Hello and welcome to episode 73 of the Panatic podcast on five by five your weekly dose of pens paper and the analog tools that we love so dearly my name is Mike Hurley and I am joined by the limited of most limited of all additions. Mr Brad daddy yes I like it how are you my good sir how are you I'm very well made very well indeed. Good are you a rested and recuperated pretty much pretty much. So you've you've had a you've had a big trip in the in the past week world world traveling Mike Hurley. Yep went out to Portland. Had a great time. How's how's that flight like it took 12 hours in total because you can't feel you can't get direct flight to Portland so I'd to go from Canada to Canada. Mm hmm you you said hi to Jim Dalrumpel a different part Canada. Cool cool so you went to the to the exo exo fest and there was lots of interesting going on there and you know I became familiar with exo exo fest last year because our friends at field notes contributed or or had available. Some neat field notes need extra field notes the the famed purple field notes addition at the 2012 exo exo fest and I noticed on the on the dock at this year. Mr. Koodle and Draplin were also in attendance this year did you do you have any field notes love field notes love this year at exo exo. Oh baby fuchsia fuchsia fuchsia I've seen some pick seen some pictures as it is bright in a person as the pictures have shown yep I am as we speak uploading an image to my square space page. Okay so everyone will be able to see what these look like so that will be in the show notes which you can find at five by five dot TV slash pan addict slash seventy three you'll find a link to my field notes page and it'll be right down the bottom. They are very they're a nice bright sort of fuchsia pink this time I'll make it yeah I've got I have a set for you. Oh yes thank you sir which I will be sending and I picked up a set for two more people who asked me in advance of me going. And then I have two sets left for myself and I gave one set to my lady friend because she said I want some of those field notes things that you've got. So I thought this would be perfect so I given a yeah that's great set of days they also had a like a draplin stand. I didn't actually get to meet the man himself which was a shame because I did really want to but he didn't seem to be around whenever I was there. Or if he was there he was like they were like it's a huge cure on the table so I didn't want to go up and bug him whilst he was actually trying to sell some stuff. But I bought the amazing draplin spaceship T-shirt the space show. How good looking is that? Oh I love that. It's spectacular isn't it? Yeah I really love that so I've actually got a picture of that on my instagram so I'll put that in the show notes and I bought a sticker of that as well. Okay cool. Put that on my laptop. Keep debating I need to go to the I need to go to the draplin site to the DDC merch shop online and pick up a couple things myself. Yeah I think you should. I didn't even know that they did that he had an online site. Yep sure does. So yeah you should definitely pick up the space shuttle thing if you can. I recommend it's one of my favorite T-shirts that I own now. And I also bought a steno pad the Field Notes steno pad. I've not opened it yet but I figured one here. Let's buy a piece of Field Notes goodness. Might as well. Yeah I thought why not you know. I love the dimensions of the steno book. I'm a big fan of the steno. Yeah I didn't know how big it actually was. It's a good size. Yeah five by eight ish or so. I'm not sure the exact dimensions. Something like that. Yeah. That sounds about right. I also caught up with Mr. Kudal. We spent some time just like a few minutes together. We were talking because he was there for a couple of days of the conference and we had a good chat. Somebody came over and they asked if he had told me the new edition. I categorically said that I did not want to know. That's right. But Jim told me that I will find out. He told me you'll find out on Tuesday. Nice. And he was right. I honestly didn't want to know. I assume that he probably had some of them with him but I didn't want to. I didn't want to spoil it for myself. Yeah exactly. And I think that's a good idea. And I think that's a good idea. And we're definitely going to talk about that. That surprise. But I don't want to get there yet almost. Did Jim talk at the event or anything? No no he was just in attendance. There. Yeah. Cool. And did Draplin do a talk or no? Nope he just had a table. They have like a thing called the Unmarket which is where sort of independent sellers they sell stuff. And he has an office in Portland. Right. Yeah that's his home base. Which is literally down the street. Like you can see it from the place called the YU Contemporary which is where the conference was held. So it makes perfect sense. Hence why they get the Field Notes editions made. Cool. He's a local. So I was going through the XOXO Fest. You know watching the tweets and the tags and the Instagramming. And I didn't notice the speaker list. Like the full speaker list. Did you get to go to see some of the speakers and things? I was at every single talk. Oh good. So you got to see. Did you get to see one Miss Molly Crabapple? I did yeah. I'm a huge Molly Crabapple fan. I don't know if you know this. I don't know if I've talked to her about her on the show. But I like her artwork and her writing online. She does lots of different things. And she's done some cool Kickstarter projects in the past that I've supported. And I've talked to her online through email when I was at JetPins and some things like that. So I have a huge crush on Molly Crabapple. I should have told you that before to make sure you attended the Molly Crabapple session. So hopefully that was cool. And she talked about some of her things. It was one of the most peculiar. That doesn't surprise me. She's an interesting girl. Yeah. She's. Yeah. She does things from just crazy artwork to these Dr. Sketchy's conferences. She was recently at Guantanamo Bay for Vice doing an article about that. So she's all over the place doing lots of different things. Yeah. I'm looking. I'll leave it at that. I'll look for the video. And when they