Super flattering that this piece made it into the top 300 quarter-finals of the Pokémon Illustration Contest 2024! Good luck Feraligatr, I hope you make it into the next round ✨
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pixel skylines
Xuebing Du
Not today Justin
i don't do bad sauce passes
hello vonnie

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will byers stan first human second
$LAYYYTER

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Cosimo Galluzzi
noise dept.
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Misplaced Lens Cap
DEAR READER

ellievsbear

Love Begins
Cosmic Funnies
Three Goblin Art

Discoholic 🪩
seen from Hong Kong SAR China

seen from Chile
seen from Argentina
seen from T1
seen from Malaysia

seen from Türkiye
seen from T1

seen from India
seen from Taiwan
seen from United Kingdom

seen from Malaysia

seen from Australia

seen from United States
seen from India
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from United States
@oolongway
Super flattering that this piece made it into the top 300 quarter-finals of the Pokémon Illustration Contest 2024! Good luck Feraligatr, I hope you make it into the next round ✨
Let's make a color together!
Red
Green
Blue
Once the results are done, I'll multiply 255 to the decimal version of the percentage, and see what color we make!!
Here's the result!! A nice lookin color, good work everyone!
i believe we've reached a consensus
moleskine = bad
IT’S SO BAD AND I HATE IT
moleskine makes people hate pens and is probably a huge part of why so many people give up on good pens.
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).
do not buy moleskine. even if the stand is right there. they have some of the worst paper you can get at that price point. expensive paper is not always good paper, good pens need good paper, moleskine paper makes good pens seem awful, and moleskine is something you should only give to someone you loathe.
THIS.
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.
Also, if you’re looking for loose paper, I highly recommend Tomoe River’s paper - so fine and thin you can practically see through it, but it holds ink like a sponge, doesn’t bleed, has no feathering, and is smooth as glass. For correspondence, though, I am a fan of G. Lalo’s Pur Vélin, which is a 125gsm 50% cotton and 50% wood pulp paper. It’s absolutely beautiful and has just enough grain to it that there’s a super pleasant tactile feedback when you’re writing.
And if you want to go a lil’ bit fancy with gorgeous designs (and I mean GORGEOUS designs), look up Castelli.
My current fave. No feathering, no bleeding, works perfect with ballpoint pens and with fountain pens, and the paper is super smooth. I’ve literally written novels in these fuckers. Also: cheaper than moleskine.
@jimtheviking already mentioned Leuchtturm; I’m adding Black n’ Red, Clairefontaine and Rhodia.
All have better paper than Moleskine, which has been milking its early reputation for years while product quality went downhill. Now they’re just another Lifestyle Accessory for people who shop by brand-name.
Best pen, no.
Best GEL pen? Definitely.
TL:DR - the Pilot G-2 is an excellent pen - reasons follow. (NB, the Zebra Sarasa looks just like it but IMO does not work just like it. YMMV.)
*****
I’ve used Zebra and Pentel gels; on occasions both dried and needed a scribble-start, or skipped, or went faint.
Pilot gels, in all the colours I’ve used (bring back Hunter Green, dammit!) and configurations I’ve owned - mostly discontinued and now hard or impossible to find, also dammit! - have never done any of that.
It’s significant that the G-2 refill will fit a lot of other pens whose manufacturers you might expect to be a bit dog-in-the-manger about using their refills and nobody else’s. Pilot’s rep seems to be Just That Good.
Here’s one of those discontinued configurations: Gel-X had the same thumb-push operating system as the standard G-2, but was a bit thicker overall and with a wider grip section that - for me, anyway - made it more comfortable to write with, especially during long sessions.
The G-2 Pro is its apparent replacement, but I haven’t seen them for sale in Europe and I don’t need one anyway, since I was able to nab a few Gel-X’s from eBay when they started getting hard to find. That turned out to be a smart move.
I wish I’d been as smart with this:
It was the G-23 Luxury, an understated elegant bit of kit which looks more expensive than it cost (£5.95 from CultPens back in 2007) and was a lovely pen to write with, the closest to a fountain-pen of any non-fountain-pen I’ve handled so far.
It not only took standard Pilot gel refills (off to a good start already), the pen’s steel body / aluminium cap construction gave enough extra weight that I only needed to guide it over the page, without needing to press down. Like I say, more a fountain-pen than a ballpoint.
I’ve seen reviews that took exception to its asymmetrical cap, for instance this:
…there is a notch in the barrel that a matching point on the cap has to slide into like a puzzle piece to get the cap on securely. This is endlessly frustrating to me, because I am used to just popping the cap on and going. With this pen, I have to pay attention more to what I am doing. The horrors!
If presumably-adult reviewers still need Mummy to hold their hand while crossing the road, that’s their problem not mine.
Its replacement is the Pilot Metropolitan gel rollerball: I have one but (a) it looks, feels and until uncapped IS annoyingly similar to its fountain-pen sibling and (b) seems to have been discontinued, which suggests that someone at Pilot though the same.
I lost my shiny sleek G-23 in 2017, went looking for a replacement, found that it too had been discontinued (Pilot do this a lot, it’s annoying) so went to eBay… And then left again after finding the only one available was £59.95 + £19.95 for shipping.
Uh. Nope.
Once again and as usual, it’s always the good stuff that gets lost; I’ve still got the couple of £1.49 still-in-production G-2s I bought at the same time as the G-23. They’re still going strong and have been refilled many times.
But only once with Hunter Green.
Dammit…
persona 2-5 ships ranked by how well they fight alongside one another in battle.
DISCLAIMER: these are NOT ranked by how much i like the ship or how well they get along or whatever, it's SOLELY based on how well they can cooperate while engaged in combat
also this tierlist did not include eternal punishment ships 😐 but katsumaya would probably be in the "desire to protect one another makes them foolish" tier and katsubao would end up in "would be top tier but they clash"
This is what Rasputin would've wanted.
I feel like I'm being seduced like one of those fancy rainforest birds
is it working
Yes
You mentioned doing a print of the previous page, any chance of posting a decent resolution image we (I) could save to use as a phone wallpaper as well? Because the page is a link I am unable save it for such a use.
Here you go. :3 This is just a JPEG copy of the page without any adjustments; I hope it does the trick for you. Thanks!
little cenozoic guys
(hyaenodon, langstonia, smilodon, dromornithidae, stegotetrabelodon, glyptodon, moropus)
Happy N7 Day 2022 🌙🌌
recent commission of vetra nyx 🌌
his eggy toast…………..
These panels slapped me in the face I forgot Jeanne has stat vision (it’s her True Name Discernment skill) and the way the artist draws it makes her look like a robot.
Jeanne looking at Shakespeare
schoolgirl and her giant robot
S T A R T 🠮 Boys
I liked this post, scrolled for like another minute before I went “SHIT FUCK SHIT” and scrolled back to reblog it
I always reblog this one when I see it on my dash. When someone posts their own art, writing, or music here they are really hoping you will share it.