Since my last one gained so much traction...

Here is your thing of the day. I just overheard a phone call between a prospective client and one of our salesgals. This guy insisted that we send him step-by-step directions from his house to our office via postal mail. Why? Because he "doesn't do" computers, the internet, or text messages.

Nor apparently does he simply write anything down that was, just for sake of example, relayed to him over the telephone three whole seconds ago.

Our salesgal, not being terribly familiar with the area, wrote down the address and passed this on to me (i.e., the keeper of the hallowed postage stamps).

...This doofus literally lives in the apartment complex across the street from our office. I'm looking at his balcony from my seat in my office right now. If I had a nice baseball sized rock I could throw it right through his window from here.

Of course I called him back and told him this. I'm not rightly positive if he understands what I'm telling him or not. He still insisted I mail him our address and directions. I can't tell at this point if this is because he is genuinely a moron, or has some legitimate disability or mental foible that necessitates this for him, this some kind of elaborate prank, or if he's just doubling down now in the hopes that it'll help him save face.

I printed out a Google map and drew a (very short) line on it with a highlighter from his door to ours, stuffed it with some of our sales literature, and I'm going to go tape it to his door after work. I'll be damned if I'm wasting a stamp on this.

I just had a client call and get Big Mad with me because he got An Email.

"I just got some email from "you all" saying something about my delivery wasn't done, and this is bullshit because I told you all that I wasn't ready for [equipment] delivery yet so nobody was there and it's saying I have 46 hours or else you'll cancel my delivery or some shit and this is fucked up and I'm not standing for it you all keep screwing everything up and if you can't do something about this right now I want my money back and this is unacceptable and -- "

You want to know what the email in question was?

It was this:

This indefatigable moron sent someone else a message from his own personal email account, got the address wrong and received this bounceback, and failed to understand this so hard that immediately concluded that this must have something to do with "us" and his equipment delivery so he should instantly pick up the telephone and screech.

Isn't it nice to be appreciated in the capacity that idiots assume that every single little thing that goes wrong in their lives must somehow be your fault?

I also partially blame Google for putting a stupid little icon of a truck on these things, obviously completely failing to account for the fact that some large percentage of idiots A) won't actually read the words, and B) can't comprehend abstract concepts.

If you try to design something to be foolproof, they'll just go on and invent a better fool.

TL;DW: A fairly automatic postprocessing script to convert your print's walls to brick layers to attempt to achieve more tensile strength in the Z axis, i.e. against layer separation. Some brief description of the current patent clusterfuck, and an observation that the new patent in question (which is probably void anyway) has not been filed in Europe...

Link to the author's github for this: https://github.com/TengerTechnologies/Bricklayers

It seems from the github issues report that this is not 100% perfect, but it appears to be at least mostly functional for those of us who would like to mess with this and not have to do it manually.

Note, I am not the author of this.

I will fully understand if nobody believes me, but I am doing my level best not to turn things into a Weird Pen Wednesday. Really, I am. I already have one of those to maintain and I need to do another like I need a hole in my pocket.

But somehow, I couldn't resist this.

I don't have a name or a model designation for it, but these are relatively easy to find from your favorite distributor of knockoff Chinese white box goods. This one was labeled "Brass Fountain Pen Kawaii Ink Pen EF/F/Bent Nib Excellent Business Office School Supplies Pens."

It's called a lot of other things elsewhere, in the typical word-salad way of this type of nonsense, usually involving terms like "retro," "vintage," and quite frequently, "kawaii." Yes, truly its design is very human.

But regardless of all of this, in my cursory research I couldn't nail down any original manufacturer by name. Or a model number. Or much of anything else, really.

You can pay any amount of money for one of these since they seem to be listed all over hell and creation with no difference between them other than the chutzpah of whoever's selling it. "EYPKPL," for instance, have the audacity to list this for as much as $36 at the time of writing which is quite absurd. Meanwhile "SHIONEOFI" present a more reasonable $12. If you're hipper still you can pay around $6, and be further assured that "This merchant is committed to only offering products that comply with the General Product Safety Regulation."

And if you really want to throw caution to the wind you can score one for as little as $1.78. You may be old and wizened by the time it shows up, though.

