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Transcript
Yay. Johnny did a toot. Hello and welcome to episode 103 of the erasable podcast. I'm Andy Welfle. This episode will feature worlds colliding. The lion laying down with the lamb, the leopard with the baby goat, and even more revelatory, the intersection of analog and digital tech and where they intersect in our lives. And speaking of worlds colliding, this may be one of the greatest, most ambitious crossover events ever, as I'm here with two different co hosts from two different podcasts, Johnny Gamber and Will Fangy. Hey, guys, how are you?
Oh, Johnny, I was going to let you go first at your show.
I'm feeling very analog. How are you?
I'm doing really well. Longtime listener, first time caller. Really, really excited to be here and appreciate the invitation.
So if anybody has ever listened to that other podcast that I used to do a lot more often and now do just sometimes, you'll know Will's voice. He and I just talk about sort of, sort of the thesis of what we're talking about here in this episode, which is, you know, we. We have a lot of tools in our life and a lot of, like, things that we use to make things easier or to create, and some of them are analog and some of them are digital, and we kind of explore that intersection and we're going to do that tonight. I thought it'd be interesting to get Johnny and Will talking together because Johnny skews more analog and Will generally skews more digital. So let's actually, before we even launch into tools of the trade, Will, can you tell us, like, the elevator pitch for who you are and what you do?
The elevator pitch? Well, my name is Will Fenge. I am a digital content wrangler for a software as a service company. I'm not defined by my job, but that's definitely where I spend most of my time. Currently sitting in Nashville, Tennessee, with my wife and two small dogs. Very soon, and by very soon, I mean literally like three, like 72 hours from now, I will be leaving Nashville and moving to a small town just outside of Austin, Texas. That's pretty much me. I'm a lover of all things analog and digital. I'm super excited to be on Erasable because Erasable is how I found Andy, who is now I consider one of my very best friends and someone who I look up to a great deal. Johnny is also a wonderful and spectacular and interesting human being. So I look forward to sitting here and shooting the breeze with you guys for a little while.
Well, you'll you'll learn more about more about Johnny as time goes on and maybe some of your dreams will be dashed.
So probably, yeah, it won't take long.
I'm in love with his erasable Persona. So as long as we continue to record, maybe he'll just remain that person in my head and in my heart.
Yeah, Johnny.
Stan, the language cleaned up.
Stay in brand, Johnny. Stay in brand. Will, let's launch into Tools of the Trade. What pop culture and or beverages and food are you consuming and what are you writing with?
Go. Who me? I'll go first. I am consuming next to nothing right now because I am getting ready to move. I did just finish Disenchanted on Netflix. It's the new show from the creators of the Simpsons and Futurama. Yeah, it was really good. It took quite. There's 10 episodes in the first part. It took quite the turn in episode nine that it had been like a really light and kind of fun show sort of based in a fantasy, almost Dungeons and Dragons esque environment. And then it got super heavy towards the end of episode nine. So I'm really looking forward to when they come out with the next part. So I'm doing that every once in a while I'll throw on an episode of Bob's Burgers while I'm eating lunch just because I work from home. So it's super great to be able to kind of take a break and sit in front of my TV and pour mindless pop culture into my head. And Bob's Burgers is pretty close to
the top of that.
And then as far as drinking, man, I'm all about water right now for multiple reasons. One, it is has been over 100 degrees here for the last few days and I've been working cleaning out storage units. So yeah, it's been just, I just been super, super hot and I'm doing this weird 16:8 fasting thing that I won't go into because I don't want to like it's like CrossFit and veganism. I don't want to like be that person that talks about it all the time. But a large part of that, since I stopped eating at 8 o', clock, I start drinking a lot of water to keep my stomach full. And then as far as what I'm writing with and writing on before I packed them all up, my current pencil du jour is the Uni Mitsubishi 9850 with an eraser. I am pro eraser attached eraser. I know it's a topic for much conversation and Debate. But I am pro eraser and the two different things I'm writing on typically are the OG Baron fig confidant with the big or with the gray fabricy color. I still have. Still using the same one from the giveaway that Andy and I did on dot grid. Oh, God. I might be four years ago now,
not quite that long, but probably pretty close. Yeah.
And then the only other thing I typically have on my desk to write on is. And Andy, I brought you a couple of these. One of those keyboard width notepads.
Oh, yeah.
I put it right in front of my keyboard. Or more appropriately, I put it typically behind my keyboard because I don't like to type during video calls for work because if I'm not using the fancy microphone like I have now, then I feel like my. Yeah, click, click, click, click, click. So I try not to do it with my good microphone. So I typically take handwritten notes there. Nice.
All right, Johnny, how about you?
So, along with everyone else who likes pencils and pencil references, I finished the latest season of Orange is the New Black recently, which. Yeah, did you. Did you guys see it?
I have two episodes left in this season.
I stopped after season one. Elizabeth finished it, though. I'm infamous for starting a show such as Orange is the New Black or Breaking Bad or Weeds or anything that is critically acclaimed. And watching the first season and then part of the second season and being like, nah, I'm good.
Just thinking out, yeah, well.
And I don't know, Andy, I don't know if we talked about this. I find shows like I'm watching TV to sort of like, vacate the world around me for a little while and sort of escape into something. And so I prefer that to be positive or at the very least episodic. So, like, that was the big deal with Breaking Bad for me is like an episode would end and I'd be like, what happens next? And I realized that's a great, great storytelling device, but it also gave me
a lot of anxiety, so understand.
So that's why I watch Bob's Burgers and Disenchanted and other cartoons, because I have the attention span of an 8 year old. It's great.
So have you guys seen that? It's on Netflix. There's a British cop show called Marcella, like the opposite of light and positive.
Oh, I should check that out.
I think you told me about it, but I don't think I've seen it.
Yeah, we just binged season two, which came out recently, which is really good. If you like non Period British cop dramas. Yeah, it's a good one. It revolves around a character who has blackout episodes wherein she kind of goes ballistic and can't remember what happened afterward and wakes up in a bathtub covered in blood. That's not hers. How the show opens, it's sunny stuff.
Yeah, sure is.
Yeah. But it's really good. It's really well cast, which is, you know, those 15 British actors.
Oh.
And so along with everyone else in the world who likes books and has Netflix, we watched that the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society film that Frankie really hated and went to sleep during and said it was boring. But I enjoyed it very much.
Yeah, Katie. And I've been meaning to watch it. We have it in our like, like PBS passport app on our Apple TV or something.
It was adorable.
Yeah.
I mean, it delivered what it promised.
Yeah.
And so I'm writing with a Musgrave Harvest on a county fair book from Washington D.C. from Field Notes, which is yellow and everything is very matchy and good.
Nice.
Cool. What am I doing? I am in the middle of reading that Tom Hanks book of short stories, Uncommon Type. Did either of you read that?
No. Is it good?
It's really good. It's a bunch of short stories. Some of them feature typewriters more prominently than others. Some of them, it's only like a passing reference, but they're mostly good. There's some period pieces, there's a couple sci fi things. There's some set. Modern day Tom Hanks. Yeah. Has a pretty like, pretty basic, like, writing style. Pretty basic, like plot. I think that if this was somebody who was not Tom Hanks, I probably wouldn't be that interested in it. I probably wouldn't have picked it up. But it's being Tom Hanks and being like, you know, featuring typewriters to some degree. It's pretty good. I enjoy it. Yeah. I actually. I own the book, the paper book. And this is a good thesis for today's episode. But I have the book sitting right on my bookshelf. But I rented the ebook from the library to read on my Kindle.
You monster.
You hero.
Hey, I bought the book. I supported Paper Bookmakers and then I rented the digital edition for free, but.
Well, you're supporting the library too.
Yeah, exactly. That's all you got to do, just like, you know, spend money and also support Charlie. No, it's fine. I. Yeah, I got a new Kindle not too long ago for the big Amazon Prime Day event. And I just like reading on it right now is a delight for Me. So that's why I did that. And I'm also. Katie and I signed up for Spotify Premium. We wanted to give that a try. This is maybe the topic a different show, maybe with Will, but the UI is so much better than Apple Music.
There's a reason why I'm on Spotify and continue to stick to Spotify. I appreciate that Apple TV is integrated with just about everything else that I do, but the UI is remarkably better. The adoption rate is considerably higher, comparatively speaking.
Yeah.
Yeah. I do not. I pay what was like 10, 12, 16, whatever it is for two people or for a family plan. I pay that money every month. I do not feel bad about it.
Yeah. So I've been listening a lot to the new album by Mitski called Be the Cowboy, who is a. I think she's a Japanese American artist. Just like a indie rock singer. She's pretty good. And I'm writing with my. Actually, since. Since I typed these show notes, I've changed it. I'm writing with my smart value 2B pencil, which is basically. It looks like it's a rebranded Viking into my Baron Fig notebook. So my Baron Fig metamorphosis notebook, which I'm about halfway through. All right, so let's do some fresh points, will you? You are declining the fresh points, is that right?
