Whats wrong with a quill pen? I like writing with them.
Hm, there's a thought...I might just have to take my handwritten lab notes, the ones that are worthy enough to go into a leatherbound book rather than just the notebooks for my, well, notetaking. But for the bona-fide great successes, the kind worthy of a permanent and elegant recording for future use, I think I might just do that. Quill-pens feel comfortable in my hand, the way they move across the paper or parchment, whilst ballpoint pens, I really hate writing with them, they make my hand ache and almost go into a sort of weird, highly localized sensory overload. Like the overload version of a local anaesthetic. That and making me ache. Pencils are better but too impermanent for a record of the best of my achievements in chemistry, and how they are to be re-achieved, in meticulous detail, when perfection is of the essence. That'd be perfect! I might even get myself a bigger leatherbound book than I already have for that, just so I can start it and continue exclusively written with quill and ink.
And if I go for style I could, just for the theme, use the old-fashioned ink that can be made from certain fungi, notaby those in the genus Coprinus, which deliquesce into black, deep dark inky slime, and used to be used, with certain additives to make it more permanent and preserve it from decay, as a good black writing ink. That is, if I don't eat them first before they get inky and go inedible (there are two especially good ones, Coprinus comatus, the shaggy ink-cap aka the lawyer's wig, which is excellent when fried in butter and extremely easily identified even for a n00b mushroom-muncher with a good degree of safety, and very little risk of misidentification indeed, none in fact if they be more than a few hours old, when the gills turn from pure white to developing a pinkish tinge, before finally blackening and the entire mushroom degenerating into black, inky slime laden with spores. The other large species of good edibility is C.atrementarius, the common ink-cap, which is again fairly easily identified, to the point I know either of them on sight from a fair way off and am very rarely mistaken upon waking closer. Tasty, but they MUST NEVER be eaten with alcohol, nor must one drink any alcohol, nor use alcoholic mouthwashes, medicines containing alcohol, or indeed any other primary or secondary alcohol of intoxicant nature (however tertiary alcohols such as tertiary pentanol can be used as an intoxicant, since tert.alcohols can't be easily oxidized into either aldehydes (primary alcohols including ethanol, our most common drinking alcohol, metabolized into acetaldehyde, which is largely responsible for the horrid symptoms of a severe hangover, as well as that awful faint-fruity kind of smell that you can taste on the breath several hours after drinking say, vodka in a fair quantity, thats the faint smell of some of the acetaldehyde produced in the liver.
The common ink-cap however, whilst totally harmless in the absence of alcohols oxidizable to aldehydes or ketones (primary, secondary respectively) in the liver, contain a compound called coprine, which inhibits aldehyde dehydrogenase, a liver enzyme which breaks down many aldehydes thus causing them to build up in levels far exceeding those naturally formed during the ingestion of alcohol, and acting like nature's answer to disulfiram (antabuse), the drug used on alcoholics who have ceased drinking, as a relapse-preventative attempt via aversion therapy. Won't kill you, unless you got real unlucky indeed and drank a shitton of booze but it would make you wish it had done.