I have, as usual, buried the lede a bit.

The "Kawaii," you see, packs up to be very small. By my measure it is 84.3mm when fully stowed, or just a hair under 3-3/8". When deployed it's precisely 150mm long, or at least my example is. I'll bet you there's a little bit of variation from one piece to another, which we'll get to in a bit.

So it's not just another potentially awful anonymous Chinese pen. It's one of those that's really, really small. So that's something.

It is also very, thoroughly, extremely crosshatched on the outside. There is a very pronounced pattern texturing the entirety of the outer barrel completely from stem to stern. Somebody somewhere has a half nut drive on their lathe and they're very proud to show it off.

For grinsies, here is a quick comparison with a variety of shorties of an ostensibly similar vein. From left to right is our subject, then an Ohto Tasche, a much beleaguered Pilot Petit, and the obligatory Fisher Bullet that just appears whenever one of these comparisons comes up whether you wanted it to or not. It is damn strange how that always happens, come to think of it.

The Kawaii Desu Elegant Retro Vintage Stationery Excellent Ink Writing Pen High End Elegant is shorter than all of them.

This isn't a slider mechanism, a clicker, or even a twister. To get it writing ready, you unscrew the front half of the pen which stows inside the other half of the body, flip it around, and screw it back in where it came from a bit like assembling a pool cue. (You could also eschew this entirely if you really wanted to and just write with the stub of the front half, which is naturally fully functional all by itself.)

It's thus got two diameter measurements. The outer body which becomes the tail is 11.02mm not including its protruding buttony thing, again more on which later. The inner body which then becomes the grip section is a pleasingly slim 9.03mm. Altogether it weighs 26.4 grams -- or 0.93 ounces in the old money.

This is because its body is entirely brass. And it genuinely is brass, not "brass" as we've occasionally seen before, where some turkey applied a brassy finish coating over something else and lied about it. I can happily report that a magnet does not stick to it, so it certainly isn't steel. Okay, so it might be zinc or some other potmetal. But it looks like brass, feels like brass, and with some initial trepidation I can tell you it tastes like brass, too. So it probably is.

Oh, yes. And the plug that isn't the writing end also unscrews and looks identical before you remove it. So you'd better remember which end is which. The two ends are totally interchangeable so you can screw either end into the body as you see fit.

There isn't a clip, but in its place is this brass button thing. It is theoretically removable in that you can plainly see it's threaded and screwed into the pen body if you look at it from the inside. But it's threadlockered or glued somehow, and undoing it would surely require grabbing it with pliers which would mar the finish. So I left mine where it was. For now, anyway.

The button does serve to keep the pen from rolling away but it doesn't do anything else. You can't press it and it doesn't move in any way, so it's no good as a fiddle aid. There is a gap between it and the pen body but the disk that comprises it really isn't enough to allow it to serve as an effective clip. I think it would have been better if it were a clip, honestly, and as it stands now there's really no elegant way to carry this thing. It's just begging to have its endcap drilled out and a keyring or similar installed in it. Or something -- anything. But be careful with that, because the point does rest inside the tailcap some ways when the pen is in its stowed configuration, and the cap is hollow.

Maybe someone suitably motivated could muscle the button out to determine what thread it has (surely it's a standard M3 or M4 pitch given that the factory must have been too cheap to develop anything bespoke) and replace it with something else.

Oh well, I guess for two bucks you could afford to experiment. I'm going to get all my photography done before I go around breaking mine, though.

Bits and Pieces

The grip section of the pen further unscrews roughly in the middle of itself, and that's where the cartridge gets installed.

Actually, let's talk about the cartridge because there's more weirdness afoot, here. And while we're at it we'll sidetrack ourselves into a lot of other things, too, because that's how we roll.

My Kawaii Desu didn't come in any kind of packaging at all, really. Just a clear plastic baggie; no box, no card. That means it also came with no documentation. Not even a cursory "QC Pass" sticker. Luckily it did come with a cartridge, because otherwise it has nothing whatsoever to describe what kind of cartridge it takes.