I am. I had little to no free time to come up with fresh points. Although I will be more than happy to weigh in and. Or make fun of the things that you were talking about.
All right, that sounds good. Speaking of which, Johnny, do you want to start us off here?
Sure. So I have three Baron Fig items. One I'm going to gloss over really quickly because it's embarrassing. And that is that by the time you hear this, all of your custom Baron figs will be on the way, but you probably should already have them. So just thank you for your patience and I send you a hug. Moving on. So also, by the time this comes out, there's another little Baron Fig item which they're calling the Vanguard Quarterly Dateless Planner, which is not quite as charming as most of their things are named, but. So it's a little pack of tiny little self cover Vanguard books. One is green, one's yellow, ones red, and one's blue. And they have seasonal images on the front and they're blank planners, so you can just use as you go. So they're really, really kind of adorable. Yeah, Even adorable for Baron Fig.
Yeah, the covers look really great.
Yeah. I don't know what the retail is, but the like the stitching is in black, and the images are really, really, really not subtle. Just they're small. They don't take up the whole cover. They look really nice.
Have they announced, officially announced those as of this time of recording?
No, there was some sort of flub where they came up in an ad on.
Yeah, I saw that.
And usually their stuff is on their website the night before it comes out, but these weren't up yet. I wonder if it was related to that.
Yeah, well, I'm sure we won't release this before that happens, so I'll.
Yeah, they come out tomorrow.
Okay, cool.
And also last week, they came out with their first content book, which is called Wander. It's a dream journal. So it's sort of like a moleskine and a dream journal and a Barrett Fig confidant. Had a baby. It's dark blue and like a confidant, and it's stamped with Celestial Designs, but it has an elastic like a moleskin, and inside, it's stuff to fill in your dreams.
So to me, the elastic band is the most interesting thing, because that's something I really wish came on confidants, but so far, they've never done that. And they talk about how, like, you know, no design is set in stone. They kind of want to evolve the confidant as they go. I wonder, like, let's. Let's speculate baselessly on if this is going to be kind of a new design offering or not. Does anybody have thoughts on that?
Here's what's interesting. It's. It's sort of. It comes open like if, you know, if a moleskin didn't have the elastic on, but. But the back of it is not tight. Like, they obviously made it so that it's not too tight and it's not gonna bend the COVID up, which I really appreciate. Cause, you know, they're so careful about other designs that this isn't an accident. But I wonder if it's a test.
Yeah.
Is it still. Is it still a hardcover?
Yeah, it has the same dimensions still.
Fabric color.
Yeah.
Normal books.
Yeah.
That seems weird to me. Cause the only time I ever really used the elastic on a moleskin is when I had the ones that were not. That were like this. Not flimsier, but like the softer, more flexible covers on both sides. And then it kind of made more sense to have an elastic over a bookmark. I don't know. Unless you crack the spine, which. I don't know. Maybe you guys are spine crackers. Maybe you're not But I don't know. Once you. I mean, if you don't crack the spine, is it really. Is it a huge deal for it to be flying open, that you need an elastic?
I don't know.
I mean, I wonder if even this could be a sitting on your nightstand kind of book. So this could give you the extra. You know, people aren't gonna read my book. Security.
Yeah.
Illusion of security.
Yeah.
You know, the smallest barrier. The smallest barrier to entry might turn away some folks.
Yeah.
If you, you know, have one on your bedside table, you could probably look at anyone who might be coming by your bedside table, be that partner, spouse, or child, and say, don't touch this.
So what are they gonna do?
They're gonna touch it immediately. Gonna go after. Especially if it's a child.
Yeah. Do either of you record your dreams in any sort of way?
I do not. Oh, go ahead.
No, I'm sorry. I was gonna say, I barely even remember mine more after. After about 15 seconds after I wake up. Elizabeth, that's my wife, for those of you who don't listen to your show. Elizabeth remembers hers, like, for days, weeks. She will, like, go in and out of the same dream multiple times per night. Maybe that happens to me. I don't have any idea.
Yeah.
Yeah. She. She's like. She will have a dream and then wake up and do something and then go back to sleep and just fall right back into that dream. And I. Maybe that happens to me. I assume I dream in color.
Yeah.
I remember my dreams, like, weeks later, so I don't usually write them down.
Yeah, something.
I'll trigger it and I'll remember it. I did bad ones.
Yeah, I'm. I guess I'm in the will camp. Like, I. Sometimes I'll remember a dre. There's a few that I've known for, like, years and years, but most of them I do not remember. And sometimes. Sometimes I'll remember sort of like the feeling that it conveyed for a while, but that's about it. Yeah.
The book is, like, completely gorgeous, which I always say when they come out with a new hardcover notebook. But I like Celestial Designs. I have a celestial tattoo, and this navy blue with the silver stamping is, like, absolutely perfect.
Yeah. Love that color, the design. That's beautiful. You have another Baron Fig thing to talk about, right, Tony?
Those were the three. Okay. Oh, the other thing. So this is sort of Baron Figish. If you are a member of the Field Nuts group, they have a custom pen that's being made by Baron Fig for members of The Field Nuts.
I just want to say that the idea of having a custom Baron Fig product made for your stationary community to celebrate an anniversary. Such an original idea. Good job, guys. No, I'm just kidding.
Why do you. Why would you go with a pen? Like, I appreciate the fact that the Baron Fig pens are well made.
Yeah. But like, well, they don't want to
make a Field Nuts group.
Yeah, you don't want to make a, like a custom Field Nuts, like notebook from Baron Fig because you're a field notes group. Right. So I think it makes sense. I actually really like. I'll be really interested to see if the green that they sort of like mocked up, which is kind of more of a like a leafy, olivey green rather than sort of like the bright green that they've done before. I'll be really interested to see if they. If that actually matches like the mock up, if they'll be able to get the anodization so close.
The logo looks cool.
Yeah, it's.
It's kind of Baron Fig esque.
It's a little simple acorn logo that Field Nuts has used before that I assume that they worked with like Jay or somebody at Baron Fig to, to kind of bring over. But they, they had two colors that they were proposing that everybody voted on. The other one was like a, like a bark brown color. I love that one. And I would have loved to have like a, like a brown anodized notebook. I don't know if that's something or not. Notebook pen. I don't know if that's something you can do, but it was cool to see that. I'm sure it'll be great. I was just making fun of like lightly poking fun at that. I think it's a really fun, like, anniversary celebration. So good job, guys.
But as a fan of green pens, will you be buying one or will you be chipping in for one?
Well, I'm a fan of green ink, so it will probably come with blue and or black ink. Although you can buy the green refill from the Baron Fig store. And it's also just a Schmidt refill, but I already have one of those and that's the experiment. So I'm thinking about it. I have a few. I think I have until the last day of August to order it, so I need to decide. And I think it's a little bit below retail price of a Squire too. Right? It's $50.
I don't even know how much a square cost.
Yeah, I think they're like 60 usually. Yeah. I can't decide yet. I might get one. I already have three different squires, so I probably don't need one, but yeah, we'll see. Yeah. Any other fresh points, Johnny?
No.
Cool.
I want to hear about the PEN show.
I think that mine is. Yeah, mostly, mostly pen show related and it just happened like on Saturday. So it was a lot of fun.
I went.
So last year when I went and I volunteered at Brad's not co booth just to like, you know, help out and like relieve him so he can go on breaks and go hobnob with other stuff. He did not attend the PEN show this year. He had a conflict come up and couldn't make it all the way out to San Francisco. So I was thinking about like, oh, do I really want to go? I'm not sure. And like that day, Ana Reinert from the well appointed desk texted me and said, hey, are you coming to the PEN show? And I was like, I'm thinking about it. And so she was going to be working at the Van Ness booth like she does every year, the Van Ness pen's booth. But she and her husband Bob Atkins wanted to have a booth for the well appointed desk and for Skylab Letterpress, which is the name of Bob's letterpress business. So they, they had like a little table there and she wanted to know if I would help help person that booth and relief Bob. So it's like, yeah. So I went, I worked the booth and I hung out and I met a bunch of people. Some of our, our contacts from the now departed RSVP podcast. Excuse me, not RSVP BYOB podcast were there. And I met Sarah from the Bijou Owl person Bijou Three Owl. And I met Jesse who was there and I met Robo Jim who was there. That was really fun. And I guess I have three things I kind of wanted to talk about from there just a little bit as follow up and just because I think it's really interesting. The first is something I talked about last year when I went and it was the introduction of this notebook company called Musubi M U S U B I. And they make really, really nice quality, very expensive notebooks. Clothbound notebooks made with wool from sheeps on some island in Japan. And these books are assembled by people with disabilities and they're sold at like significant markup that makes money for social impact. They donate to a lot of organizations. They were back and they have expanded their line and the new ones are just still completely gorgeous. They're just beautiful. I can't Say much like enough about how lovely they look. The big trouble is, is that I can't use them because they have Tomoe river paper in them and it's great for wet fountain pens, terrible for pencil.
