Scribe

Very good.

Hey. Good to be here.

Yeah, they sent me some pretty early on in my blog and I checked them out. Some of the camo ones were some of the first ones I did. They have a good paper. It kind of works for everything. So I like them. Yeah. I get them direct from their website. Since the first batch. I just go back to the source.

Yeah.

Yeah, I use that every day. You might can get six or seven words per day.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So do you actually put the sharpener in a drill and sharpen it or would that just destroy the pencil? Both.

Awesome.

Yeah.

That'll be good.

Yeah.

You might have found him. He did a Kickstarter project for a field notes cover. It was a laser cut metal.

Yeah, he did a couple different ones. I actually talked to him on the phone for over an hour one day and he just has tons of ideas and so he's been doing the combs for a while. He's out in California and in the skull and crossbones kind of just what people around him wanted. And so I'm not sure that's his only motif I've seen. He actually did a squid cover of the field notes cover on Kickstarter. But yeah, I'm looking forward to it. I want to know how bulletpencils.com you did not already own that.

We didn't, but he emailed me maybe a couple weeks ago, which is horrible, and he said, hey, I've got another idea. Call me. Let's talk about it. And I just have not been able to call him back yet, so that might be what it was. He's actually, I think, got another project, and I'm blanking on what that was

He might still be at work. I don't know.

I'm 45 minutes from this side of it, but about an hour from what most people consider Atlanta.

That's a little bit further for me.

We're.

You're four.

Oh, man.

Yeah, yeah.

Sure, yeah. The blog, if you came in six months ago, interestingly, that's not too far after it started. Pen, Paper, Ink, Letters started in October of last year. So I feel like it's been way longer than that because I don't even know how many posts. We've done hundreds of posts already, and I think we hit 3000 tweets today. We have over a thousand followers on Twitter. It is kind of blown up a little bit faster than I expected. I had heathcates.com before that, and I had a. Just a category for pin. I think I called it pin. I can't remember. It was basically Pen, paper, ink and letters or something like that. That was the name of the category. And there was just a few posts on there. I think I did a post on Bullet Journaling, and I can't remember a review of A Pen or something. And just they got a pretty good hit in traffic. And so I decided. And I've heard y' all talk about this in podcasts before. You know, there's only so much pen and paper talk, you know, the locals can take before you kind of have to splinter off. And so I had a lot of people come into heatcates.com I own a little IT company, and so I had a lot of people coming to my personal website for things having to do with that and people coming. I was actually doing little mini book reviews. And so it just. It was pretty spread out, and I didn't want it to get totally dominated by pens and paper and pencils. And so I decided I would just spin it off. And it was probably just one of those. 11:00pm let's just sit down and buy a domain and stay up a couple hours longer than I should and make something. And that's really kind of how it started. And then I just looked around me and said, hey, I'm already using this stuff. Already have it. Let me just review everything I've got in front of me kind of thing. And that took probably. I don't know, I'm not done with that. I kind of ended up putting a lot of that stuff aside when people started sending me some stuff.

The Bullet Journal one. Because I did the Bullet Journal one for my main website. But then when I started Pen, Paper, Ink, Letter, I can't remember if I rewrote any of it or just basically ported it over. I think I might have ported over the category, just exported it from WordPress and imported it. And so I had a few posts on day one already. And that. That guy. I think I don't have that in front of me. You know, there were some comments, but I actually started getting emails from it and people on Twitter asking me about it. And, you know, like I said, I do. I do tech stuff. So, you know, from day one, I already had. I had the domain, I had Twitter, I had Facebook. I can't remember if I had Tumblr right at the very beginning. Instagram came just a little bit later. But I had people contact me from different ways. And the Bullet Journal was one of the ones that it just kind of. People wanted to know more about it. And then the one that was not the first one, but the biggest kind of early one that was even bigger than that was a post called Notebook Strategies. That's where if you look that up, you just see basically me nerding out about notebooks. I think I basically go through seven or eight notebooks and what I did with them and my thinking behind why I was using them for those things. The Bullet Journal was one of those seven journals or seven notebooks.

