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[personal profile] terriko
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.


Back to school! As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve decided to use September as my “new year” because it works well with my kid’s school stuff. So it’s time to bid farewell to last year’s calendar, and set up a fresh one! I’m moving from the Traveler’s Notebook free monthly calendar to the KOKUYO Campus one, mostly because the latter is a bit bigger. (Spoiler: the squares are about 18% bigger.)





Last year’s calendar was a Traveler’s Notebook blank monthly calendar. I love the idea of the system of inexpensive refill notebooks and accessories in a planner cover that stays with you, but I wasn’t sure the slimmer form factor was going to work for me.





Traveler's Notebook blank monthly calendar with stickers on the front and a zippered pouch attached to the back cover.  The biggest sticker is a shiny aurora over a mountain.  On the upper left there is a smaller sticker of a fox-person sitting in lotus position with the caption "breathe" and in the upper right corner there is a sticker with a cat sleeping beside a witch had with the caption "today is a good day for getting cozy"
Traveler’s Notebook blank monthly calendar with stickers on the front and a zippered pouch attached to the back cover. The biggest sticker is a shiny aurora over a mountain. On the upper left there is a smaller sticker of a fox-person sitting in lotus position with the caption “breathe” and in the upper right corner there is a sticker with a cat sleeping beside a witch had with the caption “today is a good day for getting cozy”




Overall, I thought it was a great little calendar. I liked the textured cardstock cover, and I liked the whole setup even more when I picked up the zippered pouch that I have attached to the back cover and use for stickers.









Traveler's notebook with plastic zipper pouch accessory attached to the back.  In this photo it's flipped open so you can see the sticker sheets I have stuck in there.
Traveler’s notebook calendar with plastic zipper pouch accessory attached to the back. In this photo it’s flipped open so you can see the sticker sheets I have stuck in there.




I particularly liked this format when travelling this summer, when I decided to use the blank back pages I hadn’t used for testing pens as the place for travel journal entries rather than dragging my regular A5 journal around with me. The tall-thin format is pleasantly easy to pull out of a bag.





Traveler's notebook calendar with zippered pouch accessory attached to back cover.  This shows the loose stickers I have in the pouch.
Traveler’s notebook calendar with zippered pouch accessory attached to back cover. This shows the loose stickers I have in the pouch.




But when I’m *not* out of the house (which is most of the time) the calendar is just a little small. I use my monthly calendars for tracking a bunch of things, and while some days there’s enough space, that’s not true of all days when I have more stuff I want to record. I’ve also found that a lot of my favourite “small” stickers that I use as habit trackers take up a lot of space. (The dogs below were marking days that I’d spent time writing.)





A peek inside my calendar showing fairly full calendar squares including some tracking runes, dog stickers, washi tape (marking longer events)  and a note marking my last day at Intel.
A peek inside my calendar showing fairly full calendar squares including some tracking runes, dog stickers, washi tape (marking longer events) and a note marking my last day at Intel.




Since I already use an A5 notebook for my journal, I decided I might as well match it for the calendar this year. Honestly I wanted to do that last year but a lot of the A5 options are Monday start and I thought that might be annoying when Sunday start is the more common format around here. The Traveler’s refill lets you fill in your own days of week. But this year I’m just gonna lean into Monday start. I conceptually like it better so I’ve changed my phone and stuff and we’ll see if I start having off-by-one errors.





So my new calendar for the 2025-2026 school year is a KOKUYO Campus Diary Free Schedule monthly calendar. I should note that although this is a blank calendar, the year overview pages are Jan-Dec still so … I dunno, I guess I could cover the labels or just start in the middle, but I apparently barely used those overview pages last year so I’m guessing it’ll just remain blank or I’ll doodle on it or something. While the book itself is clearly bigger, the layout is such that each day’s square is a bit shorter but wider.





Here’s some size comparisons:





The KOKUYO Campus blank monthly calendar with the Traveler's Notebook blank monthly calendar sitting on top.  The Campus notebook is noticably wider and the squares are bigger, altough not as much as they might be since the Campus design leaves some blank space around the edge and the Traveler's does not.
The KOKUYO Campus blank monthly calendar with the Traveler’s Notebook blank monthly calendar sitting on top. The Campus notebook is noticeably wider and the squares are bigger, although not as much as they might be since the Campus design leaves some blank space around the edge and the Traveler’s does not.




