This is crossposted from Curiousity.ca, my personal maker blog. If you want to link to this post, please use the original link since the formatting there is usually better.
I decided to be a bit lazy with July’s stationary choices, so we’re continuing 2 pens from last month and just adding in the pen that I had been using for todo lists, and repeating the bunny sticker sheet that I hadn’t finished. I did get some new puppy stickers for my calendar (I’m currently tracking which days I spend some time writing). It’s a bit of chaos here this month as I finish my job, work on writing for a little fanfic event I decided to join, and then do some travel to visit family, so I don’t think I’ll be doing much actual journal writing.
Inks & Fountain Pens:
Pilot Metropolitan <CM> with KWZ Gummiberry
Pilot E95S <M> with Pilot Iroshizuku kon-peki
Ooly duo with original pink cartridge and orange highlighter
Stickers:
Meowashi bubble tea dogs
Stickii books and bunnies
Mind Wave puppies
The Latest Kate elephants
No changes to paper this month either!
Notes from last month:
I picked up an Endless Phantom retractable fountain pen during their kickstarter and it arrived. Unfortunately it seems to dry out constantly, so I’m going to try reseating the gasket (they have a video on how to do this) and we’ll see if I have better luck after that. I spent a bit extra to get a fude nib and it writes beautifully when it writes, but it’s been pretty frustrating!
This is crossposted from Curiousity.ca, my personal maker blog. If you want to link to this post, please use the original link since the formatting there is usually better.
Catching up on some missed weeks now!
My books
Full Speed to a Crash Landing – I read the second one first so I had some idea of how this ended but wow it was fun to see how they got there. Kind of… space heist crossed with enemies to lovers vibes, but no resolution since this is book 1 of at least 3. Absolutely fun and I’m on the list for book 3 already.
Not many books this week because i was working my way through a book I bought which I actually still haven’t finished — it’s got a lot of grief and I need to move through that slowly right now. And also because I’ve been writing rather than reading.
Picture books
Rosie goes to preschool – meh. I glanced through it but kiddo didn’t even want to read it.
Grandpa Green – a repeat. about life and memory loss and gardening. Beautiful but I don’t think it resonates too much with my kid since he hasn’t actually experienced a grandparent with memory loss yet. He still loves the gardening art, though.
Puppy Bus – kid gets on the wrong bus to school and ends up getting a dog’s education. Adorable and funny.
Good Rosie – not sure I read this one? I can’t remember it.
Pete the Cat’s got class – don’t think i read this one either.
Just Like Millie – sweet, beautiful art. Learning to cope with life via dog.
Lizzy and the Cloud – also didn’t read this one. Usually I try to get to each book at least once but kiddo was really into some other books instead!
Molly & May – a brief friendship on a train. I liked it but kiddo was kind of meh on it.
This is crossposted from Curiousity.ca, my personal maker blog. If you want to link to this post, please use the original link since the formatting there is usually better.
Library materials returned June 15, 2025. Lots of games & graphic novels this week!
Books returned June 15, 2025. Titles and reviews can be found in the associated post.
Board Games
Gravity Maze – a puzzle game where you drop a marble from a start point to an end point. Cards of different difficulties give you different setups. My kid really enjoyed the easy levels then got bored, which is about par for the course for him on these. We found it a bit finicky to use at first but once we got the hang of how the pieces went together it was pretty fun and didn’t require reading.
Nmbr9 – competitive puzzle game where you place down oddly shaped numbered tiles in order, gaining more points as you stack them such that they don’t have any gaps underneath. Pretty fun, didn’t require any reading.
Unlock – A set of 3 escape room games. We only actually finished the first one. I don’t like that they required an app to do some of the puzzles, but it did have hints in it for when the puzzles were decidedly non-obvious, so that was nice at least. Not bad but definitely the kind of game that I’m glad I can borrow from the library rather than own.
Books part 1
Hyrule Historia – I picked this up for the manga at the end but it’s the rest of it that turned out to be a huge hit with my kid: it’s full of beautiful concept art from the Zelda games up to Skyward Sword. He spent a lot of time pouring over the ideas and coming up with his own ideas about how unused enemies would work and stuff. Plus he generated a bunch of ideas for me to use in fanfic thanks in part to how much he enjoyed this book.
Slightly Exaggerated – kind of fantasy/Indiana Jones vibes. I liked it.
The Broken Elf King – romantasy in a “she’s got super special magic powers” way that absolutely echoes “the chosen one” type narratives in a fun way. Like, what if the author just leaned into the joy of a fantastic mary sue romance? It’s like someone took a teenage girl self-insert and turned it into a real book with better-than-teenage writing, and it just rejoices in it. I had a lot of fun and have already grabbed the next book.
