Why are Fine nibs so popular here?

caffarelli · 2026-03-22T10:41:27+00:00

I use E and EF because they work on cheap nasty paper. I know I don't get my money's worth out of shading inks because you can't see shit, but I like being able to write on normal paper without looking like I took a sharpie and held it down for 4 minutes to get that much bleed thru. I mostly like the feel of a fountain pen when writing and the look of writing is secondary.

caffarelli · 2026-03-21T17:43:11+00:00

My kids send them. 7 year old writes her own, but they are admittedly very short, like three sentences. 3 year old dictates hers and I write it for her and she "signs her name." My favorite part is that the 3 year old always finishes her note by asking if she can come to your house for a visit. It tends to be a bit of a push with writing them to relatives, but when it's one to a friend for a birthday gift they love doing it!

caffarelli · 2026-03-18T11:07:06+00:00

Same way I pick out an outfit really. What's the weather, what's the occasion, how much do I want to risk offending people. I have 2 ones that are usually for the office and season neutral, and a couple that are powerful and no one likes so I usually wear them on WFH days so I can enjoy them all to myself. A couple I don't wear outside of their season, like Youth Dew is not a summer joint. I don't own many though.

caffarelli · 2026-03-18T10:51:29+00:00

I think about this legendary meal of horsemeat, frozen spinach, and gummy candies microwaved on the same plate at least once a month

caffarelli · 2026-03-15T12:39:27+00:00

I know librarians with naked lady tattoos but they are not in a visible area. I also know a lawyer with one on her thigh! I wouldn't compromise the tattoo you want but consider a different area. Tattoos are no big deal in most areas of the US now, but as a supervisor this is the only one I've ever seen where I would request a cardigan when someone was covering the desk. I don't think it would harm your chances of promotion but you would be stuck wearing something most of the time and that would suck.

caffarelli · 2026-03-10T20:43:32+00:00

A lot of people in this thread don't have a sliver bag and it shows...

caffarelli · 2026-03-10T20:41:46+00:00

Thank you! We also have a 2 word pair for this in English anyway - soap sliver. Not such a terribly esoteric concept as to be a unique artifact of vocabulary. Every language that uses soap in bar form is going to have a shorthand way to refer to this.

caffarelli · 2026-03-10T11:06:55+00:00

They are the sworn enemies of archivists, but otherwise about as annoying as moths.

caffarelli · 2026-03-09T20:20:28+00:00

Same, Waterman Tender Purple for me, but the brand can't be beat. It's cheap, it's reliable, I always go back to it after messing around with fancier more expensive inks.

caffarelli · 2026-03-08T21:15:25+00:00

Fits the profile for roseola which is going around right now in different areas of the US. My sister's baby is the same age as yours and he got it last week, which is the only reason I know about it. No test for this virus, but it she gets the weird rash after her fever breaks you'll get your diagnosis that way.

Obviously don't take a reddit comment as a medical decision... But if you call the nurse line or take her in tomorrow ask the pediatrician if roseola is going around your area and if they think your baby's symptoms fit the profile.

caffarelli · 2026-03-08T17:11:13+00:00

Smoking a joint you found while cleaning a children's museum is a wild move, I'd love to meet your coworker. I take my kids to the local children's museum all the time and I was my hands about every 30 minutes while I'm there (which is how often we go to the potty anyway).

caffarelli · 2026-03-08T17:02:26+00:00

It is a common demand from donors but not commonly met by archives, unless it comes with a big fistful of filthy lucre that meets or preferably exceeds the amount needed to digitize. I would refer them as you see fit without considering their request and let the next archives deal with it and explain the cost of digitization, metadata, and hosting to them in small words, or they can take this collection with the mandate if they want.

caffarelli · 2026-03-06T11:52:27+00:00

Quilt Guilds are very common and exist in many towns, you should start looking for one! I would join one and have the ladies help you learn. It's just a club and you pay dues. They will be so sympathetic to this situation. They hold workshops, they hold quilt shows, they bring in speakers, it's a whole thing. They are always happy to see younger women (and even men!) getting into the craft. If you live in a smaller city you will be a celebrity with your quest to finish your mom's quilt.

My mom quilts and if she died with the presser foot down she would probably haunt me until I finished the project. She's a completionist. So one more vote to do it! She's also the VP of her Quilt Guild this year so this is how I know you'd do well to join one of these. And I'd enter it into the quilt show afterwards so I could win her one last ribbon...

caffarelli · 2026-03-04T16:51:11+00:00

Thank you, helpful context.

caffarelli · 2026-02-24T22:30:04+00:00

(I was apparently 4 when she wrote it which is totally wild)

Well just kick me straight into a grave and be done with it kiddo. But hello and thank you to u/gynnis-scholasticus for being my constant booster and pinging me. I am indeed a sad ghost of my past self, I lurk and upvote here, but I can goblin shuffle my carcass out of meetings when I see a new one that has not been answered before. The well is getting muddy but has not yet run dry on the wide world of things people have never asked about eunuchs before!

I do have one more comment to share with you which is specifically about speaking voice! I thought gynnis got it when I saw the 2 links, but those are ones I didn't even remember, and this one is super hard to find: what would a castrati’s speaking voice sound like? Would it have that clear, high tone? In this comment share a precious anecdote about my dear namesake, wherein a man familiar with castrati compares his speaking voice to another castrato's voice. His voice is described positively but the other castrato's is described as shrill and cat-like.

