I've had a fixation on making good pizza since the COVID lockdown. I, like many other people, decided that the best way to weather a pandemic was to bake bread, so I made a sourdough starter and quickly had to find ways to use up the discard. There are a lot of ways to do that — I've experimented with banana bread, pancakes, waffles, and cake, to name a few, but my favorite way to use it is pizza, because pizza is good.
I've turned into a complete pizza snob and haven't gone out for pizza in a very long time. The homemade stuff is too good! Fortunately, I'm a generous pizza snob, so here is what I've learned after a few years of pizza-ing.
I like Platinum pens. I have a few, and they've all been great and reliable and I use them very frequently. The affordability is a huge plus (Platinum's budget pens all clock in at under 20 USD), but if you're looking to burn a little more money, there's the Platinum 3776 Century, a pen that retails in the US for around $200.
I had my eye on the 3776 because one of the nib options is the "soft fine," which has been described as "springy" by multiple people. What does a pen have to do to be called springy? I had to know!
Luckily for me, my local art store carries the 3776, so I got to try it out instead of perpetually wondering. The store justifiably only lets you test fountain pens on a water pad, but even then, I could feel the springiness that everyone was talking about. I was sold! Unfortunately, they didn't carry the 3776 in green and neither did the store's flagship location, so I reluctantly had to resort to online shopping. If I'm paying this much money for a pen, I'm not settling for a non-green color!
I always mix my own paint colors as a rule — I've owned only cyan, magenta, and yellow (plus black and white) for years — but I've been really into nontraditional primaries lately. It's an interesting challenge that produces interesting paintings, and the Zorn palette is a particularly... limiting limited palette.
The Zorn palette is named for Anders Zorn, a Swedish painter who used it extensively in his work. It consists of cadmium red light, yellow ochre, ivory black, and titanium white, a color selection that locks you out of blue and most shades of green. If you're using the Zorn palette for portraits, this isn't a major limitation, but landscapes are a different story (and guess what I've been using it for)...
I'm not an adult Lego connoisseur by any means, but I've received a handful of the adult/collector sets as gifts over the years. I was pleased as punch to see that they released a collection of realistic insect models consisting of a Chinese mantis, a Hercules beetle, and a blue morpho. I thought they were sold separately, so I spent a long time agonizing over which one to buy until I found out that all three came in a set!
Since these guys clock in at under 30 bucks per model, they're not particularly complex or difficult, but they still provide plenty of mental stimulation for an adult. I'm physically incapable of doing Legos in more than one sitting, so I finished all three of these over the span of an evening — around 4 hours with some distractions, give or take.
These are all made to scale, which is delightful. And the finished bugs are fully poseable! Bug legos: $80. Being able to hold your new little bug friends because you'll probably never get to do that in real life: Priceless.