The Chip Bag

I love me a good prompt list as a substitute for actually working on stuff. Here's one with a million questions. You, too, can answer a million questions by copying 100webmaster.txt!

I had originally started writing this draft entitled "Not Dead" in... August 2025. As it happens, I am dead! Hopefully less so now.

Some context: I moved (again) to start a new job (again) last summer. Starting a new job in education is famously annoying and difficult. I was doing a lot of work for free, and I was tired of looking at screens so much.

I also bought a computer last year, a tower, because I wanted to be able to replace parts as needed instead of dealing with the cycle of constant machine replacement. This worked out for a while until the computer started suffering from frequent forced logouts or OS crashes, which was the product of some kind of poor interaction between the on-board graphics and the OS because Linux is fun. I didn't have the time or money to spend on the computer for most of the year so I put that on the back burner, but I finally got an extremely basic GPU and presumably everything is fine now.

All the life and tech issues (not to mention All That Shit in the world at large) have meant that I've been spending all my free time doing non-internet stuff. It's been really freeing, and I haven't had to think about doing write-ups for anything in a long time! I do want to find a more sustainable way to keep the website afloat without going ghost for a full year, though. I don't know what that looks like yet, but there will be a fairly significant reduction in scope just so there's less stuff to deal with.

If you're still hooked up to this RSS or still browse this website occasionally, I'm glad it's still serving a purpose for you. Thanks for bearing with me :-)

I went to a curio-themed art/craft fair a few weeks ago, and I'm so happy I did because everything was completely up my alley. It's hard to find local artists without social media, and you don't usually find this type of stuff at granola mom craft fairs. It was also just fun to talk to so many people with common interests. I was happy to have gone for that reason alone... but of course I ended up buying a bunch of things.

The vegetation is finally turning green here, which means it's jorts season! And update crayon tin season!

I never had a specific interest in vintage pens until I went to the Colorado Pen Show last year. (Here, I'm loosely defining vintage pens as any model that is no longer in production, mainly from the 20th century.) There was the usual garage sale thrill of finding cool old things, and the people selling vintage pens are always happy to regale you with stories about them.

I have an interest in pens from the 70s-90s because they usually fill by cartridge/converter so I don't have to worry about them degrading over time, but I've become interested in older lever fillers because you can find a lot of interesting nibs in those pens. In general, I've found that older pen nibs have a certain character to them that modern mass-produced nibs usually don't.

This is an excessively deep look at the vintage pens I have at the moment.