Ennui Vagaries

The amazing GAMENOTE keyboard, in all its gamery goriness. Introduction So, if you were to ask me why I got into mechanical keyboards, the picture above would be the explanation. This is the Havit “GAMENOTE” keyboard (aka the KB512L). This keyboard is responsible for me spending a little over a year in a mechanical keyboard rabbit hole. Now, let's be clear: this was not a good keyboard. It had a hollow sound to it. The stabilizers rattled. The keycaps were thin and felt horrible. The RGB was…

Recreation of a Conklin Crescent Filler fountain pen. (Photo by Unattributed, Licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) Introduction I don't recall any point in time where I had any interest in fountain pens. I was born well after the time of the fountain pen, and there weren't any relatives in my family that had any special attachments to fountain pens. Then, there are some questions to answer: What drove my initial interest? How long have I been interested in them? Do I have some objective in collecting…

Originally Published: 2022-06-01 Introduction There are a lot of “influencers” in the keyboard community that complain any chance they get about keyboards that have the LEDs installed in the north side of the switch socket (see the little white squares in the cover photo). One literally titled his review of one keyboard “This board is almost perfect, EXCEPT” with the text in the thumbnail image reading “$60, but a fatal flaw.” That “fatal flaw”? North oriented LEDs. Another recently whinged in…