I did some measuring too:





Measurements comparing the squares in the Campus blank monthly calendar to the Traveler's one.  Numbers in post below this image.
Measurements comparing the squares in the Campus blank monthly calendar to the Traveler’s one. Numbers in post below this image.





  • Traveler’s Calendar: 27mm wide by 33mm tall (total 891mm squared)




  • Campus calendar: 34mm wide by 31mm tall (total 1054mm squared)





So the Campus notebook squares are about 18% bigger, I guess. I don’t know yet if that’ll be enough, but I’m unlikely to start carrying around anything bigger than an A5 notebook so if this doesn’t work out I’ll likely have switch to a weekly planner for at least some of my tracking. My calendar seldom leaves the house but I carry it from room to room and into the backyard in my knitting bag, and A5 is my preferred size for that.





The Campus notebook is cheap enough that it won’t be a tragedy if I bail on it part way through the year. It looks like I paid $5.50 for the Campus one and $11 for the Traveler’s one, so it’s half the cost but also neither of them is exactly going to break the bank. And yes, I did intentionally buy this earlier in the year to help me resist getting too curious about fall planner launches.





The cover is considerably less nice (thin enough that I will need a flat surface or pencil board to write in this, no pleasant texture) but I have a cover for A5 notebooks that should compensate for the thin cover, and I already own several pencil boards that I use with my current journal, so neither of those is deal breakers at this moment.





Campus Monthly free Diary cover. It's grey and has a picture of some calendar squares on it.
Campus Monthly free Diary cover. It’s grey and has a picture of some calendar squares on it.




I’m also curious to see how I like the Campus paper. It’s supposedly decent enough for fountain pens, and although I only use those for date numbers currently, I’ll be using the pages in the back of the calendar for ink testing. I’m curious to see how I like it, mostly for the fun of testing a different paper. Although they do have a lot of other cute paper products geared at students that are quite reasonably priced, and I’m never sad to have options.





Some things that did work well this year:






  • Thin washi tape for marking longer blocks of vacation and events. I love the way it looks even if it takes up a few precious mm of space.




  • Sticker “rewards” for habits. I’m amused by how much more rewarding these are than drawing tracking icons.




  • Switching to pencil for calendar writing. I tried pen for a while but didn’t love it.




  • Getting a pen shaped eraser so it fits in my pencil case better.




  • Getting a pencil board and using it also as a bookmark so my calendar always opened to the right page.




  • The zipper pouch for stickers.





I may keep the zipper pouch for stickers even though it won’t be stuck on a notebook any more (I mean, I could, but I’m going to try having both A5 notebooks in a single cover so it would be kind of in the way).





I haven’t actually written in the new calendar yet (I’ll be setting it up on labour day and I’m writing this the night before it posts) but I’m excited to try it out!

Code deploy happening shortly

Aug. 31st, 2025 07:37 pm
mark: A photo of Mark kneeling on top of the Taal Volcano in the Philippines. It was a long hike. (Default)
[staff profile] mark posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance

Per the [site community profile] dw_news post regarding the MS/TN blocks, we are doing a small code push shortly in order to get the code live. As per usual, please let us know if you see anything wonky.

There is some code cleanup we've been doing that is going out with this push but I don't think there is any new/reworked functionality, so it should be pretty invisible if all goes well.

denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)
[staff profile] denise posting in [site community profile] dw_news

A reminder to everyone that starting tomorrow, we are being forced to block access to any IP address that geolocates to the state of Mississippi for legal reasons while we and Netchoice continue fighting the law in court. People whose IP addresses geolocate to Mississippi will only be able to access a page that explains the issue and lets them know that we'll be back to offer them service as soon as the legal risk to us is less existential.

The block page will include the apology but I'll repeat it here: we don't do geolocation ourselves, so we're limited to the geolocation ability of our network provider. Our anti-spam geolocation blocks have shown us that their geolocation database has a number of mistakes in it. If one of your friends who doesn't live in Mississippi gets the block message, there is nothing we can do on our end to adjust the block, because we don't control it. The only way to fix a mistaken block is to change your IP address to one that doesn't register as being in Mississippi, either by disconnecting your internet connection and reconnecting it (if you don't have a static IP address) or using a VPN.

In related news, the judge in our challenge to Tennessee's social media age verification, parental consent, and parental surveillance law (which we are also part of the fight against!) ruled last month that we had not met the threshold for a temporary injunction preventing the state from enforcing the law while the court case proceeds.