Yeah, so that's kind of the. I don't know if that answers the question enough, but that's kind of the background of getting into it. I've been blogging for much, much longer than that. I live in Auburn, Alabama. I don't know if this will put people off, but, you know, we went to the. We have a pretty good football team. And back when I was. I can't remember exactly how old I was, but back when I was just the end of junior high, beginning of high school, I started a blog on Auburn football. And it just had stats and pictures. And this was back in the day when GIFs were not. Or GIFs, whatever you want to call them, were not. They weren't. I don't know, I felt like there was a phase. It's kind of like 80s clothes. You know, they were original and then they were horrible. And now they've kind of come back and people accept it again. I was in the first round. I Blogged about all kinds of stuff I've had blogs about. I did a bunch of local blogs for a while about like coffee and coffee shops and a bunch of other stuff I won't bore you with.

I believe that first one was geocities or it might have been Hometown. AOL Hometown was one of those.

Yeah. So every now and then I just try to go back and see if there's some cache of it somewhere. I found like a super late copy that I had somewhere, which I probably lost again. But yeah, archive.org has no. No cache of it.

Yeah, you know, it was, it was not at all what I expected. So what I planned to happen and how it happened are not the same story. The Notebook strategies, it actually it got several thousand views within like just a few days, which I was not expecting. And I think some of that came from Reddit, some other like link sharing sites that are, you know, they were in subgroups that were like pen and paper people, but they weren't. It wasn't like any of the other pin bloggers. So, you know, people kind of found me, I think, from the outside of the world looking in. It wasn't from the inside out. And then just to give, you know, due credit, I'm a member on the FP Geeks forum. And so what I would do is, you know, I would post, you know, I would write my post and if it had, if it was a fountain pen review or an ink review, I'd go over and I'd just basically write in their forum the review out and say, hey, you know, if you want to also check out the blog, you can go check it out here. And I think there's. That's kind of been the slow steady trickle came from fpgeeks more than any of the other blogs. And then, you know, I got on a few ink links, maybe I Know, gourmet pens and trying to remember Brad. I don't know.

He did. And I'll try to make this super short. The first time Brad found out about me, he was. It was on one of his podcasts and I got a couple of links from Brad and actually never heard of them, I don't think. And I went listen to the podcast. And the podcast basically was, hey, there's some guy, I can't remember his name, but he's doing something I don't like on his blog. And so it was kind of a weird thing. I've actually met Brad since then and, you know, he's a cool guy and he's linked to me, but he just. The way I was doing some things in the beginning, I think he just thought was. Was kind of weird. I have an index just loads and loads of reviews called the Massive Review Index. And it has pen, paper, has a few pencil links and just to reviews all over the web. Just kind of a centralized index for that stuff. And so, yeah, that's the short story.

Yeah, I. People that, you know, that know me, they think of me as the tech guy, you know, but I'm not really a. You know, I like gadgets just like everybody does, but I've kind of been a pen and pencil guy. I just enjoyed that process. I've not always maybe used them super productively. I didn't, you know, ace college or anything like that because of my desire to use those tools. But yeah, I just. My mom was a teacher. She was a sixth grade teacher. And so I can just remember really early, you know, she'd bring home, you know, pens and pencils and paper and all that kind of stuff. And so, you know, not that every kid didn't have pencils when they were, you know, in elementary school. But I probably just had maybe a little bit more selection or something and I just kind of kept using them. So that was my, you know, mostly elementary school and junior high for me. Pencils, I think that's the trend. And then pens more in high school and then.

And the using wood case pencils and in work, that's another thing. I do have a digital calendar, but I actually. And they go to one of your topics earlier. I write it down and then I take a picture with my smartphone and it, you know, I can then copy the text out of my picture so I can still write it down first. And so, yeah, I don't. I don't know that I can go much more specifically on. I have a horrible memory. So looking back and trying to pull out, you know, in 1997, this is when wood pencils made sense to me or something like that. I just don't have that. But yeah, yeah, makes sense.

