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Blue Ink Stains On My Fingers - 23/11/24

On November 17th, I ended up filling my previous journal, I moved on to a similar journal, black hard-cover, 200-ish pages, A5 format, I'm currently 51 pages into this one at the time of writing.
Getting back into journaling has been easily one of the most best things I could have done, it has helped me add some structure back into my life and it has given me a platform to process and engage with the things I experience.

I've written a little about it here, but for a time I ended up switching to journaling digitally with vimwiki (listen, I just HAD to sneak in that I use vim, ok?), and my journaling habit immediately dwindled, this could be attributed to me going to an IT school and being busier, but I think there's something more important.
Writing on a computer is objectively more efficient, faster, and cheaper, however it feels cold and distant, and you can get easily distracted ("Why write when I can watch youtube videos instead?")
There is a realness to doing things the analog way, there are so many little things that you end up missing otherwise.
The minutiae of picking a journal, picking a pen, feeling the pen run across the paper and getting drier as it runs out, seeing the ink slightly bleed through to the other side of the page, the satisfaction of filling up an entire journal, and doing it all over again.
Experiencing the unique interactions and relationships between pen, paper, and ink.

Speaking of minutiae, pens.
The pen I'm currently using is about to run out, it's a run-of-the-mill Bic ballpoint pen, there's a few things I think are pretty neat about it.
I love that it allows me to write fast and dirty, and the line opacity changing depending on the pressure is pretty neat for drawing, in some ways it's sort of the opposite experience to using a fineliner, which has a very clean and continous line quality that kind of compels one to write slowly and deliberately.
But, it's gonna run out, and I'm gonna need a new one, of course I've got a couple other ballpoint pens lying around my house, but I actually want to get a pen dedicated to journaling.
Another reason that makes me ponder picking a new pen is that throwing away more than a dozen pens a year is obviously not great for the environment, so something refillable would be pretty neat.
Unfortunately, there's no truly refillable ballpoint pen, there are refills for ballpoint pens, but those are also gonna end up getting thrown away.

So it seems I'm gonna have to go for a fountain pen, usually they require high-quality paper to not bleed-through, but like I said , that's not something that I mind, plus there's some inks that bleed less than others.
A good source of information is the very thorough JetPens blog, they are an online stationery store, but they are based in the US, and I don't want to pay a gazillion Munies for shipping, thankfully there are more local stationery stores where I am.
I'm probably gonna get whatever is cheap but still reputable.
I initially wanted to get a Platinum Preppy with a converter, however apparently the Preppy doesn't work properly with converters, some part of me feels that this is a very dickish and intentional design decision.
I'm probably gonna go for a TWSBI Go, it's got a piston refill system.
For the ink, I'm probably gonna either go for J. Herbin Perle Noire or RnK Salix.

So, yeah, writing by hand is pretty fun.
After that last post, I forgot that writing blog posts usually doesn't give me headaches, lol.
An interesting part of working on this post was experimenting a bit more with photo processing, so you can expect me to write about how I do this stuff soon +3+