The Tennesee law is less onerous than the Mississippi law and the fines for violating it are slightly less ruinous (slightly), but it's still a risk to us. While the fight goes on, we've decided to prevent any new account signups from anyone under 18 in Tennessee to protect ourselves against risk. We do not need to block access from the whole state: this only applies to new account creation.

Because we don't do any geolocation on our users and our network provider's geolocation services only apply to blocking access to the site entirely, the way we're implementing this is a new mandatory question on the account creation form asking if you live in Tennessee. If you do, you'll be unable to register an account if you're under 18, not just the under 13 restriction mandated by COPPA. Like the restrictions on the state of Mississippi, we absolutely hate having to do this, we're sorry, and we hope we'll be able to undo it as soon as possible.

Finally, I'd like to thank every one of you who's commented with a message of support for this fight or who's bought paid time to help keep us running. The fact we're entirely user-supported and you all genuinely understand why this fight is so important for everyone is a huge part of why we can continue to do this work. I've also sent a lot of your comments to the lawyers who are fighting the actual battles in court, and they find your wholehearted support just as encouraging and motivating as I do. Thank you all once again for being the best users any social media site could ever hope for. You make me proud and even more determined to yell at state attorneys general on your behalf.

france travelogue II: traveling

Aug. 30th, 2025 10:15 am
jazzfish: Jazz Fish: beret, sunglasses, saxophone (Default)
[personal profile] jazzfish
versailles, driving, prehistoric art )

Next: Gorges du Tarn, the Camargue, Marseille.

i accidentally a sonnet

Aug. 30th, 2025 07:53 am
jazzfish: artist painting a bird, looking at an egg for reference (Clairvoyance)
[personal profile] jazzfish
COMMENTER 1: I'll predict that when he's dead and buried, the ground will be quite damp.
COMMENTER 2: And have a certain Musk also, too? One can but hope.

Look, if you're gonna leave me an opening iambic pentameter line the morning after I've been rereading Mike Ford, I'm gonna take it.

Well, I'll predict that when he's dead and buried,
The ground above his corpse will be quite damp
And have a certain Musk of odor, carried
To grace our noses with that acrid stamp.
Upon gold highlights golden showers splash,
Reflecting further graveyard elegies.
Veneer peels back; someone has saved some cash
With accents from Home Depot shopping sprees.
His plastic headstone rapidly decays,
Collapsing into softened earth, until,
Weaken'd by overzealous acid sprays,
It's indistinguishable from landfill.
    So shall that asshole lie; then we'll begin
    To scrub the mess he's left our country in.

Not bad for under an hour's work.

snuffle / salsa / chacha

Aug. 29th, 2025 12:02 pm
graydon2: (Default)
[personal profile] graydon2
This is a small note about a delightful function. Not cryptography advice or serious commentary. Just amusement.

A couple years back I had occasion to read in slightly more detail than I had before about the state of the art in cryptographically secure PRNGs (CSPRNGs). These are PRNGs we trust to have additional properties beyond the speed and randomness requirements of normal ones -- inability for an attacker to reveal internal state, mainly, so you can use them to generate secrets.

If you look, you'll find a lot of people recommending something based on one of Dan Bernstein's algorithms: Salsa20 or ChaCha (or even more obscurely "Snuffle"). All the algorithms we're discussing here are very similar in design, and vary only in minor details of interest only to cryptographers.

If you follow that link though, you'll notice it's a description of a (symmetric) stream cipher. Not a CSPRNG at all!

But that's ok! Because it turns out that people have long known an interesting trick -- actually more of a construction device? -- which is that a CSPRNG "is" a stream cipher. Or rather, if you hold it the other way, you might even say a stream cipher "is" just a CSPRNG. Many stream ciphers are built by deriving an unpredictable "key stream" off the key material and then just XOR'ing it with the plaintext. So long as the "key stream" is unpredictable / has unrecoverable state, this is sufficient; but it's the same condition we want out of the stream of numbers coming out of a CSPRNG, just with "seed" standing in for "key". They're fundamentally the same object.

I knew all this before, so people naming a CSPRNG and a stream cipher the same did not come as any surprise to me. But I went and looked a little further into ChaCha in particular (and its ancestor Salsa and, earlier still, Snuffle) because they have one additional cool and weird property.

They are seekable.