come out, they do release the videos eventually for the XOXO Fest, right? Yeah, they will be. They will be releasing the videos. Okay. So I'll look forward to checking that out. I'm glad you found it interesting. Now my interest is peak to see. Yeah. It was definitely an interesting one to say the least. Nice. Nice. All right. Well, we got lots of good things to talk about today. And I know one of them we wanted to get to is that new field notes release. I got lots to say about that. I got them in about 10 minutes ago. I went to the mailbox before we started this show. So they are in hand. So do you want to take care of our first sponsor? Then we'll get into the nuts and bolts. That sounds like a great idea, sir. An absolute great idea indeed. So of course, this episode is brought to you by the fine folks over at squarespace.com. This is where you can go to get everything you need. It's the all-in-one platform for creating your own space online. They make it fast and easy to build your own website or online portfolio. Maybe you want to site for your business. Maybe you want somewhere to sell something. Well, squarespace have got all of that in hand. Sign up for a free trial and get 20% off during September by going to squarespace.com and using the offer code, tallyho9. Squarespace are always doing great, great work. I love the stuff that they do. As we're talking, I'm adding very simply a new image to my field notes page on my squarespace site. And I'm just dragging and dropping it around the page and just very easily resizing it. I needed to rotate the image. So once it was uploaded into one of the image blocks in their drag and drop platform in their page building tools, I was able to just go straight and edit the image and rotate it from all within the browser. It's all within squarespaces tools. They have an aviary plug-in, so they use the fine folks over aviary. They use their photo editing tools, and that's built right into squarespace. It's just one of the many features that they have built in. On the front end, for people to see, they have a choice. They have a 20 highly customizable templates. They're really beautiful. They've won numerous design awards for these templates. If you need any help at all at Squarespace, it's so easy to use. 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So that's Squarespace, everything that you need to create an exceptional website. Awesome, thank you Squarespace. There was one more thing that I meant to mention about the show. So I met a listener of the show at a 5x5 meetup. Oh, cool. So he came up to me, he had, believe it or not, he had a 70s, it was T-Sharm. Nice. That was represent. Yeah, it was pretty sweet. Jason, I believe his name was, I feel terrible for, I'm pretty sure it was, I feel like I say these things, right? And I don't want to get them wrong, you know what I'm like with this sort of stuff. So I'm trying to check now, frantically. Because I'm sure, because when, I hate this stuff, you know what I'm like with this stuff. Way to go. I know. I'm looking. I'm looking. I'm looking. Same way when I pull something off of Twitter, I always end up forgetting or end up saying, trying to determine whether to say their, their Twitter name or their real name or whatever and end up butchering both. Yes, I was, I was right, I believe. It's Jason P. Becker. He's @JasonP Becker on Twitter. So if it wasn't Jason, although I'm sure it was Jason, this person, Jason has got a free plug, but no, I am 100% sure now, because I had an image. We took a photo together of him wearing his 70 decibels t-shirt, which was potentially the best thing that happened. I'm going to put, I'm going to put that picture in the show notes too, actually, so people can see a very happy me with Jason and his 70 decibels t-shirt on. All right, so you mentioned something in the show notes before we get on to the new field notes about retro 51 at XOXO? Ah, yes. So my buddy Chase, who shared a room with me and Matt, Mr. Chase Reeves, I can't remember how we got onto it, but we were just talking about pens and stuff, and I was telling him the stories of the retro 51 and how great it was. And when we were sitting in one of the talks on paper, he was like, "Let me use this fancy pen of yours." So he used it, and he said, "Oh my God, I love this." So I gave him one of mine. Nice. I thought that was a night, you know, he was very kind to us in the week and helped us have a great time, showed us around the city and stuff. So I wanted to pay back by giving away a pen from my collection to him, and I thought that was a nice gesture. I've never done that for some of you before. Yeah, don't you love doing that, though, to be able to share that with someone else that, you know, it's kind of, you know, give them something that's nice like that, and it kind of surprises them. And, you know, here, just keep it, you know, it's yours. Exactly. Sharing the love. I like it. But I said to him, he can't lose it. That's great. Yeah, I love giving away, you know, the products that I like and things like that. So to kind of make someone's day, or, you know, give them something, you know, people that are picking up this show for the first time, which we're getting tons of new listeners. We get that all the time now on Twitter. To be able to share just the products that we love with people that, you know, we're just kind of getting into this to kind of give them that push to say, "Hey, there's really some better things out there, and there's some neat stuff going on." And this little realm of ours, it's fun to see, you know, how happy they get and how much they enjoy things like that. So that's awesome. Good job by you, mate. Thank you, sir. All right, so while I guess this happened while you were at XOXO, did the new field notes actually launch while you were gone? No, I was home. You were home when it came out. It came out on Wednesday. When is that? Tuesday. So you were already back. So yeah, so the new field notes, the fall 2013 edition came out, and it's called the Drink Local Edition, and it's pretty amazing. Oh, boy. Yeah. Yeah. They did a great job. Yeah, when I first saw this, one of my biggest enjoyments about field notes, some of my favorite products in the past. Have always