What am I Doing? Why?

I got into the fountain pen habit a few years ago. There were two major reasons: (1) I have some nasty osteoarthritis, and I found that writing with ballpoints and other pens that frequently required some pressure was really unpleasant, especially over long periods of time. (2) I decided I didn't want to take my laptop to meetings, or even to the office at all, on most days and thought it would be a good way to encourage myself to work more in notebooks, especially finding ways to deal with the longer writing sessions.

Unlike a lot of folks in the habit, I don't buy new pens very frequently. I made the choice to chase a few of my grail pens early in the game (a Pilot Custom 823 and a Visconti Homo sapiens), and make use of them every day. What I did fall in love with is the diversity and the complexity of inks. So that brings us here... I want to share my fascination with ink and my continued pursuit of learning about those inks with all of you.

There are a few strong video and review series on inks, and I'll make reference to them periodically, especially when I'm reviewing and talking about things they've already done, but my major goal here is to provide a resource and opportunity for folks who want to talk about and learn about inks.

There are also some core questions that I want to ask when talking about inks, beyond just the straightforward properties like hue, saturation, drying, permanence, etc.

On what projects would I use this ink? Sketching? Journaling? Annotating?
How often would I use it? Is it an all the time ink, or for special occasions?
Why would I recommend it to someone? What would I tell them to be wary of as potential dealbreakers?

These are the kinds of questions that I want to get involved with here. Another reason that I want to get involved is that I have a long-standing photography background that I haven't made as much use of as I would like, and this is an opportunity. There are some folks who do a good job at capturing the properties of an ink, though sometimes it is difficult, and I want to take a stab at illustrating those differences with photography work, as well as illustrating what sorts of paper and nib choices get the most out of your ink.