The majority of nameless Chinese pens these days all take similar cartridges to each other, which have a 3.4mm inner neck diameter and are about 50mm long. I can't find any official name for these things but they're the closest you can get a Chinese standard if you can consider such a thing without bursting out laughing.

Well, this pen doesn't take those. Its cartridge is on the far left, above. There's a Chinese Standard (snerk) right next to it, in this case one of the ones that came with my Oaso. It's most similar to the standard international short cartridge, which is the next one in line. And it certainly isn't whatever tomfoolery came with my Writech. We have another mystery on our hands.

I measured the inner neck diameter at 2.6mm, and the cartridge is 39.15mm in overall length. We'll call it 39. So that's very close to the international short, but not quite.

This is apparently a size that exists, though, but I've never handled one in detail before so I don't know what it's called, either. If it's even called anything. You can buy spares e.g. here, so this appears to be perhaps yet another chimera dreamed up by the Chinese.

I tried and you can indeed wrestle an international short onto this and it works, despite the neck of the international cartridge being 0.2mm smaller.

Anyway.

I noticed the nib on mine was sitting on the feed crooked. It didn't take much doing to figure out that the nib, feed, and section on these are very easily to separate. It's not unusual to be able to dismantle a pen like this given that many of them appear to be made out of commodity parts, but usually it requires at least some manner of tools or maybe the application of a little heat to break any glue that might be in there.

Not with this. You can just slip the nib out with your fingers. It goes back in just as easily, too, and the problem with mine was it wasn't pushed in straight when I got it. The further it's pulled out the more wiggle is possible in it, but you can have the nib pulled out about an extra 2-3mm before it knocks into the endplug when you put the pen together, and even in that state it'll still write. Hence my asterisk about the overall length of the pen back at the beginning of this.

The feed indexes in via a slot on it that engages with a little fin on the section. It's thus impossible to get wrong; you can only insert it one way.

The nib is really nothing special. It's steel, 0.40mm thick, and quite inflexible. It's plated with something gold... colored, and has some scrollwork embellishments on it that do nothing.

Given its dimensions I strongly suspect this is interchangeable with the garden variety #5 (i.e. 5mm) nibs which are only slightly less ubiquitous as their #6 counterparts. This raises the possibility that a suitably enthusiastic ~~nut~~ owner could swap it out with something a little more refined. A quality nib will probably run somewhere between 5 and 10 times the worth of this entire pen, so the financial wisdom of this endeavor is left as an exercise for the reader.

It says "iridium point" on it which is almost certainly a lie, and also "Germany" which definitely is.

Flipping it over reveals that the markings are stamped into it and not engraved, which is not surprising given its cheapness but may just at the outside impact its performance, since the stampings carry clear through to the underside and will serve to separate it from the feed minutely.

The body is a straight through tube with the same thread profile machined into both ends. You could thus assemble the pen backwards if you really wanted to. This also raises the possibility of spending $4 to get two of these, and you could assemble yourself a double header. Or install two tailcaps, an activity which would truly be -- ah ha ha -- pointless.

Writing With It

The Kawaii Desu writes like myriad other hyper budget Chinese pens. It's not bad. It's not special.

Of course, it will feel special -- or at the very least quite different -- to anyone who's never handled a fountain pen before. Which these days is a surprising number of people. It seems in modern times the unordained automatically consider any fountain pen to be "fancy," even when it decidedly isn't.

Mine had a minor hard starting problem until I got the nib situated correctly on the feed. Now it works just fine. The seal of its end plug is only really okay, though. Mine will dry out noticeably if left unused for more than about three days, and thus far restarting it hasn't been too hard but that might get annoying for someone who will use it only very occasionally. There's nowhere to fit an O-ring or gasket in there, though, and all the contact surfaces are metal-on-metal. So maybe that's to be expected.

Available nib options are fine, extra fine, and a "bent" (fude) option is also available. Super fine nibs kind of annoy me so I ordered the regular fine, though I suspect I was sent an extra fine anyway. That's because the EF is rated at 0.38mm which is exactly the line with mine puts down, and the F is supposed to be 0.5. So I guess I got slightly ripped off. Oh well.

And the nib width is not marked anywhere on the thing, of course.

