Podcast Episode: Pens, Rocks, And Outdoor Finds

Pip: The Fabulous Scientist is a blog that collects chatoyant fountain pens, wades through rivers to find ancient limestone, and apparently cannot attend a café lunch without leaving with a painting — which, honestly, is a lifestyle.

Mara: fabulousgrass covers a lot of ground here — pen reviews and ink picks, field geology and nature walks, a travel art purchase, and some thoughts on preparedness and learning. Let's start with the pens.

Fountain Pens, Inks, and the Collector's Itch

Pip: The throughline across these pen posts is a collector who has developed very specific tastes — chatoyant resin, piston fillers, and anything that looks like it was carved from a gemstone — and is now reviewing the consequences of those tastes one pen at a time.

Mara: The Asvine P20 overview sets that up clearly. The post describes the pen's resin body as having "this wonderfully chatoyant finish that shifts and dances under the light — exactly the kind of aesthetic weakness I consistently fall victim to."

Pip: That is a person who has achieved a level of self-knowledge most of us only reach in therapy.

Mara: The P20 review also gets into practical detail — the piston-filling mechanism, the translucent body that lets you monitor ink level, and a minor nib issue where the tines sit slightly too close, causing the Rohrer and Klingner Alt-Goldgrün to run drier than it does in a Pilot Explorer.

Pip: So the pen is beautiful, functional, and already scheduled for minor surgery. Classic collector relationship.

Mara: The Jinhao Shark review takes a different angle — it's a budget pen shaped like a shark, picked up at the Manila Pen Show, and it genuinely surprised on writing performance. The EF nibs are described as smooth and consistent, and the pen comes with a converter included at its price point.

Pip: The TWSBI Kai long-term review covers a piston-filler with a chatoyant indigo body and rose gold trim that spent months on a shelf because it looked too premium to risk losing. That is a specific kind of problem to have.

Mara: The Majohn P140 and P139 Endurance reviews both make the case for affordable Chinese pens punching above their weight. The P140's medium nib is described as "gloriously smooth — not good for the price smooth, not after a bit of tuning smooth, just plain smooth." The P139 Endurance draws comparisons to the Montblanc Hemingway aesthetic at a fraction of the cost.

Pip: The Pelikan M200 Cherry Blossom gets called the Glinda of the collection, which is accurate branding for a pale pink piston-filler with cherry blossom-shaped ink windows.

Mara: Two ink reviews round out the segment. Troublemaker Inks Butterfly Dream is a Filipino hand-mixed shimmer ink — deep moss green with blue shimmer that performs best with dip pens and glass pens rather than fountain pens, where the shimmer stays restrained. Jacques Herbin Emerald of Chivor, acquired secondhand at half price, is described as an emerald-teal ink with red sheen and gold shimmer that "enters the room before you do."

Pip: The Wancher PuChiCo Arctic Blue is a pen roughly 65 millimeters capped that functions as both a writing instrument and a potential pendant necklace, which is either very practical or a sign the hobby has fully taken over.

Mara: And the five-pens-under-fifty list and the pen-meet selection post both pull from across the collection — the Asvine C80, Hongdian M2, Sailor Tuzu, Majohn P140, and Pilot Kakuno as budget picks, and the Pelikan Cherry Blossom, TWSBI Kai, Asvine C80, Wancher PuChiCo, and Jinhao 82 Mini as the pen-meet five.

Pip: From rocks to rivers next — and the geology posts are doing something similar: finding beauty in things most people walk past.

Reading Rocks and Rare Plants in the Field

Pip: These posts are about what happens when a geologist leaves the office — and what the landscape reveals when you know how to ask it the right questions.

Mara: The alodapic limestone post from Agoo, La Union, anchors the geology here. The post explains that alodapic limestone consists of reef-derived fragments transported and redeposited elsewhere, and describes crossing a knee-deep river to reach the outcrop: "Crossing the river was kind of my favorite for this fieldwork but I have to admit, the plants growing on the river bed felt kind of ticklish on my feet."

Pip: Science, but make it sensory.

Mara: The fossil hunting post from La Union covers a mudstone layer along a highway outcrop — exposed during road widening and scheduled for demolition — that turned out to be packed with leaf fossils occurring as both impressions and carbonized remains. The urgency of the site drove the trip. The JC's Vine post shifts to botany: a rare endangered Philippine vine, Strongylodon juangonzalezii, spotted during fitness walks at UP Diliman, blooming once a year in deep violet clusters. And the Camp John Hay forest bathing trail post documents a family trek through pine trees and flowering Arabica coffee trees — gentle enough for kids, with the added detail that the coffee blossoms smell like jasmine and lemon.

Pip: The art that came out of that La Union trip is its own story — and it involves a painting that refused to stay in the gallery.

The Painting That Came Home

Pip: Sometimes a trip produces more than field notes — this one produced an unexpected art purchase with a story attached.

Mara: After a morning of fossil hunting in Sto. Tomas, the group stopped at Ciano Cafe Gallery in La Union, where local artists' work covered the walls. One painting stopped the author immediately: "The painting seemed to illuminate itself. Even the sky seemed to glow, as if below it was hidden city behind the mountains."

Mara: That painting turned out to be the artist Vanie's very first completed work — and the purchase made its buyer her very first customer. The post reflects on what that means for an artist putting work into the world for the first time.

Pip: The camera post connects here — a secondhand Fujifilm X-T20, eight years old and acquired at half price, became the official documentation tool for the La Union trip and the fossil photos. The logic of buying secondhand, learning fundamentals before upgrading, runs through both posts.

Pip: That instinct toward learning by doing carries straight into the final segment.

Preparedness and the Case for Mentors

Pip: Two posts here that are both, at their core, about what you carry with you — one literally, one philosophically.

Mara: The earthquake EDC post is direct and practical. It covers N95 masks, safety glasses, work gloves, a whistle, high-energy food and water, a flashlight, a portable charger, and a written emergency contact card — prompted by recent seismic events in Mindanao, Venezuela, Japan, and the US. The framing is clear: "The best emergency kit is not necessarily the biggest or the most expensive. It is the one you actually have with you when the ground starts shaking."

Pip: The mentoring post makes the complementary argument — that having someone correct you in real time beats any number of tutorials. Muay Thai, boxing, ukulele, and voice lessons all illustrate the same point: a coach sees what you cannot see about yourself.

Mara: The post puts it simply: "YouTube can show me what to do. A mentor can show me what I'm doing wrong." That gap between information and correction is where the real learning happens.

Pip: Carry the right kit. Find the right teacher. The rocks, the pens, the painting — all of it rewards that kind of attention.

Mara: What connects all of this is curiosity that doesn't stay in one lane — geology, stationery, art, fitness, preparedness — and a willingness to go deep on whatever is in front of you.

Pip: Next time, we'll see what else The Fabulous Scientist finds worth writing about. Given the track record, it could be anything from a nib adjustment to a mudstone outcrop.