(Part 2) Best products from r/PenmanshipPorn

You may be surprised to hear this, but MS is not a hereditary disorder. Your family may be like mine, wherein autoimmune disorders, in general, run in the family, but even in my family, even that is questionable. What is significantly more likely to be happening in my family (and maybe yours) has to do with epigenetics. Go down that rabbit hole, it's fascinating. The MS center I go to has been offering my family to graduate medical researchers to study if/how epigenetics has played a role in the autoimmune diseases we all seem to have (especially because we have all spent most of our lives geographically and socio-culturally close to each other.

Mental illness in early hominids or even early H. sapiens is absolutely fascinating to me, though any information we find can only be inferred from things like endocasts, other neuro-structural elements in the fossil record, and from the behavior of mammals and primates, apes in particular. It can also be inferred from mental illnesses that are found to be caused 100% by biology. This book gives a thorough overview of mental illness in animals and the research studies she cites could be looked at in the quest for our own maladies. Other things we look at are mental health disorders that we know to be found in all current human cultures, with evidence in some past cultures. Schizophrenia is a good example.

We have to be careful of culture-specific disorders and disorders that are not considered disorders in other cultures. I'll give you some reading for thins:

This book is not directly about a mental health disorder, but it shows why medical and psychological anthropology is vital to living in a melting pot like the US. I have stories from my mentor, a forensic and bioanthropologist, that are similar.

This book is an absolutely fascinating book that talks about how the mental health framework has been exported all over the world. Again, it's not directly able to talk about mental illness in early hominid species, but I think it important to understand while we are on that search.

Hopefully those books will help you with your questions, at least until more fossil evidence is found, since endocasts are not just popping up everyday!

I felt the exact same when I was an almost-13-year-old! I've always loved cursive and calligraphy. My 8th grade English teacher used to assign handwritten journal entries every week for our reading logs (do you still do reading logs?)

Anyways, I taught myself cursive and used the entries as practice. I haven't gone back since! If you ever want to teach yourself, look into getting a cursive workbook from Amazon! They're super inexpensive. Here's their best seller if you're interested.

And your handwriting is great btw :)

Oh, nice! I've had pretty good experience with Microns, though they don't come cheap.

I've been in love with the Foray Rolle 0.7mm's for the last few years, though my handwriting isn't much to look at it's such a satisfying feeling pen. Tactile bliss.

Yes, more or less. It's actually a kind of fiddly matter sometimes. There are some English sounds that just aren't perfectly represented in either the Quenya or Sindarin modes of pronunciation for the Tengwar.

If you look at the title page of LotR, you can actually see an example of the Cirth (a runic alphabet similar in appearance to the Furthork) across the top and Tengwar across the bottom which collectively spell out an English phrase. These give some good hints at Tolkien's preferred mode for English, but there are still some omissions. (I have a copy that I worked on way back in high school. Please excuse the quality of the images. The bit that is left undone on the one page was from the Silmarillion, I believe.)

A good example of something that looks a bit off to most English speakers when just directly transliterated based on the consonant values given in Ruth S. Noel's book The Langauges of Tolkien's Middle Earth, the word "the" is represented just as "dh", because "dh" is commonly used to represent the voiced dental fricative (as opposed to the voiceless dental fricative, such as in the word "thing" or "thin"). So it's still the right sound patterns, just not represented in latin letters the way we're used to it. (At least according to the equivalents she gives.)

There are some other writing samples, too, as well as a multitude of posts on the internet proposing best-fit solutions for an English mode of writing for Tengwar based on evidence and some interpolation and guesswork.

More information can be found by reading the excellent book I mentioned (and linked) above or by reading Appendix E of Lord of the Rings.

TL;DR: YES

The two main groups of penmanship styles are Palmer and Spencierian. You can buy workbooks for both off of Amazon. Personally Spencierian is easier for me, but realize both are technically "cursive." Which I rarely use.

The book that I instead learned from was Lettering for Architects & Desginers. I realized that I always wanted my print writing to look like my mother's. She learned how to write in a drafting class. I did some research and that was the book that I found.

The 3 tips that I took to heart from my time learning Spencierian script were:

1. Slow down.: Seriously. If you do nothing else just slowing down will help a lot.
   
2. Think through every stroke. You need to make sure you have enough room to complete every letter and that all of your letters are roughly the same scale.
   
3. Practice everyday. Instead of writing "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" over and over again I copied famous passages and poems. Edgar Allen Poe, Shakespeare, the lyrics to Aerosmith songs. Pick something that interests you and use that.
   
   Hope this helps.

I'm not sure if this will help, but have you tried doing crossword puzzles? I used to have pretty good handwriting, but over the years it's turned to a sloppy mess. When I do a crossword though, since I concentrate on one space at a time and use caps for each square, they look pretty good. And I've become kind of a pen snob and I'm in love with these right now:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00HEQS2WQ/ref=sxts1?ie=UTF8&qid=1482549943&sr=1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65

Fast drying, ultra deep black. Most pleasant thing I've used to write with.