Yeah, well, I've always been interested in pencils. I'll say my interest in pencils has probably always been after looking into this, the wrong ones. I used to. I used the cheap pencils that are the horrible pencils. I use the, you know, the electric pencil sharpeners that just destroy your pencils. So I had no previous experience with, you know, the good ones, the quality ones are basically nothing that y' all have talked about the last six episodes. So going into Pencil Week, it kind of was. I've been following you guys on Twitter and your blogs, and I do. When I first started the website, I would do ink links. That's. I think that's what Brad calls it. I don't Even remember what I called it, The Bing. Basically, I did once a week, I did links to other people's blogs and stuff. And so I was kind of following you already. I might have done a few things. I quit doing that for a good while and I started doing that again not too long ago. I started calling it winx.

Yeah, I don't know people. I need to do a poll on whether or not that's too cheesy or not. But basically weekly Wednesday ink and pen and paper and ink links. So every Wednesday at noon, I post links. And I started kind of seeing some of y' all's stuff popping up again because I'd kind of come back into checking out other blogs a little bit more. And really it just came from, I want to use a better pencil. I want to use, you know, a better sharpener. And so Pencil week kind of came out of I want to put all this information together in my head. And this is kind of the way a lot of my blogs have been. I'm just a research guy and I just love to, you know, spend a ton of time really figuring something out, just looking at all aspects of it. And I've kind of learned that as an entrepreneurial thing, if I'll write that down or talk about it then, you know, produce something out of it, then it's not just going into my head to be forgotten later. And so Pencil week was kind of. I'm going to do that. I'm going to do the research. I'm going to look it up in the first. The kind of intro to Pencil week, which basically it was a week long of. Every single post on the website was going to be about pencils. Pencils, pencil sharpeners, erasers. So that was the thing. It started back on the 26th and ended on, I guess on Saturday, whatever day that was. But so ran for a week. And that's what. That's what Pencil Week was. In the first post, I put, I admit right here on day one, I'm actually reading this to make sure people can know this is what I said. I'm not a pencil expert. I am not a daily pencil user either. I've used pencils daily for almost the past month in preparation for Pencil Week. And I've done loads of reading and research. But consider all in house articles. So basically anything I produce, not the stuff that people submitted, just consider that to be spreading the word about pencils. It's not teaching a class, the stuff I put up. And so, you know, it Was basically spreading the word. When I got into. When I first started the website, you know, I'd been using ballpoints and gel pens. Fountain pens were fairly new to me. So this is just kind of the next step. I think that's cool. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, I had. I'm not sure if I'm going to say his name right. Dryas from the Pencil Case blog.

And then jb, which I know is initials, but I can't remember what they send for from the gentleman station. The gentleman stationer. I'm saying that wrong.

Yeah, he did. He did the one on Musquerat pencils. So. Which was. Which is interesting because I. I know y' all talked about them some and he bought like two, just like Ziploc bag kind of deal large stacks, stashes from them. And so look that up. So. Yeah, and I actually had. So those were the people that contributed articles, Bob Truby's brand name pencils. They were kind of the sponsor and they sent me just loads of vintage pencils, which may or may not have been the best setup. I think it was neat because it made some of the articles be about pencils that are not just the ones you walk into the store and buy, but at the same time, you can't just go in the store and buy everything we talked about. But it was awesome that he did that. And then Vanessa Pen shop, they sent me a pen. A couple other folks sent me pencils to do in that. So it was. A lot of people had hands on it. I definitely could not have done it by myself. And looking back, we did 36 posts in six days. Wow. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Kind of just, you know, I'm not the editor. I'm the. I'm the first draft guy. You know, I'm getting better at making it a little bit more refined. I try to not put out this trash, but if, you know, I just go for it. You know, I write what I can write. Same thing with everything else on the site. So I maybe have more content than most people on a daily basis. And I think it's all good content. But you know, you're gonna find. You're not gonna find a there, there, there situation probably where I do that wrong. Yeah. But you'll find, you'll find grammar mistakes, you know, and Stuff like that. I just, that's just the way it kind of goes.

