Yes, once again, just in time for a long weekend when everyone is out of town… oh, dear. Well, let’s hope not, because me and my pen-sensitive fingers will be available for free massages* at Paper Umbrella, which is found at 2724 13th Avenue in Regina, which is in Saskatchewan, which is in Canada, between 11:00 am and 2:00 pm on 19 May.

*Massages available to pens only, and their parent or guardian must be present.

Things you may see applied to a pen

The first item in this entry has very little to do with pens, apart from having emerged into the world from the end of one.  A story of mine, “Free Balloons for All Good Children,” had been posted on Pseudopod, one of the great names in horror podcasting (and I’m not just saying that because they were nice to me).  It’s free there, for either reading or listening to; the only cost may be some lost sleep.  I’m pretty proud of it.

Closer to home, I have some new pictures to mention.  There’s now the gold-capped version of the Pelikan P1, the V-Pen which is the everywhere-but-America version of the Pilot Varsity, and the even-more-interesting reciprocating piston variant of the Wing Sung 601.

I have changed the theme of the site for the moment to one which is… ugly, to be frank.  However, it has the charm of allowing all the pull-down menus to work properly.  Before I explain what’s happening in that department, I will also quickly mention a new page for a jolly interesting new pen (which does not look it)– the Wing Sung 601.  There’s also been updates to the First Time Buyer Suggestions, because I realize I have some more pens that I would suggest, and a picture of a rather good Sheaffer J8C added to that maker’s flat tops page.

[Edit, not an hour later: Found an easier solution than I had expected.  Some of the moaning which follows is moot, and the ugly phase is now over]

Now, the tedious explanation– the last lingering effect of the Great Catastrophe is that the WordPress software  cannot see all the picture files I’ve downloaded over the years.  This is not a big deal, as I discovered to my joy, because if I know the link address for any given picture, I can still cause it to appear in the content of the page.

However, what I can’t do is set it as the banner image at the top of the page.  And it seems that the theme I had chosen, if not given a banner image to present, gets a little strange about very long drop-down menus.  This would also be not a big deal, except what people mainly come here for it the catalogue of pen models, and getting at any Waterman model, or any of the few makers below Waterman, was not easy.  Since I don’t want to put people off by making their lives difficult, I am putting them off by making the site look less appealing than it did.

The ideal cure would be to get my WordPress Media Library to take notice of all my pictures again.  However, searching for a solution seems to come up with stuff that sounds like it might have worked for WordPress 3.5 (and I’m now stuck with 4.9) or something along the lines of “Just reload the pictures.  Sure, this doubles your use of storage, but that’s not a big thing as long as there’s not too many of them.”  You may imagine the unhealthy laughter with which I greeted that advice.

While I continue to seek a real cure, what I plan to do is upload some kind of universal place-holder, along the lines of the one which has spontaneously appeared on all the pages in this theme.  This is presenting some mysterious stumbling blocks as well, which I have finally worked out how to get around while remaining mystified on the subject of “Why are you doing this to me?”  I will then have to go to each page and add a fresh banner.  Once that’s seen to, we’ll be back to the slightly more appealing look of the site.

Yes, I am slightly cranky about all this.  If only I had something less nebulous to blame than Teh Intarwebz and the looming facelessness of WordPress.Org.

Things are mostly back to where they should be here, which the absence of The Apocalypse Announcement on the opening page probably tipped you off to.  I still have to go through the news posts like this one and eliminate a quantity of mysteriously-appeared back-slashes (and the link-breaking they bring with them) but since all that is dated and of little interest to anyone now, I’m content to say we’re fixed (enough) and ready for people to look at again.  There’s also the matter of absolutely every header image having vanished from each page, but… trivial from the user’s perspective (I hope) and proving to be a real bear to sort out from my side of the fence.

Of course, if you find a page that isn’t working, please do nip over to the Contact page and let me know.  There’s a LOT of pages here, and I might well miss something.

Something went wrong with my Word Press set up; anyone who has been trying to visit here since 20 February has likely been seeing a perfectly blank screen. Well… I SORT OF fixed it. I initially had a small attack of the marthambles when it looked like all the content had evaporated. This is not the case.

It’s just all been turned into slightly illegible posts.

Which means I’m going to be a while getting the site looking like something useful again. Whatever you’re looking for is still here, but it’s hiding.  The only thing I can suggest is scrolling through the news archive, because EVERYTHING is in there.  All the internal links are broken, too, including the ones to pictures, so… well, it will be a while before we’re back on our feet here.

Well, I appear to have undone the damage done by Jerk MacJerk of Clan MacCreep, but I’m still trying to sort out the damage done by the WordPress update it required.  For example, I’ve just noticed that what used to produce a different coloured background text box now doesn’t, so there are several pages with mysterious <important> instructions now appearing in the text.  I’m sure I’ll get it sorted eventually.

On a happier note, I have several fresh pen profiles up.  One is very fresh indeed, for the fresh out of the oven Lamy Aion.  The others are not quite so warm with the heat of their own creation, but all are definitely recent models; the retrospective Kaweco Student, the psst hey buddy do you want a cheap pen Wing Sung 3008, and the get it while you can Sheaffer Taranis.

The title of this entry is almost completely without meaning, by the way.  Just me playing with allusions.

If you are here to find out why the hell this site has been bugging you to buy stuff, I’ll say briefly: Some jerk got through my defenses and has been annoying people without my knowledge or consent.  I have a slightly more detailed version of this event over at my blog, if you are interested in a bit of a rant against that jerk and similar creatures.

A side effect of the jerk’s attentions it that there’s no way to contact me through this site at the moment.  I am working to correct that.  Part of the attempt at correction has left the place looking a little different than it had, which I am also working to correct, because at very least the Galleries are all askew.

If you’re not here out of anger, but for the usual reason of seeing what’s new: there’s now profiles for the Pilot Custom Heritage 92 and the TWSBI Classic.

Free Pen Tuning Clinic!

Saturday, 21 October 2017, 12:00pm to 2:00pm!

See the walls of Paper Umbrella run from floor to ceiling AND lengthwise!

Life and death struggle!  Man against minor imperfections of tine alignment!

…yes, I may be overselling it a little.  But it is happening.

I go months without an update, and now two in one week!  I’m dizzy from it!

Now appearing are new pages for an Esterbrook pen which predates the Esterbrook J Series which most of us are familiar with– it’s called the Dollar, because otherwise we have to call it three different models, and that seems untidy.

There is also a new profile for a much more accessible pen, the Jinhao X750 which anyone can have for the price of a meal at a fast-food restaurant (although delivery may take someone longer).

I recently realized that I had a quantity of broken content here, thanks to the combined efforts of Dropbox and Photobuquet.  That’s an intentional misspelling to keep from helping with search engine results because Dropbox merely closed some doors while those others are engaged in piratical monetization by infinite pop-up ad.  I suspect they’ll find it is eventually a fatal condition.  In any event, I’ve fixed all that, so various images and PDFs that weren’t working last week should be available now.

Also, a couple of new things: a very pretty and utterly nameless bulb-filling pen given me by a friend, and a new and better picture of the Statesman model of early Sheaffer Touchdown.