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Sat May 1 18:16:48 PST 2021
It's been quite a while since I last wrote to this gemlog. It's probably because I didn't really know what to write here. These past few months have been filled with either me reading some of the most wonderful articles in the geminispace or fiddling with fountain pens. I would like to talk about the latter in this post.
I really can't remember the time when I first became fascinated with fountain pens. It has always been something that exists in the corner of my mind and it's something that I've continuously put off. Though the most tangible memory that I have with them was when a friend of mine showed me her pen and I kept asking questions, mostly about price, about it.
That was a few years ago, however, and my current fascination with fountain pens is mostly because of Chris Were's video on fountain pens [1]. Watching that reminded me of what my friend told me about how fountain pens are really not that expensive, especially if you're not chasing after ``expensive'' brands. So I began looking around the local ``digital marketplace'' and saw pens priced around Php 70 up to Php 170. Of course, these are not your Parkers or LAMYs but rather Chinese brands such as Jinhao and Wing Sung.
With a pen in hand, I've decided to read more about fountain pens and boy is that rabbit hole. The various inks, nibs, filling mechanisms and even paper. Going through all of it felt like I was installing Gentoo Linux, the amount of customisability that you can do with fountain pens are really staggering. I bought some inks, a more customisable pen and the most ``hedonistic'' purchase that I've ever did in my entire life up to this point. I bought a Tomoe River 52 gsm paper.
If you're someone who is not privy to fountain pens at all, you might wonder what's so special with that paper and why did I consider it a ``hedonistic'' purchase. In simple terms, Tomoe River is an ultra thin paper designed to deal with fountain pens and fountain pen inks. It's the gold standard, as far as I know, in the fountain pen crowd when testing inks because of two things, (1) the paper treats the ink laid to it very well that your writing looks very crisp and clean and (2) the paper ``resists'' ink so well that certain types of ink can really show their inherent properties.
All of these ``features'' don't come cheap and the price really is the reason why I consider this as a ``hedonistic'' purchase. For comparison, a ream of high quality A4 printing paper costs around Php 240; Tomoe River, on the other hand, costs around Php 450 for 100 sheets of A5. That's around 4 times more expensive per sheet of paper compared to the printing paper.
While I'd argue that Tomoe River is worth the money that you put into it with the qualities that it has, it's certainly not an economic option for papers. It's a highly premium product designed to bring the best out of the fountain pen inks that you use.
At the moment, I'm a place with fountain pens that I think I've got what I need up to the foreseeable future. I see no desire to purchase more ``exotic'' pens and the ones that I have write really well and is cost-effective to me, aside from the Tomoe River paper of course.