But yeah, so tons of people helped out. It was a. It was great.

Hoping the same. And we got even feedback that more people would be interested in helping when we do the next one, which is already on the secret calendar.

Yeah, well, it's pretty obvious. Pen and paper, ink, letter. It's primarily been pens and notebooks and other accessories and stuff like that. So that's what most people who come to the website are used to. So it was a bit of a, I think a surprise for some people. I've been promoting Pencil Week for a little while, but I think some people just. So in other words, we had it all over the map. We had people who said, why are you talking about pencils?

And then we had some people who were like, you know, there's nothing else on your website I care about. I'm only here for Pencil Week and I probably will never come back. So, you know, I think the cramped they did, I can't remember what they wrote about. I think actually maybe they linked to your article, Andy, about starter pencils. And I got several people that came over from that. That was kind of a lot of the comments came from people that had come to Pencil Week through that and they were interested in pencils. And so I think the starter pencil idea was good. So yeah, I think, you know, every. I didn't have any individual articles or any individual posts that I think threw people one way or the other. Just it was kind of the idea of a Pencil Week is just too much for some people. But some people loved it. I think, you know, just across the board, I really do think that the best thing to come out of is people are just exposed to it. People that are writing with fountain pens sometimes can be, you know, a ballpoint pen is the most horrible thing. So I think a pencil probably is. I don't know where. Yeah, I don't even know where in that world it goes. But to a certain extent I actually think it might even be better because there's just kind of the artisan and the kind of hands on thing of filling your pens with ink. And I've kind of found in Pencil Week a kind of similar thing using the tools and sharpening and erasing in different ways and kind of doing all

Because, I mean, if you're gonna spend the money that fountain pens. I mean, I know I've talked about this before, it can be ridiculous. Yeah. If you're gonna spend that money, you know, it. Some people, it is a collection, but a lot of people, it is, they want to use it. And so people that are writing letters to people, people that are, you know, long form writing, writing novels with a pen, you know, they're. Even though they may be, you know, they maybe think they're completely tied to the fountain pen, you know, experimenting and trying new things, you know, with that, I think is. Can kind of broaden your horizons and it's just something else that kind of goes hand in hand, I think.

I'm not a novel writer. I've written several things that no one will ever read. And so. But, you know, and I write letters to people all the time and so. And my next one is actually going to be written in pencil. I'm not. There's one article, the first article, I guess, that I wrote in Pencil Week is. And I hope people didn't take offense to this, it's called Cautions, warnings and when not to use a Pencil. And I didn't want to throw people off on day one. But. But, you know, there's just. There are certain things that pencils aren't for. And I figured, you know, let's start with, you know, the reality. Same thing with fountain pens. There are just certain things that they just don't do. And so I thought about kind of knocking that out. You know, you don't sign a check with a pencil. That's nothing against a pencil. It's not a knock against a pencil. You know, and everything I talked about, like official documents and signatures, weather conditions, archiving, grading papers, all of those things I talked about also kind of get counterpoints of how pencils kind of can maybe even fit in places you didn't think they'd fit.

But I mean, I think starting off the week with that, I took all my pen people and said, okay, you can't complain. You can't just. You can't use the comment section of every single article to say, you know, pencils can't do this and can't do that. Yeah, okay, we can't. Let's just look at everything they can do. And to me, pencil week was great. You know, I just, you know, a pencil will be much. A much larger part of my rotation than I ever thought it probably would have been before the month. But even after the week, I think it'll fit in better. And, you know, you guys definitely have helped with that, so it's been great, too.

