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A shameless, most paltry, early attempt at writing some kanji characters. Written on a small A6, cream-colored, Talens Art Creation sketchbook (140gsm/90lbs) with a Kuretake urushi brush pen and Noodler's Lexington Grey. The side image has nothing to do with it (it just happened to fit there). A Haiku from Matsuo Bashō: On the Stone Mountain, it is whiter than the stones: autumnal wind

I ordered an ambitious jowo compatible nib unit and it was stuck inside the pens grip section and it got deformed when I tried to remove it please instruct me on what to do to remove the nib unit

I’m minded to agree with most of what you wrote there (especially your final sentence, which is unquestionably true), but ‘mind’ in English seems to me to be a more versatile/slippery/mutable beast than those French words. It can function as a distinct noun, but also as different verbs, and it is the root of at least one other one. Another example of English being confusingly ambiguous! E.g.s ‘esprit’ reminds me more of ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ for more-direct equivalents, and ‘compréhension’ has of course been stolen by entered English as ‘comprehension’ (in my mind’s eye, I see English lurking in dark alleyways for other languages to pass by, so that it can knock them out and then rifle through their pockets for shiny new words). Then again I, sadly, am hardly a great linguist - I am shamingly monoglottal 😔 - so perhaps you shouldn’t pay me any mind. Also, thank you for correcting my spelling of ‘cerveau’ - I have, for years, stupidly mixed it up with ‘cerebellum’ 🤪 I’ve never minded being gently reminded of my errors, and I appreciate being alerted to holes in my learning. As they say on the London Underground, ‘mind the gap!’ 😉 My silly word-games aside, I do also acknowledge that English is also incapable of expressing some subtleties that other languages are better-equipped to illustrate. E.g. its general lack of grammatical ‘gender’ means that it is deficient in comparison to ‘gendered’ languages when it comes to poetic capacity. Taking French for comparison again, ‘la Mer’ has much more poetic resonance and potential than does ‘the Sea’. (And why do we English tend to refer any individual boat as ‘she’, when in French it would be ‘le bateau’?)

Patent numbers 410661 and 424210 should be fine, but I got a "no references" result for these patent numbers. I do not know why. Is it possible that the patents are invalid for some reason... The form on this website allows you to search for Japanese patents by entering only the patent number. https://www.j-platpat.inpit.go.jp/s0100 Japanese is a language that omits the subject, and in conversation this is increasingly evident. This time the author of the blog explains it in the form of a conversation between Holmes and Watson, so I think the translation software has lost track of who is who. It is difficult even for me, a Japanese person, to understand the correct operation of the CON-70(N) by watching the video produced by Pilot without knowing how the converter works. I think Pilot should have explained clearly how the CON-70 mechanism works and the problems that can be caused by mishandling, using an animation etc. The threads on pilot converters, especially CON-70, are often confusing discussions. It is beneficial to the community to have more English- speaker "nerds" who have the ability to calm down the discussion. 😁

Where do you hear such things? Some US retailers may be selling their nibs, but they manufacture and sell out of India only. Just google their website and you can order from there, or you can message them on their contact info provided on their site.

Hi @Silly Party Candidate, and welcome to FPN! It might help people to give you better ink recommendations if you reveal what make/model of ‘vintage’ pen you have, and especially if you reveal what type of nib is on it (‘EF’? ‘OB’?). But here’s one from me anyway 😉 If you are after a purple ink with some water resistance, I would recommend Rohrer & Klingner ‘Scabiosa’. Its water-resistance comes from it being a (light-) iron-gall ink. Some people are wary of iron-gall inks, but they were commonly in-use in the era of ‘vintage pens’, and so should not present any challenges to your pen, as long as you never let the ink dry-out in the pen, and remember to flush the pen with plain water every three months or so. One corollary of Scabiosa being an iron-gall ink is that it tends to feel ‘dry’ under a lot of pens’ nibs but, if your ‘vintage’ pen has an ebonite feed, and writes ‘wet’, Scabiosa should be a good match for it. That said, although R&K’s iron-gall blue-black ‘Salix’ works really nicely in my vintage Parker “51”s, I found that Scabiosa felt painfully ‘dry’ from my first “51”, so I actually had to dump the ink out of that pen. Another consequence of the ink being iron-gall is that its colour changes as the iron-salts ‘cure’ on the page. It dries to a dusky purple-grey colour. Nothing else looks quite like it. And it gives you really beautiful shading 😊 I recommend that you search through the… …and search for reviews of Scabiosa (and also of any other ink that gets suggested to you here). I recommend that you read several reviews of any ink, in order to get the best idea of its colour, its behaviour on different papers, from different nib-widths, and from different pens. I wish you good luck, and hope that you have fun on your quest Slàinte, M. P.S. I’d vote for you! 😉 Edit to add: Another place to look for inks that you might like the look of is… If you see an ink in that thread that piques your interest, look at reviews of it to find out whether its properties look like they’d suit you. And of course you could always ask whether people have used that ink safely, happily, or with joy in [your pen] 🙂