been the multicolored notebooks, like, you know, the one three pack with three different colors. Or like the six pack in the past with the National Crop Edition, where it was six different color notebooks. And this one, the Drink Local Edition, is kind of sort of similar to the National Crop, even though it doesn't come in a six pack itself, even though it's built as a six pack for the beers. There are six different colored notebooks. There's a three pack of Drink Local Lager editions and a three pack of Drink Local Ails editions. And each of them has a different color cover. Let's see. Let's see. The Ails have stout, which is dark brown, black, amber ale, which is warm red, and India pale ale, which is rusty orange. And Lager features the Pilsner, which is the gold one, Bach, which is the brown one, and the pale Lager, which is the pale yellow. And again, they kind of nailed my two favorite things that I've always liked about field notes. One is the different colored three packs, each book being a different color. And two is the different colored grid line, instead of the standard brown, which actually would have matched on this one pretty well. They went ahead and changed it. What are they calling the color of the grid here? They had a name for it. Hefweisen, hefweisen, yellow orange graph grid, hefweisen. Speaking of my bad German, I got corrected on the Coleco. It's actually, as you can imagine, Kaveko. No way. Yeah. Oh, well, we have to- It's got the very V German W. Kaveko. So, yeah, work on that. Work on that. There'll be a test next episode. Kaveko, okay. That's hard to say, isn't it? Kaveko. Well, it is now that we've been calling it. I know. But I forgot who sent me the email, but thank you for doing that. It was enlightening. So, what do you think about this edition? Oh, I can't wait. What are your initial thoughts? You don't have it yet, right? It's not in hand? No, I will probably have mine before next week's episode. I can't wait to get my hands on it, man. So, it looks so exciting. And you've got a little six-pack thing. I've actually bought another set of the beach because I know I'm going to love it. And I'm only at one set of each, you know. So, but you have yours. I do. So, you can just go ahead and tell me about it because I'm really interested in the covers. Okay, yeah, and I am too. So, I haven't- I waited to open it until we got on here. Oh, wow. Yeah. My subscription pack came with- I got the pencil and the ballpoint pen and the band of rubber, which has got a permanent place on eBay, apparently, for $2.99, if you're ever interested. Oh, wow. That annoys me so bad. Sorry. But I did get the six-pack holder, which is really cool. It's like if you've ever had the old subscription editions where they've done like the insert for like sharpening the carpenter's pencil or, you know, the little calendar inserts. It's that same heavy cardboard, and they have the instructions on building the little six-pack holder, which I thought was a great idea to do it. So, each three-pack, so I have a three-pack of loggers and a three-pack of Ales, and each of those comes with its own coaster, too. We didn't mention that. So, like the- the- the loggers three-pack on the back of it, this is inside. This isn't loose in the packaging. This is shrink wrapped in- inside the belly band of the three- of the three-pack. Oh, awesome. The loggers has its loggers specific coaster, and then the Ales has the Ales specific coaster. So, the loggers is a little bit- a little bit lighter, yellow, with a little bit different glass on it, and then the Ales is a little bit- a little bit orange riding in, you know, the Ales glass on it. So, let me open up- what are we going to open here? I'll open up the loggers edition here real quick, because that- what they did this time, they did a little different finish on the cover. Are they saying it's a- it's not a- it's not a- Right, so what we've got is feature heavyweight new page Sterling Premium 120 covers with a soft touch varnish, giving them a soft, almost rubbery feel. And the logo is varnished of a contrasting glass, and each book is colored to represent a different brew. A brief history of each style of beer on the back cover. Yeah, so the cover's thick, thicker than, you know, just the basic covers, the basic memo book covers, but most of the- most of the colors editions have had some kind of thicker cover than just the regular craft paper. The finish feels great, it's that satiny finish. Like, I did a review today of the Rodea R Premium Notebooks, and it's got the same satiny finish cover. I did make a comment on that, that how it's prone to getting fingerprints on it. And this is the same kind of finish, although, you know, it's not getting fingerprints on it as I'm messing around with it. But I like the thickness, and I like the feel of it. I want to like the durability aspect of it, honestly, I think it's going to be real good. The- the graph line, the grid line is awesome. This makes a huge difference for me. I mean, I ordered some extras as well, and this could be like my go-to edition for, you know, regular use. Like, I've always said, one of the reasons the grass stain green has always been my number one favorite is because it uses the green line for the grid. And this yellow orange grid is killer. They did a really good job with this. All the inside covers are, see, is it all of them? Yeah, all the inside covers are black, which is kind of cool. Oh. It really, really sets it off well. So the inside is black with white text. You know, it's got all the great practical app applications and things like that. Let's see. The practical applications. Divious dives, I like that. Brewery's visited. Barrel count. Yeah, I'm sure it's all beer related, right? It is. It is. Designated driver rotations. And then the back. This is cool. In the back, it has the drink local loggers logo on there, which is the same that's on the coaster. And then it says, like, on the Pilsner book, it goes through the Pilsner description. And then on the Bock book, it goes through the Bock description and the pale logger, the same thing. Generant lists some of the specs and some of the origination of that type of beer. They kind of boggle my mind with everything that