Yeah. Well, I don't know if this will be considered blasphemy, but I think a mechanical pencil actually is going to stay in and we'll allow it. If I get muted for the rest of the show, I'm not leaving on purpose.

So. But you know, there's just sometimes that, that makes sense for me, but it's not, it's not the most enjoyable experience. Definitely the wood pencils are much more enjoyable to use but just. I mean they fit in the rotation for me. Just the experience and what you get on paper from especially what I found with the soft, the softer lead pencils, it's just something you don't get any in any other way. I sketch all the time and I have a. I don't know if you know, Grid Co. Grid Co they're a UK based notebook maker. They sent me a. What size is it? It's a gigantic notebook. It's UK sizing and so I'm not going to remember it's an A something or maybe it's not an A something but it's huge. And I've, I've sketched my.

Is it a three?

It's actually black so I'm not sure if that's the same one and just the monitor is looking. Is viewing it different or not. But it's the only dot grid Co notebook that I have on the site.

So. But yeah, I built my kids a two story playhouse clubhouse Fort kind of deal a couple months ago over spring break and I sketched it all out and actually did most of that in pen because I hadn't really started doing the preparing for Pencil week. But some of it I just did in pencil. It just made sense. Hey, I'm about to erase a ton here so I think I'll be using it a lot more for that. And I also do I build web pages for people I'm not doing. I used to have a web development company and that just was too much time and I don't have the skills to do all the back end programming. But I still do a lot of sketches of what things are going to look like for clients. I think that a pencil makes sense at least for on my side before I show it to them of drawing out where things go. And you know, it's the cliche, it's erasable. You know, that's the reason your podcast is named that there's just. It's. It's gonna stay in that. I'm still working a little bit on my. I like to have processes of how to use things. I've kind of gotten that with fountain pens and other pens and I haven't 100% gotten my process down for how to carry the pencil, how to do the sharpener, all that together. Because I've kind of found, and I think this was even somebody else advice that the enclosed sharpeners just, they've been jamming on me and getting full. So I've still got to work out where, if I'm in a client's office, where do I sharpen my pencil kind of thing. Yeah, that makes sense.

I don't know if that exactly answers. It's going to be in my, in my rotation. I'm just going to have a wood pencil there. I'm still figuring out how it's going to be used and what all. You know, the case, the use cases will be, but I'm going to have one.

Not really. I mean, I, I think y' all might have even answered this. And some people answered it on social media. There was a couple of times I had lead break on me actually had a Blackwing 602, the modern one, where the lead just kept breaking at the tip. And I sharpened a little bit more and it break and I'd sharpen a little more and break again. You know, people told me maybe I was using too much force when I was sharpening it or maybe the lead had been broken from a fall. But after that, that was really my only problem. I guess I had that. The KUM ellipse, I think that's what it's called. And it just, I just found I couldn't really use that. I would, you know, if I took off both end caps of it. It's a pencil sharpener that has a cone to collect shavings and another cone to cover it, just to put it in your pocket on that particular sharpener, just as I was sharpening the hold was just too small. So, you know, But I've heard y' all talk about these, but I'm still going to pronounce everything wrong. The rachetta, the ratcheting pencil sharpener, it's the last thing I reviewed on pencil week. It had a little bit bigger spot for holding, shaving. So I actually did decide that an enclosed pencil sharpener is not the end of the world. It's just my experience before that. Yeah. Was it super broad? But yeah, I mean, it's a pencil. I mean, and not to make that too simple of a statement, but, you know, if I buy a, you know, 12 cents for, you know, a dozen pencils, that's probably going to be a bad experience. But none of the older ones that I tried I had any problems with. You know, one of the ones that Bob sent me was a $10 pencil. I posted a picture of it. It has square lead and it's horribly off center. If I had used that one, it probably would have been a bad experience, but I was just like, it's a $10 pencil. I'm not gonna sharpen this. Especially because it wasn't like a $10, like, modern drafting pencil or something that, you know, with super hard lead that I could use for particular thing. But yeah, I mean, cool. Yeah, it was good experiences all around.

