Journaling Series: Journaling in Response to Media

There’s a new show out on a streaming service and I’ve started watching it. It’s part of a large franchise with a vocal fandom, and as usual, the fandom has opinions. These opinions are extreme, because that’s what social media and news sites amplify. Outrage sells. Hate sells. Abusive bot attacks drive up traffic and “engagement” so why should these companies stop them?

I too have opinions about this series, but they aren’t of the outrage kind. A few years ago I would have expressed them on Twitter, More recently I would have written about them in various group chats. These days I do neither.

I journal about them instead.

We have been trained to think that our opinions on the media we consume must be packaged attractively and shared as widely as possible. We have been told that it’s our responsibility to go on social media and let everyone know how we feel about a show, a movie, an album, a book, about every bit of culture we consume. We have been told that it’s for the benefit of our friends and for the benefit of the artists we like. It is not. It is for the benefit of a small group of shareholders.

I have no interest in feeding the outrage machine. Screaming into the bot filled void does nothing but make you hoarse, miserable, angry, and possibly part of a mob.

I also realized that I’m not interested in entering a debate or an echo chamber about this particular series. I just wanted to clarify for myself what worked in this series, what didn’t, and should I continue watching it or not.

So I journaled about it. No outrage. No drama. Just me and a blank page having a bit of a think about a streaming series. There’s no personal affront here, no mob cheering you on to hurl abuse on the series creators, no mob telling you what to think about certain casting choices, plot choices or the series creators.

My thoughts and conclusions about this series aren’t interesting, just as the name of the specific series is irrelevant. I recommend this process with every bit of media you feel the need to share your opinion about, BEFORE you share your opinion on it. It’s what I do with the books that I review. It’s what I do about podcasts, movies, series and shows. It allows for a guiltless, safe place to voice my opinions, to consider and rework them. It’s also far from the maddening crowd, which means I know that these are my own opinions and not the regurgitated opinions of others.

If you’re interested in the process, here are some questions you can use as prompts:

  • Why did I start watching/reading/listening to this?
  • Who would I recommend this to?
  • Am I enjoying each episode/chapter? Am I looking forward to the next one?
  • What is my favourite thing about this show/movie/etc? What is my least favourite?
  • Bonus: How would I change the show/movie/etc to make it better? What would be gained and what would be lost with this change?

Do you journal about media? What prompts do you use?

Stabilo Boss NatureCOLORS Review – Can Highlighers Be Used for Sketching

Stabilo make THE highlighters – Stabilo Boss – chunky, reliable, classic. Over the years they’ve added pastel colours to their original neon coloured highlighters, and just recently they’ve expanded their pastel highlighter lineup to include the NatureCOLORS. The NatureCOLORS lineup can be bought separately, or in a wallet of all 6 new colours, or a wallet of 8 that includes two black “marker” pen. The 6 new colours are Warm Grey, Earth Green, Mud Green, Beige, Umber and Sienna. The black “marker” is just an opaque black “highlighter”.

From top to bottom, black marker, warm grey, mud green, earth green.

I first saw these in a bookstore in Paris, and while I hardly ever use highlighters, the black marker and the natural tone of the other highlighters made me buy four of them to try out while sketching. As usual with Stabilo, there’s no indication on the pen body what colour it is beyond the colour of the pen body and a number that you have to look up on their site.

Testing the pens out

I used these pens for quick landscape thumbnails and sketches, and they work pretty well with a few caveats:

  1. They bleed through everything but the thickest paper.
  2. They spread on almost every paper.
  3. They aren’t archival (so they will fade and discolour with time)
  4. They are chunky, which means they aren’t the most portable of pens (even though they’re light)
  5. They can be awkward to hold and manipulate at times.
Bleedthrough

They’re also not at all built for layering and mixing, which means that trying to create layers with them will just leave you with a soggy paper mess:

They don’t layer well, as evidenced by the grassy hill in this sketch.

So what are they good for? They work well for quick impression sketches, particularly of buildings, where you can get shading and shadows down very quickly. I used them on an architecture walk to get an impression of the buildings and they worked very well.

What they’re good at – blocking the windows, shading the building, impression of a cloudy sky.

It’s difficult to be accurate with them, but in these sort of sketches I’m not looking for accuracy, just of an impression, a quick note of what I saw and what caught my eye. A photo is great, but it doesn’t highlight what made me stop and take a second look at a building.

They even work decently well on cream coloured paper.

Yes, copic markers could do the job, but they cost much, much more than a Stabilo Boss marker, they aren’t as readily available, and they dry out very quickly. Sometimes you need a cheap workhorse to get the job done, and for this new use I think the Stabilo Boss NatureCOLORS work just fine.

July’s Currently Inked Fountain Pens

This month features a few new inks, and a lot of old favourites that I haven’t used for a while.