So
I talked to Darrell, the guy who. Yeah, it's a guy from Singapore, lives in Japan, works at like a notebook company in Japan. His name is Daryl. So talk to Darrell and he says he, they. They want to make some without Tomo. Tomoe river paper. They want to explore other Japanese papers. So that's coming in the future. He says definitely by 2019. I cannot wait. I will maybe spend $90 on a notebook once. Probably not more than that. They really are just really beautiful. I just wanted to stand there and just pet them all day. So, yeah, that was atelier Masubi. They were, they were back at the. At the show and bigger, bigger booth and they definitely supported like they, they definitely have grown a lot. I'm our listener and friend in the group. Mark Cohen was there. He lives down in. Just down in the Bay, the South Bay. He was there with like, had a little booth. He was selling his hand roasted coffee, his home roasted coffee and boxes of black Wings volumes. So he had a bunch of them. He had some 24s there. He had some 1138s there, like a bunch of stuff in between. So it was one of the few places in the. At the show that actually had pencils for sale. But it was really fun. A friend of mine actually bought. There was another booth that had a gross of old color, bright Eberhard Faber colored pencils, those kind that like Ana Reinert really likes. And they sold them to a guy I know who came to the show. The whole gross of them for $20. She did not know that lady selling them had no idea what she had in front of her. And I was telling Anna about it later, she was so mad. She was like, she should have sold it to me, but it was fine. Yeah, last thing I'll mention. So Jessie from the former BYOB podcast, she's started a business selling. Just really being an authority and selling Esterbrook fountain pens, like the original vintage Esterbrooks. And I've talked a little bit about it here before, but in a few other places, my grandmother's old Esterbrook fountain pen is actually one of the first kind of entries that I had as a child into stationary and into nice writing utensils. And so I have kind of a soft spot in my heart for, for old Esterbrook fountain pens. And also there's something about them that's just like so appealing to me. Like there's so many like expensive, gaudy fountain pens I don't care anything about. But like these, these like antique 60 year old fountain pens from you know, like that were just super common back in the day and like don't cost that much money relatively. They didn't cost much money back in the day and nowadays you can get like a nice functioning old one for like 40 bucks. She's kind of made it her business buying and selling these things and they're completely gorgeous. So I have a, I have an orange lacquered one in mind that I think I'm going to buy for myself sometime soon. But yeah, I would love to have her come on the podcast and talk about what she loves about Esterbrook fountain pens. Will, are you familiar with Estherbrooks?
Only what you and I have discussed. I dabbled in the fountain pen world for a while, but I have since stepped away with my familiarity when I see Esterbrook. I also instinctively think of your grandmother's fountain pen.
So yeah, they're very distinctive in how they look. Johnny, you're familiar with Estherbrooks, right?
Nope.
Okay.
Yeah, we're little.
They're kind of like, oh, they were just super common and really inexpensive and just a really nice old American company. They were very kind of Eberhard Faber like in like their popularity and just quality. And they had a certain series of them that are just very distinctive. Like if you've seen them, they look very similar just in different, different colors. And the one that I had was this blue one, kind of a blue opalescent kind of marble looking one. And they make them in orange and red and all sorts of colors. And it's the kind with the little like lever on the side that when you stick it in a bottle of ink and pull the lever it kind of draws it up into the bladder and then you can write with it.
Like a bug's bunny.
Yeah. Uh huh. Yeah. Good. Great fountain pen. It was a really good show. I like, even for somebody who's like not so independent, I just love being around people who really care about something and something specific and that was that show. There's really interesting methodology to testing out inks and trying out fountain pens and talking about them makes me wish that there was like a pencil show that we could do. We could have or go to, but maybe we can do a booth at this show. I really wanted to cosplay at the pencil at the pen booth. Excuse me, at the Pen show with that pencil costume that I have and carry around a sign that says graphite is right. Maybe next year. Cool.
I still apologize for not offering up my home when I lived closer to Shelbyville and not being able to do a national pencil show there. I'm sure we would have brought in a dozen of people. Dozen and dozen of people.
There are dozens of us. Dozens. Yeah. That would have been really cool. You know, the American Pencil Collector Society does every two years they do a convention. And I'm really, really trying to gauge, like, how many people show up at these things. And if we flooded it with, like. And I say flooded, but, like, let's say. Let's say we got, like, 10 erasable listeners to attend, and then we just sort of, like, made it our own little, like, party or something. I think that would be really fun. But also, I don't want to, like, disrupt this thing that has probably been going on for 60 years. And. Yeah, I don't know. It's definitely. I've noticed a new vibe among PEN shows, even from two years ago. Two years ago was the first one I went to. Actually, I think three years ago was the first one I went to. But Johnny's been to a PEN show, a couple of them, and it really feels different. It feels like there's a younger community. And we were talking about this earlier, Johnny. It feels a little bit like it has a fancon vibe to it now as well. Yeah.
So a lot of drinking.
Yeah, a lot of drinking.
I got to have a little bit of beer in the daytime. That was nice.
Yeah, it was. And I really want. If anybody at Blackwing is listening to this, I think that you should have a booth at the San Francisco pen show next year if none of you actually want to attend it. I will. I will person your booth if you send me the stock. So I'll just put that out there right now.
Likewise for Baltimore, but I'm not sending anything back.
Exactly. I got to keep what I don't
send you the money. That's it. Yeah.
So cool. Do you guys want to jump into the main topic? Do we want to take a break first, or do we want to just jump right in?
I'm good.
Okay.
I'm good either way.
All right. Yeah, let's do this. All right, so I think we're going to start with a quick. Another segment. I know that we're kind of in segment overdrive here, but it's a segment we do in dot grid, and we call it Pencils and Pixels. Pencils and Pixels. All it is is that we recommend something we love that exist in analog space, like a new pencil or a coffee mug or something like that. And then also something we love that's digital or operates digitally. So like an app or a piece of electronics or something like that. So we're going to do all of our analogs at once and then all of our digitals at once. And we'll provide links and show notes. Johnny, what is, what is something analog that you recommend?
My new Fender acoustic base.
Yay.
Even though it does have electronics, but you don't have to plug them in.
Yeah, it's.
Yeah. Then so it's like it's not.
Go on. I'm sorry.
You know, if you're a bass player, you always had to drag around an amp or, you know, bass guitars don't project very well, so it's hard to find an acoustic bass you can play acoustically. And this one is a good acoustic one. So. Spent some time playing on my friend's roof recently, which was super fun. I have a strap that is rainbow, which is a reference to Mork's suspenders, and it makes me happy.
Oh yeah? Yeah, that's cool.
That's. That's the instrument that I always told myself I wanted to treat that I've always wanted to teach myself how to play because I had one for a while a buddy gave to me and I carried it with me through a bunch of different moves and ended up donating it, I think two or three moves ago. But yeah, the base is high on my list of like, if I was going to teach myself an instrument, that's 100% what it would be. So yeah, if I decide to go back that direction, Johnny, I'll hit you up. You can give me some tips on things I need to pick up.
Yeah, so if you play bass, you hold the whole band together.
So, you know, I played a mean guitar hero bass, I'll tell you that.
Yeah.
Cool. And Will, how about you? What is your analog pick?
So typically analog picks are harder for me, but I have recently had the opportunity to look at literally every item in my home that I own. And so I was thinking about what I have that is not remarkably digital, that I like a lot. And my sister in law gave me a mandolin slicer two Christmases ago. Speaking of stringed instruments, a mandolin,
it
makes a big difference. I do a lot of cooking at home. I really love to cook. My dad, I grew up watching my dad cook and he taught me to love food, to love the process of Preparing it for people you care about and stuff like that. And while I typically don't mind doing knife work when it comes to things like slicing onions or, or even garlic or vegetables for a stir fry or something else, particularly when it's stuff that has to be the same thickness all the way around, the mandolin slicer is huge for me.
Yeah.
So like, if I like, I'm cutting up, if I'm cutting up carrots for like a soup or something, I want them all to be the same thickness so I don't end up with like overly crunchy or overly soggy carrots. So yeah, it's, it's ridiculous. But yeah, mandolin slicer is, is huge for me. I don't even have one in particular to rec. What the wire cutter says. I typically trust wire cutter.
I bought an Oxo good grips one and it's really nice.
Oh, cool. Cool. Yeah, mine was, mine was one of those that they call you in the grocery store, like, hey, come get your free gift. And my sister in law mistakenly thought that the mandolin slicer was the free gift, so she walked out of the store with it. And I don't know if it was guilt or the fact that she just didn't want it that had her give it to me, but she was like, here, you'll use this more than I will.
The police are coming after you.
