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Another note on Fountain Pens
Jun. 6th, 2018 03:17 pmMeta: I haven't been posting here much, but I've been journaling a ton; just mostly in paper form.
Observation: Ballpoint pens represent a technological advance and an engineering tradeoff. They're cheap, they handle air pressure changes a lot better than fountain pens (important if you fly a lot), you don't need to worry about the quality of the paper nearly as much, etc. Most of these are positive-sum tradeoffs.
On top of that, there are a couple of tradeoffs which are essentially neutral... most people don't really care about being able to swap out umpty-bazillion colors of inks... they want to write something on something.
In fact, I can think of only one use case where a ballpoint is a negative tradeoff against a fountain pen: Sitting down and writing a lot.
Turns out I do rather a lot of that, though.
Current fountain pen of choice: TWSBI ECO, Extra-Fine point. Relatively inexpensive (~$28), a massive reservoir (~2ml of ink... about 2-3 weeks of regular writing for me), and is an utter joy to write with.
Observation: Ballpoint pens represent a technological advance and an engineering tradeoff. They're cheap, they handle air pressure changes a lot better than fountain pens (important if you fly a lot), you don't need to worry about the quality of the paper nearly as much, etc. Most of these are positive-sum tradeoffs.
On top of that, there are a couple of tradeoffs which are essentially neutral... most people don't really care about being able to swap out umpty-bazillion colors of inks... they want to write something on something.
In fact, I can think of only one use case where a ballpoint is a negative tradeoff against a fountain pen: Sitting down and writing a lot.
Turns out I do rather a lot of that, though.
Current fountain pen of choice: TWSBI ECO, Extra-Fine point. Relatively inexpensive (~$28), a massive reservoir (~2ml of ink... about 2-3 weeks of regular writing for me), and is an utter joy to write with.
