Miriada

I got a great idea that I was going to make image posts on Tumblr for my top lists of fountain pen ink (favorite inks and inks at the top of my to-buy list), but you need good swatches for that. Or I mean, that was my vision: the whole point is they're pretty.

And so I went to my favorite ink review blog, Mountain of Ink, and discovered that she's got a no-rightclick javascript over all her individual ink swatch images. Obviously, since I'm a 42-year-old millenial who has been using computers since I was a toddler, I could get around this, but I don't want to use her images if she doesn't want people to use them. (I would only have done so in the good-faith belief that normal credit and linkback was all that courtesy required. And I would have earnestly recommended her blog too, because that's what I always do!)

So that means I'd have to make and photograph my own ink swatches. Making's easy (if slightly time-consuming), but taking good photos of them is hard! Like here's some swatches I had knocking around in my folder: my favorite CRAZY expensive ink, Sailor Ink Studio 160 (a light minty green); my favorite all-purpose ink, J Herbin Vert Réséda (a bright teal with a very slight leaning towards green); a lovely dark moody ink, J Herbin Poussière de Lune (a saturated reddish plum purple).


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See, it's overcast but bright today - the sky is a solid opaque cool milky white. I took these photos two feet from an open window, with my bright light therapy sunlamp shining from the other side at the same distance. And the color reproduction is still not good! You can see it in the whites - everything looks cooler and dimmer than reality.

Sure, I could color correct them with an image manipulation program, but I think that defeats the point of swatches. And I'm not into it enough to, like, sign up for a Skillshare course in photographing art. So IDK. Maybe I will get more into making swatches. I actually bought a glass dip pen for this exact purpose a couple of years ago, only I broke the tip of the pen the first time I used it and then I didn't buy another (I have regular dip pens though so it's not really necessary).

A few weeks ago I trimmed my hair slightly too short. My intention is to always be able to tuck it behind my ears, but although I could then when it was all stretched out (right before washing), it shortens a bunch after washing because the front bits are the curliest, and now I have to wear a barrette or a headband constantly to keep it back again.

This has been an exceptionally cool summer so far. I think the season has been drifting later though, and we can probably expect the warmest part to be in the end of July and August again, so maybe it will even out. But right now it's past Midsummer and I have only worn shorts outside twice, and one of the times it was too cold and I had to go in and change. Having the warmest winter ever and then following it with a cold summer... it's weird. It's more pleasant than record highs though, probably (which are still not hot like my childhood in Alabama, but unlike there, there's very little air conditioning here, and there's also a lack of cultural knowledge and preparation for heat: people don't dress appropriately or take advantage of shade, for example, and employers don't make allowances or arrangements to help people cool off). It's definitely better than long droughts like we had a few years ago, but it's still uncanny.

In my dream last night I was trying to remember the correct route through Turku's student village (lived there my first year in Finland and walked all around it with the dog) and stumbled into a bunch of political gatherings both for and against the establishment of a new community of nuns in Finland (lol) that were going to be in the student village (impossible because they're not students), and were causing controversy, among other reasons, because their habits were too sexy (?), only then I walked by them in a procession and they were just wearing normal shapeless floor-length black robes but with yellowed lace tabards over top that looked like someone's granny crocheted them as a table runner.

Wow, the author of this fanfiction fully does not realize how fountain pens work at all. Which is fine: all you had to do was not touch on how the pen worked and nobody would have noticed! Or you could've looked it up.

Or anything other than describing red ink writing that was done with a fountain pen as "a red fountain pen".

Bonus info: fountain pen ink dries up in the pen, which can ruin it if you're not lucky, if it lies unused for long enough (how long to dry up depends on the pen, and it's longer if stored point-down, but it can be as little as less than a week; it takes longer than that to ruin a pen, though). Fountain pen ink in the bottle also degrades over time. It can spoil or grow micro organisms and also can break down chemically, but evaporation is perhaps the biggest risk. The hobbyist sphere seems to agree that typical shelf life is "ten to sixty years" (optimally: in glass, sealed as airtight as possible, protected from heat and light and no contaminants introduced), so it's not impossible you could still use ink from a bottle from the 1940s, but it's highly unlikely.