Shifting Earth – A climate disaster/portal fiction book. Hit too close to home in a lot of ways so absolutely not escapism but it was good.
A Gentle Noble’s Vacation Recommendation – some kind of isekai thing. Beautiful art and character interactions but not enough plot to really keep me intrigued.
I got abducted by aliens and now I’m trapped in a rom com – funny but I didn’t finish it. Not really the fault of the book: I got excited about writing my own fiction which makes me read waaaay slow because I keep stopping to think about my writing. As a result, my library loan timed out and I decided to cut my losses since I didn’t think I was going to stop writing any time soon.
Bikes not Rockets: intersectional feminist bicycle science fiction stories – Who can resist a title like that? Some great stories in this collection, and I enjoyed the whole concept of having bicycles in everything.
Picture books returned June 15, 2025. Titles and reviews can be found in the associated post.
Picture Books
Bark, George – hilarious. A bit hit with my kid.
What do you do with a voice like that – didn’t read. Neither kid nor I am big into biographies of congresswomen (this was from one of the library’s mystery book bags).
Beloved repeats picture books
MVP: most valuable puppy, Say Hello to Zorro, and Cat Says, Dog Says. I’m actually surprised kiddo chose the last one since I didn’t think he was that into it the first time, but we’ve ready MVP and all the Zorro books a lot of times.
This is crossposted from Curiousity.ca, my personal maker blog. If you want to link to this post, please use the original link since the formatting there is usually better.
Trying two new inks this month, and a new book cover for my journal! Also, if you’ve got tips for using shimmer inks better, one of my pens is already acting a bit clogged and we’re not even two weeks into the month, so I’d be happy to hear any advice!
New stuff
I picked up a KOKUYO journal cover for my current softcover journal. I also picked up a KOYUKO campus A5 calendar that will fit in there with it, in preparation for the end of summer when I need a new calendar. I keep an academic year calendar partially due to my own habit (getting a PhD and then doing a postdoc means I spent a lot of years in school) and also because I have a kid in school now so it’s nice to be able to have his whole school year on hand when planning stuff. The cover adds just enough extra rigidity to the setup to make it easier for me to write journal entries when I’m not using a flat surface, which is honestly most of the time for me as I typically write entries on my lap when I think of stuff. I’d previously been using writing boards for this but they tend to slip out so I think it’ll be less hassle overall. The only problem is that it’s just enough bigger that I can’t fit my pen case and journal into the same A5 pouch I’d been using, but that hasn’t annoyed me as much as I thought it would. I don’t think I’ve reached what I consider a *perfect* setup yet, but I definitely feel like the cover is a good addition.
The two KWZ inks are new: Firecracker is another “all that glitters” ink with the very small shimmer particles that make it more like a metallic gel pen than my other inks. I love it so much. BUT I will note that I used another ink from this line in my TWSBI Eco and had a lot of sparkle residue left over in the feed that caused mild problems, so I made sure to use this in a converter pen that should be easier to flush.
Gummiberry is less exciting as far as inks go, just me trying out a slightly brighter purple because I’ve learned that I mostly find darker inks disappointing. I didn’t pick up this hobby to then have writing that I could get with just any pen. I want bright colours, sparkle, drama! But I’ve been having a rough time with shimmer inks lately (possibly because I’m writing more on the computer and less by hand) so I’m trying to enjoy some options that are less of a hazard. This one is nice and I like it.
I picked up a second Kaweco Sport pen with a broad nib (it’s the yellow one) and got a calligraphy nib for my existing blue pen. The broad nib is an utter delight with the Firecracker ink. It feels absurdly smooth and looks beautiful. The 1.1mm calligraphy nib seems to be a bit less forgiving for everyday writing than my existing stub nibs, but it’s kind of fun when I use it right. I suspect, again, that I’m having more trouble with it because of the shimmer ink I’m using — lots of small skipping problems with the ink flow. But I’ve seen a few reviewers comment that the feed has trouble keeping up with the wider calligraphy nibs on this pen so it might not be the ink, I don’t know. I’ll try it on something less sparkly eventually. I like the size of the Kaweco Sport because I’ve got small hands but also because the tiny converter makes it closer to the amount of ink I actually use in a month. Who knew I’d be so into small converters?
Not new but I don’t think I talked about it before: I picked up a Lihit Labs “Compact” pencil case to hold my pens so they wouldn’t get so scratched up (the reason my existing Kaweco hasn’t been in rotation was that it was getting kind of beat up in my previous pencil case). A lot of the pen cases I looked at were very expensive and lots of them were made of leather. I like leather in general, but it’s heavy and seemed likely to get really torn up the way my journal supplies wind up in the bottom of my knitting bag that I then carry around the house all the time. This was reasonably priced and solves the problem, though I likely want to find a thinner eraser-pen thing so it fits in there, because my existing eraser has a bulky little case and honestly I mostly erase tiny calendar stuff so smaller would be fine.