they do for each of these additions and are still charging us the same price. Should I say that out loud? No, I agree with you. It's insane, right? How they manage to do this stuff all the time. Yes, so for the same price that we've always paid, we get all these extras, all this additional. I know this costs, you know, more money to do all this stuff and to add in the coasters and to add in the six pack colder than when you add in all that stuff. The shipping costs more because now the package is bigger to hold all this stuff and we're paying the same old price. So to go through our usual, they did a 30,000 print run of each. So 30,000 ails and 30,000 loggers bring it to 60,000 total books on the print run. Yes. So that's large. Is that right? Yeah, I'm looking at it. That is a large. Yeah. Yeah, 30, 30. And it's actually 120,000 when you count retail, right? People get that mixed up. Oh, really? Yeah. So you take the print run, there's a Colors Edition print run, which is what's listed here. Yeah, we've talked about this before. Because like, if you get it from retail, the back of them say retail edition. Oh, yeah. Like this one says limited edition of 60,000. Now, if you buy it from like JetPins or Goolay or local store, it'll say it'll say retail edition of 60,000. Comprenday? Comprenday. Yeah. So, so yes. I'm not supposed to say something on that. I can't remember now, but yeah, so, oh, I know what I was going to say. America is the beautiful edition, still not sold out. Oh, really? Yeah. Because I was looking when this to go verify the numbers, the print run. Yeah. It's still available on the limited edition run still available, which that was a 45,000 run, I believe. But yeah, this is going to do well. I imagine this one will sell out. Heck, I might, I might just buy them all because I really love this edition. This one, I mean, I know it's, I know it's the newness of it and that makes me say something like this, but I might like this better than Knight's guy for me personally. Not maybe blasphemous, but it may just be the, it may just be the newness of it. You know, that it, oh, hey, new shiny thing, but just from a use perspective, I love this edition. Because I love the grid line, the orange yellow grid line. That really makes a difference for me. And I'm a huge, huge fan of that. So this, I might, we'll see. I mean, time will tell. I mean, it's too early, but that's, that's what I'm feeling so far. But I will, I'm willing to admit that it might just be the newness factor that's got me all. I'll pumped up about it, but right now I, I think I will personally like it better than Knight's guy. Although I think in the end, I think most people would, in the grand scheme of things like that. It's hard to, it's hard to miss that, that black cover of the Knight's guy. They did a really good job on that. So, yeah, but when I saw these ones, I thought all this could be my favorite. So we'll see. Yeah. Yeah, we'll see. But as I get using them and, and see, I will, I will see, I have, I have a feeling there that there's, there's a chance I'm going to. This, this one's going to rank pretty high, I think in my, in my rankings. And did you, did you watch the 30 second spot online? You know how they usually do a film or whatever? Yep, I did. For each edition. This one, they did a 30 second spot, which is kind of like a beer commercial. And for those who haven't heard Jim Koodle talk, that's him doing the voiceover for the commercial is pretty hilarious. And it's not meant to be. It's like a dead serious commercial, but you can tell Jim's like, he's doing like his commercial voice. Yeah. For like a, for like a fancy beer commercial. Yeah, it's interesting. I, I, I cracked up. I liked it a lot. I liked that they did that. That's a commercial instead of instead of just like they, they usual like abstract video that they do. Yeah, it fits in with the whole theme. I mean, it's like perfect. And the six pack and the coasters. Actually, I, I ordered a couple extra notebooks as well. And I went ahead and ordered coasters because I'm, I'm actually like, I'm a coaster guy to begin with. I use coasters. So, you know, I've got, I've got a drink here as we're podcasting sitting on a coaster and, you know, I have a coaster at work. I don't know. I don't know why coasters are just a thing for me. So, I ordered extra coaster, extra coasters too. So you can not only just order the extra three packs of the books. You have to order the ales separately from the loggers, right? You get a three pack of ales or a three pack of loggers or one of each. And then you can get a coaster set. The coaster set, you get four coasters, two ales, two loggers. And that's only 395. So, as always, field notes is doing it right. So they do? Yep. So I'm excited for you to get yours in. I'm, I'm interested to see what you think about this. And I'm, I'm interested to start getting them in the rotation and see how the covers hold up. I think they're going to do pretty well, but we'll see. Anything else? I mostly enjoy the, no, no, I was just going to say I mostly enjoy the, the grid lines. That's going to be a huge deal for me. So yeah, no, that's, that's all on that, that front. So I think general consensus was, uh, this was a hit. Just in the, in the field notes realm. And honestly, how could it not be? Even people that I actually, when it came out, I was like, oh, I'm wondering if some people who, you know, don't drink or whatever are going to take offense to this. And they're like, most of the comments I was reading was, I don't drink, but this is fantastic looking and, you know, I'm all over it. So. Yeah, still look good. Whether you're a drink or not. Yep. Yep. So I found some, uh, some new stuff this week that I thought you might like, Mike. Um, one of the things I just happened to see it, um, gold spot pins. Um, they carry a lot of different fountain pin lines that I'm not normally familiar with. And I either caught it on their blog or email or something like that. That for, um, it's a pin brand called Montagrapa, an Italian pin brand. And they do, they make some real, I never used one. They make some regular edition pens. All their pens are really good looking. And then they do some special edition pens, um, based