My first pencast
May 4th, 2007Emily was recently mentioning her passion for pens, and I confessed to being quite a pen lover myself, but whined about how seldom I now use one, as keyboards and screens gradually spoliate pen and paper.
And I had an idea: although I know I would not change keyboard for pen while editing, I also know that I still like writing down the final manuscript patiently, as a remembrance of when I wrote letters. Fellow bloggers have recently set a foot in the podcasting world. Maybe I won’t. But I can start a pencasting fad. It is quite suited to literate blogs, and much more bandwidth-sober than podcasting.
So here is my first pencast, the handwritten version of my latest post, entitled standing on the shoulders of giants.
Nice handwriting. I think many people will resist this trend out of fear of revealing how bad their own is though.
Thanks. I think judgement on handwriting is very relative, though. I believe people tend to look down on their own just like they hate their voice in recording or are shy in front of a camera. Any handwriting has a personality of its own, and cannot be intrisically bad (at least if legibility is not a criterion).
Well done mandarine! It reminds me of the time I transcribed my great-aunt’s diary onto the computer, reading the flowing lines. She had a peculiar way of writing which at first glance was indecipherable, but if you took the time to work it through became quite readable. Although my own writing is somewhat ‘creative’ in its appearance (’chaotic’ might be a better term) I confess to keeping a moleskine notebook nearby and have my favourite pens. For jotting notes and putting down ideas nothing beats a crisp piece of paper and pen.
Doug
I like your pencast! Mostly I was admiring your copperplate and taking less notice of your words, but I promise to make a cup of coffee and come back and read for ideas not neatness. 10/10, Mr Mandarine.
Doug, I have been looking for a plain old recycled paper notebook here in France, and such stuff is nowhere to be found. It is all fancy Clairefontaine paper with psychedelic French schoolkid grid. Maybe I will have to make my own.
Charlotte: I had to look up copperplate, and well, thanks. I confess I was glad to discover that although I had not used my pen for over a year, the old buddy and my joints were not too rusty.
Hey Mandarine,
Try
Jnf Productions
17-19 rue Visconti
75006 Paris - France
tel. +33 (0)1 44411960
fax +33 (0)1 43298711
jnfprod@jnfprod.com
www.jnfprod.com
Moleskine’s are ridiculously expensive, but fit in your hand like a glove.
Doug
Thank you. These things are nice indeed. Some are even not that expensive. I might slip somebody a gift idea for my birthday…
My handwriting is appalling. Well, ok let’s say that differently; it’s full of character. So full of character, in fact, that it’s barely legible. Comes from spending too long in lecture halls taking notes at top speed. Yours is beautiful though, a little work of art.
It probably has something to do with not taking notes in lecture halls: after my baccalauréat, 90% of the courses I took came with their own book. I was finally just a student, not a scribe.
I enjoyed your pencast mightily. More pencasts, please!
I had the odd experience recently of looking at an old letter of my father’s and realizing that my handwriting has become exactly like his: a mixture of lower-case and capitals, strange curlicues trailing off into nowhere, i.e. utter chickenscratch.
There will be more, that’s for sure. The strange thing about handwriting genealogy is that mine neither resembles my father’s nor my mother’s, but it looks like my wife’s: we were meant to be together…
You’ve tempted me. At some point, I’m going to have to try this (have to learn how to use the scanner and then how to drop that into a blog post, but hey, learning how to do such things is one of my 2007 blogging goals, right?). When I write slowly, my writing is legible, although I once started reading a book on handwriting analysis that had me so worried I might be schizophrenic I couldn’t finish reading it. Maybe my first pencast should be about that, or maybe it should be about why no one will ever, ever hear my voice on a podcast.
I am looking forward to your pencast, whatever the theme. But you should not be saying that you will never ever record a podcast. You might perjure yourself some day in the (far) future…
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