Ah! I haven't tried using one of those yet. I'm talking about this. The issue I've had with exacto knives is that they can't turn corners cleanly, so I usually cut out block-text, then slow shave slivers off to get clean curves.

[Like this is really easy](
https://imgur.com/a/NjltA) on the cutting boards mentioned above.

This was one of the harder projects, forgive me I can't draw hands (and I wish I had beautiful penshipship like this sub to fill in a beauty & the beast quote ><)

The Pilot V7 was a longtime favorite of mine. I never thought I'd have good reason to say this online, but I worked at Office Depot through college and got to try out pretty much a million different pens. Being a bit of a penmanship guy it was fun. I eventually landed on the Uni-ball Jetstream Ballpoint - fine tip, just the capped kind, not retractable - and it's been my weapon of choice for at least 10 years. Smoother than hot ice skate blades running on a freshly zamboni'd rink, and no bleeding. Funny how Reddit brings people together like this lol

Pilot Acroball Color Ballpoint Pens, 0.5mm Extra Fine, 8 Color Set (Japan Import) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0137F7NQ8/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_aDvgDbK4WK9J0

These are my absolute favorite pens. It says "Fine" but I'm 90% positive it's actually 0.38. I like the barrel size and grip. I will definitely try your pen though!

There are a couple of different types you can get. I've been meaning to buy this hot piece of pen, but I use this one at the moment. There's a cheaper option, which is a nib for a fountain pen, but it's really messy. I use a huge T-rule (is that what it's called?) for straight staves, and a credit card for bar lines, the rest is free hand.

Ahh!! That's it! I used to get these all the time, Japanese stationary stores are really something else. My favorite was very small, but 5 stories tall, and had just about everything you can think of.

Amazon has the pen & pencil:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0018RF0IQ/
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0018RHUM0/

Now I just need a justification to buy some. They feel like they most amazing portable pens to insert into moleskin type diaries.

Well, history lesson: the earliest samples of Chinese writing were from oracle bones and tortoise shells. Ancient Chinese wise men would write (actually carve with knives) ye olde characters onto ox bones or tortoise shells, and then put them into a fire. The bones would crack and create lines. These lines would tell the fortune (I prefer fortune cookies).

The oldest form of writing is called "seal script" and is still used today for stylistic purposes. As you can see, the seal script looked a lot more like pictograms than modern Chinese characters.

There's a good book called "China: Empire of Living Symbols" that you may be interested in reading if you want to learn more.

It could be a "Dotted Bullet" notebook,
I like it for the reason thatm you can write vertical and horizontal- both ways having a guiding line.
For stadistics and math, is very easy to make graphs and charts with the correct measure and is very clean and fresh

Something like this:
https://www.amazon.com/Kyokuto-F-COOP-Ring-Notebook/dp/B00777RMM8

I would recommend not getting a fountain pen, because it would be expensive to get one with the flexible nib necessary to have variable-breadth strokes like in the OP.

Just get a starter set of nibs and a nib holder like this Speedball set for $10, find a tutorial for pointed-pen scripts like Engrosser's or any of the scripts mentioned in this video.

Oh, you'll also need some ink. India ink or walnut ink both work fine.

This is a Leuchtturm1917 Bullet Journal, and my tracker is by Northbooks.

Picking the right journal is definitely a process of trial and error. There are actually a lot of variables to consider, and I haven't found one single notebook that covers all the things I want.

Some things to consider

• Paper thickness: for the most part, thicker paper = less show-through/ghosting (when you can see writing on the other side of the page) or bleeding (when your ink actually soaks through the paper). If you plan on using markers or anything other than a ball-point pen, I would suggest looking for 90-100 GSM weight paper. Moleskine is usually 70gsm and Leuchtturm is around 80gsm (which is my biggest gripe with this current notebook) and neither of them are great for ink-heavy journaling. I bought a HUSTLE notebook with 120gsm paper that seems really promising though... I'll have to update you once i've tested it out more thoroughly :)
  
  
• Binding: there are hardcover, softcover, ring binding, lay-flat binding, glued, stitched, etc, etc, etc. It's all personal preference so make sure you do your own research
  
  
• Paper color: white, off-white, ivory... Each has their pros/cons depending on what sort of ink you use, or if you'll be using a lot of color

It's a Moleskine professional notebook, it has cool sections for things both front and back, and the pages are split too!
Dream paper quality too 🥰
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Moleskine-Large-Professional-Hard-Notebook/dp/B00UG3J29Q/ref=asc_df_B00UG3J29Q/?tag=googshopuk-21&linkCode=df0&hvadid=218119927412&hvpos=1o1&hvnetw=g&hvrand=4607526492019452782&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=m&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=1007251&hvtargid=aud-543273805630:pla-420085096990&psc=1&th=1&psc=1

These pens here are fantastic. I have a different version, the Slim Knock version, but it writes so fantastically and I love me some fine tip pens. If you look around, you might be able to find the .2mm versions even.

This is a calligraphy pen. Here is the pen and here is the nib. ID thread.