You'll have to let me know if it writes decently for you.