updates on various tools

Micro.blog: A couple of days ago I posted this: “I really do think this is a great service, and I’d like to be here regularly, but I wonder how much longer I’ll do this if no one I know (or almost no one I know) is here. I’m keeping fingers crossed that friends will show up!” And immediately I started getting a flood — well, honestly, it was just a trickle, but given how small the place is overall it felt like a flood — of dudes advising me how find new people, how to get more followers, and I thought: Ah. Here we go again. I’m a pretty intense introvert: I don’t want to meet new people, in an ideal world I would have no followers I don’t already know and like, and nothing will ever convince me that giving unsolicited advice to strangers isn’t extremely rude. (Acknowledgment: I know those guys were “just trying to help.” I get that. Nevertheless.) It’s the old problem of intimacy gradients all over again, but on a platform that actually has fewer controls on what you’re open to than Twitter does.

In theory I’m totally supportive of the simplicity of micro.blog, but … what all this demonstrates to me is that with social media I have two choices: far more unsolicited human interaction than I’m comfortable with, or no social media at all. So I just need to make my call and live with the consequences. 

AirPods: I went back and forth about these for several months I wrote about them last year. I’m pretty sure I would be using them regularly if they worked regularly for me — but they don’t. Apple promises that if you flip open the AirPod case a sheet will slide up showing the charge percentage of the AirPods and the case; this happens for me maybe on-third of the time. When you put the AirPods in your ears they’re supposed to pair automatically with your iPhone; this happens for me maybe half the time. And one time in five the phone tells me the AirPods are connected, but sound is coming through the phone’s speaker instead. By contrast, my wired buds always work precisely as expected, so I rely on those. (Everyone else I know who uses the AirPods simply raves about them, so either they don’t have these problems — which wouldn’t surprise me, because I’m digitally cursed: no computing device ever does for me what it’s advertised to do — or they overlook them because of the convenience of going wireless.) 

Notebooks: For several years now I’ve been using the Leuchtturm1917 A5 notebooks, which are just marvelous. But they are fairly narrowly ruled, and I find that writing a little smaller than comes naturally to me tends to make my hand cramp. So when I finished my last Leuchtturm I decided to try the slight-more-widely-ruled Conceptum in the same size, and it’s great. The thicker paper is also very nice to write on. For around the same price it has fewer pages, and of course I’ll write fewer words per page, so I’ll go through this more quickly than I would a Leuchtturm, but that’s a relatively small price to pay for more comfort. Plus, it’s sort of fun coming to the end of a notebook and putting it on the shelf with its predecessors. 

Pens: I have a few fountain pens (nothing fancy, mostly Pilots) that I like, but it seems that when I write my grip slides down the barrel of the pen in such a way that I always end up with ink on my fingers. I don’t mind being metaphorically an ink-stained wretch, but I’d rather not make that literal. I tried a Tombow rollerball but I find it a scratchy experience. I don’t like using throwaway pens but I have found that the smoothest, most enjoyable writing experience I can get for a reasonable price and no inky fingers is the Pentel Energel. Highly recommended. 

Text Patterns

May 25, 2018