This means that you can, with O(1) effort, "reposition" the Snuffle/Salsa/ChaCha "key stream" / CSPRNG number stream to anywhere in its future. You want the pseudorandom bytes for block 20,000,000? No problem, just "set the position" to 20,000,000 and it will output those bytes. This is not how all CSPRNGs or stream ciphers work. But some do. ChaCha does! Which is very nice. It makes it useful for all sorts of stuff, especially things like partially decrypting randomly-read single blocks in the middle of large files.

I got to wondering about this, so I went back and read through design docs on it, and I discovered something surprising (to me): it's not just a floor wax and dessert topping CSPRNG and stream cipher. ChaCha is also a cryptographic hash function (CHF)! Because a CHF is also something you can build a CSPRNG out of, and therefore also build a stream cipher out of. They're all the same object.

How does the construction work? Embarassingly easily. You put the key material and a counter (and enough fixed nonzero bits to make the CHF happy) in an array and hash it. That's it. The hash output is your block of data. For the next block, you increment the counter and hash again. Want block 20,000,000? Set the counter to 20,000,000. The CHF's one-way-function-ness implies the non-recoverability of the key material and its mixing properties ensure that bumping the counter is enough to flip lots of bits. The end.

Amazing!

But then I got curious and dug a bit into the origins of ChaCha and .. stumbled on something hilarious. In the earliest design doc I could find (Salsa20 Design which still refers to it as "Snuffle 2005") the introduction starts with this:

Fifteen years ago, the United States government was trying to stop publication
of new cryptographic ideas—but it had made an exception for cryptographic
hash functions, such as Ralph Merkle’s new Snefru.

This struck me as silly. I introduced Snuffle to point out that one can easily
use a strong cryptographic hash function to efficiently encrypt data.
Snuffle 2005, formally designated the “Salsa20 encryption function,” is the
latest expression of my thoughts along these lines. It uses a strong cryptographic
hash function, namely the “Salsa20 hash function,” to efficiently encrypt data.

This approach raises two obvious questions. First, why did I choose this
particular hash function? Second, now that the United States government seems
to have abandoned its asinine policies, why am I continuing to use a hash function
to encrypt data?


In other words: the cool seekability wasn't a design goal. Shuffle/Salsa/ChaCha was intended as a tangible demonstration of a political argument that it's stupid to regulate one of the 3 objects (CHF, CSPRNG and stream cipher) since you can build them all out of the CHF. (And, I guess, "obviously you should be allowed to export CHFs" though I wouldn't bet on anything being obvious to the people who make such decisions).

And then I googled more and realized that when I was a teenager I had completely missed all the drama / failed to connect the dots. Snuffle was the subject of Bernstein v. United States, the case that overturned US export restrictions on cryptography altogether! And as this page points out "the subject of the case, Snuffle, was itself an attempt to bypass the regulations".

Anyway, I thought this was both wonderful and funny: both the CHF-to-CSPRNG construction (which I'd never understood/seen before), but also the fact that Snuffle/Salsa/ChaCha is like the ultimate case of winning big in cryptography. Not only does ChaCha now transport like 99%[EDIT "double-digit percentages"] of the world's internet traffic (it's become the standard we all use because it's fast and secure) but that it was pivotal in the evolution of the legal landscape and all arises from a sort of neener-neener assessment that the law at the time was internally inconsistent / contained a loophole for CHFs that made the whole thing "asinine".

home from the sea

Aug. 28th, 2025 09:24 am
jazzfish: an open bottle of ether, and George conked out (Ether George)
[personal profile] jazzfish
Got in last night around quarter of ten, to a very affectionate cat. He's currently curled up on the heating-pad mat next to the laptop, where he's been for most of the last couple of hours. I think he may have missed me.

This is admittedly the most jetlag I've ever tried to recover from, but I am just not getting it. Been crashing out early and waking up after five or sometimes six hours' sleep. I made it home last night due to copious applications of caffeine and sugar, and still woke up at four AM. Hopefully being Actually Home will suffice to reset my system.

In Pattern Recognition, William Gibson talks about jetlag as a result of traveling faster than humans were meant to travel, so your soul needs time to catch back up to your body. As a description of the sensation it's about right.