Big Idea Design’s Fountain EDC is far from perfect, and yet I’ve inked it up again. It’s the ultem and the ease of capping an uncapping it – it makes it a great EDC fountain pen even though it still has infuriating flow issues. This, however, is the last time I’m inking it for a while (after filling it three times in a row) as I have lost patience with getting it to work properly when I’m journalling. The Schneider Cognac is a new ink for me, a cartridge packet that I bought in London for a pretty steep discount. The colour is a nice orange brown with a good amount of shading and good flow.

Kanilea Pen Co Haleakala Silhouette is gorgeous and overpriced pen that I haven’t used in a while. Sailor studio 123 ink was also in my previous rotation, but I now have two bottles of this most gorgeous of grey inks, so I feel like I should give it more use.

Omas Bibliotheque Nationale is a pen that I bought about a decade ago at Mora Stylos in Paris. The nib is extraordinary, and I decided that I wanted to use it again. It lays a thick, juicy line of ink that works well with Diamine Earl Grey. Diamine Earl Grey is not only a great grey ink at a fraction of Sailor Studio 123’s cost, it also doesn’t bleed through to the other side of the paper in even the Omas’s generous ink. So I get a dark grey with plenty of shading and character, but I can also journal on the other side of the page.

Rotring Levenger 600 is a wonderful pen that Rotring needs to make more of, and Sailor Jentle Sky High is a discontinued ink that Sailor likely makes under a different name and a higher price now. I like the colour, even though it’s a blue and blue inks tend to be boring, and the Rotring works well in use for my office notes.

Writing sample part 1

Sailor Pro Gear Slim Graphite Lighthouse is one of the last Sailor pens that I bought, and it’s one of my favourites. The H-EF nib is extremely fine, and not for everyone. Sailor Jentle Epinard is a great discontinued dark green ink from Sailor, and they likely make something similar under a different name and higher price (or you can find a parallel Diamine ink for much cheaper). The Sailor Jentle ink’s discontinuation was when I bought this and the other Jentle inks in use here, and I kind of regret my shopping rush. There’s no point in buying discontinued ink, as you’ll likely easily find something else similar to that (something that doesn’t use the Jentle ink’s terrible flat bottle design), or something better.

Schon Design faceted pocket six patina is a great pocket pen, and the Schneider Bermuda Blue is a great teal ink. The shading on this ink is excellent, and if I get a chance to buy another box of cartridges when this one is empty, I will.

The TWSBI ECO T isn’t as interesting to me as the ink inside it. I’ve been wanting to try out Diamine Ancient Copper for a long time, and when I was in Oxford I managed to get a bottle. It does not disappoint – great flow, great shading, great rich burnt sienna colour.

Writing sample part 2

I haven’t used the Platinum 3776 in a while, and I almost forgot what a great workhorse of a pen it is. Sailor Jentle Ultramarine, a very bluish purple, long discontinued, is kind of on the boring side.

Here are the pens from top to bottom:

Big Idea Design Fountain EDC

Kanilea Pen Co Haleakala Silhouette

Omas Bibliotheque Nationale LE from 1999

Rotring Levenger 600

Sailor Pro Gear Slim Graphite Lighthouse

Schon Design Faceted Pocket Six Patina

TWSBI ECO T Saffron

Platinum 3776 Demonstrator

The pens

What have you got inked up this month?

Book Review: 4321 – Paul Auster

When I started reading “4321” Paul Auster was still alive. By the time I finished it he had passed away. That does add an element of difficulty when discussing a work that is far from perfect – one feels that it’s somehow rude to point out the flaws in a recently deceased author’s works.

Nevertheless, here’s my review:

“4321” is doorstop of a book, a massive tome that demands quite a lot of time but not a lot of effort to read. Auster is good writer and he is very capable of writing very readable books. At no point during “4321” will you feel that the writing drags or that you’re struggling to understand what’s going on. In his telling and retelling of Archie Ferguson’s life in all four variations of it, Auster very adeptly makes sure that you don’t lose sight of the plot and get confused wondering which version of Archie are you tracking now.

That’s the highlight of this book, and it may also be its downfall. “4321” is Auster in his most polished, most controlled, and most repetitive. It’s all the previous themes that you’ve met in previous Auster novels, coupled with Auster’s own biography and his love for certain types of characters and relationships. It’s like watching Kenneth Branagh’s “Hamlet” – a work of supreme technical difficulty and accomplishment, polished to a mirror-like quality, and reflecting only the creator himself. Somehow after more than 900 pages you realize that there’s no there there.