on people or time of year or whatever. And I get an email or I saw it on the blog post. They're doing this Montagrapa skull pin for Halloween. And I just thought that looks super cool. I think I tweeted out about it. Um, it's about a $300 pin, but it's all black. It's got skulls all over it. Um, the cap might be a little much for me. I don't know if I'll get it, but I thought it was really neat looking. And, um, so I was checking this out and I was talking about it. And then someone, someone tweeted me was like, well, have you seen the Montagrapa Batman limited edition? I was like, oh, mercy. I was like, now I remember when that came out, it was probably last year or something, but I totally forgotten about it. And I was like, I got to show this to Mike. So have you looked at this Batman pen? I'm looking at it right now. It is nuts. Don't look at the price. I just did. So the skull pin that I was looking at that I thought was pretty cool. I don't know if I'll order that or not. It's, it's borderline. The cap might be a little bit much to me. The cap's got a single gigantic skull. And the skull looks like he's got like a little shiny rhinestone tooth or something like that. That might be a little, that might be a little much. I like the barrel with all the mini skulls wrapped around. This is Batman pen is stunning. Every bit of it. But the difference between the skull pin and the Batman pen is about $2,800. The Batman pen retails for like $3,300. Oh no. So it's about $3,000 difference. Yeah. But if you pay $5,695, you can get a watch in cufflinks too. Now that's got you written all over it. Yep. So we'll have all this in the show notes. You have to check out this Batman pen. It's actually quite impressive. I don't think it's, it's tacky or gaudy or something like that. I mean, it's obviously monstrously expensive. And I would never, you know, even consider, but I'm enjoying looking at it. And I love the design of it. Yeah, I think it looks awesome. Yeah. And like the, the bats that they have all the bat logo, bat symbols that they have all over the barrel. They like, they fill in. It's not like consistent around the barrel. Like the back of them, there's just a few and it kind of grows into a bunch around the front side of the barrel. And it's got a really interesting clip on it. I don't know if that's a batarang clip. Kind of looks like it. Yeah. They've done their best like, you know. Yeah. So I wanted to put this in there for people who haven't seen it. Go check out this link in the show notes. You will. I was impressed. So hopefully you will be too. It's, it's pretty stunning. And I remember when that came out and I just, I think I just blew it off and because it was so expensive. I don't even remember looking at it. But now that I look at it, I'm, I'm pretty impressed by it. I wish I had that sort of money laying around. Yeah. See, I don't know that I would even spend it then. I mean, if you spent that kind of money on a pen, would you use it? If I could spend that sort of money on a pen, then it wouldn't make a difference because it would be like buying a $200 pen. Yeah, I guess so. That's true. Like in the, like if it was now like me or you buying this pen, like spending all this money on the pen, I don't know that I could use it. But I guess if you're in the, in the world where you're spending that much on a pen, I guess it probably is a point. But if I was to buy it now, you know, like with the money that I have, I would like just only ever use it at home. And I would empty it. All the, you know, I'd empty the ink every time. You know, I would, I would use it very, very rarely. Right. Right. Yeah, I'm with you on that. I don't, I don't even know that I didn't get an ink it up. I don't know how to, I'd be hard pressed. So anyway, so that's not the only interesting pen I found this week. Have you seen, did you get as many tweets and emails as I got about the polar pen on Kickstarter? I got a few people contact me just to say, you know, look how expensive this thing is. Look at what it's doing, that sort of thing. I got an email actually about it. It's the most, I think it's the most successful pen kickstarter of all time now. Yeah. Suck it, Visionair. Yeah. That lasted all of about a week. This is gone berserk. It's at 421,000. This, it's in Canadian dollars, but it's, that's practically a one to one exchange rate with US dollars, so it's right around that same. And that's only in 10 days. I think this was a 30 day. Oh no, it's, it's been more. It started on September 10th. So it's been about 45 days. No, it's 36 days. It's definitely period. Okay. So it's been alive for about 15 days. And it's already at $421,000. $7,318 backers. This is, I'm shocked at the quantity of backers that they have and how many they've sold. It's pretty stunning. It's a really unique concept. What it is, it's basically a pen that's built off of a magnet set. Is that the best way to put it? Yeah. It's hard to explain without going to look at it, but it's basically like the magnets build the barrel of the pen and you're able to use it as a stylus. You're able to use different pen refills in it based on the amount of magnets you buy. I hope I'm doing this justice. I haven't totally done all my research on it. Just looking at it for me personally, I have zero interest in this pen, but it looks pretty cool. You know, I'm not going to back this pen. I just don't think I would ever use it. What do you think, Mike? Yeah, it also looks cool. I mean, I'm watching the video now and he's doing a bunch of fun things and cool things of it, but I'm like, this is not at all what I want or need in a pen. Right. Okay, I'll just make a circle out of it. Okay, that's fine. This is an interesting project, but there's nothing about this. Nothing about this is the reason that I buy pens. Right. That's why I'm shocked at the money so far. Well, because if you think about it, that makes sense. Because all of the reasons that we buy pens are not any of the reasons that regular people buy pens. Yeah. To make nearly half a million dollars, it will make over half a million dollars. It could make a million dollars. That's what you would want, you would want something that is so out of the ordinary. I don't think this could