Today: shower, unpack, get groceries (ordered, just need to pick up once ready), therapy, farmers market. Probably watch the last two episodes of season 3 of Slow Horses, since I watched S1 on the plane to Paris, S2 on the plane from Paris, and the first four of S3 on the plane from Mpls. Possibly rave about how great that show is. Ideally write up the next stage of the travelogue, but I'm not pushing it.

Meant to link these yesterday but forgot, so, have some Wendy Cope:
Onward.

france travelogue I: Paris

Aug. 27th, 2025 04:26 pm
jazzfish: Jazz Fish: beret, sunglasses, saxophone (Default)
[personal profile] jazzfish
intro; catacombs, louvre, sainte-chappelle, shakes & co )

Next time: Versailles, an awful lot of driving, Cap Blanc and Lascaux.

back, ish

Aug. 26th, 2025 10:07 am
jazzfish: an open bottle of ether, and George conked out (Ether George)
[personal profile] jazzfish
I am back from France, mostly. Returned to Minneapolis Sunday, returning to Vancouver tomorrow. I remain mostly, though not entirely, exhausted and Wrung Out.

It was a complicated trip and I can't sum it up as "good" or "not good". Some of it was very good, some of it was less good, nearly all of it was stressful in different ways. On the whole I'm glad I went.

Extended travelogue later. Catching up on two weeks of internet now.
denise: Image: Me, facing away from camera, on top of the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome (Default)
[staff profile] denise posting in [site community profile] dw_news

I'll start with the tl;dr summary to make sure everyone sees it and then explain further: As of September 1, we will temporarily be forced to block access to Dreamwidth from all IP addresses that geolocate to Mississippi for legal reasons. This block will need to continue until we either win the legal case entirely, or the district court issues another injunction preventing Mississippi from enforcing their social media age verification and parental consent law against us.

Mississippi residents, we are so, so sorry. We really don't want to do this, but the legal fight we and Netchoice have been fighting for you had a temporary setback last week. We genuinely and honestly believe that we're going to win it in the end, but the Fifth Circuit appellate court said that the district judge was wrong to issue the preliminary injunction back in June that would have maintained the status quo and prevented the state from enforcing the law requiring any social media website (which is very broadly defined, and which we definitely qualify as) to deanonymize and age-verify all users and obtain parental permission from the parent of anyone under 18 who wants to open an account.

Netchoice took that appellate ruling up to the Supreme Court, who declined to overrule the Fifth Circuit with no explanation -- except for Justice Kavanaugh agreeing that we are likely to win the fight in the end, but saying that it's no big deal to let the state enforce the law in the meantime.

Needless to say, it's a big deal to let the state enforce the law in the meantime. The Mississippi law is a breathtaking state overreach: it forces us to verify the identity and age of every person who accesses Dreamwidth from the state of Mississippi and determine who's under the age of 18 by collecting identity documents, to save that highly personal and sensitive information, and then to obtain a permission slip from those users' parents to allow them to finish creating an account. It also forces us to change our moderation policies and stop anyone under 18 from accessing a wide variety of legal and beneficial speech because the state of Mississippi doesn't like it -- which, given the way Dreamwidth works, would mean blocking people from talking about those things at all. (And if you think you know exactly what kind of content the state of Mississippi doesn't like, you're absolutely right.)

Needless to say, we don't want to do that, either. Even if we wanted to, though, we can't: the resources it would take for us to build the systems that would let us do it are well beyond our capacity. You can read the sworn declaration I provided to the court for some examples of how unworkable these requirements are in practice. (That isn't even everything! The lawyers gave me a page limit!)

Unfortunately, the penalties for failing to comply with the Mississippi law are incredibly steep: fines of $10,000 per user from Mississippi who we don't have identity documents verifying age for, per incident -- which means every time someone from Mississippi loaded Dreamwidth, we'd potentially owe Mississippi $10,000. Even a single $10,000 fine would be rough for us, but the per-user, per-incident nature of the actual fine structure is an existential threat. And because we're part of the organization suing Mississippi over it, and were explicitly named in the now-overturned preliminary injunction, we think the risk of the state deciding to engage in retaliatory prosecution while the full legal challenge continues to work its way through the courts is a lot higher than we're comfortable with. Mississippi has been itching to issue those fines for a while, and while normally we wouldn't worry much because we're a small and obscure site, the fact that we've been yelling at them in court about the law being unconstitutional means the chance of them lumping us in with the big social media giants and trying to fine us is just too high for us to want to risk it. (The excellent lawyers we've been working with are Netchoice's lawyers, not ours!)

