I’m dead serious about my pens. Some want expensive tennis shoes, some will get by with cheap ones. Some want the nicest, fanciest, sportiest cars, some just want basic transportation. Some want a mansion, others just need a roof over their heads. It’s all in what you put emphasis on. For me it’s pens, something I use all day every day during work. My wife will use whatever plastic pen with a broken clip that she finds on the floor, but I want something a little nicer that feels good in the hand.

And while you think $100 is a lot, it’s really not in the machined pen community. Fellhoelter pens can go for hundreds or even a thousand. The best thing that happened to me was for my wife to go with me to a pen show (yes, they have pen shows). Fountain pen prices can be insane, and she saw some for $20,000 and $25,000. It made my $100-$200 machined pens not look so bad! She’s still not happy about me spending money on pens, but after the pen show she knows that it could be SO much worse!

There’s a good sized market for metal machined pens that take standard refills like Parker-style or Pilot G2. If you use one once, you’ll either get it or think it’s stupid. If you get it, the rabbit hole can be deeeeeeeep.

When I pay $100 for a pen, I don’t lose it!

Seriously, I’ve never lost one in the years that I’ve carried them. And the writing experience is drastically different than writing with a cheap plastic one.

I’m a big fan of the Tactile Turn machined pens. They are made in titanium, copper, and bronze, and they have microgrooves for grip. They make bolt and click pens in standard and slim width. They take either Pilot G2 refills, Parker-style refills, or (in the case of the mini) Pilot G2 mini refills.

http://www.tactileturn.com/

I was on .world too, but I’m from Georgia, so I like being on yall.theatl.social much better. It’s a smaller, more tight knit community, and it’s in Atlanta, so it’s more-or-less local for me.

I used Apollo to browse Reddit. It was really a great app, and it made browsing Reddit enjoyable. The dev, Christian, listened to his users, frequently updated and improved the app, was active in the subreddit, and seemed to care about making it a positive experience. It really was like being a part of a club.

It wasn’t just that Reddit shut down the API, but the way they boldfaced lied about Christian and their interactions with him. He was feverishly in talks with them to save the app, but Reddit not only wasn’t negotiating in good faith, but even worse, lying about the interactions to try to smear Christian and make him look like the villain. It was then that I knew that Reddit would never be the same, and I started looking for alternatives.

I tried several, but Lemmy seemed to be the closest to Reddit and scratched the itch. Not only that, an amazing dev created Voyager, which is heavily inspired by Apollo, (pretty much a direct copy), and makes me feel at home. There’s not as many communities here as subreddits over there, but I have curated a great Home feed, which includes most of my interests and that I enjoy browsing. I can honestly say the comments here are much better and more authentic. On the whole I get real replies and have better conversations instead of trolls and confrontations like I frequently did at Reddit. I do stop in over there sometimes out of boredom and browse, but it’s really not the same as before. (And maybe it is, and I was just fooling myself and not seeing it.) I don’t think I’ve posted or commented on Reddit since Apollo died except on live sports game feeds, which I do miss over here. I found a regional instance that I like, and, on the whole, I really enjoy it here.

TLDR: API killed Apollo.

I’ll bet he didn’t see that coming! Oh, wait….

This refers to Google instead of Wikipedia, but I think this cartoon still applies. 🤣

• EXERCISE IS GOOD
• MEDICINE CAN HELP
• SMOKING IS BAD
• EAT RIGHT FOR BETTER HEALTH
• CANCER CAN CAUSE DEATH

That’s funny, I have the same cartoon, just slightly different. (I didn’t know mine wasn’t the original version.)

Read all about it in this month’s issue of Duh.

I wear button up shirts for work, and I only button and unbutton the second one down and pull the shirt on and off over my head (I never button the top button). By not buttoning and unbuttoning the other ones, it reduces the stress on the threads, and greatly reduces the chance that you will have a button pop off.

If Tim Walz served two terms as vice president, then was elected president and served two terms, at the end of his second term as president he still wouldn’t be as old as Donald Trump is today.

I could only read this in Jeff Foxworthy’s voice, which made it…. weird.

This kind of behavior would have resulted in discussion of dementia and Alzheimers if it was a Democrat. literally any other person on the planet.

Fixed it for you.

Where is this located? (Yes, I’m too lazy to Google it.)

“It’s not that the wind is blowing, it’s what the wind is blowing. If you get hit with a Volvo, it don’t matter how many pushups you did that morning.”
—Ron White

Wow, thanks thehill.com for not linking to or even telling me the name of the account in question.

Read all about it in this month’s riveting issue of Duh.