work like this. I can't imagine it working very well. Like I'm looking at it, right? And these are tiny modular magnets. What happens if you like grip the pen too hard? Did they all like dislodge? Right. Do they adjust like side to side as you're writing? Is that what you mean? I feel like it would be moving around. Mm-hmm. Like the barrel would be contorting as I'm writing. Not a lot because obviously the pen refill runs through the middle of it. Right. But I just can't imagine it working, I don't know. I mean, watch the video as we speak and it looks like a lot of fun. But that's not, that's just, that's not what I do here. And I actually don't think it looks very good. Yeah. Have you ever heard of Bucky Balls? Yeah, I have some. So it's very similar to this. That's what reminds me of Bucky Balls, which are just like the magnet balls. It's like a desk toy where you can just build different shapes to the magnets. And then they ended up getting pulled off the market. Like the US government or whichever, I don't know, whichever business unit monitors this kind of stuff. Ended up pulling those off the market because they said that they were a danger to children. Even though they weren't marketed to children. I mean, I'm totally on Bucky Balls side of this thing. It's kind of ridiculous that they got, that they got yanked off the market. But this is the same kind of thing, you know, where those magnets are small enough and the theory is someone, you know, a kid puts those magnets in his mouth and those magnets stick on the insides of their bodies and do bad things. So that's all I can think about with this, with this thing is that it's like, it's very similar to Bucky Balls. And, you know, it's probably the same type of market that's buying this pen, right? Anyone who bought the Bucky Balls would be totally into this and the Bucky Balls blew up. I mean, they sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of those things. So it's pretty interesting. And I don't know what happened on this Kickstarter page, but it's already lost like $25,000 while I'm looking at it. I was just about to say that to you. It went from $4.21 to $3.95. So what has happened there? I have no clue. It's like an auto-refreshed. Yeah, it just did that for me. Oh man, that's so annoying. I wish I could, I wish I knew how many backers there were beforehand. I said it on the thing. So right now there's 71, 67, so we'll just have to listen back to see what I said previously. So the listeners know. Yeah, so I said how many backers there were just a minute ago. I was just about to say, I was like, hang on, that's changed. And I've gone down to 395,000 people. Did you, this is where you find out that I had $20,000 behind this thing? That would be awesome. That's so weird. Yes. So anyway, we'll keep watching this and I'm interested to see how high it goes, but it's not a pin for me, but all I can say is hopefully all the people buying this pin need a pin case. That's all I can say. How close? We'll talk about that at the end. All right. We'll save that, save that to the end. You will be surprised in a good way. I just did a search and you didn't show up. No, please, you would know if it was live. I am. Probably because I would be in the hospital with like a heart attack or something. From stress. But yeah, we'll talk about it at the end. We got a couple other quick topics that I want to get to and then we'll talk about the knock launch time. So why don't we get into our last sponsor and we'll knock out a couple other things and we'll call it a day. Sounds like fun to me. So I'm going to take a quick moment to thank Shatterstock.com, this is where you're going to find over 20 million stock photos, vectors, illustrations and video clips. Start searching at Shatterstock.com to find the perfect image for your website, add publication or any other creative project. Shatterstock.com gives you a global image collection to find images from across the world to suit your project. Choose between image packs and monthly subscription packages, whatever fits your needs you never have to compromise. If you need just one image for your blog or mock up, you can do that too. Every time you visit Shatterstock, you're going to find something new since they add 10,000 new images every single day. And it's more affordable than you think with no extra charge for large files. Just download any image in any size and pay only one price. They don't nickel and dime you for high resolution images at Shatterstock. If you need them, just take them. You can easily curate and share pictures via light boxes so you can choose your favorite pictures of videos and add them to your own light box gallery as you search. And they also have an iPad app if you want to do this too. They also have a huge library of vectors, icons, infographics, templates and video clips, not just images. Shoot you need any of those. And if you need help over at Shatterstock.com, you can get an account rep dedicated to you who can answer any questions. They also have 24-hour support during the week. Go sign up for a free browser count now by going to Shatterstock.com, no credit card needed. And when you find the images you like and decide to purchase, use the offer code PENDS9 and you're going to get 25% off any package. Thanks so much to Shatterstock for the support of the PEN Addict and all of 5x5s. Alright, so I went and searched logger on Shatterstock.com this time. So I don't know why this became a thing, but it's kind of fun to do. I was going to ask when you searched. Yeah, so I'm looking at all the loggers and it's pretty cool. I got 23,484 results for loggers. It's really cool. The resolution on these pictures is pretty amazing. If you're putting together anything, any kind of anything online, you know, related to, I don't know, not just beer. But gosh, any topic you can imagine has got so much stock imagery on here. It's amazing. Yep. And the vector images on the beer ones are really cool too. So it's got some neat stuff. I love that kind of artwork like our compatriot, Joy Raphael. What is he doing the logo a day? I don't know what he calls it, year of logos or something like that. I love just those tiny vector images. I don't know why that type of artwork