The most interesting characters are the ones that Auster glosses over, slotting them into their role in Archie’s narrative (his mother Rose is perhaps the most glaring example of this), and the characters he does care about are… uninteresting. Archie, through his 4 turns in life, never evolves. He’s always a detached, not very interesting young man that looks at the events of the century from the sidelines. His friends also never evolve, and while his path to becoming a writer might be fascinating to Auster, it wasn’t very interesting to me. It was too neat, too clean, too uncomplicated. The whole thing was rather bloodless, the rank opposite of Doctorow’s “Ragtime,” which is a messy but punchy and lively affair.

You spend over 900 pages of uncomplicated, almost light reading, and get to… not a lot really. There’s nothing here that hasn’t been written about elsewhere and much better about love, life, creation and the creative mind. What you do get is to view the supreme craftsmanship of a very good storyteller. Maybe that’s enough. For me it wasn’t.

Planning Update – How I Plan a 13 Week Year

This is the second post on this topic. For an explanation on the 13 week year read this post.

As life tends to constantly throw curveballs at me, planning ahead in short bursts has proven to be invaluable. During the previous quarter my dad went through an unexpected open-heart surgery and I realized that I’d have to find a new apartment in the not so distant future. If I had planned ahead for an entire year (goals/themes, the system is immaterial), I would have had to scrap all my plans on February. As it was, I made a few minor adjustments, and finished not so far from where I originally planned.

Just before this 13 week/quarter started I got some bad news about my cat. That’s going to affect my plans, which I made before I realized that he was likely dealing with cancer. That’s OK – my plans are short term enough to allow me to easily change them, and I’ve already built plenty of wiggle room into the plans that I made. Unlike themes, which I find to be to vague to be useful, or yearly plans, which are too long term to be practical in my circumstances, 13 week planning allows for just enough time to make meaningful progress in the key areas of my life whilst being short enough to allow me to quickly pivot if necessary.

How I Make a 13 Week Plan

This is my third round with 13 week planning, and I’m getting progressively better at it. Here’s what I do that’s been working so far:

  1. List all the roles and areas in my life and make sure I’m covering all of them. Some examples of the areas I use: Health and Fitness, Reading, Mental Health (important enough for me with my PTSD to have it under a separate area), Conversations (meaningful connections with friends – that’s face to face get togethers or one on one phone calls or zoom meetings, not WhatsAapp messages), French, Creative Projects, Film Photography (more on that in a separate post), Professional Development (this is the only work related stuff that I track at home), Decluttering (trying to prepare for a future move), Drawing, Blog, Money. Yes there are a lot of them, yes it’s worth listing everything down and addressing as much of it as you can with your plan.
  2. Figure out measurable goals that can be reached during the 13 week stretch. Where possible I set a bare minimum, easily achievable goal, and then stretch goals. So for instance the minimum reading goal is 6 books, with 8 books and 10 books as my stretch goals. This means that if the unexpected happens, it’s almost always only my stretch goals that are affected. It also means that I’m not setting myself up to say: “this is impossible, why even bother?” Every little bit helps, and it helps to be kind to your future self.
  3. Set up various scaffolds and aides to your goals. Wherever possible I use the app “Streaks” to help me hit my goals. I also use the great NRC (Nike Run Club) app to help me keep track of my running goals and challenge me there, and I schedule as many things as possible in my calendar ahead of time. GoodReads has a reading challenge that helps me track books. Then there is my weekly planning session, where I build up next week’s plan. During that time I go over all of my goals for the quarter and make sure that I’m hitting at least a few of them that week.
  4. When executing your plan, break things down to monthly, weekly and daily goals. Whether it’s X amount of running sessions a month, X minutes of exercise a week, or how much time you spent away from screens every day, the longer term goals need to be broken down to shorter term chunks for you to actually be able to do them. It’s also helpful when reviewing your weekly or monthly plan to see where your quarterly (or 13 week) plan was too optimistic. If, for example, you’re travelling for two weeks in August, you need to make sure you didn’t account for those two weeks during your quarterly plan, because chances are you won’t be able to hit very many goals during that time.
  5. Don’t be afraid to refactor the plan when major things happen. Your plan should be flexible enough to account for the small and medium sized surprises life throws at us (broken fridge, out of town friend unexpectedly drops by for a few days, you picked up a new hobby), but don’t be afraid to rethink your plans when the big things hit (major illness, unexpected move, promotion, job change, etc). You don’t score points for sticking to the plan – the plan is just a tool meant to help you achieve your goals.

My planning is done on paper, and then I use Fantastical (a calendar app) and Streaks on my phone to help me keep daily track of things. I look at my weekly plan almost every day, and I track things there as well. On a weekly basis I review my progress and decide what to focus on next week. If it’s a busy week I’ll select only a few relatively easy goals, for example. The point is to build a plan that is detailed enough to cover the most important areas in your life well, and yet allows for flexibility.

