I love pencils

This post is the second of at least 31 daily posts as part of WeblogPoMo2024. Expect (and forgive) more words and less editing.

I have a gorgeous fountain pen: a Pilot 'Vanishing Point'. Mine's black and has developed a Leica-like patina such that the underlying brass shows through.

I love it. And I never use it. Because I rediscovered pencils.

Pencils are easier. They're more adaptable. They smell better and I think they're prettier. They're cheaper; you can have a collection of pencils. I have at least 30, mostly sourced from the wonderful (Australian) site Pencilly.

I spent a hundred-ish dollars on my ridiculous pencil collection. About the price of one fountain pen.

Pencils are objectively better than pens. Fight me.

A few of my favourites

Here's the daily drivers.

Mitsubishi 9850 HB

If I could only have one, this would be it. The lead is perfect for daily writing, and it has an eraser. It's cheap and available. It's the best all-rounder...

Colleen 2020 Super Drawing

...but not my favourite. That's the discontinued Colleen 2020. This guy doesn't love it but for me it's just a beautiful writing instrument.

These are not readily available, and they're a couple of dollars each. I have a supply that should last me a good few years, but as a result I don't use it every day.

Blackwing Pearl

The pencil snobs just turned up their noses. Blackwing! Isn't that a little common?

I hate snobbery. And I love this pencil. Actually this is the reason I rediscovered pencils. Me and Lucy were on holiday in NYC, staying at the Arlo, and they had these in the cutesy little lobby shop.

I didn't buy any at the time -- we travel light, and aren't souvenir collectors -- but the memory stayed with me, and I ordered a set when we got home. This was the realisation: that pencils aren't dull. Every pencil isn't the cheap thing you were given at school.

Pencils can be beautiful things. Crafted. Designed.

And it turns out the Pearl -- my preferred of their standard range thanks to its slightly-harder-than-the-darker-one lead -- is a terrific daily pencil.

I have them scattered all over the house. I Blu Tack them to the back of notebooks. I use them down to the nub. A+ pencil.

(Also, snobs, I use Global knives and I love my Lodge pan. Up yours.)

Caran d'Ache Swiss Wood

This one's a little fancy and so is the price. But they last forever thanks to their you-must-be-joking-if-you-think-that's-HB-it's-more-like-2H lead.

So they're great for finer work, such as writing on tiny little Post-it notes.

Oh and they're made of Swiss beech wood and they smell amazing. Also I'm a sucker for Swiss iconography.

On doing-one-thing-at-a-time

The index card experiment continues and I'm loving it.

Here's today's story of not doing one thing at a time and having it bite me in the arse. There's an issue with Astro, which I use to build this site. One of its plugins is turning "curly quotes" in to "incorrect" curly quotes.

I'm working round it by running a regex, grep -r '\w>"\w' ./dist, over the built site. If this picks up any bad quotes I just go in and hand-fix them. But when I add this to my build step in package.json, it breaks the Netlify build.

Long story short, I didn't realise this because here's what I did:

Fixed some quotes.
Did a build.
git push to send it to Netlify to build for prod.

...at which point I should have waited and just watched it complete and then checked it. But what did I do instead?

I immediately switched to doing something else. So I come back later, check my site, the quotes aren't fixed (the build failed at Netlify), and now I have to context-switch back to that and figure out why and fix it.

It would have taken less time if I'd stared vacantly at the build process for one minute and seen it fail.