So thanks, Naomi. But yeah, mandolin slicer is my analog pick. If you cook a lot, you do a lot of knife work and you need things to be a particular width. Thickness, I guess is the thing to go there. A particular thickness. And the one I have also has vertical blades as well as a horizontal blade. So if I need to shred things, like if you make your own hash browns, which I have been known to do on occasion, or if you really want to mince an onion, that's the way to go about it. So this has been cooking tips with Will, Andy and Johnny.
Mine is you inspired me with your kitchen analog pick for me to change mine. I just bought some really nice ice cube trays the other day. Thisis35. I have a couple of those swell bottles which are like the water bottle shaped like thermoses that keep your liquids hot and cold. And I couldn't fit any ice cubes in there if I just wanted to carry on some iced tea or something to keep, to keep cold. And we bought these like little pill, like they're bigger than a pill but like pill shaped ice cubes trays like ice cubes and the tray they come in have this, like, very flexible, thin silicone bottom. So when you. When you fill it up, you just like, very easily push. Push the water or push the ice cube, like, up and out. So apparently this is, you know, silicone ice cream trays have been around for a long time, but apparently this is like my first foray into them. So I'm like, this is genius.
Yeah.
I have one of those ones that does giant cubes sitting in my Amazon wish list. And the two reasons it's there is one, typically if I drink booze, it's bourbon, and if I drink bourbon, it has an ice cube in it. Because if you're not putting at least a little bit of water in your bourbon, you're not doing it right. Johnny, thoughts?
I also own those giant ice cubes. Mine are round. Well, I have giant ice balls, but that's why I have them.
Didn't you buy one of those at Muji Will? One of the big.
Yeah, yeah. So I have one of the big circular ones, but the other reason that the square ones are in my Amazon cart is because they're like $8. And so the next time I need to hit 25 or $35 or whatever it is to get free shipping, boom. Ice cube trays bought.
Nice.
That's an Amazon hack, right? You've got to have a couple things that are like between $2 and $6 for $10 to keep in there. Because you're like, I don't want to pay $6 for shipping. I'd rather pay $8 for an ICE cube tray.
Yeah. This has been ice cube tray talk. Yeah. So let's talk about digital. Johnny. This is something I'm very interested in hearing about. What? You have digital in your life, so
I couldn't pick one. So I'm gonna gloss over Pandora Premium and go with the timer that I use for timing my French press coffee.
Okay.
Because it beeps for a straight minute and it's really, really damn annoying. So you never miss it.
And Johnny, what do you do? You know what, what brand this. This timer is, like, what model it is.
I got an Ikea a couple years ago recently enough that I think it still has the original battery. Oh, wow. And it's white. And it'll survive being dropped off of your refrigerator many times.
Nice.
It's a very good timer. I should have bought more than one.
How long do you steep your French press for?
It depends. Usually four, but lately the stuff I've been getting is a little lighter. So five.
I am also a four minute man. Let's not put that in the show
title.
I was gonna say that.
Yeah. I'm really looking forward to moving into this new place because we live in a house now that's somewhere between 750 and 780 square feet. And I think the kitchen in our new house is that big. So I'm looking forward to having actual counter space, whereupon I can set up all my fussy coffee things again, including my French press and my Aeropress, which I haven't used in forever. So I've been typically, typically I'm a French press guy as well because I can make two cups of coffee and that's pretty much all I need.
The. And your new house is like straight out of the like Mad Men era, right?
Yeah, straight. Yeah. It's complete mid century modern. So it's straight out of mid-60s to mid-70s with the lines and we've got
land of huge, huge appliances. So like plenty of room for coffee.
All sorts. Yeah, all sorts of room in there. I think there's a radio built into the cabinets in the kitchen.
Cool.
Yeah, it's super. It's looks super, super cool. And we got like stained glass as you come in the entrance and some exposed brick in some places. So yeah, I'm looking forward to as again as a guy who spends a lot of time cooking, being able to get in a kitchen and having more counter space because right now I don't have any. And if you cook at all, you know how important it is to be able to just like spread your stuff out all over the place. And so now I'll be able to do that again finally. Including all my. If my wife lets me put all my coffee stuff out where I can see it.
Cool. And will, what is your digital pick?
So I oscillated back and forth on my digital pick. I almost picked the apple pencil just because. But I assume I'm going to be talking about it again a little bit. In a few minutes I am going to preach the gospel of Apollo. It's an app for browsing and perusing Reddit, which has been my my wife. When she is tempting to go to sleep at night, when she's tempting to chill out, we either do Pinterest or in some cases Instagram. Most of the time she'll just scroll through an endless Pinterest feed. I do the same thing with Reddit. I'll either do my homepage or the popular post from Everywhere to the point that I've had to stop following some Instagram accounts that are there purely for humor because I'm like, I saw that on the Reddit front page like three days ago. So Apollo's great. There's a free version. There's also a paid version that removes ads and gives you a couple other premium features. I highly, highly, highly recommend it if you are a Redditor on any digital devices. It's a little bit lacking for the iPad version, but the iPhone version is 100% on point. And if you have an Android phone, I don't know that they make an Apollo for that, but I guarantee you there's a really awesome Reddit app out there for you. I don't ever use the Reddit website anymore, which is good because apparently no one likes the remodel. I've read a really interesting article about that, Andy, if you want me to send it your way about how they completely did all about the whole new Reddit redesign process they went through. It's super, super cool.
Yeah, send it to me and I'll put it in show notes for the three people who will be interested in who listen.
I'm just saying, as far as I can tell, the Pencil community is lacking on Reddit because I'm in the Notebooks group and probably the Moleskin group and I think I'm in Pencil's subreddit, but I don't ever see anything.
I am a of the Pencils subreddit, but I don't know what that. I don't know how to do anything there. I don't know what it means to be a mod. So I just see messages from people saying, hey, can I cross post this? I'm like, okay, sure. I don't care.
Yeah, sure, sounds good. But yeah, Apollo is my push or is my, is my pick. My digital pick for it now highly recommend it. And the developer is super involved on the Apollo subreddit. He's always in there, always like taking tips from everybody and sort of feedback. I don't remember exactly what happened, but a week or so ago he did all of his proceeds from one day and donated it to a charity. Something had happened. I forget what. I don't watch the news. We can talk. I think we're talking about that here in a little bit about how we consume the news. I don't do a lot of news, so I don't remember exactly why he did it. But I mean, he's the developer is overall a really good guy, so somebody you don't have to feel bad about giving your money to. Unlike the actual Reddit app, which is probably owned by. I don't know, like Skynet at this point or something.
Yeah, cool. What is. Okay, I'm trying to decide for my digital pick how in depth I want to go about this because I could probably speak at length about it, but nobody would care.
You're going to alienate Johnny 30 seconds in, you're going to alienate me a minute after that. It's that bad.
Let's start with this. So you know how. You know how Twitter is kind of a trash fire right now? Right now, just in general, right? Like, we're all on board with that, right?
Oh, yeah.
My God. I feel like in November it's been a trash fire for about two and a half years, but go ahead.
Yeah. So there have been multiple, like Twitter, Twitter type services that have come along that have tried to, like, start up. And usually, usually they're like decentralized or there's like different terms of service, they're open source or something along the way that, like, you know, that makes them different than Twitter. And because Twitter is just sort of this like corporate monstrosity that just consumes and consumes. They've all failed because Twitter is really good at that particular thing. They can't make money from it, but they can do it. So the latest, like, like, probably, I bet I talked about it on here, like early days of erasable. There's this one called App. Net, which was a really stupid name for a really cool Twitter clone. I actually met Harry Marks on App. Net. I followed him on Twitter. Hi, Harry Marks. Continuing the dot grid tradition on this show of mentioning Harry Marks in our episodes. I just totally lost my train of thought. Okay. Anyhow, app.net was a Twitter clone replacement. Got big for a while, then it just fizzled out. The latest flavor of the month, which I really hope sticks around for a while, is something called Mastodon. Really dumb name, but also Twitter's a dumb name. So the difference is that it's decentralized in that you have your own little server of Mastodon. They call it an instance. So kind of like Minecraft, where you start up your own server, like your little internal community. You can do this on Mastodon. But the difference is that they can all connect with each other. So they can. They can talk to other instances and just kind of make a global feed. So I was on one for a
while,
just played with it and tried it out.
It's really cool.
It's very Twitter. Like, there's some things that make it different. Like you can put stuff behind essentially, like a content warning. You can do other things. It has like a 500 something character limit. And so I just went in depth the other day and I bought a domain, which I do all the time, like a web domain, and I bought Grid ID.gr ID. So it's an Indonesian domain. So it says dot grid.
Obviously, Andy, you're missing the most important point, which is they call them toots. What?
Yes. So instead of a tweet, you do a toot. I don't. Yeah,
that's maybe the one thing that's keeping me from, like, buying in. Because as Andy will attest, I am all about going headfirst blind into whatever the new hotness is. Maybe it's just because I've soured on social media in general, but it's a toot, man. Like, really?
Do you remember back in the day how ridiculous? Saying something like saying that you tweeted was like, remember how ridiculous?
Oh, yeah.
