Tangible Things: I Like Watching Paints Dry
When I was a child, I used to run my hands on rocky walls and running water fountains. In class, I would smell wooden pencils and toy with the heft of a pen. I stabbed my arms with mechanical pencil leads. The good ones would stand on your skin and it was good for "special effects" if you ever had to pretend you were pierced by an arrow. I drove my teachers crazy by stacking the contents of my pencil case if left idle, even in the middle of an exam.
My father decided to let his 8 y.o take a box of disposable, but very handsome Parker pens he got as a gift from a grateful client. I found out they would pool and bleed into paper fibers if I hold them in a spot, and I probably spent as much time making random Rorschach-esque blots as actually writing. It was mesmerizing, seeing how the fluid would snake and spread along the fibers. My mother was not amused. In middle and high school, I enjoyed Chromatography lab so much I basically stole the extra paper. Probably dissolved one too many pens.
I adore metallic and glitter inks like you would never believe. To tilt and turn a sheet of paper in your hands, to see them shift in color as they catch light, is magic. Then there's dice and spinners and minis of all shapes and textures. As much as I like computers, it's not something you can readily feel digitally, however more convenient it is1.
It took me going back to drawing to realize I had forgotten about these for a while: how satisfying it is to hear the soft scratchy sound of your pencil moving on a toothy paper, how nice it is to roll sheaf of your notebook around your fingers, to rotate and flip and manipulate your tools the way you like. To feel wet paint and juicy ink on your fingertips. To curse when you accidentally run over a still-wet line.
I like to write lines and rearrange them with my hands. My notebooks are difficult to capture properly as I like textural mediums, unless I want to invest in a good scanner/photograph system, or spend time in an image editing program to restore the colors. Even then it just doesn't feel the same.
I don't think physical media is going to die. If anything, it's making a resurgence as people have gotten tired of everything-digital. In the hands of modern tech world, computing lost its playful edge and becomes utilitarian2. It doesn't have to end all be all either. My friend was researching a glove-shaped input device to interface with digital world. There's a research lab inventing a pen to draw in 3D VR. Exciting things in the horizon.
I still like to watch paints dry, though.