AI Spam?
The best way to describe this eludes me – is it impressive, or is it depressing or even scary?
The origin is the best clue – comment spam from accounts with links to “discount duct cleaning” or “vitamin supplements”.
The writing is coherent. The one thing that seems off is that pencil talk readers and commenters usually have a certain passion for the topic, while the spam is written clinically, dispassionately.
The content is the unsettling part – for example questions about whether the grade of a water soluble pencil dually refers the darkness of the mark and the solubility of the pencil. It’s a really good question, and something I’d like to investigate. But not today.
A WordPress Upgrade and other infrastructure matters
The blog runs on WordPress. It started with version 1.5, when WordPress was just one year old. Unfortunately the upgrade from 7.0 to 7.1 this year blew away the sidebar contents, and I haven’t figured out a solution.
There were links to other blogs (which we called a “BlogRoll” back when this started), a search bar, a link to the associated Instagram account, and a nice way to approach the almost 21-year old archive. Even a drawing. I hope to carefully revive this. I note that the list of other blogs is ever diminishing. I enjoyed Scription, yet even their provider TypePad has ceased business, almost all the Japanese pencils blogs have ceased, and others are inactive.
One other thing, this blog has been hosted by a large provider for many years, and the fees have gone up considerably. They have gone from a trivial amount to thousands per year. I want to move hosting to a local small business. The problem is that I have a lot of content outside the WordPress database, and that’s not compatible with the future format, which isn’t a virtual machine but just hosted WordPress.
the pencil news
Yes, we are starting an email newsletter! We are going to have a lot of fun discussing pencils, pencil brands, and the larger industry! You can sign up here:
The newsletter is for enthusiasts, collectors, buyers, retailers, people in the industry.
Hokusign Pencils
You can now buy these fantastic modern polymer pencils four ways:
Direct contact to sales at penciltalk dot org.
The pencil talk shop, more stock to be added.
pencil talk on eBay, also pencil collectibles.
I do not have all products/all shipping locations set up in each sales web front, but anything can be arranged. Just ask.