I’ve spent these past few weeks tinkering with my systems. The time between Christmas and New Year’s is great for that. The season brings a reflective mood.
Some changes in digital note-taking. Adopted Obsidian 1. Backlinks are very useful, and I like how everything is just a text file in the end.
I’m trying to treat the phone more as a tool. Widgets. Fewer infinite scrolls. The phone now sleeps on the kitchen counter, not my night stand. My Apple Watch and Braun alarm clock get me up in the morning. Yes, an actual alarm clock, new-to-me in 2023.
Ink
Here’s what I was writing with this month. Format very much inspired by mnmlscholar’s Inked Tines.
Pens
Some mainstays and some supporting characters.
Pilot Custom 823 Amber (M). Pilot Blue. About 1/2 full. Bought this pen in november last year, and it’s been perpetually inked with Pilot Blue ever since. Needed a refill at the beginning of the month. Buttery smooth. Mainly for journaling.
Platinum #3776 Century Black Diamond (F). Diamine Honey Burst. Nearly full. On the finer side, with noticeable feedback. Diamine Honey Burst provides a pop of color among the blue, black and blue-black inks. Accents in the planner. Some work notes and journaling.
Sailor Pro Gear Slim Mini Puf Brown (MF). Sailor Black. Empty. This pen has found its niche. Easily pocketable, but with a touch of fine writing. Fine line, pleasant feedback. Work bujo, meeting notes. Emptied this past week.
Sailor Profit Casual Red (Zoom). Sailor Shikiori Yozakura. 1/3. This combo is the other colorful bookend of the nib size spectrum. Used for headings and a greeting card.
Sailor Pro Gear Black (M). Sailor Black. New arrival, and I forgot to add a converter to my order. Popped in one of the cartridges that came with it. Lovely feedback, and a gorgeous two-tone nib. Used for planning and journaling.
Majohn C4 Transparent (M). Sailor Shikiori Oku Yama. Huge capacity and wide line. The eye-dropper body swallows ink samples whole. Used for ink tests and scratch notes.
Notebooks
Work bujo. Last years Hobonichi Cousin was not renewed for this year. Going back to a bullet journal setup in various notebooks. The Cousin was nice, but I ended up mainly using the daily pages which felt like a waste of good paper. I also felt like something different after a year of pretty much only writing on Tomoe River.
To start off the year I set up a new Kokuyo Campus A5. Twenty-four pages, including index, future- and monthly log. Daily rapid logging and a weekly retrospective.
Journal. I’m on year three in my five-year Hobonichi. A daily journal entry, just a sentence or three. Otherwise I’ve moved journaling from an A6 Hobonichi Techo back to an old Rhodia Goalbook I’ve used in the past. Feels nice to not be constrained to an A6 page, or (on the opposite end) feel the obligation to fill the whole page.
Collection
Arrived or incoming.
Sailor Pro Gear Black (M). The final piece in my “one from the big three” collection. Found it for a good price. Beautiful two-tone nib. Fun feedback.
Galen Leather Magnum Opus 6-slot in Crazy Horse Brown restocked sooner than expected. On the way, along with a 40-slot zipper case. My “Pen Addict 100”.
Stationery order from Komadori. Platinum Preppy Perpanep Edition was restocked. Grabbed that and an engineer pouch from The Superior Labour, some Midori MD sticky notes and a B6 Slim notebook.
A sample of Sailor Shikiori Oku Yama. A thank you from a buyer of a pen.
January turned out to be a bit of a spending spree for me. Not a level I want to stay at. Keeping tabs on my spending in a spreadsheet this year, like the past few years. The next few months will see fewer things incoming.
Sold or for sale.
My Pilot Custom 743 SM has found a new home. It was my first size 15 Pilot nib. I loved it, but it was too similar to the Custom 823. The sale helped balance out the spending spree above ever so slightly. Happy people on both sides of the transaction. That’s a win.
Used up
I have a goal of emptying at least one ink sample monthly this year. Three samples were emptied this month, but some of that came down to a leaky vial. Turns out I’m not crazy for storing them in zip-lock bags after all.
- Sailor Ink Studio 343 (inked one pen, leaked the rest).
- Platinum Cassis Black.
- Sailor Shikiori Oku Yama.
Code
The last weeks of 2022 I updated Bootstrap and did some UI work over on Fountain Pen Companion, which got released this January. I’ll be helping Urban out a bit going forward too.
It’s also been the time for tinkering on Some Sass. Rename symbol support is released. I landed some refactoring and small improvements on main. A new release should be ready in early February.
Currently reading and listening
Reading. Finished A Life on our Planet by Attenborough and Hughes. Honestly kind of depressing. I hope we can sort this thing out without too much suffering y’all.
Started reading Odin’s Child for some fiction.
Listening. Meloria is an older record, but I only started listening to Ghost somewhat recently. There are many excellent tracks on this record, so give it a listen.
- MacStories has been a great help here↩