In general, purple inks (and red inks) tend to stain pen parts, although Skrips purple may a better option from the staining standpoint. https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/topic/305572-purple-sheaffer-skrip/ I think it will be challenging to find a water resistant purple ink from the manufacturers generally considered safe for vintage pens. JHerbin Amethyste de L’Oural has been reviewed as having some water resistance, and is made by a manufacturer often considered “safe” for vintage pens. It is, however, a “glitter” ink, which many avoid using in any pen. A potential way around this is to allow the glitter to settle to the bottom, then either decant to another bottle, or draw ink only from the upper portion of the bottle.

4 Octopus inks two shading; Caramel and Bronze and two sheen; Medusa and scratch Sea Dragon....Amazon didn't have it...took Unicorn. I spent a good 30 minutes getting the inks ordered with clunky as all hell, Octopus site....and then made the mistake of saying use my Amazon account instead of Paypal...it got hung up and a telephone call to Dresden, only told me to use Amazon...which don't have all the inks. Money came whistling around the corner with his hands in his pockets; so I mugged him with my gold plated shovel....one has to have something to throw money over one's shoulder with. I really hate it when one scrapes the gold plating off the bottom of the shovel.

Thank you for the response Arcfide, Yea I would agree with you that the letters not being fully formed is definitely as Duffy said "squiggles". Hmmm thats interesting I didn't think of it like that, but now that I have that makes a lot of sense, I think I have tried to make the writing have that flat elongated look but I neglected to increase the hight of the letters to maintain that readability. I will look over it soon and do a revised style of writing that hopefully maintains those ideas. Ah yes, I completely agree with this, I think I mostly do it without thinking but it 100% makes it much harder to read as even sometimes I struggle to see what letters I wrote haha... Definitely going to work on that letter formation. I think this is a great idea as from the examples you sent they are easily readable and still have that sorta more flat look that I like about my writing, I will definitely be trying this out but as you said its all in jest without proper letter formation. Thank you for the help, Max

That is right! LOL

how far he

Jinhao 159 green and white.

Jinhao 159 black Jinhao 950

Beowulf was a bit much, but I managed Chaucer.

This auction:

What a great looking pen! Congratulations. Now I want one like this as well. 😊

i understand "last" here more in the sense of "most recent".

There's no such thing as a last pen purchase.

Actually a used one was available on a Bonhams auction last year if I recall correctly, which had been inked and showed some wear from use, with an estimate of between $6k to $8k, which i tried going for but it ended up selling for $26k

Caviar and Bordeaux look really interesting... might have to stump up €24 to get the pair of them!

Ask them and report back?

Money came whistling around the corner with both hands in his pocket...so I mugged him. Both papers ordered and my 4 Octopus inks. Got the inks too, well one amazon didn't have so took another one.

I don't know if I would agree there... French "cerveau" (not cerbeau) for the hardware - yes. The mind could be nicely translated with "esprit". Or "compréhension" if the meaning goes into the direction of understanding. German: "Gehirn" for the hardware and "Geist" (like esprit) or "Verstand" (like compréhension). I doubt that there are many languages where you can't differentiate between the hardware and the software.

The image hosting server went down yesterday, so that’s why you couldn’t see any photos. It’s been fixed now