I just arrived in a happy place with pens. I rarely obsess over a class
of equipment, but when I do, I'm consumed by it, and I do not enjoy
that. But I do it. It's happened with analog cameras, lenses, headphones
and earbuds, and lately, pens.

I had a requirement: I wanted a capped pen. And I don't do fountain
pens, which it seems almost corners the market of capped pens. I found
two rollerballs that looked good, the Kaweco Perkeo (ooh, check out the two-tone chambray colorway!) and a charcoal gray Lamy Safari. They each
have a different style of angled body and feel great in the hand -- and
they both write thin, scratchy and skipping. Absolute garbage refills.

By chance I had a Papermate Profile Ball 1.4 that fit perfectly in the
Kaweco, and now it writes butter smooth. Yesterday an order of Uniball Jetstream SXR-10 refills arrived. It'a a popular pen and a dream to
write with, but somehow I found no comments online about modding
it for the Lamy. It was necessary, and I ended up adding an extender
to make up the length. The refill's tip was a little thin for the
body's, so I cut a piece of transparency tape and wrapped the metal just
above the ballpoint. It now fits snugly in the pen body. And the ink gliiiiiiides.

I think I will now chill out on reading pen reddit and random blog
reviews, and get to the business of spreading ink.

what pens are working for you all?


--- Synchronet 3.20a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

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Content-Type: text/plain
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

threatcat@tilde.club writes:

I just arrived in a happy place with pens. I rarely obsess over a class
of equipment, but when I do, I'm consumed by it, and I do not enjoy
that. But I do it. It's happened with analog cameras, lenses, headphones
and earbuds, and lately, pens.

I had a requirement: I wanted a capped pen. And I don't do fountain
pens, which it seems almost corners the market of capped pens. I found
two rollerballs that looked good, the Kaweco Perkeo (ooh, check out the two-tone chambray colorway!) and a charcoal gray Lamy Safari. They each
have a different style of angled body and feel great in the hand -- and
they both write thin, scratchy and skipping. Absolute garbage refills.

By chance I had a Papermate Profile Ball 1.4 that fit perfectly in the Kaweco, and now it writes butter smooth. Yesterday an order of Uniball Jetstream SXR-10 refills arrived. It'a a popular pen and a dream to
write with, but somehow I found no comments online about modding
it for the Lamy. It was necessary, and I ended up adding an extender
to make up the length. The refill's tip was a little thin for the
body's, so I cut a piece of transparency tape and wrapped the metal just above the ballpoint. It now fits snugly in the pen body. And the ink gliiiiiiides.

I think I will now chill out on reading pen reddit and random blog
reviews, and get to the business of spreading ink.

what pens are working for you all?

Just saying that I appreciate your initiative and that I don't
personally fancy pens :-P .

Cheers for Netnews and for Freedom,


=2D-=20
The pioneers of a warless world are the youth that
refuse military service. ~ Albert Einstein

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threatcat to ant:

what pens are working for you all?

Only fountain pens here. I enjoy most fontain pens if a have
been able to adjust, align, and polish it to perfection. I can
make a candy out of the two-dollar Baoer 388.
--- Synchronet 3.20a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

threatcat:

It's happened with analog cameras, lenses, headphones and
earbuds, and lately, pens.

I share your passion for film cameras and lenses, but deplore the
colossal prices of film, especially sheet film and medium format
film. I love my 5x4" pinhole, Arax (a updated Kiev-88), Zenit-E,
and Zenit-APK.

By the way, some people don't believe this to be a genuine
pinhole shot:

https://files.catbox.moe/e9d8kf.jpg

With a digital camera, I can never achieve that lovely texture
that only film offers, especially black-and-white film.
--- Synchronet 3.20a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

ant <ant@tilde.club> wrote:

threatcat:

It's happened with analog cameras, lenses, headphones and
earbuds, and lately, pens.

I share your passion for film cameras and lenses, but deplore the
colossal prices of film, especially sheet film and medium format
film. I love my 5x4" pinhole, Arax (a updated Kiev-88), Zenit-E,
and Zenit-APK.

Never knew about the Arax! I long time ago, I really wanted the Kiev II,
but my dad gave me his old Canon 7s -- with the 50mm f/0.95 "dream lens"
-- so i went all in on Leica thread-mount. I did get an Industar 50,
which was the super contrasty polar opposite of the Canon 50.

