Love BIC!

From pens to ChatGPT. What a ride.-

It's not very comfortable, its hard edges are unpleasant for the fingers and it feels too thin.

The flimsy cap gets lost easy and there is an endless amount of ballpoint pens you can click, that don't even need a cap in the first place.

Average clicking ballpoint pens have a plastic that's more comfortable to suck, lick and bite.

I always hated them.

Also useful for picking some tubular locks

https://postureinfohub.com/how-to-pick-a-tubular-lock-with-a...

I use gel pens, because they leave thinner and more black trace. I think ballpoint pen belongs to history.

It's the perfect product. I pick it up, I use it, it functions perfectly without thought.

It's a lifelong mission to find any such tech product.

Two articles on it (which probably were part of the source for this one):

- https://www.penaddict.com/blog/2016/1/17/bic-cristal-ballpoi...

- https://www.jetpens.com/blog/How-the-Ballpoint-Pen-Changed-t...

a book which has a bit on the usage of this and similar Bic models is:

https://www.paulshawletterdesign.com/2012/12/blue-pencil-no-...

(ob. discl., I received a copy (which I gave to my daughter) to write the review: http://ftp.tug.org/TUGboat/tb34-2/tb107reviews-zapfhallmark....) which has the line:

> Some such details are very humbling, such as the exquisitely beautiful design study for Zapfino-like capitals intended for use with Firenze shown with the 49 cent Deluxe Fine Point Bic ballpoint pen used to render the letters (pg. 43).

I bought a pack of 100 of them for super cheap a few years ago, and a pack of 200 or so pencils with erasers from amazon basics. They carried me through all my exams in university, I have some in every backpack, purse, everywhere. Never had to worry about not having a pen ready, or a replacement if I lost one the morning before the exam. That is truly a buy-it-for-life level investment.

The bic clic (not cristal) is the iconic pen of my childhood.

It's hard to explain how popular they were in NZ, if you asked kids to draw a pen that's what they'd draw.

It's such a versatile product. I bet everyone here who's older than 45/50 have at least once used a Bic pen to rewind a cassete tape.

I also used the plastic clip as a stapler remover.

There were many other uses for it, for sure.

There are some amazing drawings done with blue Bics.

https://mymodernmet.com/paulus-architect-ballpoint-pen-drawi...

Such a crappy pen design, guess it proves mediocre designs sometimes prevail. The logical backflips that people use to justify its success are a little annoying though

What's the proper name for that other, arguably even more well-recognized, BIC pen, that looks like Cristal except its main body is opaque orange, and is generally cheap garbage that breaks in your hand if you squeeze it it too hard, and doesn't even write half the time?

(And yeah, I remember the taste of it, too. I've "eaten" through my share of these pens as a kid. It's the one pen you can't bite on, unless you like having shards of orange plastic everywhere.)

It's also magical in a big way - it's almost as if it were enchanted with a "handwriting: -10" debuff, because that's what happens when you try writing with it, relative to anything else (including pencils and crayons). To this day, I occasionally wonder, how did they manage to achieve that distinct effect.

In my circles, BIC as a brand is basically the stuff you don't buy unless as a last resort, whether that's ballpoints or razors or anything else.

The Cristal is the front-runner in my brain for "most iconic consumer product of the 20th century."

That said, it's weird how they've completely vanished from my personal landscape. The opaque white Biros are more common now. But I think I'll go seek out a Cristal later today, just for nostalgia's sake.