u/zmila21

I finished copying the text of "The Hound of the Baskervilles" (in Esperanto) by hand.

The writing began in September 2025 - so it took about 8 months. I wrote 2-5 pages (almost every) day. There are 27 notebooks in total, 12 sheets each. The text is 51 thousand words long with 300 thousand letters.

When I write the next book, I will calculate more carefully about what pens I use and how much ink I will spend (at least, how many times I will refill them).

I struck the log three times in a straight line.
The round replied: gg. :)

The standard English alphabet has 26 letters. When we look only at lowercase letters, typographers divide them into three groups:

• Ascenders – letters that rise above the x‑height
• Descenders – letters that fall below the baseline
• Short (or x‑height) letters – those that sit neatly in the middle

Only 7 lowercase letters have ascenders: t, h, d, l, k, b, f. Their combined frequency in a typical English text is 27.92%. Only 5 have descenders: p, y, g, j, q. Their total frequency is a mere 6.17%. The remaining 14 short letters make up the rest: 65.93% of all characters.

So in standard printed English, ascenders outnumber descenders by a factor of 4–5 to 1. The visual rhythm is decidedly top‑heavy: the eye skips upward far more often than it dips down.

What about the Shavian alphabet?

In Shavian, the gap nearly disappears. Tall and deep letters are now roughly equal — ~16% vs. ~14% — and together they account for only about 30% of the text. The script becomes visually symmetrical, with no strong upward or downward bias.

I haven’t been able to find a single definitive published frequency list for Shavian letters, so the figures above are a composite estimate, drawn from three independent sources:

• Classical phoneme‑frequency studies of American English (Mines et al. 1978, Edwards 2003, the TIMIT corpus)
• The article “Most common sounds in spoken English” (https://thelanguagenerds.com/2019/most-common-sounds-in-spoken-english/)
• The Reddit post “Shavian Letter Frequencies” (https://www.reddit.com/r/shavian/comments/ovke9g/shavian\_letter\_frequencies/)

Across all three sources, the group totals are strikingly consistent, so the final distribution should be robust, even if individual letter frequencies shift slightly with accent or corpus.

"Everyone ran — so I ran too."

So I bought that hyped nib, screwed it into a Majohn P138 (known for having the longest cap thread in the game: 3 1/4 turns), and wrote with it for a couple of days. I can confirm what everyone's already noticed: the nib is semi-flex — just a little, true — but you have to apply noticeable pressure to make it flex.

Comparing it to a pen from a top-three Japanese brand that costs six times more:
When you're just doing little strokes, loops, or eights, the results are pretty much indistinguishable.
But when you sit down to write actual text, you start to feel that pressing on the nib for extended periods to get line variation becomes a chore. Your writing speed takes a serious hit.

In the photo: The first four lines are written with no pressure from either pen.
The next ones are with pressure — I tried to increase it smoothly from line to line, towards the bottom of the page.
And while I was writing with the Pilot (FA), I was scared I might ruin a painfully expensive nib. But while writing with the Majohn, I was scared I'd tear right through the notebook page. :)

Overall, I like this new nib. I'm very glad I bought it and will use it. I think I'll order another one in a different color for another pen.

As online stores often say: "Due to different monitor settings, the actual color may vary slightly from the images."

This is true! 😄 The alarm clock matches the lamp perfectly, but the pen isn't mint as advertised.

Still, I'm not complaining -- I'm very happy with my new Little Meteor.

It will be my EDC in my bag, while the black-and-white cow variant will stay at home.

Math task:

If you have 8 ink bottles containing 50 mg each and 12 bottles containing 70 mg each, how long will it take to use them all if you write 2–3 pages per day?