Funny coincidence, with the Kodak film news, I was just searching about
Tri-X, and apparently the 320 version exists for large format. I haven't
shot film in a decade, but I would love to get back on TX320.

By the way, some people don't believe this to be a genuine
pinhole shot:

https://files.catbox.moe/e9d8kf.jpg

With a digital camera, I can never achieve that lovely texture
that only film offers, especially black-and-white film.
.

I'm remiss in how long it took me to reply to this: This photo is
lovely, ant -- great tonal range and depth in the shot, and for a
pinhole! (Also looks like a fantastic bike to ride)

My main film cameras are rangefinders -- the Canon 7s, and a Rapid-Omega
200. But I love shooting with the cheapie, thrift-store found Kodak
Brownie Hawkeye Flash. Bakelite body and plastic lens, but there's a
sweet spot to it if you open it up and flip the lens so it's reversed.
The focus is a touch sharper in the center, and then a swirling blur
emanates from that and then vignettes. Extra fun: the camera takes "620"
film, so to make that happen, you need two original takeup spools,
scavenging one from another camera: then in a changing bag or darkroom,
you feed a roll of 120 film onto a 620 spool, and this is now
'backwards'. Then you unroll that onto the other 620 spool so it's ready
to shoot and advance 'forward'.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/stet/147713414/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/stet/170232028/

Looking at these makes me want to shoot film again, but yeah Ant, to
your earlier point, the costs are just insane now.

--- Synchronet 3.20a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

On Tue, 28 Oct 2025, threatcat wrote:

I wanted a capped pen. And I don't do fountain pens,
which it seems almost corners the market of capped pens.

Curiously, I don't find this to be the case where I'm from;
virtually all of gel pens I found in my area were capped.
In my case, it would be those non-gel ballpoints which
large proportion of them come in click-clack retractable form.

they both write thin, scratchy and skipping. Absolute garbage refills.

I feel you. Many of brand-new gel pens models that unfortunately
have graced my hand are like this (I always try out new pen before
I consider buying; thus I would not most of them in the first place);
while some others developed this symptom over time for inexplicable reason
some time after I have bought them.

I ended up adding an extender to make up the length.
The refill's tip was a little thin for the body's,
so I cut a piece of transparency tape and wrapped the metal
just above the ballpoint.

Maybe I have been too used to "non-refillable" gel pens,
but what exactly are those "refills"? Did they come as an
an ink reservoir tubing with ballpoint tip built-in at one end?
Meaning you unscrew the pen's body, pick the old guts ("refill"?) out,
place the new "refill" as the new guts, and screw the pen's body back?

By chance I had a Papermate Profile Ball 1.4 that fit perfectly in the Kaweco, and now it writes butter smooth. Yesterday an order of Uniball Jetstream SXR-10 refills arrived.

Thanks for writing these recommendations down, in case I might randomly
stumble onto these in local stationery stores and try them.

8<-----

what pens are working for you all?

I am kinda-sorta a fountain pen fan. From my vague recollection:
the primary school I went to started requiring fountain pen use
around grade 5-6; and I found that I liked writing with it.

However, as much as I liked writing with fountain pen, and I liked
the lack of cartridge-compatibility shenanigans (as well as
the lack of waste) of bottle-refillable fountain pens I used;
main drawback I saw was they didn't stand getting dropped
to the ground very well.

And you know, in a grade school or middle school student life,
accidentally dropping a pen (or whole pencil case)
is not an uncommon occurrence. When my fountain pen was dropped
while uncapped, I would get large splats of ink... if I was lucky;
but if I was unlucky and the pen dropped tip-first... apart from
the splats of ink I had to towel up, I would also have to cough up
5 meals worth of money to buy a new fountain pen.

(And if the whole pencil case was dropped, chances were I wouldn't have
to buy a new pen, but I would have to spend the next half an hour or so toweling up everything inside my pencil case because they would be covered
in fountain pen ink)

There is also a minor inconvenience when I used a ruler to draw lines
with fountain pen, I would have to either wait for a while after penning
each line, or remove the ruler carefully in a very-specific way;
else I would find that the ruler left a long trail of (undried) ink
along the way of its removal.

