Mark my words. We are all going to be writing on triangles in our Mars colonies. We'll chuckle to ourselves about how we used to think notebooks should have an extra, totally wasted side.
I'm pleasantly surprised to find that, in the future, the paper in our triangle notebooks will not be half bad.
I forget what ink I have in the Ondoro, but it's definitely on the wetter side. The paper doesn't do a perfect job with it, but this is not bad at all. The cursive italic nib in my Franklin-Cristoph with...whatever ink this is...does better. With a finer nib and slightly drier ink, you can totally combine fountain pens and triangles. The future is now.
The Faber-Castell Ondoro continues to delight. It's almost always in my work bag. My other pen in heavy rotation is the Franklin-Christoph model 20. It writes so beautifully and is such a pleasure to hold and look at.
At work, I have developed a preference for Caran d'Ache ballpoint cartridges. I have a growing collection of rollerball pens modified to take Parker-style ballpoint refills. My current favorite is a titanium model from
Right Choice Painting Company. The model designed to take a Pilot G2 is slightly longer than you'd expect, which makes it really fun to fiddle with (please hold your jokes). They're sold out of just about everything, it seems, but they just offered their non-clicky version on Massdrop, which was neat to see.
I want to rope my coworkers into doing a big survey of ballpoint pen refills this year. We'll see if I can find time to set that up!
*edit* I forgot to add my two cents to the Lamy discussion. I have not run across any quality control issues with my Lamy pens, but I'm hearing about issues more and more. What's interesting is that 3/4 of the posts in the UK fountain pen group I follow on Facebook seem to be about Chinese pens. At the same time, every time someone orders an unbelievably priced Pilot Vanishing Point or whatever, they receive a Chinese Lamy Safari knockoff. It's always a fake Safari. I sort of wonder, looking at these two little things, if Lamy is caught between a rock and a hard place. If you raise the price of the Safari, it becomes way less attractive as a starter pen. But if they cut costs by letting the QC slide a bit, it stops making sense to spend $30 for a real Safari, when you can instead buy 10 knockoffs and have 3 or 4 of them work really really well. They basically need to make a pen good enough that you'll always go for the Lamy brand, but within a pretty narrow acceptable price window. I get the sense that they are leaning pretty hard on special editions to drive some enthusiasm, but to the point where they don't feel super special any more.
Or that could all be rubbish, it's business as usual at Lamy, and precision manufacturing is tricky.