Yeah, I mean, I think every time y' all do a podcast, it changes for you guys. Yeah, I feel like I'm even more condensed on that because I also have this wealth of knowledge that is kind of just flying over my head. And so, you know, I don't want to be the uncool guy that, like, says, oh, well, this is my favorite pencil. And it's like 99 tied to, like, you know, just the aura of the pencil. And, you know, the, you know, people have said the 602. You know, that's. That's right up there. That's one of those that I'm like, why do I like this pencil this much? You know, is it because it has the weird shaped, you know, ferrule on it? Or if it's, you know, the eraser, Is it the. The history? I read way too much about the controversy of the original, the modern, and so it's like, should I hate this pencil, but, man, I should have them in front of me. I actually got every one of the pencils and was going to bring it and have it sitting in front of me so I could be looking over all of them. But, yeah, there was a couple of. That had. The core was just a little bit thicker, and so those were just more interesting, I guess. So I enjoyed using those a little bit more. I liked, actually. Like, there was one called the Tri Rex. And I just don't know enough about all the history of these. That's Richard's best, I believe, is the pencil company that made that. It's one of those. I don't know if I should just be like, grinding these pencils down and if I should be, you know, thinking a little bit more about it when I do it. But it's a. A little bit oversized and it has a triangle grip. And for me, that just worked really well. Now you have to sharpen it a ton because you can only flip it in thirds, so you can't really keep it at a sharp point. And it's a fat one. And the only oversized pencil sharpener I have doesn't put a very long point on it. So you're. You're kind of. It gets blunt pretty quickly, but I enjoyed using that one a lot. Yeah, I'm trying. I'm not going to mention any mechanical pencils.

Yeah, Yeah.

The Tombow mono 100. I like that one. And then the Mitsubishi. Is it high Uni. How do you say that?

Yeah. Yeah. Being. And honestly, I've used way more pencils than Ron here. A few people's feedback was, hey, man, fire hose, slow down. I've got probably. I mean. And some of them may actually last to next pencil week, but I've probably got 30 or 40 more pencil reviews just sitting, waiting. And so, you know, there's just too many to narrow down. I'll just leave it there, you know, I guess the. A couple. I didn't do the. The Ladee. The Ticonderoga Ladee. You know, it's just. And I think that's. It's. It's a little bit bigger. It's a round one. I hadn't really. I thought I wouldn't like the round ones, but I kind of Enjoyed using that one.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, one, some of them. I didn't review one of them, which surprised me. But then actually I can't remember which one of you guys mentioned this. The. And I'll say this wrong too. The Faber Castell the grip. The 2001. For me that just. I love the grip and I just, you know, before I started writing with it I thought I was going to love it, but it just, it felt, it just. Scratch is not the right word. That's the fountain pen word. But you know, it was a little bit rough riding with it. It just wasn't super smooth. And so I raced. I had three of them I think and I would sharpen a little bit more and try and actually had three different size ones. I got the pack that had three different sizes or hardness and all of them were kind of the same. And so I don't know if I just didn't know what I was doing or if that's to be expected, but

I guess I just, you know, coming into this like one of the first ones I tried was the Mitsubishi high uni in 9B. And that's just like writing with butter almost. And it's just, it's. It's a satisfying use and I had to sharpen it a good bit. But you know, I'd kind of use a little bit. A few more soft pencils. And then I jumped over to that one and that one kind of threw me a little bit. I still have them. I'm not throwing them out. I'll go back to them later and see if I can. If my, my mind changes.

I can't remember what I said. But yeah, probably 30 to 40. Wow.

I have three kids.