For these reasons, toward the end of my middle school years
(grade 8-9, I didn't remember exact year), I started to try out
alternatives, and discovered gel pens which gave the similar smooth lines without most of the downsides. I switched to that, and never looked back
for a very, very long time.

The gel pen I discovered early on and stuck with the longest
(nearly 2 decades) is Zhixin GP-212 0.5mm Gel Pen-- which comes in blue,
red, and black color, all with the same model number,
and the same EAN barcode 6-925473-815682 for some reason.

But just a shy of two years ago, I started looking for alternatives again;
in an aim to find my new favorite gel pen model that was manufactured
locally in my country... or at least wasn't manufactured in China.

I still haven't found the holy {grail,pen} I originally set out to find;
but months ago, while I was trying out pens in a department store
I did not frequent, in hope to find some wild "treasure" I couldn't find anywhere else; I spotted one series of odd pens that looked vaguely
like marker pens, but were labeled "Plastic Fountain Pen" on its side...

They came from a well-known Japanese stationary brand-- Pentel;
but marked "MADE IN INDIA". Seemingly available in blue, red,
and black color there. The price tag wasn't steep either (35 THB / ~1 USD), just 1.75 times of a regular/disposable gel pen here (20 THB ~ 60 US-cents). Here, cheapest student-grade "normal" fountain pens would be priced at least *10* times of a regular gel pen.

This immediately piqued my curiosity of course. When I uncapped the blue one
to test, I was met with a tapering plastic "beak" with its thin end
cut in angle as a tip.

Writing with it is smooth, but doesn't feel exactly like writing
with traditional fountain pen; it rather feels more like it something
in the middle between traditional fountain pen and felt-tip pen.
The closest description I could come up with is it feels like
I was dragging an edge of plastic button over a paper.

(And like a regular fountain pen, if I rotated it differently when writing,
the line would come out in slightly different style, and different pressing force resulted in different line width; allowing variations)

This unusual combination of marker-like body, the state of it being non-refillable disposable plastic-everything, and the fact that
it is a fountain pen... while I wouldn't go as far as calling
such thing "sacrilege", these made me perceive it as some kind of
curiosity kitsch object.

For that precise reason, combined with its low price (for a fountain pen)
and the fact that it writes decently, I bought that pen from the store
without much hesitation. The brand-model designation of the
blue-colored one I bought is Pentel Stylo JM11-C Plastic Fountain Pen. <https://www.pentel.co.uk/product/pentel-stylo-fountain-pen-jm11/>
(UPC-A barcode 8-84851-01669-0)

And after months or so of use; last week, I decided to drop by
at the same department store again to buy the red-colored one,
specifically to allow me to differentiate color when I mark printed maps.
The red one I bought is Pentel Stylo JM11-B Plastic Fountain Pen
(UPC-A barcode 8-84851-01667-6). There is also a black-colored
Stylo JM11-A too, but I have yet to buy that.

Now I use these pens in rotation with one anonymous gel pen
and another Sakura-branded gel pen I have, in regular un-fancy daily
writing like notes, TODO lists, paper map annotations, paper forms;
and I found myself liked writing with these kitsch more than these
2 not-so-ideal gel pens just I mentioned.

However, there are two minor snags I found with these fountain pens;
or more precisely, their ink. One is their water-based ink
(which I guess most fountain pens have in common) would dissolve and spread
in any slightest contact with water; which I found out the hard way
that leaving TODO list written with these plastic fountain pens
in a sweaty shirt pocket less than half a day would turn it
into unreadable smears.

(Good grief that it had yet to manage to stain my white shirt
when I discovered this; so I have to remind myself to either sandwich
the list in my pocket away from my body, or writing that with gel pen
instead)

Another minor snag is their ink also seem to be a bit too eager to seep
through the paper to the other side (even with my 80-gsm printer paper);
so when I lingered too long or pressed too hard in certain part
of my letter stroke, that would result in a tiny faint blot (or faint line)
of ink being visible on the other side of the paper. Not big deal,
but it does annoy the perfectionist!me sometimes. I vaguely remembered
that I got this back in my fountain pen days too; but with these new pens,
I have not tried writing these on multiple kinds of paper yet though.

During my uses, I also have accidentally dropped one of these
plastic fountain pens couple of times (while capped), and I'm happy
to inform you that it doesn't seem to leave liquid ink splash inside its cap. This aspect is definitely better than fountain pens I had used
in the old days.

