As we round the corner into autumn in the northern hemisphere, the air is a little crisper, the days are shorter, and the leaves are changing... and looking for some new inks to try out. Do you have favorite inks for the season?

I occasionally have to read & critique manuscripts for work and I find it much easier to do with a printed page. But the computer paper that we have in the office is not ideal for fountain pens - tons of bleeding and feathering.

Does anybody have experience with computer printer paper that is relatively FP friendly?

I thought I might keep a ream or two at my desk and swap out some sheets when I'm about to print something that I'll be writing on. (Something relatively budget friendly would be great too... Not planning on putting Tomoe River through the office printer!)

Four eras, four seasons, aired 1983-1989. Rowan Atkinson, Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, Tony Robinson, and Rik Mayall. Hilarious and, in the end, famously poignant.

Inspired by seeing Lee Pace in the Pushing Daisies post.

I feel like this show got overlooked amongst many of AMC's big hits around this time - Walking Dead, Mad Men, Breaking Bad. But Halt and Catch Fire deserves to be right up there with the best of them.

The storytelling is rich and compelling, the writing is great, the characters are nuanced and dynamic, and the actors are phenomenal. The show manages to capture different eras for the same characters flawlessly with each season - the sense of time and place is so well developed, and there is strong conceptual continuity throughout the show despite each season having a very different arc, look, and sometimes tone. If you haven't seen it, you should check it out!

I was riding with a Wing Sung 3009 today (a pretty nice, super cheap piston filler BTW) when I noticed this gunk on the inside of the cap. I'm pretty sure that I filled the pen up with Noodler's Air Corps Blue/Black a few months ago and then let the pen sit. It wrote pretty much right away.

But I noticed this brownish / tan / black residue on the inside of a cap, at the very bottom. I'm not sure if it was there before and I just didn't notice, or if it is new. It almost looks like burned plastic? Or maybe it's mold? But it seems like a weird place for mold to develop since there's no ink there. Has anybody seen anything like this before? I'm probably going to throw the pen away anyway (it's about $3.50) but was curious 🧐.

New pen came today: a Jinhao 82. This is Jinhao's "homage" to the Sailor Pro Gear Slim, released late 2022 I think. I got a medium nib, transparent blue body. Takes a #5 nib, available in EF, F, and M.

Overall the pen seems great. Inked it up with Waterman Mysterious Blue and it writes like a treat. Very smooth nib (I don't have a PGS but they have a reputation for having a good amount of feedback; there is none of that with this nib).

The slight translucency and rich dark blue body combine nicely with the gold trim to make this a really attractive pen. I like slightly smaller pens, and got this one to see if I might like the size of a PGS at some point - this is a great fit for me.

Converter included. There's also an O ring - wondering if this might be amenable to eyedroppering?

For $9 this pen is a terrific deal, and it comes in a ton of different color options. This is definitely going to be in my heavy rotation!