What happens when you let other people pick out your next fountain pen and ink combination? Magic.
That’s what took place last week in Thursday’s Twitch stream, and the experience was so enjoyable I thought I would take the time to write up how complete randomness turned in to something awesome.
One of the interactive parts of Twitch is a tool called Channel Points. Viewers watch the stream, and passively build up a bank of points. As a streamer, I can then create Point Redemptions for the viewers to make me do different tasks. For a few points, you can make me hydrate, or check my posture - which are things often missed while streaming. For more points, you can get me to run a stationery giveaway on stream, or, as in this case, ink up a fountain pen. That’s where the fun came in!
This point redemption allows the user to pick any fountain pen I own and make me ink it up with any ink I own. When this redemption happens, it turns into interactive awesomeness between myself and the stream, with discussions around what they should make me do.
In this particular case, the point redeemer, let’s call them Alan, leaned into the randomness by not having any pre-planned ideas for the pen and ink choice. So, what did we do? We rolled the dice.
I had recently received several random dice to use for my solo journaling games (more on that another day,) so we put them into action. My Toyooka Craft 100 pen box is the perfect partner for dice rolls with 5 trays of 20 pens each, so we grabbed the two dice needed for a D100 roll and fired them across the desk.
The result? 69. You cannot make this up. Nice!
That put us into the 9th slot of the fourth tray, which held the elusive Franklin-Christoph Model 20 Italian Ice. This is a pen that was on my shopping list for years before I was able to acquire it, and it will be around for years more. That said, it hasn’t been inked up for a while, so this was a wonderful choice.
While picking the pen was rather straightforward, my ink is not in a well-organized situation that would make it easy to match up with dice. We decided to roll a d20 and a d6 to pick a letter of the alphabet that we could match with an ink brand or color name. We hit 8 on the roll, meaning we had to come up with something related to “H”. It took a second, and then “Herbin” was shouted. Jacques Herbin! I have plenty of those, especially of the shimmer variety. My favorite of those, Shogun, was mentioned, and Alan decided that yes, that needs to be inked in the Italian Ice.
These results made me want to write this post. I love my Franklin-Christoph Italian Ice. I also love J. Herbin Shogun. Not in a million years would I sit here and put those two together, and to someone who often gets stuck in safe pen and ink pairing ruts, this is a goldmine of fun. I want more of it.
Maybe one of these days, I’ll go full Omakase at a pen show and see what kind of trouble we can get in to.
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