Three kids less than three years apart. So I've got a three year old and a two year old and then a little wee one. Yeah, you know, I do sleep. I own my own business and I have my own office where I'm the only occupant of My office actually have two pretty big rooms and so I actually can go into a room and actually have an entire desk that is just set up for this blog. So I have a massive desk. I just go there and sit down and it takes longer to take pictures. I don't have pictures. I don't think almost all the pencils that I've reviewed that aren't on the website don't have pictures yet. It doesn't take me a ton of time. It takes me more time. I like to use them for a little bit, so I don't want to just use it for five minutes and write a review. So I've just kind of been using them since Bob sent me his stack and since I ordered some from pencils.com pretty early, I got the Palomino sampler from them and things like that. So it took me a little while using them, but then I just started spitting them out. So if you think my reviews are horrible, you know, and I need to spend more time, you know, let me know. But I, you know, I think they were great.

You.

Yeah, I mean, honestly, you probably know him as well as I do from. From that. I just. I was kind of looking around. I had a couple people I thought maybe would make good fits, but before pencil week, and I said, this might not have ended up being the best thing, but before pencil week, I thought if I just go to somebody like pencils.com or pencils.net, which I think is the other one that you worked for.

I think they're Musgrave pencil things.

Pencil things. Yeah. I had several on my radar. I don't know if I'd emailed any of the other ones what they would have even. But I just thought, you know, hey, let's all these old brand name pencils. This to me seems like maybe a little bit more interesting and it would kind of be a little bit more variety. So I just said, hey Bob, you want to do this? And he was the first person I emailed. I sent out maybe one tweet about hey, does anybody want to sponsor this? And I had a couple people that I've already kind of been working with and with pins say yeah, they would send me like one or two things or. But they weren't really up for like sponsorship or you know, anything more than that. But yeah, I think, you know, and I hope Bob's gotten, you know, some good traffic from it. I'm not sure, you know, being mostly pin blog and this being the first pencil week, you know, my. The click throughs were decent but they, you know, I don't know. Yeah, we'll see. I hope people are buying stuff from him. But yeah, I mean he was super great. We went back and forth actually never talked to him on the phone. We just emailed back and forth. He seemed like he thought it was a good idea and he sent me this ridiculously long list of links saying these are all the pencils I'm going to send you. And so it kind of blew my mind just the amount of, you know, the pencils. We kind of had some. Yeah. And all the other stuff. But so yeah, his site is an amazing.

It's got to be something because even the massive review index I have on my website, I actually have hit all kinds of limits on just how long documents can be and things like that. And some of his stuff is just, I mean, oh yeah, it's unreal. It'll hurt your brain. Spend too much time over there. Yeah, it's good stuff.

Yeah, there's a secret. Yeah. The unofficial next one. I guess this will let the cat out of the bag on part of it. The unofficial next one, which is in the calendar, is a year from now. It actually is not quite. It's not exactly a year. And I wouldn't mind having more before then, but I'm going to wait a little bit longer and kind of see the kind of trailing feedback of, you know, is this something that my readers can handle? An entire week solid of nothing else? And I think probably so. I mean, there's 52 weeks in a year if I did two solid on pencils. But I may not. Because one thing I want to do is. I want to do just. I mean, pencils are just gonna be part of the website. So I don't know that there'll be pencil reviews. I don't know. I do. I do tons of reviews. And so, you know, there may be pencil and eraser and sharpener views every week anyway, so we'll just have to kind of wait and see. It will at least be every year, you know, if I have anything to do with it.

I am, yeah. And Pencil Week to me was a great first week because it's not like. I don't know, some people may look at it as gimmicky, having like a week or whatever, the pencil week kind of thing. But I just thought, I'll start with something. And Pencil Week came into my mind before the idea to do other weeks. But after I kind of came up with that idea, I'm like, yeah, let's do Pencil Week first. And that way later on, you know, when I focus on kind of one thing at a time. And my thought on that is, you know, I don't know about Ruler Week. Had nothing about that one.

What is that?

Typewriter Week. I will.