The extra fine nib is not as scratchy as you would expect and I actually rank it above such hyperbudget offerings as the Oaso K016. Not much line width variation is possible since the nib is stiff as a board, but with significant pressure you can achieve as much a 0.42mm. A whopping 10% difference! No one but the most maniacal of pen nerds would even notice.

I will use the customary writing example to illustrate the one big point about this that hasn't been addressed:

The Inevitable Conclusion

I have no damn idea why this pen is so frequently marketed as "kawaii."

Because it isn't.

Yes, it's very small. But I would have been quicker to label it steampunk instead. (Which, yes, is about 80% of why I bought it. How did you know?)

Anyway, it's amazing just how much pen you can get these days for less than what it would cost you to buy a 20 ounce soda at 7-11. This is a perfectly functional and reasonably well built fountain pen with quirky looks and a neat little form factor that's so cheap you could truly treat it as disposable. And it's not even made out of crappy plastic. That's remarkable, right there.

It would be a bit better if getting it out weren't such a faff. Unscrewing and re-screwing the halves together is probably fine if you're going to be holding it for an extended period, but for duty as, say, a quick jotting short note taker I predict that's going to wear out its welcome in a hurry.

The only other issue is that as ever there is no such thing as repeatability with these brandless products. It'd be one thing altogether if it had a model number, even a completely unmemorable and obtuse one. Even Jinhao pens have model numbers, but this doesn't even manage that. I can't in good conscience really recommend anywhere for you to get one nor what to ask for. You'll just have to roll the dice and see what comes up.

I've been at it again.

I've been using the hell out of these drawer thingies, what with you fill with Gridfinity bins and store ~~pocketknives~~ various things in.

Well, I screwed myself over and it turns out I need a stack of drawers one cell narrower than stock. The original author posted sources in Onshape but I will be buggered if I'm signing up for Yet Another Account just for that.

So I reconstructed the entire thing -- my way -- in FreeCAD. Because obviously that's the less insane option. (I guess this also allowed me to excise the magnet ears from the drawers, which is a worthless increase in print time and small waste of material for me since I don't use magnets with my Gridfinity bins)

Anyway, here it is.

This is my dinky 2x2 test print. Which is very nearly but not quite completely useless. (For instance, it fits Nite-Ize cable ties very well, as you can see.) If it makes you feel any better, the generator absolutely will make you a 1x1, 1u tall drawer assembly if you ask it to which truly will be fully useless...

VSO.

So we got one of these rather silly sponge holder ducks.

The only problem is that Mr. Quacks here doesn't quite weigh enough. With a sponge his beak -- especially one that's laden with water -- he's prone to falling over into the sink. The sponge is held quite a ways outboard, and altogether the entire duck only weighs 65.4 grams.

I tried one other gimcrack solution before this, which was to glue a suction cup to his butt. That didn't work very well.

Instead, I opted to fill him up with some ballast. These will do nicely.

Yes, all of these pictures were just taken on my grubby stovetop. No, I am not going to pull out all the stops to perform my usual level of photography on, let's not put too fine a point on it, a butt plug for a rubber duck. I used a very short (less than a meter) scrap of left over TPU I had lying around to make a... cork... so I could fill the duck with ballast and then keep it all inside.

I am also given to understand that I should have perhaps made such at thing corkscrew shaped, but I am very sorry to inform you that I didn't do this, either.

I didn't count how many BB's I used. Two fillings of that speed loader that came with my Crosman M4, is what it was. I'll let you do the math: Now he weighs a much more suitable 265.7 grams, a little over four times the original weight, and acts rather like a weeble-wobble. With this you can tip him over so far the sponge falls out before he topples over himself. And can also shake him like a maraca, if you're really bored.

That's right, I'm back on my bullshit. Now with this:

In my apparently evergreen quest to own every single production retractable fountain pen in the world, here is the "Writech" W-784. In keeping with tradition for this sort of thing, I have no idea if Writech is the actual manufacturer of this, or if it's a yum-cha OEM product that is likely to appear under a variety of baffling and inscrutable nonbrands depending on where you buy it.

But never mind all that, and check out this cool plastic capsule case thing it comes in.

