From pens to ChatGPT. What a ride.-

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.

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

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

- 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).

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.

I also used the plastic clip as a stapler remover.

There were many other uses for it, for sure.

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

(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.

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.

But if you want to know what the best cheap writing pen, it's the clear pilot pen. Everyone around me uses it. There is also the opaque pilot v5 which was the gold standard when i was in school.

> Marcel Bich bought the patent for the ballpoint pen from Hungarian – Argentine inventor László Bíró

Presumably beating his rivals John Pencil and Wolfgang von Fountain-Pen to it...

As well as being ubiquitous, reliable and cheap, you can also vary the line weight it produces with pressure. This makes it great for sketches and diagrams, as well as straight writing.

Not quite; in New Zealand they're surprisingly rare. I've never seen them for sale there, even though they're common in Australia.

https://fr.bic.com/fr/bic-m10-original-stylos-bille-retracta...

If you like taking analog notes, I highly recommend getting yourself a starter fountain pen and some good paper (emphatically not Moleskin—those work best with pencils; too much bleed with fountain pen ink) and enjoy hand writing as it was meant to be. ;)

[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/08/ballp...

They could have half the ink capacity and most people would barely notice.

The BIC Round Stic, however, I love. I bought a box of sixth like a decade ago and still have like thirty left. Super simple, super cheap, and just great for me.

Not only is this pen ubiquitous, but it's ink flow is usually pretty light, which makes it not smear on your hands or the page.

IIRC in the late 70s they sold for nineteen cents each (NE USA).

Ya couldn't beat that with a stick.

He claims the BIC has quintessence, a quality he says he has been devotedly tracking since reading the 1983 book Quintessence : The Quality of Having It by Betty Cornfeld and Owen Edwards: https://archive.org/details/quintessence00bett