fascinates me. Anywho, speaking of fascinating, I got a magical tweet. Earlier this week. And I say magical. It was forwarded to me by a follower Keith Ketover on Twitter at Keith Ketover. Sent me a tweet from David Blaine, the magician. You're familiar with David Blaine? Of course I am, yeah. I guess, yeah. I'm sure most people have heard of David Blaine. So David Blaine on Twitter, just puts out a tweet, it said favorite pen and put out a picture of it. And I was shocked. And you know, I probably wouldn't have received it if it was just some silly ballpoint. But he's got a secure, pig rib micron, the 005 size, which is the tiniest micron. And he's writing on an Ace of Spades, you know, I guess for, you know, one of his card tricks. And he's got a Einstein quote on there, reality is merely an illusion. And I thought that was pretty cool. I'm so strange to me. There's nothing about this tweet or image that is normal to me in any way. I agree. And that's all he says. I mean, it says, it says favorite pen. Boom. Here's the picture. Well, this dude is far from a normal gentleman, though, isn't he, really? Right. He's very, very strange. He's a very peculiar fellow. I actually find him hard to watch. I can't watch any of his magic stuff, but I mean, I understand who he is and what he does. But I can't watch him. It's a little much for me. But I thought that was a cool picture that if you didn't see it, I thought it would be worth including in the show. And it's just for y'all to check out because it's kind of interesting. I was very, very surprised at the pin choice. And that's cool because that's a great pen. But for him to take the time to put favorite pin out there, I thought that was pretty neat. We're, we're infiltrating Mike. I'm already lost in the next link. Okay. Well, let's get to it. I have many problems in my life. Purchasing problems, pins being the primary one. Probably my second biggest problem area for spending too much money and things that, of course, I need them, Mike, but, you know, maybe you don't necessarily need them, but is backpacks and bags. And my favorite paper designer, Mr. Chad Donne, combined with my favorite bag designer and topo designs to make a topo designs plus Donne paper mountain briefcase. So it's a collaboration between topo and Donne. Topo has a mountain briefcase design already. And you can buy it in different colors, but this, this one that they collaborated with Chad Donne on is very different than any of the other ones. And there was no way I was not ordering this. And I got it in yesterday. It came really quick. It just went for sale on the 23rd. I already got it in. I ordered it the 23rd and got it in. Got it in yesterday. It's spectacular. I'm in love with it already. I loaded it up last night. Got everything set up, how I wanted to. It holds everything I need. It's mostly using it for work. So it's got my work laptop and notebooks and pins and field notes and headphones and five-hour three drinks and all kinds of stuff in there. All the stuff that I normally carry for work fits in there easy. What's cool about what I love and so far about this is you can carry it three different ways. By the way, it's designed. It's made, it's got handles on the top like double handle so it can be carried briefcase style. It's got a shoulder strap so it can be carried over the shoulder like messenger style. And then it's got two tuck away backpack straps on the back side so it can be carried backpack style. It's pretty awesome. I love the versatility of it. I'm going to carry it probably briefcase style or backpack style. I've taken off the messenger bag strap for now. I'll probably carry it one of those two ways. I just love the look and feel. I was actually worried that my wife would give me a lot of grief about it. She stopped giving me grief about pins. She's finally on board with all the pins that I buy. She's like, "Oh, that's nice." And you know, ignores me. So I had this sitting in a chair last night and she goes, "Ooh, is that your new backpack?" She said, "That's really nice." And I said, "Huh?" What's happened here? Yeah, I was like, "Are you okay? What's wrong with you?" So she actually made a comment and it unsolicited. Like, I get it in and I just start using it. I don't even show her. I'm not even like, "Hey, look what I got." Because usually she'll be like, "Oh my gosh, another backpack, just what you need." But she actually made a comment. She's like, "Wow, that's really nice." You know, just unsolicited for me sitting in the chair. So yeah, I'm really happy with it. I'm looking forward to using it. It's going to be my primary everyday bag. And it's beautiful. It's just the right size for everything and it looks great. So job well done, Topo and Chaddo. It's a shame they don't ship to the UK. I say it's a shame. It's probably for the best. Yeah. I mean, I could always ship you one. Well, I'm thinking that, you know, I probably know a guy who's going to design backpacks of his own at some point. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Definitely. Definitely on the radar. And this is expensive. I mean, it's not a cheap bag. It's $170. But, you know, I think the regular, I don't have the Topo design up, but I think they're standard ones like around 140 or 150 anyway for the mountain briefcase. So in this end, the regular ones don't have the leather that this one has on it. And the other detailing that the collaboration has. So I was, it was, it's probably, that's probably the most I've ever paid for a bag or a backpack. Something like that. So anyway, it's pretty awesome. And for paying that much, I better use the heck out of it. And it looks like a, well, it's got everything I'm looking for in a bag or a backpack and it's going to be great. I'm excited about it. So speaking of bags, we have a launch date, mate. Okay. So you've been following along. All the readers have been following our, our, the creation of Knockco, our, the pin case that I'm working on with my friend, Jeffrey. And we've been spending, I don't know, the last couple of weeks, almost twiddling our thumbs just because it takes a long time for everything to get approved. Like our work is done as far as getting everything made and set and pictures taken and