The lid on the capsule is a clutch fit and is not hinged, but the little pedestal mounts that hold the pen for retail display are clearly designed to be removable and the lid does stay on securely enough that you could, if you really wanted to, use the capsule as a general purpose pen-and-pencil case.

But the packaging is not even the weirdest part about this pen.

This is, of course, yet another retractable fountain pen. It is capless, and operates via a clicky plunger on the end that is familiar to anyone who has handled a retractable ballpoint pen. So, everyone. Since I have enough black and silver pens, and I learned my lesson after our last little... incident... I got this variant in a rather pleasing sky blue color.

Herewith it bears the warning sticker that I peeled off immediately after taking this photo, never for it to be seen again and instantly ruining my collector's value. Yeah, I cut all the tags off of my Beanie Babies back in the day, too. Sue me. (Actually, I stuck it to the inside of the capsule.)

Obviously as a real live fountain pen this needs some kind of sealing mechanism to keep the ink from drying out when it's not in use. The various retractables on the market therefore employ a variety of tricks with trap doors and little ball valves with varying degrees of elegance.

This... Not so much. The diagram on the sticker kind of gives away the punchline.

In again, out again, Finnegan.

The Writech employs this gimcrack setup, which I can only describe as a submarine hatch trap door. It pushes out a short distance and then swings away to the right side. It is exceedingly bonkers.

The Writech is entirely made out of plastic, and when they made that decision they really meant it. Even all the flexible and what should at least be superficially spring loaded parts in the trap door are also made out of plastic. The only metal parts in it near as I can figure are the nib itself, the clip, and the spring that drives the plunger. Since I've only owned this for about a week, the wisdom of this methodology is something I really can't comment on.

At first blush there's no visible gasket, either, but closer inspection reveals that the ring the trap door's inner face seats into is made out of some kind of squishy silicone-like material. That probably goes some way towards keeping the interior sealed when the point is retracted. I've had mine inked up since the moment I got it and it still hasn't dried out, so it must work.

The Writech is nearly completely cylindrical in cross section, 12mm in diameter. There are two shallow scallops in the grip end which serve to indicate which side is up, and provide a little more secure grip. It's really not much, but it's something.

Even so, it feels decidedly strange to use because you are always cognizant of the trap door which is just there the entire time you're writing with it. It really feels as if it ought to knock against the paper all the time when you're writing, but somehow it doesn't. But it's still likely to fill you with trepidation all the same. With any luck that'll go away eventually. Maybe not.

In the capsule you also get a little cardboard box containing five of what are as far as I can tell completely proprietary ink cartridges.

The pen unscrews in a normal fashion and there's an empty cartridge inside it, I suppose perfect if you prefer to fill it with your own ink via syringe. There is no inkwell converter, nor is one available that I can find. Just as well, probably, since the nib lacks the traditional inlet hole at the top of the split. So it'd probably be a bugger to vacuum any ink up into it even if you had a way to try.

Even the cartridges are weird. They're very short and fat, very flasklike. That's the Writech one on the right there, and I'm pretty surprised this thing doesn't take regular old international shorts (left), nor even the old China Knockoff Standard cartridge (3rd from the left) or any of their near-twins like the Zebra V-301's. Any of the above would certainly have been an easier -- not to mention cheaper -- way to do it. Maybe there are other brands of pen that take these but I've never seen one in my life. I find it hard to believe that anybody bothered to make a bespoke cartridge for this, but maybe they did.

The nib is all steel and very plain Jane. The split between the tines is seriously tiny, nearly invisible to the naked eye. That doesn't seem to affect its performance any, though, and this "fine nib" per the manufacturer lays down a line width of about 0.43mm with not a lot of variation (measured via my highly scientific method of randomly scribbling on a Post-It and peering through a loupe at my calipers on it, and averaging the results). Unusually for a fine nibbed cheapola Chinese pen, the Writech is actually a pretty wet writer and puts down a lot of ink.

The nib is folded over the feed, with what would have been its wings rolled over so far that it's nearly cylindrical. That probably explains a large part of its stiffness, plus as usual most of its length is supported by the feed as well.

This is one of those jobbies you could probably reliably use on multipart write-through forms if you had to.