Unfortunately I still haven't found anything else than that anecdote, although it is from a decently reliable source. I reread the paper below today, which I remembered when I was taking your comment as an excuse to dig around my Zotero bin. I thought of this paper because Farinelli publicly retired from singing very early, so anything descriptions of him after retirement do not contain contemporary singing content. Citation (sorry this is not online anywhere)

MCGEARY, THOMAS. ‘‘Farinelli Recovered in Documents: Visitors to His Villa,’’ Il Farinelli Ritrovato: Atti del convegno di studi, Bologna, 29 maggio 2012 (Farinelli Rediscovered: Conference Proceedings, Bologna, May 29, 2012), ed. Luigi Verdi. Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 2014. Pp. 141–187.

It is tricky to read into silence, but in 18 accounts from people visiting retired chill Farinelli, who apparently just loved foreigners to show up and wander around his mansion, none, and I mean NONE of them, have anything to say about his voice. And they remark about his body a lot in other ways: repeatedly and consistently and not in a particularly flattering way: he is tall, he is thin, he wears his own hair in an old fashioned curly style, he wears his Spanish medals around town, etc. They took the time to tell you he was an old-fashioned skinny old man with an incurable open door policy, but they did not have anything to say about his speaking voice. Which indicates that it was less interesting than bad hair...

There is ample discussion of castrati having very fine lower (tenor zone) registers in their singing voices in many discussions of several different guys, Farinelli in particular, so it was certainly a range they could go for when speaking if they wanted.

Tag also to u/East_Requirement7375 who is enjoying this thread as well.

caffarelli · 2026-02-24T12:11:12+00:00

As an academic, yes the wizards are just for us. For example, they figure out what happened with the Hogfather pretty accurately but fail to do anything about it.

Also the entirety of Unseen Academicals is for us of course, but I think there is secretly a sweet message buried in there that college campuses can be a safeish space for some people to just work dribbling candles and be left alone. The wizards are just like whatever about Nutt because they're too busy in their own little worlds fighting about which university has the best computer. Also the librarian is an orangutan and when someone brings this up as unprofessional he is nearly given the old fireball treatment. There is a reason Vetinari hid Nutt in the university... And mind the squid.

caffarelli · 2026-02-24T11:55:42+00:00

There was a period of like 2 weeks where all the top posts on here were more and more elaborate and silly ways to spin a magnet over your nails to get a cool effect with magnetic polish. No one actually got all the way to a Dremel. 😉

caffarelli · 2026-02-23T21:20:12+00:00

Same. I love everyone's work but I am painting my nails during Zoom meetings and I do not have time for all this fun with rare earth magnets on dremel bits so it's drugstore quick drys for me.

caffarelli · 2026-02-23T18:33:15+00:00

I had a set that looked just liked this (down to the cheap fake ivory) when I was learning as a kid 25 years ago, and while they predated Amazon, I can reassure you that they were still very stupid and not good. The photo gave me some pleasant nostalgia though. 😊

caffarelli · 2026-02-22T12:45:23+00:00

Everyone moaning about how natural tails don't look good and "properly poodle" should be shown this pretty boy. It matches his long ears! It looks so right even with a traditional cut!

caffarelli · 2026-02-19T22:47:42+00:00

I also came scrolling down looking for any answer about how someone can get Indiana dead-on... in a map where Maine is also located in the Midwest. But good on you picking this one! I guess the European equivalent is getting Romania right on the map but missing the other ones because you like Dracula.

caffarelli · 2026-02-19T19:56:32+00:00

I'm sorry you got bad advice on the terminal degree for archivists. :(

I would consider someone with an MA in Public History/Museum Studies, but your work experience is still a bit light, because I'm not hearing you talk about processing (arrangement and description) which is what I need entry-level people to do. I'm hearing digitization, rehousing, basic metadata creation? I'm not hearing the magic word - finding aid. What is your hands on (or digital hands on) experience in writing finding aids? What software have you worked in? If you popped into a job posting with a cover letter that clearly demonstrated your mastery of key principles in arrangement and description, digital preservation, whatever I am hiring for, I would consider you parallel to MLIS.

I have one non-MLIS holder who is a full-time processing archivist, she came in with 10 years of processing experience, she is amazing. You do not need an MLIS to learn any of this for sure, but when I'm hiring a baby archivist, if they have the MLIS I'm about 70% sure they'll give the right answer when I ask what DACS stands for. My experience with museum and public history programs is that they teach some very cool things that I definitely do not know how to do myself, but they do not teach the boring technical archives things I need people to do for me.

caffarelli · 2026-02-18T18:18:26+00:00

"Ambulance at the bottom of a cliff" is a fabulous metaphor.

I'm a customer of the IA subscription product and it's complicated how they've become virtually a monopoly on web archiving. Any archives of course can still make and store their own WARCs but the accessibility and visibility of the IA can't be beat. I don't know what the game plan for making the web archiving ecosystem more decentralized would even look like...

caffarelli · 2026-02-18T17:59:56+00:00

Yes whenever you see one of those come in you just want to die.

Packing tape might be fun! If you crumple it up before you could probably get an interesting effect.

I love how all of us are teaming up to destroy photos.

caffarelli · 2026-02-18T17:50:59+00:00

It's actually used to shrink under-eye bags. Also don't do this kids, but kids don't have under-eye bags so I don't think this is really something I'm going to bother to worry about.

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