- An all-black LAMY Safari fountain pen filled with a mix of water, Platinum carbon black, and inkjet printer ink.
- A blank sheet of A4, folded in half three times.
- My passport.
- A fully loaded Secrid card carrier.
- A really nice rock. It has been in my pocket for a year. Don’t think about it.
- A dumb watch. (Casio W-59. Very small, light as a feather. Green LED-backlight LCD display. 50 metre water resist. Tough, within reason. Effectively infinite battery life.)
- A beta of the PinePhone Pro, equipped with dreemurrs archlinux.
- A USB drive containing all of my computers’ boot partitions and Archiso.
Yeah I’m in Australia and I left my lab notebook by a window over a holiday break. It was probably getting over 50 C daily and the ink all faded. I don’t think it was UV, as multiple pages were damaged, I think the ink wasn’t hugely temperature stable.
It wasn’t like magically gone, but faded enough that my chicken scratch was hard to read. Between that and water damage at various points I figured I’d just switch before something got fucked up beyond salvaging. Besides, you never know what’ll be interesting to future generations. Whether it’s a grandkid paging through something to get a sense of who you were or some researcher going through archives. Archivists ink is non acidic, so it doesn’t destroy paper over time. Idk whether printer ink is.
Wow, that’s awesome! I mean yeah I’m sorry to hear your ink faded in the heat, but at least some good came out of it: that’s a whole new mode of failure I didn’t know about. Hey, maybe I’ll try putting a test page in the oven’s warming drawer or something.
Yeah might be worth a test. I assume most modern pigments are probably pretty stable, this was 10 years ago using ink that was 40 years old even then. At a certain point we all just develop idiosyncratic neuroses as a result of experiences :)