I don't use anything resembling the italic style of handwriting, but I do applaud any attention that the issue manages to receive. When this conversation comes

I don't use anything resembling the italic style of handwriting, but I do applaud any attention that the issue manages to receive. When this conversation comes up, you hear a lot of people say 'Who uses pen and paper anymore? I only type these days.' But then, the moleskine is an icon for nerds and geeks everywhere, so there's another data point for you. As for me, I write quite a lot of things down. I don't use italic or block printing; I actually over the last several years started with designing a single uniform style of alphabet to use, then moving on a series of word and letter-sequence abbreviations, glyphs, and the like, in inspiration from the writing systems of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. I guess my point is: given the set of aesthetic values that so many hackers and geeks share, and the sheer amount of time that they spend dealing with letters of all kinds, I am surprised that more of them seem to have absolutely no investment whatsoever in their personal manual expression of written language.