All of this means we've made the extremely painful decision that our only possible option for the time being is to block Mississippi IP addresses from accessing Dreamwidth, until we win the case. (And I repeat: I am absolutely incredibly confident we'll win the case. And apparently Justice Kavanaugh agrees!) I repeat: I am so, so sorry. This is the last thing we wanted to do, and I've been fighting my ass off for the last three years to prevent it. But, as everyone who follows the legal system knows, the Fifth Circuit is gonna do what it's gonna do, whether or not what they want to do has any relationship to the actual law.

We don't collect geolocation information ourselves, and we have no idea which of our users are residents of Mississippi. (We also don't want to know that, unless you choose to tell us.) Because of that, and because access to highly accurate geolocation databases is extremely expensive, our only option is to use our network provider's geolocation-based blocking to prevent connections from IP addresses they identify as being from Mississippi from even reaching Dreamwidth in the first place. I have no idea how accurate their geolocation is, and it's possible that some people not in Mississippi might also be affected by this block. (The inaccuracy of geolocation is only, like, the 27th most important reason on the list of "why this law is practically impossible for any site to comply with, much less a tiny site like us".)

If your IP address is identified as coming from Mississippi, beginning on September 1, you'll see a shorter, simpler version of this message and be unable to proceed to the site itself. If you would otherwise be affected, but you have a VPN or proxy service that masks your IP address and changes where your connection appears to come from, you won't get the block message, and you can keep using Dreamwidth the way you usually would.

On a completely unrelated note while I have you all here, have I mentioned lately that I really like ProtonVPN's service, privacy practices, and pricing? They also have a free tier available that, although limited to one device, has no ads or data caps and doesn't log your activity, unlike most of the free VPN services out there. VPNs are an excellent privacy and security tool that every user of the internet should be familiar with! We aren't affiliated with Proton and we don't get any kickbacks if you sign up with them, but I'm a satisfied customer and I wanted to take this chance to let you know that.

Again, we're so incredibly sorry to have to make this announcement, and I personally promise you that I will continue to fight this law, and all of the others like it that various states are passing, with every inch of the New Jersey-bred stubborn fightiness you've come to know and love over the last 16 years. The instant we think it's less legally risky for us to allow connections from Mississippi IP addresses, we'll undo the block and let you know.

terriko: (Default)
[personal profile] terriko
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 mentioned back in June that shimmer inks had been giving me trouble. But I’ve found a new solution! the Pelikan Twist.





I own a few of the cheaper pens that people said worked for them, and the one that had been giving me the least trouble had been the TWSBI Swipe. But even “least trouble” meant that I could use the pen, but it felt like it was getting a shimmer particle stuck somewhere on the regular, so I’d have skipping and low ink flow and the whole thing felt scratchy and annoying to use. You can kind of see it in my journal writing:





A sample of writing using my TWSBI Swipe and Diamine Wishing Tree ink. There are noticeable dents in teh paper where the pen was giving me trouble.
A sample of writing using my TWSBI Swipe and Diamine Wishing Tree ink. There are noticeable dents in the paper where the pen was giving me trouble.




Note that this ink *is* shimmery but I couldn’t get an angle of light that showed the paper dents and the shimmer at the same time so you’re not seeing much of it in these writing samples. This is on white Clairfontaine paper in my current journal.





Someone on mastodon (sorry, I forget who but it might have been [profile] paradoxmo?) mentioned that they liked Pelikan for shimmer inks, but the ones they used were pretty pricey. But I had a Pelikan Twist I’d bought ages ago. So I wanted to know would the feed take shimmer as well as their more expensive pens? I can’t answer that because I don’t have any of those, but I can tell you that it’s worlds better than the TWSBI Swipe, or any of the other pens I’d gotten in search of the One True Shimmer Pen for my collection.





Sample of handwriting using Diamine Wishing Tree Ink. The first two lines were done using my TWSBI Swipe fountain pen and have missing sections and dents where the pen wasn't working correctly. The bottom two lines writen with the Pelikan Twist pen are ver smooth in contrast and show no skipping or dents.
Sample of handwriting using Diamine Wishing Tree Ink. The first two lines were done using my TWSBI Swipe fountain pen and have missing sections and dents where the pen wasn’t working correctly. The bottom two lines writen with the Pelikan Twist pen are ver smooth in contrast and show no skipping or dents.