And now it's just sort of entered our mainstream. But maybe some hashtag, whatever hashtag. Probably someday toots will get there. Probably not. So long story short here, I don't want to live on this planet anymore.
Called it.
If anybody wants to follow me on Mastodon, come find me at Andy. Grr. Idiot.
I forgot to mention the fact that there's two symbols in everybody's name, right?
Unless you're on the same instance as somebody, in which case it's just a one. So if you're one of the other, literally three people on the grid instance, it's just ndy. But if you're outside of that, it's D grid.
Those of you that are halfway interested, I'm sure that Andy has already planned to put the article from Lifehacker linked in the show notes. That certainly made me feel a little bit better. If you would please share with your lovely listening community both of the articles that you send to me, I think that will be very helpful and very enlightening and it will let you know very, very quickly, I'm into this. Or nope.
Yeah. Also, I will put in our show notes the invite to the dot grid instance in case you would like to become part of the dot grid community. I was going to try to do something involving erasable, but I was like, this seems more like the dot grid crowd, so there's that. Okay, so actual main topic this time, actual episode.
Let's see. My recording is at 58 and a half minutes. That's about on par for us.
We don't want to make this the Accidental Mastodon podcast. I think that would be fun. Johnny. Are you done for that toot?
Toot.
I have a train whistle around here somewhere. That's all we need at this point.
Just the train whistle. Johnny actually has a train whistle.
Johnny has left the room to go get a train whistle. Yay.
Johnny did a toot.
The first app that makes a train whistle, like the notification sound, I will download and try to get back on board with because they'll be making fun of themselves. And I'll get.
Oh, yeah, I'm sure there's going to
be like, you have a toddler in your pocket.
Toddler in your pocket. Yeah.
All right.
That's going to lead to everybody smashing their phones.
We're done.
It's just.
It's over now. All right, then.
Johnny's mouth instruments.
So here's the deal. Will and Johnny are both friends of mine with whom I talk to pretty much every day. We talk a lot about the tools we use and things we like. But Johnny skews more toward the analog, as you all know. Will generally skews more toward the digital, but still has an appreciation for pencils and notebooks and things like that. So I just thought that today we could just pick at some of those differences. I'm just kind of curious to see because I think I'm probably somewhere in the middle between you two. So I think I just want to talk a little. I want to ask some questions, and I'd love to just kind of talk through some of your processes. I guess we're branching off a little bit from specifically pencils today, but I think that's okay. We got to try some things out. We're up in the hundreds of episodes, so it can't just always be pencils all the time, guys.
Can't be all incense, cedar, and graphite. Andy.
I'm sorry. Just always there's a global cedar shortage going on right now. You know, we got to do other stuff.
That's true.
Diversify your basement.
Exactly.
Your content investments.
Good job. Let's make a podcast about investing. I think the three of us are very qualified to talk about that, Right?
Sounds great.
I have a huge background in that.
Put all of your money in two
elevens, Guys good at math.
Yeah, It's a bubble that will never burst. Two eleven's, guys. Will, what are some. I'm going to start with you. What are some uniquely analog tasks that you do? Like, what do you do when you specifically go for paper? Paper and pen or pencil? When you need. When you need to do something?
I think better in analog. I also edit better in analog. I guess that probably comes from being a teacher for as long as I was, which was actually not that long at all. When you say it like that.
Hey, you said it, not me.
Yeah, I said it. Yeah, it was like five years. I I edit better. So back when I was doing more editing of my own writing editing of other people's writing at my jobby job where I do all what I do every day. I never went so far as to print things out, but I did like saving things as PDFs and then marking them up with the Apple pencil, which I realize is not technically analog, but it's a stone's throw away. When I was coming up with my I recently went through a transition work where I went from being a digital content writer to renaming myself as a digital content wrangler. Doing a little bit more of the content strategy style stuff that your lovely co host typically spends a lot of his time doing. I was spending time trying to make out my you're lovely sir. I was trying to come up with my goals and trying to come up with like my plans for the next year and the next six months, things like that. And I reached again for that that Mitsubishi 9850 and my Baron Fig because it's easier for me to focus what I'm doing if I don't have a bunch of things flashing and dinging and like drawing my tuning away. Yeah, tuning, yeah. So I also am better about taking quick notes in analog, either with a pen or a pencil, whatever's handy again on that little typical keyboard with notepad just because it's quicker for me. Like I I haven't checked myself. I learned the other day that I'm apparently a pretty solid touch typer, but I've never timed myself to see what I am words per minute. But I just feel like I can get the essence of what I'm trying to say on paper quicker than I can get it into some sort of app that I have to open and then start a new document and then make sure that I get real fiddly with stuff. And if I just have my cup of pencils and my notebook in front of me, I don't have a chance to be fiddly. I just have a chance to get my work done. So yeah, like planning and editing and sort of less creating more is esoteric the word to use here. I don't even know. I like to throw big words around and pretend like I know what they mean. Just sort of the more cerebral tasks like thinking and planning and Organizing, I would probably do much better with a paper to do list. But I'm so deep into todoist the to do system that I use that I would have a hard time transitioning out of it. But for like stuff around the house, I'll do handwritten to do lists and stuff like that.
Cool.
That answer your question?
Yeah, that's perfect. That's exactly what I was looking for. Conversely, I think all of us here probably know mostly when Johnny turns to analog tools, which is almost every time. But Johnny, I kind of want to ask you the opposite. When do you reach for something electronic, something digital, like a word doc or an email or I don't know what. Surprise us. What else do you do digitally rather than like a pencil and paper?
Huh. So for any sort of writing to go digital, usually it's only if I need to share it somehow.
Yeah.
And usually I just use Google Docs and Word Assist. I use. What is it called, LibreOffice on Linux, that it's really just like a draft. Like I'll type it into that and then eventually winds up in Google Documents.
Yeah.
So outside of writing, the last time I was in a band we had cassette recorders. So now, you know, we have apps on our phones. So joining a band that already exists, I have to learn a lot of songs. So the digital stuff has really helped me record practice sessions and not just see all the places where I'm screwing up, but also memorize, you know, the way that songs change and when times change and stuff like that. So unexpectedly. The digital stuff's helped me a lot in that area. But for writing, really, if it's just for me, I hardly ever type it, which is weird because I can actually type way faster than I can write.
Yeah.
Lately.
But that's kind of the point, right? Like, it slows you down. It makes you kind of think about what you're doing.
Yeah.
Are you ever writing anything, like really long form that you need to. That even. You're not sharing that you. That you type rather than write, are you? Are you writing longhand still too? Nope.
So the couple times that I quote, unquote, one National Novel Writing Month, that only exists on paper.
Yeah.
Because I don't know, like, you know, those aren't things I'm looking to publish. So it just doesn't make any sense to waste the time typing them up or spend the time typing them up. But yes, for me, I can read my own handwriting. 12 years of Catholic school, it's pretty legible. I think
mine has deteriorated horribly and that. That gets even worse when I start doing stuff with the apple pencil. But, yeah, my handwriting is just. I used to drive my students nuts because I'm one of those people that writes in all caps. So capital letters are tall capitals and regular letter and lowercase letters are short capitals. I typically find that to be a little bit more legible. I couldn't write like an email, something email length in cursive right now if you paid me for it. Or at least not with any legibility, just because mainly when I start writing cursive, I just want to do the letter Q and the letter Z a whole bunch of times because it makes me. I'm like, oh, look, he's weird. Swoopy letter. This is fun. Yeah, my handwriting is just. Especially since I quit teaching and went completely over to the computer. I just don't write anything of any length by hand anymore. So I can type like a fiend.
I mean, my handwriting is atrocious, but, like, I still write mostly cursive. Like, I would say, like 80% of my handwriting is cursive. And there are a few things that aren't. Like, I actually write, like capital letter. Like printed capital letters generally.
But yeah, handwriting is not atrocious.
Hey, it ain't great.
Yeah, it's not beautiful, but at least you can almost read it.
I have a tangential question to that, Andy. When you used to be more of a journalistic reporter type person, did you take notes in print or in cursive?
Still cursive.
Yeah.
Yeah. And that was rough because I also didn't. Like, I could always read my handwriting in my notes, but they weren't always the most coherent. Like, I couldn't easily track back to what I was saying. So I actually, back when I had The, I think, third generation iPod back in like 2002, 2003, 2004, I had a little attachment, like a little recorder that I put on the top of it. I don't know if you remember those things at all. Before an ipod had any sort of a microphone attached to it. So I actually had one of those. And I would record most of my interviews in that and I would just write down timestamps.
Yeah, that was. I ended up doing that with. I had a tiny digital recorder when I was doing my more journalism stuff. Elizabeth, when she was doing all of her journalistic writing and things, had a manual tape recorder. Like, that's how we can tell.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, with the little tiny tapes in them. And that's how I can tell when she's writing in a hurry. She'll typically write in print, but if she's writing really quick, she'll switch over to cursive. Which is why I asked Johnny, are you a printer? A cursive writer?
