Time for a much needed keycaps update. As you know by now I’m working on Elven/Dwarven keycaps, the colors are finalized –which is a big achievement– but dye-sublimation is proving more difficult than anticipated. I received various rounds of prototypes in these last weeks but the manufacturer doesn’t seem able to get all the pieces right. The problem I believe is a mix of multi-color legends together with the side prints.

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We gave too much attention to the Elves recently. We all love them, but we know how pain in a$$ they could be. The previous batch of prototypes for Dwarvish was all messed up so I haven’t showed you anything… until today! I’ve got more prototypes and the sets are simply delicious!

Very quick but very juicy update. I got the first batch of prototypes for the Tolkien sets and they are lovely!

Tolkien sets development proceeds at a steady pace. All colors have been finalized and they are delicious! Legends should be final; for the Elvish set most of the work was already done (from previous Sindarin keycaps), for Dwarvish things are a little more complicated.

The official material is very sparse so I had to rely on Neo Cirth, which is an effort to expand the little Dwarvish vocabulary we have documented from Tolkien. It won’t be super accurate, but it’s a close approximation.

Development of the Tolkien sets is proceeding at a steady pace. The colors are pretty much final and the manufacturer has already produced a few test keycaps. This is just a quick update before the Holidays.

It took forever but it’s kinda sorta semi-official that we will soon™ release licensed Tolkien keyboards, keycaps, desktop mat, …

It’s not clear yet how much stuff we are going to do, but I would like to start from a few sets of Elven and –this time also– Dwarven keycaps. Both being composed by extremely complicated glyphs we can’t do double-shot, so this is going to be MT3 profile in PBT material with dye-sublimated legends. It is somehow limiting in the color selection (we can’t use light on dark schemes) but we can use any sort of iconography from the Tolkien world.

UPDATE: now live on Drop!

When we designed the MT3 keycap profile we had very specific vintage keyboards in mind. One of them was the IBM 3277 (and the whole 32xx series). So before venturing any further in colorful and extravagant color schemes I had to honor the 3277 by dedicating an MT3 set to it.

Hence I’m proud to introduce to you simply “3277”, the next MT3 double-shot to be produced in the coming months.

It was March 16th –basically 12 years ago in the time of covid– when I first told you that Susuwatari was going production. I was not happy about it, we weren’t ready and I had no trust in a factory that to that point gave only disappointment.

Well, when I’m wrong I’m wrong. Today I got the production prototypes for Susuwatari… and to my great surprise they are pretty darn good.

If you follow me you know that I’m an annoyingly perfectionist and I’m never 100% happy with my work. Well, this time I’m moderately optimist. I have no clue how the manufacturer pulled this off after the countless low quality tests we made in past year, but I’m not gonna complain.

Of course there’s something I’d still like to fix. Colors are still not a perfect match of what I had in mind and a couple of keys (not important ones) would need some retouching, but anyway they are ready for production and shipping as they are.

So warm up a special place in your collection, Susuwatari is coming to you real soon!

Let’s start with the good news. /dev/tty2 is finally live! I thought it was “ready to buy” but it turned out Drop started with a preorder page. But there shouldn’t be delays, this is the third time we make these and the manufacturer can vomit /dev/tty pretty easily by now.

Please note that there will be some updates in the coming hours! More keys will be added and few things fixed. Honestly I didn’t know Drop was about to release the Kraken so soon.

Susuwatari is in production right now and as far as I know it is very close to be completed. As I said few weeks ago they rushed the production so I’m still not sure what will be actually released. We sent the manufacturer a very detailed report but I don’t think we’ll be able to fix any error unless it is very very bad.

That’s all for now! Stay safe!