Frankenparker: 1938 Parker Parkette with XF Wearever nib of similar vintage, inked with Private Reserve Sonic Blue.
My dad found the Parkette in an antique shop, along with a couple of Wearevers. I just deleted a bunch of boring details re: its problems. End result: cobbled together parts and now she writes. The extra-fine nib is a treat.
I have a Cracked Ice Duragraph w/a very wet Medium nib that I adore and am just as happy with this stub. The stub is a touch scratchy, which is to be expected as it’s untipped, plus I’m using a particulate/GLITTER! ink in it. Makes me happy though.
The Ahab is a pleasant surprise. I have been battling a loathed Nib Creaper Flex for two years, following every adjustment tutorial, heat-setting, replacing the nib and feed, etc and it’s just a piece of hateful, hateful junk. It therefore seemed masochistic to try the Ahab but I really wanted flex. I absolutely love it. I’d thought it looked like a gross, fat torpedo in pictures, but in person, it’s the perfect size for me. Colorway is pretty, too. But the real action is in the nib, which does what I’d hoped. So, happy days. It pretty much confirms that my craptown Creaper was just defective.
My pen/ink/paper wishlist is… healthy. I was afraid that might happen.
So much stuff has been going on, a lot of it really heavy and depressing – world stuff, and personal. I have been self-medicating with:
My first playthrough of Mass Effect; psyched for Andromeda now. May replay ME2 but unlikely to play the others again. Currently replaying Fallout 4 just because it soothes me.
Books, including Mary Sangiovanni’s Chills, K. C. Alexander’s Necrotech, Cherie Priest’s The Family Plot, Gleick’s Time Travel: A History, and Arnold’s Necropolis: London and its Dead.
Bourbon, tea, and thick socks
There are also a couple of new loves in the household. Both need caring for, which is good for everyone.
The Remy dog:
She is the sweetness. Enjoys Dirk Gently, milkbones, and nocturnes.
The Underwood #3: after lots of cleaning, tinkering, replacing rollers, etc, she’s up and running. All she needs are new decals and a single key top. Maaayyybe a bit more polishing, but hey, she works.
Last month, author and old friend Alex Bledsoe invited me to talk about Last Night at the Blue Alice on his blog. I thought that was as good a time as any to describe one of the weird things I chose to do along the way, which was build this dollhouse. You can read all about it here, and while you’re there, see what Alex has been up to. You should read his books, they’re wonderful.
I want to say “Hemingwrong” now. Or at least “Hemingnevermind.”
I love mechanical keyboards, and I love e-ink, and I love dedicated devices and gadgets and low-fi and fancy-fi. (I dislike when people say anything “fi” though. So fickle of me.) I was excited when I heard about the Hemingwrite in this thread on reddit and promptly signed up for their newsletter to keep an eye out for the preorder.
The “preorder” opened today, and I’m out, though a bunch of other people definitely aren’t.
The campaign pics still feature the prototype: the Poker II keyboard with a weird 3-D printed spacebar + an e-ink device (Kindle, probably) encased in a 3-D printed housing. That’s fine. The creators said, when asked about pricing, “think mechanical keyboard + kindle.” My Price Is Right guess, allowing for novelty/niche markup, was full MSRP at $250 with actual retail around $170.
It’s $499. That’s fucking crazy.
Aside from the outrageous pricing that I’m sure will land this in the Williams-Sonoma Christmas Catalog under “budget stocking stuffers and party favors,” or on Goop! as a super idea to use as quirky individual place cards at your next dinner, I have nitty-gritty reasons for my nope.
I’m leaving all of this up anyway because it illustrates the kinds of questions that people should answer at the outset.
The creators said it will sync to the cloud via Evernote, Dropbox, or Google Drive. Turns out it will only sync to these & other services via a planned web portal. There’s no telling how secure that portal is, or what will happen to it if the company fails, or if the company will suddenly charge an access fee to stave off said failure.
The only real file backup/retrieval option is their Postbox cloud-sync gateway service. The device charges via USB and they’ve said, “The USB charging port can be mounted as a read-only file-system when connected to a computer to ‘liberate’ your files. This is for exporting files ONLY and should not be used to edit documents on your computer.”
I think that means you can pull the files but not edit them and reload them into the machine, which would be fine, assuming they were clean & editable elsewhere. But I’d be pissed if I made that assumption, paid $499, and was wrong.
And I don’t think that’s the case, since it looks like the “syncing” offered via their gateway is one-way, anyway. Ie, you can only dump text from the device into the cloud, not polish it and then sync it back to the machine to continue work on the document as a whole.
Which, again, fine – just picture a manual typewriter that automatically scans your typed pages in for you. You can’t put those pages back into a typewriter, either. I get it. So, okay – but that approach suggests that pulling via USB if you have no wifi available does not result in an editable file, but a truly read-only one as stated.
They say they’ll provide an open software devkit and blah blah for third-party plugins and expanded compatibility and so forth, which, fine. It might happen and people might independently develop useful things and such.
They also haven’t answered anyone regarding which Cherry MX switches they’ll use. If this thing ships with blues, ain’t nobody gonna be your friend if you take it to a coffee shop as required in the promotional materials. They did refer to the switches as “tactile” somewhere so maybe they intend to build with browns. Again, though, that’s a big question one should answer when trying to sell people a $499 thingie.
The other thing that rubs me the wrong way is that they have been talking for months about “opening the preorder.” The website had a “preorder countdown.” The emails announced that preorders were open today at 1pm. The website has a big button at the top that says…
Buy on Kickstarter.
Yep. All of their activity in the past few months has been a buildup to a damn Kickstarter campaign. And, as I’ve learned after being burned (robbed) on every Kickstarter I’ve ever backed, you don’t “buy” things on Kickstarter. You throw money and wishes at strangers, and they take the money. What happens after that is anybody’s guess.
(Like, if you are named Richard Fox, you may for example use the money people gave you for The Symbolist Tarot Deck to move to Austin. I’m not bitter.)
The only indications that this was going to be a Kickstarter campaign are the following:
1. From their website: “We will be open for pre-sales this winter (very soon!) and will need your help to move on to the next phase: manufacturing.”
2. It’s 2014 and every goddamn thing is a Kickstarter campaign and I should have known better.
If they deliver this machine exactly as they’ve envisioned it, it won’t do very much for $500. “Not doing very much” is exactly its main selling point, so, congratulations?
I completely forgot to bitch about refresh/ghosting problems in e-ink: competent typists will be three lines ahead of the text.
That being said, they launched their campaign 3 hours ago and have gotten $132k $138k in pledges so far.
So I guess I’ll get busy mocking up a line of upcycled vintage-textile carrying cases/cozies to hawk on Etsy or something. I’ll put a bird on it.
Strong black tea, sick amounts of it. Filthy strong.
E-reader or Physical Book?
I will always opt for an e-book for my Kindle (or whatever e-ink device I’ve got at the time) if one is available. If I adore the book I then buy it in hard copy for no real reason, because I’ll likely re-read on my device.
I have thousands of paper books that I’m trying to unload. It’s bad. Two moves in one year made me vow that hauling an entire moving truck’s worth of pulp is never going to happen again.
Fictional Character You Probably Would Have Actually Dated In High School:
This is supposed to reveal something about who I was in high school or something, but I can’t be bothered. I certainly don’t read books with an eye toward whether or not I’d have imaginarily-dated characters in the book when I was a kid.