Stickers
purple bunnies from TheLatestKate’s patreon
bunnies and books from PinkPafu via stickii
bunnies and flowers from Dai and Qin via stickii
I think both the stickii ones were from this year’s advent. I’ve been thinking about advents since the yarn ones are starting preorders now, and I think I’d probably do the stickii one again, but I’m less sure about the Diamine ink one because I definitely won’t have made as much of a dent in using the inks as I have the stickers unless I start writing a lot more. But the inks were more fun actually *in* December than the stickers were because I enjoyed all the swatching. It may be all a moot point as work is figuring out layoffs right now so who knows if I’ll even have a job to be spending money on advent stuff, but I find it good to think about these things in advance so I don’t get trigger happy when things come up for pre-order.
Fountain Pens & Inks
Kaweco sport <b> – KWZ All That Glitters – Firecracker
an orange-red ink with gold shimmer. More like a metallic gel pen than most shimmer inks. The “gimmick” is that it’s suppose to need less agitation and it’s true. I find it a lot easier to use as an everyday writing ink.
Kaweco sport <1.1> – Diamine – Pine Needle.
Green that honestly isn’t quite like either new or old pine needles, but it’s a nice colour anyhow. Lots of gold/green shimmer. Was an absolute dream to use the day after I put it in the pen, but I think the feed is slowly clogging up with the shimmer because it’s already getting less fun to use. I’ll probably try to use it more for my todo list/craft tracking and see if the problem is mostly that it’s getting used every 4 days instead of more often, but it may just need more agitation before I try writing.
Pilot E95S <m> – Pilot Iroshizuku – kon peki
A repeat from last month. Still the nicest nib I own and I love using it.
Pilot Metropolitan <cm> (not pictured because it was getting cleaned) – KWZ Gummiberry
A nice bright purple with a bit of shading. Easy to use.
This is crossposted from Curiousity.ca, my personal maker blog. If you want to link to this post, please use the original link since the formatting there is usually better.
Trying something new: I haven’t been reviewing books because it takes a long time to write reviews on my phone, and I’d been working on reducing my phone screen time. But I’ve been using my computer more to write fanfic so I’m going to see if weekly book posts are more likely to happen now than they were last time I tried.
My books
(first one I own, other two from the library)
Kitemaster by Jim Hines. I accidentally pre-ordered this twice, which probably gives you some idea of how I felt about it. A young woman mourning her husband goes to release his spirit kite only to discover she has developed a rare magical gift, and she soon attracts the attention of some very powerful people… I loved the worldbuilding around kite magic (safety lines! The spirit kites!) and the sky serpents and the poetic legends about dragons and the evil queen and the sky pirates and the race of monkey-like people. Maybe it feels particularly good to me right now because I’ve been playing a game which includes a lot of gliding around in the sky, but I wanted to live in this world. There’s also a lot about grief and cultural traditions around mourning in there, in a way that I had to stop and let it sink in sometimes. In a good way.
Halfway There – A graphic novel about being half Japanese and half American, but mostly it was about finding yourself and depression. Her experience of people’s weird reactions to her being “hafu” resonated but the self-loathing not so much.
The Roommate by Rosie Danan – I’ve read a few from her and they’re all different. I find it kind of hilarious that I felt like this one was less believable than the werewolf one but honestly I love a kind of absurd premise as long as the characters are fun. And they are! Just… I’d recommend Fan Service (the werewolf book) over this one. It’s the most recent one and I think the characters are even better despite the premise being more absurd.
Kid books:
Catnapped is a repeat, so kiddo liked it enough to get it out again. Or he liked that it has a cat in it and he’s got this thing where he wants his allergic dad to fake sneeze for fake cats so my kid is extra motivated to get cat books out of the library.
Bob and Joss get lost – ok but no repeat requests on this one
Amazing Grace – never read it, kid wasn’t interested. (Recall: we get mystery bags from the library and not all of them are winners for him)
Storm Whale in Winter – spawned some good conversations about snow safety but no repeat requests
Little Blue Truck Makes a Friend – kid had fun with the animal noises but was mad I made him read some of this so it was slower going than it could have been.
Charlie Chooses – very cute, lots of dogs, we read this a few times.
Toby – another repeat. cute dog, kind of melancholy story so i was surprised he got it out again.
Board Game
Despite the giant box this is mostly a card/dice game where you build a little city and money based on dice roles hitting your numbers. None of the cards are secret held in your hand, so that was great for my kid’s reading level (he can read but it’s a lot of work and he gets tired of doing it), and the rounds are pretty fast and the rules not too complicated. We may buy a copy of this one.
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