However, if you are a diehard fountain pen fan, you probably want to give
this one a pass; because it is just a non-refillable plasticky thing.
But if you never used fountain pen and would like to feel something
resembling the fountain pen writing experience, but without the extra mess,
and with the beginner's price tag, now you know that this choice exist.

(And I'm happy with this choice to date, even if for all the wrong reasons)

Cheers,
~xwindows
--
xwindows' gallery of freely-licensed artworks
https://tilde.club/~xwindows/ http://tilde.club/~xwindows/ gopher://tilde.club/1/~xwindows/
--- Synchronet 3.20a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

On 2025-10-28, threatcat@tilde.club <threatcat@tilde.club> wrote:

I just arrived in a happy place with pens. I rarely obsess over a class
I think I will now chill out on reading pen reddit and random blog
reviews, and get to the business of spreading ink.

what pens are working for you all?

If you like capped pens, you must like rollerballs? Try the Aldo Domani
with a nice monteverde cartridge in it? My second recommendation is a
Lamy Studio - Lamy rollerball cartridges are very smooth but pricey.

--- Synchronet 3.20a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

xwindows <xwindows@tilde.club> wrote:

On Tue, 28 Oct 2025, threatcat wrote:

I wanted a capped pen. And I don't do fountain pens,
which it seems almost corners the market of capped pens.

Curiously, I don't find this to be the case where I'm from;
virtually all of gel pens I found in my area were capped.

oh, if you get mostly Asia-made pens, I used to go to a stationery store
in Philadelphia's Chinatown that stocked a lot of Asian imports, and a
lot of capped gel pens. I remember them generally being a bit long and
with skinny bodies, not the best for writing for long stretches. But
what triggers the memory is thathe caps were always short -- and were
prone to uncapping in-pocket. This must be something that has always
bothered me, considering my recent cap requirement. Which means, to this
day I must be mildly traumatized by ruining pants with pen ink.

they both write thin, scratchy and skipping. Absolute garbage refills.

I feel you. Many of brand-new gel pens models that unfortunately
have graced my hand are like this (I always try out new pen before
I consider buying; thus I would not most of them in the first place);
while some others developed this symptom over time for inexplicable reason some time after I have bought them.

Sometimes I get this delayed scratchiness with Pilot G-2 pens. No matter
how good they are in 'good times', I wouldn't buy a pen that burned me
twice with this. Yet I've gotten enough free ones through work for disappoinment to become dislike.

By chance I had a Papermate Profile Ball 1.4 that fit perfectly in the
Kaweco, and now it writes butter smooth. Yesterday an order of Uniball
Jetstream SXR-10 refills arrived.

Thanks for writing these recommendations down, in case I might randomly stumble onto these in local stationery stores and try them.

Likewise with the Zhixin and Pentel below, and good idea putting that in
the subject line.

8<-----

what pens are working for you all?

I am kinda-sorta a fountain pen fan.

[snip]

Lurking the tilde spaces and elsewhere is selling me on the idea of
trying fountain pens again. Maybe especially the Pentel you mention.
Despite what I said above about ruining pants, and what you said about
dropping them, I think I might be careful enough now to not ruin a desk
setup with a fountain pen.

However, there are two minor snags I found with these fountain pens;
or more precisely, their ink. One is their water-based ink
(which I guess most fountain pens have in common) would dissolve and spread in any slightest contact with water; which I found out the hard way
that leaving TODO list written with these plastic fountain pens
in a sweaty shirt pocket less than half a day would turn it
into unreadable smears.

how does this work with the rainy season? especially as a student, i
would imagine a plastic bag is necessary.

--- Synchronet 3.20a-Linux NewsLink 1.2

randymon <randymon@tilde.club> wrote:

If you like capped pens, you must like rollerballs? Try the Aldo Domani
with a nice monteverde cartridge in it? My second recommendation is a
Lamy Studio - Lamy rollerball cartridges are very smooth but pricey.

Those look good -- the heft looks nice and comfy. But the reason i
wanted a capped pen was really just because retractables have a tendency
to stain my pockets lol

One thing, is it just me, or does the Moneverde logo/font seem
incongruent with the product?

.

--- Synchronet 3.20a-Linux NewsLink 1.2