{"id":15672,"date":"2007-09-17T09:24:00","date_gmt":"2007-09-17T13:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/hameblog\/2007\/09\/17\/a-fine-line\/"},"modified":"2025-09-12T07:49:45","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T10:49:45","slug":"a-fine-line","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/2007\/09\/17\/a-fine-line\/","title":{"rendered":"A fine line"},"content":{"rendered":"<p align=\"center\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"200\" src=\"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-content\/uploads\/posts\/1021\/a-fine-line\" alt=\"doodle of a cat\" height=\"173\" style=\"width:200px;height:173px\" title=\"doodle of a cat\"><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been doodling my whole life. I couldn&#8217;t guess how many felt-tip pens I&#8217;ve gone through because they ran dry or &#8212; more often &#8212; because the felt-tip got mushed by my&#8230; <em>enthusiasm<\/em>. (Gorilla-grip, whatever you&#8217;d like to call it.)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>At some point I heard about drafting pens, but someone, somewhere told me that you had to hold them at a perpendicular angle to the page. Given how close I put my face to the paper when I draw, I would poke out my eyes, not to mention that it&#8217;s an uncomfortable way to doodle.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>Well, I took the plunge and bought a pair of Rotring Isograph pens (0.3cm and 0.5cm)&#8230; holy heck! These things are <em>great!<\/em> The line quality is perfect and consistent. Even better, they&#8217;re refillable.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>Friends often make fun of my obsession with &#8220;line quality&#8221; when looking at illustrations &#8212; in other words, the strength and clarity of the strokes used in the drawing. I suppose it&#8217;s a matter of personal preference, but I love a smooth, dark line, and tend not to like sketchy drawings with scarecrow-stuffing edges to them.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>And nothing appeals to Hamishes like finding a better way to do his creative stuff.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>~<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>This afternoon I was in a coffeeshop taking notes for an article, and the place gradually transformed into my personal hell: the George Heriot School let out and the place filled with rambunctious tots and their oblivious mothers. To cap it off, the cafe put on the reggae album I hate so much, yet all their franchises play. And the cafe I was in yesterday had the music up to a record shop level.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>&lt;<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>p&gt;Today is a local holiday, so the library was closed. And I <em>do<\/em> like working in coffeeshops (concentrating at home is nearly impossible). But I have to find one that has the following qualities:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>It&#8217;s comfortable. No steel chairs or glass tables. Sofas are nice for reading, but I do need a table most of the time.<\/li>\n<li>No schools nearby. Tykes Formula One-ing around the cafe annoy me almost as much as pods of screeching teenage girls.<\/li>\n<li>It&#8217;s okay to stay <em>forever<\/em> and not feel like the owners are hovering over you. (The nice thing with the chains is that the baristas really don&#8217;t care how long you&#8217;re there; it won&#8217;t affect them financially. The only problem is that they do get antsy to leave and start mopping under your feet and stacking chairs about an hour before closing.)<\/li>\n<li>Very quiet music or, preferably, no music at all. They&#8217;re happy being a good cafe, and aren&#8217;t trying to get into CD sales. Likewise, no televisions.<\/li>\n<li>Decent atmosphere, with corners to tuck yourself away in so people aren&#8217;t always brushing past.<\/li>\n<li>Experienced staff, or people who can at least <em>listen<\/em> and have a clue, and who don&#8217;t consider customers an interruption.<\/li>\n<li>Open before noon and after six. I&#8217;d like to find someplace I can go during the week, on the weekend, or at night.<\/li>\n<li>Serves FairTrade coffee.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Anybody local know of a place that fits at least a few of these criteria?<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>&lt;<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>p&gt;I know: this list officially marks me out as <em>old and cranky.<\/em><\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been doodling my whole life. I couldn&#8217;t guess how many felt-tip pens I&#8217;ve gone through because they ran dry or &#8212; more often &#8212; because the felt-tip got mushed by my&#8230; enthusiasm. (Gorilla-grip, whatever you&#8217;d like to call it.) At some point I heard about drafting pens, but someone, somewhere told me that you [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15672","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15672","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15672"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15672\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}