descriptions written and everything. So to get ready for this Kickstarter launch and, you know, we have to wait for Kickstarter to approve and banks to approve and everything to get all synced up. So every, everything's on the same page and everything's ready to go for launch date. And I submitted the final Kickstarter project last Sunday for approval. They came back, I think on Tuesday, came back on Tuesday, said, hey, we need to see some additional things in the, in the project. So I finished that up last night, resubmitted, and we got the approval today. So we are officially approved by Kickstarter. So now what that means is we are ready to launch when we are ready. And Jeff and I are more than ready. So even though we got the, we got it today, we got approved. So this is a go. It's going to be a Kickstarter campaign. It's not live today. It's not going to be live tomorrow. We don't want to, we don't want to go on a Friday. No. I think that's a bad idea. So we're going to go on a Monday. We're going to turn it up. We're going to turn it up Monday. Oh my God. I excited. Yeah. I'm excited too. I'm nervous. Yeah. I don't know if I'm, I don't know which I'm more of, more, more nervous or more excited. I'm pretty excited. I think I'm more excited than I am nervous. So we're going to go live Monday. I don't have an exact time yet. We're still sorting out that details. But it'll be, you know, morning East Coast time before launch East Coast time. So that's, that's kind of the plan right now. And we'll have more details over the weekend and we'll send out, we'll send out a mail with the, the final link and everything for everyone who signed up to be notified when the project launches, but yeah, it looks like Mondays ago. So I wonder what we'll talk about on Tuesday. Yeah. I don't know. It might not be that because I might be like passed out, fainted, like, you know, when we haven't sold any. I hope and I really hope that we come to Tuesday show and you've been funded. I hope so too. I hope so too. We'll see. There's a shot where our, our goal is, I think, very achievable. Okay. So I hope so. But yeah, that's the big news. We're, we're finally ready. Everyone's been patient and, you know, some things are out of our, out of our control. And we finally got everything. All the eyes dotted in the T's crossed and now it's in our hands to push the button to make it live. So we're going to do that on Monday. So keep an eye out. How long is the campaign? 30 days. Okay. Wow. Yep. I believe it feels like only like days ago that you guys started working on this. Despite how slow the last couple of weeks have been, in general, it's gone by exceptionally fast. And that's, you know, all credit to, to Jeffrey for getting, you know, all these samples made. I mean, we went through so many tiers of prototypes to get the final ones made. And, you know, he's been working his butt off to get all this stuff done and, and getting it all organized and, you know, and, and us working together to get all the kickstarter and all the backend stuff that you got to get done to at the same time. So we're finally ready for it to launch and it has gone in the grand scheme of things. It's gone by super fast. I mean, we've, we've not to pat ourselves on the back, but we've, I think we've done a good job at getting, going from point A to launch date in a pretty, pretty straight line. So, and, um, hopefully it, uh, hopefully it becomes successful. Um, we're, we're counting on it. And, you know, I think this is going to be a good thing. And, you know, hopefully it'll go well. And then the future will be so bright. You will have to wear shades. Okay. Now listeners, now he won't say this to you, but I will. So this is, this is what you need to do. On Monday, well, first off, make sure you're following @knockco on Twitter. N-O-C-K-C-O, or Brad @doudysm-D-O-W-D-Y-I-S-M. Make sure you're following him. On Monday, all of you have but one job. You watch Twitter for the announcement. Actually, I'm going to give you two jobs. Three jobs, I'm just giving them three. Yeah, three jobs. You have but three jobs. You watch Twitter for the announcement. This is where you will go. You will follow those two accounts and you will watch. As soon as Brad says that the, the page is live, you go and you back. And you back as much money as you can. And then you share it with your friends and you will make me proud. Oh, I appreciate you saying that. And you're, you're right. I wouldn't say that. Because you know how I am. I know our listeners and our listeners to this show, they love you. They also love fine products. And I want to come on to this show on Tuesday and you have met your goal. And the people that should be able to help you do that at least at the listeners to this show first. So I think that the listeners to this show should show how much of a genetic they are and make sure that they back before the show on Tuesday. Remember, you still then have 30 days to pay or whatever. No money leaves your account until the funding date back. And then we can come on to the show on Tuesday. And the only can we talk about the process of it and how the launch has gone. But we can also talk about the future of not go because they will know that it's safe. So make that happen. Is this show and you will make me and Brad very, very happy. Well, I appreciate you saying that. Thank you. Thank you. And I think we'll have, you know, there's several different product products we're launching with. So hopefully people will enjoy them. People think they're good looking and functional and see something that's a good fit for their ever-growing pen and paper collection. And yeah, we look forward to for a good launch next week. So we're excited. And with that, I am I Mike. I am YKE. I will, of course, be tweeting about Brad's Kickstarter project. But, you know, follow him @dowdeism on Twitter. And you will see everything that you need to see. And thank you so much for listening to this week's episode of the show. If you want to go and get the show notes for this week, go to 5by5.tv/penadic/73. Until next week, Brad, are we done? We are done, sir. Good luck. Thank you. Godspeed. And we'll be back next week. Thanks so much. All right. Bye-bye. All right, bye-bye.
