y’ain’t y’haw’d

to folks who might not know, moleskine is extremely famous AND infamous. they are hardcover notebooks with elastic enclosures. they are expensive, and sold everywhere from pharmacies to bookstores, and does collaborations with a variety of brands including james bond and pokemon. moleskine has tried to establish itself as a luxury notebook, which it technically is.

as long as you do not write in it.

moleskine paper is wholeheartedly shit. it is complete fucking garbage. you might wonder, what makes good paper? well the first thing is how well it can be written on. good paper can handle ink well. good ink handling means clear, solid lines without any feathering (fuzzy spreading), not bleeding through the page, and not ghosting. basically, you want paper that can do crisp lines with a variety of different inks and be used on both sides.

moleskine does not do that. anything more than a ballpoint or pencil will look fuzzy and gross and bleed right through the fucking page. the paper is shit. and that makes people think their pen is shit. and ballpoint pens can be seen on the other side of the page.

common knowledge is that fountain pens, rollerball pens, gel pens, felt pens, and more work better on good paper. good meaning good with ink. but when many people think good paper without knowing any better, they will reach for a moleskine notebook. because moleskine is expensive and advertises itself as good and is widely available. so people try out actually good writing implements on this shit paper, see how bad it works, and then blame the pen.

fountain pens, gel pens, and rollerball require much less pressure than ballpoint pens. they are ergonomic. easier on joints, easier for chronic pain. and moleskine makes people give up on them. nobody wants shitty bleeding feathered lines.

in the united states, our ideas of good paper and good stationery in general are extremely warped. so much of this is because paper here fucking sucks. a lot of paper performs like moleskine. there is shit paper at all price ranges. but you can pick up caliber brand paper (the ones that say made in vietnam) from cvs and have infinitely better performance for pennies. even though it looks low quality, caliber paper (vietnam) can even handle calligraphy ink clearly. bad paper makes people hate good pens and bad pens make people hate writing.

another thing really important to mention, a lot of people think thick paper is always better. this is extremely wrong. in terms of being able to handle a wide variety of inks clearly and cleanly, some of the best paper in the world is tissue thin (tomoe river).

God Moleskine is such a frustrating product, and as an aspiring stationer, I hate that it's so popular in North America. They're beautifully constructed, yes, but god the 70gsm paper that they use is SUCH GARBAGE when it comes to inks wetter than a ballpoint pen. They do offer heavier paper - 100-200gsm weight - but only in extremely expensive, large, or difficult to find products.

Leuchtturm 1917 produces great sketching books and, if you get their 120gsm notebooks, they hold up to inks fantastically. Their standard notebooks come in 80gsm paper, and that does hold up to fountain pen ink much better than Moleskine, but while you do get much less feathering and bleeding, there is still some bleedthrough with wetter pens.

Now, if you want the finest fountain pen paper I've found in a notebook format, you want Maruman's Mnemosyne 183. It's also an 80gsm paper, but it's treated and laid in such a way that there's no feathering or bleeding, even with a very wet fountain pen.

That said though, honestly the best notebook I have, in terms of accessibility, expense, and quality of paper, is a Brandz United notebook that I got for my birthday a few years back. It's not anything special, in terms of paper weight - I can't find anything concrete, but it feels like 80gsm to me - but it barely feathers and you need to really saturate the page for it to bleed through.

What is happening is that Georgian dancers and ballet dancers are pretty similar when it comes to the effort they must use in order to show themselves as graceful on stage as possible, but while ballet dancers are using pointes to hold themselves on their toes during certain movements, female Georgian dancers wear shoes that have a bit of high heels and are, more or less, tiptoeing across the stage, with steps as small and quick as possible so the audience doesn’t have a chance to pay attention to the way their skirts spin everytime they take another step.

tl;dr The secret is that they are tiptoeing as fast as they can in the rythm of the music while keeping up the appearance that they are gliding across the floor.

Enderman: *looks at player’s eyes*

Player: 01010010 01100001 00100000 01110010 01100001 00100000 01010010 01100001 01110011 01110000 01110101 01110100 01101001 01101110 00100000 01101100 01101111 01110110 01100101 01110010 00100000 01101111 01100110 00100000 01110100 01101000 01100101 00100000 01010010 01110101 01110011 01110011 01101001 01100001 01101110 00100000 01110001 01110101 01100101 01100101 01101110 00100000 01101111 01101000 00100000 01100110 01110101 01100011 01101011 00100000 01100001 01101110 00100000 01100101 01101110 01100100 01100101 01110010 01101101 01100001 01101110