Yeah, well, I've got. There's actually a guy who sells typewriters on man is on Etsy or I follow him on Instagram, and he's I think he's in Kentucky and he's got some awesome stuff. He just refurbs them. And I think he may either work near or for a. Some type of museum or something.

And this is horrible, I should be giving him actual credit, but look at who I follow on Insta. Instagram. I guess you probably find him. But yeah, I've already put out the call. Hey, who do I know that has one? That's cool because. And I keep this wide open, the letter and pen, paper, ink. Letter means. It means. It basically means anything that does. Is not covered in pen, paper, ink. So, you know, yeah, it can be typography for all anybody knows. Right. So writing letters and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, cool. Typewriters will be more expensive. See, the one thing I loved about Pencil week, I did 36 posts and I have tons more in the wings. I've not spent a million dollars, but, man, If I did 25 typewriter posts, I even tried to pay for that.

Yes, there's a.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I've also. I'm not, you know, I'm not super old or super young. I still consider myself to be young, but I. I've lived through the. Everybody used typewriters and then the computer takes over. Now no one can find typewriter ribbons. Where are they? There's like one guy in your town that sells them, and so they almost completely die. And now the Internet is so big it doesn't matter if you have a typewriter. So, yeah, I do think they're kind of the. With the exception of how ridiculously expensive they are to ship.

That's kind of the holdback. So. But yeah, there'll be more weeks. Some of them will be much more tied to what I've already been doing. Much more connected to like fountain pens and inks and that. But then some of them will be kind of. I think Pencil Week was a great way of kind of introducing pencils. Now I'm going to, you know, keep doing pencils and it won't feel like this weird thing. Yeah, absolutely. And so, you know, have another week. So kind of be the same thing. Kind of stock up.

Well, yeah, I do a podcast myself and it's me by myself and I talk over an hour. So sorry for. Oh no, super late.

Yeah, it's. I'm trying to do them once a month. I think I've almost done once a month since I started, but this. They're sporadic when they come out, but.

I am. I was going to do it before this podcast but I thought, hey, let me talk to the experts and then maybe it'd come off a little bit better. So we didn't. It wasn't in May, it'll be in June. I actually may end up doing two podcasts in June. But yeah, I mean, I love Yalls stuff. The first six episodes of Erasable I think are. They're huge. Great kind of launching point for people. The post you did on Starter Pencils, Andy, I think it's a bit of a fire hose because I've done all this research. It just literally reads a list of what to do and I think it's perfect. I think for people that that's the first time they read. It's just like anything any. Here's the way to get into it. It's kind of if they. They're just gonna have to go out and buy the stuff you recommend and then try it and then they'll understand everything you're talking about. Yeah. And kind of the. Johnny did the one on the evolution of the pencil.

Yeah. Yeah. So I think long winded. Well, no, go back and read. Oh man. Some of my. Go back and read my review on the Baron Fig notebook or the one I did on Furrow Books, the beta, his Kickstarter. I mean most of my reviews are kind of shortened to the point I try not to go too long. But every now and then one just kind of, you know, I'll write a 10 page paper on it. But no, I think y' all are doing awesome stuff. I'm stoked to be on here. I have not used that word in a long time. So yeah, it's been great to be

Yeah. And I'm going to have to have you guys on at some point, too. Oh, yeah, Love to do that. Yeah. Penpaperinkletter.com no hyphens or anything. And then ethepeople. And I thought, I love that pun, by the way.

I do, too. I've written to Ryan Goulet a few times for his videos and he always says, we the ppil, which is probably better to say it that way because you know what it is. But yeah, on Twitter it's we the ppil. And on Facebook, it's just slash, pen, paper, ink, letter. And then we the ppil on Tumblr and the same thing on Instagram. And I'm actually like you, Andy, on app.net nerdin it up.

Pen, paper, ink, letter. And then actually, I'm Google too. Pen, paper, ink, letter. So I'm pretty much on everything that's

I'm too old. I may do that, but I feel like a poser.

That would be rough.