Usually cursive?
Yeah.
We weren't allowed to print at a certain point in school.
Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what it is. I think it's just like, I just got much faster in cursive than I got with print and, like, significantly faster, at least for me. So I guess that just kind of stuck with me.
Oh, well. Your writing tool never has to leave the paper, right? Changing words. And if you're only picking it up in between words, as opposed to each individual letter, it's only like microseconds or whatever they're called. Sorry, time nerds, but. But you're saving that much time every time that you write. I think that's what really gets in my way when I'm trying to print is that I have to take that break every single time. And by the time I get caught up with the thought I'm trying to have, I've already had three more that I didn't get a chance to write down.
Yeah. Yeah. So kind of pulling back a little bit. We talked a little bit about this last question on here about long form writing, but I'm interested to know when it comes to writing, or let's say it comes to. To do lists or typing or whatever, whatever. Have either of you tried a workflow that just didn't work out for you? You really were set on doing it in this one app or something like this? And what went wrong, I guess. Will, let's start with you. Can you think of something like this?
Yeah. So I have had journaling recommended to me by both the community at large and by therapists just to help me deal with some things. I'm bipolar, as the listeners at Dot Grid know. And so there are oftentimes, especially when I was first getting everything sort of situated and adjusted, that I worked out things in my head a little bit better if I wrote them down and journaled with them that way. And I want to say that, like, analog journaling didn't work for me and digital. Digital. Digital journaling did, but that would be a lie. I'm a little better about digital journaling than I was about analog journaling, but I'm still not that great about it. Um, I actually have completely simplified that process now and I downloaded an app, I guess about a month and a half ago. Now called Emoods, which is not a particularly descriptive name for an app, but it lets different inputs every day. Like I get a reminder every night at 9pm, go in and fill this out and it asks me how much sleep I got, if I was set, if I was depressed, if I was anxious, if I was irritated or if I was like a little manic. And lets me input whether or not I took my medication. And that's really helped me. I mean the reason I whole reason I started journaling besides to work through things was to be able to track my sort of moods. Because even on my bipolar medication, instead of being like majorly up for a couple of weeks and then in the middle and then majorly down for a couple weeks, I still cycle back and forth, just not as quickly. And so this is I'm trying to aggregate all the data I possibly can to try to figure out how I can plan for when I'm going to be down and depressed or to be aware of this days that I'm like up and a little more manic just so I can have my safeguards in place to make sure I'm getting all my work done and also not spending boatloads of money@pencils.com because I have a tendency to do crazy things like that. And I don't like to use the word crazy. I tend to do kind of out of the ordinary things like that when I'm manic. So I want to say that journaling is something that didn't work out for me either way. But I've always like I carry around my field notes that I journal in. Like I have it in my bag or bags depending on what day it is. Like I have it in there in case like the mood strikes me. But I don't think I've written anything in like a year and a half. Yeah, I have. I have had journal entries to day one more recently than that, especially since I got my Apple watch and they do a lot better about your like your daily tracker as far as what you post on social media and your activities and things like that. So I do have more day one posts that go in there. But yeah, journaling. Anybody got any tips on the ways I can make journaling? Journaling is a habit that sticks and don't say do it before or after you brush your teeth. But yeah, anything like that is. Yeah, I just Journaling didn't work for me either way. But digital was a little more successful than analog.
I wish I had some way to keep consistent with it like I really, you know, I always, always have day one just easily accessible to me. But I, I don't do it unless there's something big I'm trying to work out or like a big change that's on the horizon. But like just sort of everyday stuff I'm terrible with. I'd never have been consistent with it. I wish I was. Yeah. Johnny, how about you? Have you. I'll kind of repeat the question. Have you ever tried a workflow that just didn't work for you with something, be it digital or analog? And what was it and what went wrong?
Trying to do anything. Scheduling that's not a paper planner has never worked for me. I mean, a lot of this could be because of when I stopped working outside the home, which was early 2011. So, you know, things technologically looked a lot different back then. Like you wouldn't have smartphones, you made fun of that one person on the BlackBerry all the time.
Yeah.
So, you know, having synced calendars in the office wasn't such a big deal back then. So I could just get away with being like, no, I'm not doing this. But anytime I've ever tried to rely
on
Google calendars or digital calendar apps or anything that's not a planner, it's never worked because I don't input things enough because it's a pain and I never look at it. I feel like if I write something down, I don't usually have to look at it, I just remember it. But for things in the middle of the day, I find those digital assistance dingers to be really helpful for medications and stuff like that.
Yeah, that's it.
Any workflow that's not looking at a piece of paper with something to write in my hand just never really worked for me very well.
That's interesting.
If I didn't have do, that's my reminders app on Android. It does the same thing that your. It does something similar that your French press timer does in that I could snooze it, but it doesn't snooze permanently. It'll come back to me every two minutes or five minutes or whatever. And that's literally how I remember. Like the medication that I take for my mood stabilizer makes me groggy for about 14 hours. Not like you can't drive groggy, but like I take it at 6, I'm ready for bed about 9:30 and you're not dragging me out of bed until about 8 o' clock the next morning at the very earliest. On the nights that I Forget, because I didn't adhere to my timer, and I take it at like, 10:30. The next morning is rough. So I end up having to use do as, like my constant pecking out my brain. Hey, do this. Hey, do this. Hey, do this.
So, yeah, it's interesting. My. The thing I was going to talk about is very similar to Johnny's, I think, except the opposite. I really, really want to be able to have some kind of a paper planner now, but I just can't anymore, so. So it's a whole. Like, I used to when I worked at a small nonprofit, I, like, loved nothing more than to go out and pick out what my new weekly planner was going to be for the year. I think my peak weekly planner was the Moleskine Diary plus planner, which had a page, like a blank line page, and then a weekly planner on the left side of the spread. But after a while, like, I started working in places where it required so many sort of shared meetings that there was no way I was going to be able to sort of version track my. My day into a paper planner. And then also, like, you know, it would just. I would just be duplicating effort. Like, there was no use in me writing it down on paper. So that's like. Yeah, that's funny. That's. That's my opposite experience.
I know Sean Blanc does something similar where he has, like, a digital calendar, but he sits down every morning and like, writes down what his agenda is for the day into his. I want to say it's a Baron fig, actually, and writes down what his agenda is for the day and the things he has coming up. But I'm at the point now where. And Johnny, God love you, I wish I didn't have to adhere to a schedule that I literally have to have timers for the 15 minutes, 10 minutes, and 5 minutes before a meeting starts. Because the first few weeks that I was working here, I was just like, oh, I'll just have a timer at 30 minutes for a meeting, and then I'll make sure I clear my calendar and I'm ready. And then I was like, 15 minutes late to a bunch of meetings because, you know, you just get in the zone, you start doing stuff, and you're like, oh, crap. It's like, you know, 11:15. And I had a meeting that started at 11, and great, this will be fun. It's not like, Zoom doesn't make a. Zoom makes a doorbell noise every time somebody enters a meeting. So there's like, no way to sneak in late to a meeting, you're just like, oh, there's that guy that didn't realize that we were having a meeting right now.
So yeah, the one thing I guess I do that is kind of a hybrid between that is to do lists. I have sort of a long standing to do list and one that I sort of rapid input into things, which is a Mac app that works on mobile and on desktop. I've been using that for years and years through its different iterations. So I use things as sort of a to do input, like a capture as soon as I think of it. And I also use it as sort of a long time storage. But then when I'm like trying to decide at the beginning of the day what I'm going to try to get done that day, I usually write it down then. And that's what I usually put into generally my confidant. But sometimes into my field notes or pocket notebook, I should say, in case I'm going to be out and about. So that's kind of my interesting like hybrid of analog and digital. Do either of you have any sort of a hybrid system like that, Johnny, are you pretty much all analog here or do you have anything like that that you do?
Yeah, it's all analog. Unless it's like, you know, remember to call somebody and I really can't miss it. I'll put a reminder on my phone, but that's so infrequent. I don't actually know what that sound sounds like. And it just kind of goes away. I look at it later like, oh crap, I was supposed to call somebody.
I make Google Calendar invites for all of our recordings. Usually that's you. Except. Yeah, how about you, Will?