I don’t know if the photos convey how different the writing experience is between these two pens. The TWSBI Swipe feels most often like I’m writing with a mechanical pencil: lots of feedback, very scratchy. It also tends to get finicky about angles. It’s not consistent: I think it’s happening when a particle gets stuck somewhere, so it’ll write fine for a word and then just choke. But basically it works beautifully for a day or two and then it feels like it’s running out of ink half the time.





The Pelikan Twist on the other hand, writes like, well, a fountain pen, even with the same shimmer ink. It’s smooth and the ink flows consistently. I can leave the pen for a few days without having to run the nib under the tap to get it going again. It is everything I wanted out of the writing experience but had never been able to achieve when using shimmer inks in any pen.





Pelikan Twist pen in red. It's a pen shaped like a long trianglular "tube" with a gentle twist so the ends are offset by about 1/3.
Pelikan Twist pen in red. It’s a pen shaped like a long trianglular “tube” with a gentle twist so the ends are offset by about 1/3.




I’m really pleased, but also confused: lots of people love the TWSBI pens for shimmer, and I have 3 of them all of which eventually did the same half-clog thing. None of my other pens fared better, including the Wing Sung 698 I’d bought especially for this purpose. (To be fair, that one had other problems so I may have just gotten a bad one.) I still don’t know if I’m doing something wrong or if I’m just significantly more picky about my writing experience. The former is entirely possible, the latter seems unlikely given how fountain pen users are. I am rolling the pen periodically to keep the shimmer moving as I write, and making sure the ink bottle is shaken so the shimmer is suspended in the ink before I fill the pen.





For all that I now love it, the Pelikan Twist is a weird pen. I think it cost me about $20 and only came in medium (which is fine, I like medium). I had some trouble finding a converter that actually fit it. The internet said it should fit a standard international converter but nothing I had on hand worked; thankfully the fine folk at Jetpens have more precise recommendations so I picked up something from them and it’s great. (I could also hae refilled the cartridge that came with it, but I like converters better.) I will say that the plastic on my Twist is already kind of dinged up (if you look closely in the photos you can see some grey areas), probably from when I carried my pens around in a pencil case that didn’t keep them separated.





Pelikan Twist pen in red with teh cap off to show the triangular grip section, which continues in line with the twisted pen body.
Pelikan Twist pen in red with teh cap off to show the triangular grip section, which continues in line with the twisted pen body.




Unfortunately, the reason this pen never made it into regular rotation when I bought it to try many months ago (because it looked weird and was on sale) is that I don’t love the feel of the triangle grip. It’s not unbearable, just slightly off from what I find most comfortable. This got it most often relegated to “to do list pen” for months while I used up the cartridge, then got it forgotten in the pen cup until my shimmer problems made me pull it out.





But even *with* a grip that doesn’t perfectly suit me, it’s worlds better with shimmer ink than any other pen I own, and I’m really happy because this means the Diamine Inkvent inks I’d been struggling to use now have a dedicated pen and will be coming out significantly more often than they would have if I’d had to use a dip pen with them.





Another sample of writing with the Pelikan Twist fountain pen using Diamine Wishing Tree ink. Again, the writing is smooth and shows no misbehaviour from the pen. there's also a sticker with a strawberry macaroon shaped like a sea turtle on the same page.
Another sample of writing with the Pelikan Twist fountain pen using Diamine Wishing Tree ink. Again, the writing is smooth and shows no misbehaviour from the pen. there’s also a sticker with a strawberry macaroon shaped like a sea turtle on the same page.




I should note that it’s not *all* shimmer inks that give me these headaches. I’ve been having a delightful time with the KWZ All That Glitters inks in pretty much any pen I try. But my ink collection is very small so it’s pretty dominated by last year’s Inkvent calendar at the moment. Still, the problem was bad enough that I’d been refusing to buy other shimmer inks and had taken the Diamine inkvent 2025 calendar off my plans for this year because I didn’t want to pile up more inks I could barely use.





Anyhow, I’m very happy with discovering that even this cheap Pelikan pen has a feed that takes shimmer better than anything else I own! But I will admit that it made me go look at other Pelikan pens and of course I feel in love with one that’s considerably more expensive and limited edition to boot. I can’t really *blame* companies for making money and no one manufactures exactly the same thing forever, but this hobby can be a bit much with the special editions to keep you buying. Ugh!

May 2017

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