A small snippet from this quarter’s plan

Have you found this helpful? What tools do you use to achieve your goals?

Quick Update – Cats and Shoulders

I’ve had a rough few weeks, which is why there’s been a dearth of posts. At first I was sick, then I found out that my beloved cat has a tumour (as yet to be determined if it’s benign or malignant, but chances are that it’s malignant), then I almost lost him due to stress induced urinary blockage. We’ve been recovering from that over the past week, when my right shoulder decided to act up again with a pretty painful bout of inflammation. Writing has been a bit challenging under the circumstances.

That being said, I like this blog, I’ve kept it going for quite a few years now, and I have no intention of quitting.

The little prince recovering from his ordeal. They shaved him quite a bit, poor thing.

2024 Planning Update: The 13 Week Year

Back in January I wrote about trying a new long term planning system that isn’t the Theme System or theme based, and isn’t yearly goal based, but rather is based on breaking the year into four 13 week blocks, each one representing a fully independent quarter.

I’m now in week 11 of the second of these blocks (quarter two, to put it more simply), and I’m starting to plan the next quarter. While working on my plan I thought that it would be useful to document the procedure, talk about my review process, and discuss how I planned the previous quarters, how things went, and what I plan to do differently in the third quarter.

The point of this system is to break the year into more manageable parts. This allows for greater flexibility in planning, time to “recover” from life’s surprises, and time to work on meaningful, long term projects. On the one hand the entire year isn’t a wash when life deals one of its blows, and on the other hand you can allow yourself to express a realistic amount of ambition.

Starting the Third Quarter’s Setup

I use the Leuchtturm Bullet Journal for my planning, and it should last me to the end of the year. After that I’ll switch to a Leuchtturm 120gsm dot grid notebook, as I don’t use any of the Bullet Journal features in my current notebook.

The first bit is a bit mindless, but I prefer to see it as meditative. Each week in my planner gets two pages, and so I leave four empty pages after the last spread of the previous quarter. These four pages will contain my plan for the quarter, broken into various sections. More on how I build that in a later post.

Then I sit down and draw out 13 weekly spreads. On the left side of the spread I write down the days of the week and the dates, and on the right I just put a “Weekly Tasks” title with the number of the week in the quarter in square brackets. I do this in one sitting for the entire quarter, and it takes about 30 minutes because I don’t rush it. This is how the pages look at this point:

This is how it looks when it’s filled and in use:

The left side gets filled with my exercise plan for the week, major appointments, and important things I don’t want to forget.

The right side has my weekly goals, both in the form of various checklists with checkboxes and more general lists. This is where my quarterly goals get put into action – every Friday or Saturday I look at my quarterly goals, and then try to advance as many of them as I can in the week. Things become more quantifiable at this point, though it’s often only in my daily to do lists that they become real, doable tasks. My daily to do list is something that I write the night before on an A5 loose sheet of paper, and recycle once I’m done with it.

Next time I’ll post a bit more about how I create the quarterly plan.

How do you plan your year? How is your planning going now that the year is halfway through?

Diamine Purple Edition Inks

The 2023 Diamine Inkvent inks are now available in their gorgeous, 50ml glass bottle version – the Diamine Purple Edition inks.

You can read about the 2023 Diamine Inkvent inks here, and you can purchase them directly from Diamine or from Cult Pens (non affiliated links).

The 2023 Inkvent lineup was Diamine’s strongest so far, and there are a lot of great inks to choose from. I’m currently on a shopping hiatus, but I’ll likely get the Fireside Snug, Weeping Willow and Jacaranda from this ink lineup.

Are you planning on getting any Diamine Purple Edition inks? If so, which ones?

Sketching with Iron Gall Fountain Pen Ink: Rohrer and Kilngner Ebony

I have recently purchased the Rohrer and Klingner limited edition Ebony iron gall ink, and I’ve filled one of my Lamy Safaris with it. While iron gall fountain pen ink can be corrosive to pens, and it does change colour over time, it does have a pretty nifty trait: it’s waterproof when dry.

So I made this quick sketch with my Lamy Safari extra fine nibbed fountain pen on a Cass Art recycled paper sketchbook:

And then I added some watercolour to the sketches (note that although this isn’t watercolour paper, the paper in this sketchbook does take light watercolour washes):

As expected, it worked pretty well. Note two things about the combination of iron gall ink and watercolour:

1. The ink must be dry before applying the watercolour.

2. As the water causes the paper fibers to expand, your ink lines may “spread” or display soft edges if you apply watercolour over them. You can see this in both sketches. Different paper will lead to different results, of course.

This was a fun little experiment, and a great way to test out this ink a bit more.

Full sketching kit.

Have you ever used iron gall ink with watercolour in your sketches?