I'm trying to think. Yeah, I'm trying to think about if there's anything that I do that is sort of a hybrid. And I mean, not really. Like, I wish I, I wish I did, to be perfectly honest with you. Like, I mean, you said it in the intro, like, I do appreciate pencils and notebooks and stationary. I mean that's kind of how, that's literally how I came to make meet you guys. I started episode one after hearing about your podcast on the Pen Addict and was just like, you know, enamored with, oh man, I can't believe that pencils is a thing that there would be a podcast about. And this is so cool. And then, you know, I lived in Shelbyville for so long, so I got on this real big Musgrave kick and pencils. No pencils.com has a really great educator discount So I ended up ordering a couple different gross of pencils for my students when I was there. And I kind of became known as, like, the teacher that always had a pencil if you needed one. Like, I wish I spent more time with my analog tools because I do love them and I do love the tangibility of them. I mean, I got my brother addicted to fountain pens even more so than I am, and I just. I really appreciate them. But I don't know right now how that would integrate into my life because, I mean, I work remotely. My entire company is remote. I spend, you know, seven and a half or eight hours of a working day in front of a computer typing, you know, communicating via text or video. And there's just. There's not as much of an opportunity to integrate unless I'm, like, drawing a really quick sketch or something to show somebody. There's just not as many opportunities to integrate analog tools into my day. Or maybe there are and I'm just missing it. You know, maybe I'm not trying hard enough. Maybe I'm disappointing the analog side of my brain and all of the people out there who think that I could be doing better. But, yeah, I just. I want to. And I love that stuff. I just have a hard time finding where it. Where it goes.
Yeah. Well, actually, I'd be really interested in opening this up to listeners if you're like, you know, we have a lot of people in marketing and just sort of like, you know, like, thought, what am I trying to say here?
Knowledge workers.
That's what I'm trying to say. Thank you, knowledge workers who listen to this. If you have any interesting ways in which you've been able to kind of, like, reincorporate analog back into what you're doing, I'd really love to know. Just kind of maybe comment. Go to erasable US103 and leave a comment. Or if you're in the Facebook group, like, I'd love to know, like, how you do that. I'll make sure that Will sees it for sure. And Johnny and me trying to think of other interesting use cases for the way that people do something analog or digital. We kind of alluded to this before, but consuming the news is something I'd really be interested in knowing about. Like, do you. Like, how do you usually stay abreast of the news? Do you stay abreast of the news? And if not, if you're just, like, reading, you know, magazines either online or in paper or like, a bunch of blogs, how are you doing that? Will, how about you let's start with you this time. I know that you try to like, you know, skip some of the day to day new stuff, but
so I found myself a little while ago, I don't know, probably about a year, a year and a half ago, really like having that constant nagging feeling in the back of my head that something was wrong and like I was having a hard time being like completely happy. And I realize it sounds almost a little dramatic and a little like over the top, but I realized that I was spending a lot of time, I mean, as a journalism student, as someone who was a practitioner for a while. I mean it's, you know that the phrase it bleeds, if it bleeds, it leads is pretty much true. But like when you're incorporating that into your daily life and it's a lot of like, there's not necessarily a lot of negativity, but not a whole lot of like, hey, check out this positive thing that's happening coming across your icecreen, your vision, whatever you want to call it, incorporating into your brain and your thought process that it can kind of be a drag on you. So I've pretty much taken out a lot of my news consumption. That being said, I am about to move to a small town south of Austin that has still has a locally owned daily paper, which is astonishing to me that Gannett hasn't reached its greasy, disgusting tentacles into every paper it can possibly get. And I'm super excited to like subscribe to the daily local paper. Oh yeah, it's the like the Lockhart News Sentinel or Lockhart News Journal or something else. And so I'm super excited about that. And one of the ways that we found out about this town that we're moving to in Texas was via Texas Monthly, which is a primarily print publication. Well, as much as anything can be a primarily print publication anymore. Aren't you glad I have the pop screen on tonight? Primarily print publication. And I'm really excited to subscribe to that and get it in my inbox because there is, there's a lot of quality journalism going on, at least at that establishment. And as a practitioner and fan of journalism, anytime I see good stuff happening, like, I want to support it. So I don't consume a lot of news now, but I look forward to getting at the very least a monthly magazine and hopefully a daily paper once I move to this tiny little town. But yeah, I don't consume the news. Every once in a while I will sneak into news news on my phone, like the app news. But the problem is I opened one article from People magazine once, and now that's, like, 80% of what it feeds me. Like, hey, check out Ben Affleck going back to rehab. And, dude, I don't care. I don't need to know about that. That's the other thing is, if it's not negative, it's, like, pointless, mindless. Just like, bleh. I don't have a word for it. It's just a noise.
And I don't, like.
I don't need that. It's just taking up extra cycles when I can be, I don't know, watching Bob's burgers, which is obviously far, far higher up the pop culture food chain than People magazine. Gauntlet Throne.
Did you see the news alert? I just got through on my. My phone, posted this picture.
It's a missing man, which. It's in a home.
Like, how else do you get there as. As you were talking about how, like, the news, you just have a feeling of something that is wrong. I got an alert from the San Francisco Chronicle on my phone that says a headless corpse is found in a fish tank in a San Francisco home. And now investigators are trying to determine if it's of a missing man who lived there. Holy crap.
What other headless corpse would it be? Like, this guy? Like, that seems like a two plus two sort of equation for me. Like, well, this guy's missing, but also in a fish tank in his home.
This is. This is going to be in Law and Order sometime. Like SVU at the very least.
Oh, yeah, that's like. That's like episode four of next season. I watch all of that, by the way, because it's episodic for me. And Elizabeth and I will talk some mad trash about how bad SVU is. Like, it's never been the pinnacle of television drama, but it's just. It's. It's gotten real, real, real derivative of the news.
Speaking of bad local news. Well, local, like, terrible news that comes through of, like, local events. Johnny, how do you keep abreast of Baltimore news,
largely? I don't pay that much attention to it. Yeah, because, you know, we have, like, a murder a day and several shootings a day, so the police used to basically put their blotter on Twitter. So, like, every couple hours, like, you know, some guy got shot because he was doing something really stupid to a drug dealer. Dealer, or, you know, some kid got shot because two drug dealers are doing something stupid and they can't aim the guns. But lately, I guess I've curated who I actually follow on Facebook, so people posting links and then my own, you know, surfing is how I usually get my national and world news. So, yeah, it's all online, I guess. I mean, I read Sierra Magazine first or environmental stuff. That's not really news. That's more like journalism.
Yeah. Do you consume news digitally at all? Do you ever cruise the websites or use Twitter?
Yeah, all online, sometimes.
Tv.
I mean, we have a pretty quaint newscast that I've been watching my whole life that I enjoy. Channel 13 in Baltimore. Yay. But yeah, I mean, that's more like who got shot today and what's. What are people pissed off about in Annapolis? Why are people mad at the mayor? I don't think that's really news.
Yeah, I really think it's interesting. When I move from a smaller market to a larger news market. I thought the quality of the local news was going to get much better. It did not. In fact, it's still just sort of like a bunch of people awkwardly bantering with each other and sometimes interspersing it with news moments. Yeah.
Sort of tangentially connected. Andy, I want to turn this on to you because you kind of alluded to it in what we were consuming. How do you do now that you have your Kindle? Has that become your preferred way to read? Because we did an entire episode on this a while back and it might be worth revisiting on the other show that we do.
But
what are you reading on paper and what are you reading on E. Ink? How do you decide which one to do do?
Yeah, well, I. So we got a newspaper subscription to the San Francisco. San Francisco Chronicle. We got a Sunday only edition subscription.
All the headless body news you can.
All the headless body news I can read. And with the paper subscription comes a subscription to their website that's not hidden behind a paywall. So I can. I can read read on my Chronicle app and I could get notifications and things like this, but I don't know. When I read, it's like when I read books, I should say like novels or biographies or something. I have to sheepishly admit that I usually read it on my Kindle. Like, it's just. It takes up less space. I often like to have a couple different books going at once, and it's much easier to do it that way.
Wait, hold on. You're one of those monsters.
How do you do that?
Well, it's Johnny. I apologize if I offended you. I don't know if we're on the Friendship Lovely where I can call you A monster. But, like, I don't. I don't know how. No, dude, no. I give myself permission to stop reading books that I don't like, but I can't have more than one going at once. Like, I don't. I can't cross the streams. And it's usually Jack Reacher hanging out with Harry Potter. That's not how these things work.
Well, they usually can't be the same kind of genre. Like, I. I usually have, like, maybe some nonfiction going at the same time as some fiction, maybe maybe some short stories thrown in there. Like, usually.
But I have one nonfiction book that I started reading, like, six years ago and never make it past, like, the first third.
Yeah, it's the.
A Brief History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.
Yep.
History of science from all over the world. I literally have an electronic and paper copy. And I just, like, I can't get past, like, 1755. I just can't. And I don't know. I don't know what it is. I envy those of you that can keep track on nonfiction for a long time.
Yeah. Well. And I do have, you know, I do sometimes, like, often read paper books, too. Like, I'll have, like, some of my very favorite books I have a paper copy of, and I just want to kind of keep it around. And sometimes I'll run across a book that, like, is just printed really well. Like, maybe it's really this beautiful texture on the paper or the font's really nice, or great cover, something like that. I'll read that paper copy. And then also, like, sometimes I'll read something that isn't just straight, just text on paper. Maybe there's, like, formatted text in there. Maybe there's illustrations or photos, and I really want a paper copy of that. So I do still consume paper copies of books. But for sure, like, as far as news goes, like, I. And not even, like, hard news. Like, if it's like an Internet article I want to read from Wired or the New Yorker or something. I. I used an app called Instapaper, which I bet a lot of Apple users who might listen to the show know about. It's kind of a. Read it later.
It's not just Apple. It's.
Is it on Android?
Yeah, it's on Android. It reaches across the platforms.
It's pretty nice. It kind of allows you to like it not only just bookmarks an article you want to read, but it takes it into the app and formats it into a very, very readable format. So strips out the ads and the little, like, Pop ups and everything and makes it just a really nice readable text. So I use instapaper a lot. Often what I'll do is throughout the week I'll see an interesting article I don't have time to read and I'll instapaper it. And then on Saturdays Katie and I usually go in the mornings go to a coffee shop and have some breakfast and a coffee and read things and I usually read it there and then. Yeah. New.
Did you ever send stuff over to your kindergarten? I don't does that and I love it.
Yeah, I used to but I don't know why. I just don't. I just don't do it like that. I usually put it just read it on instant paper on my iPad. I read it that way but I
get a weekly digest on Fridays if I have any more than like three new stories sent over to my super ancient Kindle keyboard which is my preferred way to read things. But yeah, it's just, it's packed.
Yeah. I will say Johnny, if ever you have dabble in the electronic books, something like a Kindle like that has that E Ink display is the closest you can get to high contrast paper reading without actually reading paper. It's not at all like reading the screen. You don't really get ice drain from it. It's really nice.
Yeah, I've never read an ebook before. Yeah, I have all the Harry Potter ebooks. Yeah, I read them.
Yeah. I one time read an entire novel on my, on my phone and the backlight gave me a huge headache.
Oh God. Yeah.
I decided I was never not going to like you know, stare at a screen like that again. So the Kindle and like the Nook and the Kobo and all of the like E Ink displays like are pretty good. About that. Yeah. Anything else we should talk about before we button it up? Any other big sort of dichotomies between digital and analog that we didn't discuss?
Johnny, how do you do sheet music? Or do you ever do sheet music? How do you.
Okay, I know a lot of people
prefer to do iPad for that but
when I had to learn new songs for a band I used to field notes and assign pages because I don't like to wear my glasses when I play so I had to have the big lines to see but just a regular field notes.
Yeah, that's really cool. I don't, I can't read sheet music so I'm of no help here.
It's been a long time. I was in choir in high school and I was in Band in middle school. So hard pressed I could read it. But I. I would have a very hard time playing.
Yeah.
So congratulations, Johnny. You're an esteemed musician in. When it comes to this company, you are the best musician of the three.
Well, Tim's a pretty good guitar player. I think if we ever started a band, I would have to be the guy on tambourine.
Or I could sing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, sing. You have such an angelic voice.
It's beautiful. It really is. All right.
Definitely. It definitely wouldn't scare your cats away.
Well, on that note, let's. Let's button this up. Will, thank you so much for taking time out from your packing. I know you packed up an entire storage unit this, this week so far.
Yeah, two of them. Two of them. Well, did not so much packed as sort of liquidated some props. But yeah, we're. We're pretty good as far as packing goes. I gotta pick up my truck tomorrow night at 6pm so we're gonna spend. We're sleeping a little bit tomorrow because we've been up early to try to beat the heat past couple nights. So we're gonna kind of sleep in a little bit tomorrow and finish packing things up and then Thursday morning I'll hit the road. Accompanied by probably not this podcast, maybe all episodes of this podcast. Yeah, episodes of my other favorite podcast, My Brother, My Brother and Me. If you haven't listened to it, go check it out. My sweeper mix. My Taylor Swift Justin Bieber mix that I listen to shamelessly and do not care that you all are judging me because they may be pop culture heathens, but I tell you, their music is. It's durn catchy.
Johnny likes the Biebs.
Yeah, I will admit that Taylor Swift might be in my Pandora history.
Her playlist and my most recent and her most recent album have been on repeat for me because it's good, like empty background music for when I'm doing other things. I don't have to really think about it too much. Thanks, pop culture.
Well, anyhow, Will, thank you for joining us. This has been a lot of fun.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Well, this has been a treat for me and I really do appreciate you guys inviting me. As I told you, I told you when you were talking to me about possibly having some people on to replace Tim, I jokingly said, sure, I'll do whatever episode you want. But then when you extended the invitation, it really, it's huge for me because like I said, it's how I met you and I consider you a close personal Friend. And Johnny, you're also a class act. So, guys, I appreciate all the work that you're doing here with this podcast and for this community and thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate it.
Absolutely. And where can people find you on the Internet if indeed you want to be found? Well,
so I check my Twitter mentions every once in a while, although that recently became much more difficult. Thanks, Twitter. You can find me on Twitter ilfangy W I L L F as in field notes A, N G U Y. I'm also in the Erasable group on Facebook which I've started to use more and more recently because it's the best way for me to keep in touch with my family. So just tag me in a. Is that what it is? Or is it mentions? What are we doing? Is it mention here?
Toot. I believe it's toot.
Yes, yes. Toot at me. Make sure to use the wind emoji. Shoot at me on Facebook or on Twitter. Probably Facebook. You'll get a quicker response.
How about Mastodon?
I'm also on Mastodon thanks to andy@will gr id@. Is that right? You can hit me up on the Mastodon if you want to, but yeah, Facebook, Twitter, Mastodon, smoke signals. I'm all Instagram, I'm all of these things.
Yo. All those things. Awesome. Thanks again, Will and Johnny, how about you? Where can people find you?
You can find me@pencilrevolution.com and on social media at pensolution.
All right. And I am Andy Welfle. I am@woodclinch.com I'm on Twitter at Andyo. Wait, what's my Twitter name? A Wealthley. Thank you, I appreciate that. It's getting caught up in my own Mastodon name. If you are one of the two people on Mastodon who who listen to this, find me@andy Gria ID. Yeah, this is the Erasable podcast. We are online@ erasable us. This has been episode 103 so you can find a recording and show notes at erasable us103. Come find us in our Facebook group. There's a lot of really good, really good pencil related conversation happening there. Facebook.com groups eraser and find us on Facebook. Our official voice on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram raceablepodcast. Give us a recommendation on Overcast or a view in the itunes directory or what have you that helps us be found by other interested people. So thank you very much and we will talk to you again soon.
The intro music for the Erasable Podcast
is graciously provided by this Mountain, a
collaborative folk rock band from Johnson City, Tennessee.
You can check out their music at www.thismountainband.
Com.
If I could just count the time this has happened.
Hello,
Tim. Happy birthday.
It's.
It's Andy and Johnny and Will Fengy.
Hey.
Yay.
We are.
Thanks so much for taking a hiatus. That way, I could be the third voice in place of you, the highlight of my life.
That is a great result.
Yeah. We're recording tonight, and we were like, hey, it's your birthday, so we should call you and make this the intro to the show. Is that all right with you?
Awesome. Yeah. That's fantastic. You cheered me up because I just got home, got out of the car, and dropped a bottle of wine in my driveway.
Oh, no. It's been that kind of birthday.
I was literally cleaning up my birthday bottle of wine while you called me, so that was a nice.
What are you gonna do without your teacher juice? I don't understand.
Yeah. Oh, there's more. There's more. I'll find some more.
So much more. Teacher juice.
The people who know anything about me will appreciate this. Is that today. It's my birthday. Also, the Cubs are playing, and tonight at Wrigley Field, on my birthday, it is Grateful Dead Day. The first ever Grateful Dead day at Wrigley Field.
What?
I have an informant, somebody who's there at the game who's getting me the giveaway, which is a hat that has four Grateful Dead dancing bears with a Cubs bear in the middle dancing with them.
Wow.
It is a.
It's the intersection.
I dropped my bottle of wine, but I got to talk to you guys. And it's Grateful Dead day at Ridley Field.
Yay. If only they had Grateful Dead Cubs pencils.
Oh, man. I was just. I would quit my job, and I just call, you know, just going to early retirement at that point.
Be like, this is. This is my life.
Peak.
Peak.
Tim.
Yeah, Tim.
What are you guys talking about?
We're actually going to do kind of a crossover of dot, grid, and erasable. We're going to, like. Basically, I'm going to pit Johnny and Will against each other as to. I'm going to.
I'm going to pick on Johnny for being a Luddite.
Yeah. Basically.
Okay.
Yeah.
That's fair.
Tim's like, I sign off. Sounds good.
Yeah. Getting out of this mess.
I can't wait to look good.
Yeah.
Exciting.
All right, well, I will. Yeah. Have a good birthday. Tacos and baseball tomorrow.
Thank you. Yeah, I'm definitely looking forward to that. Was like the pre game, so.
Yeah, cool.
We'll enjoy it.
Yeah.
Thanks for calling.
Absolutely.
We love you, Kim.
We love you.
Happy birthday. See you.
Thank you.
Thank you. All right, have a later day.
See ya.
See?