The nib is quite sharp and rather scratchy. If we're feeling charitable we'd call it "controllable." It puts me a lot in mind of the nib on the Oaso K016, although it's much wetter, bolder, less sensitive to position, and quite a bit less awful.

It's actually pretty okay if you don't mind the scratchiness. But it is neither elegant, nor refined, nor expressive. If you're one of the types who likes to have an inch long 14k gold tuning fork on the end of your pen, it will surely annoy you mightily.

The action certainly isn't very refined, either. The click is not very clicky, and is in fact rather vague and mushy. This is made up for somewhat by the fact that every deployment should probably be accompanied by, rather than a click, blaring klaxons appropriate for preceding the firing of an intercontinental ballistic missile. Awooga! Awooga! Open the hatch and prepare for launch!

The clip is okayish. It's aluminum and has a nice bead blasted finish with a Euro chic vibe going on. It holds well and releases easily, but the end of it isn't chamfered or sloped much so you have to employ some fingernail to spread it away from the pen body enough to get it onto your shirt. It'll do.

It hasn't got anything sticking out in the way of itself, and there's a pretty sizable gap left between the clip and the body of the pen so thick fabrics should be no issue.

The only other note I've got about it is that the clip is on the plunger end of the pen rather than the end with the point, which is the reverse of most of the premium retractables. This has the side effect of leaving all of the rather long plunger sticking up past the clip, which isn't a dealbreaker but is mildly annoying if you clip your pen to a t-shirt collar rather than a breast pocket since it'll be prone to poking you in the neck.

The Inevitable Conclusion

If you can get over the inherent wartiness of the trap door design, I think the Writech is the least expensive retractable fountain pen you can get that's not objectively awful. Yes, the K016 is cheaper, but it's also a lot worse.

The Writech costs about $27 in the US and comes in a couple of pastelly colors if that's your jam. It frequently goes on sale whereupon you can get it for even less. And it comes with a "free" pencil case, I guess.

The only problem with all this is that it's really not far off from the cost of a Majohn A2 Press which is even better, not to mention quite a bit less doofy. So as usual, my recommendation is still that the Majohn A2 (or the A1, but definitely not the A3) is still the best value for a retractable these days.

Unless you absolutely must be a hipster or otherwise generally contrarian. Because the Writech sure is damn weird.

This might be a strange one.

I build a new PC. Yea and verily, it is like unto a tiny god. Especially compared to my old PC, which as I have opined around here before I built in 2012 (!) and was still sporting a Sandy Bridge i7 2600K.

Is. Is sporting. It still works. I will undoubtedly replace my living room media center machine with it.

My new machine is very fast and very swanky, and through my component selection I also inadvertently wound up making it very quiet, as well, which it turns out I kind of like. Part of this is no doubt contributed to by the fact that it hasn't got any hard drives in it -- just two SSD's. Currently its four SATA sockets sit forlorn and empty.

Part of my old machine's raison d'être was that it had a big old RAID array in it. Four whole terabytes across a RAID 5 array consisting of 4 disks. Hey, cut me a break. That was a lot of ones and zeroes, over a decade ago. Of course, the contents of that entire RAID can fit snugly (very snugly...) on my 4TB boot drive now. But I kind of want some additional bulk storage. I have work to do; All that media out there ain't gonna pirate itself.

This raises an interesting concern, since this thing lives on (not under, at least as of yet) my desk full time about 24" away from where I sit. And this is a metric that's remarkably difficult to search or filter for:

What is a good quiet hard drive option?

Not fast, not inexpensive, not even especially capacious -- I'll be stringing 4 disks together as a RAID 5 array again. 10 or 12 TB units will probably do. So I don't care about any of those things.

These days it seems that big spitting platter drives are all marketed towards either NAS applications with all the jet-turbine trappings that entails, or "screaming" gaming performance, which is deeply silly since all of my OS, programs, and games will reside on an SSD.

Any ideas?

(And no, I am not interested in building a NAS and tucking it in a closet someplace.)

This is a broadly substance free post. But I assume most VR headset owners have at this point at least tried Half Life: Alyx.

It therefore follows that most of you are familiar with this dumb popup you get the first time you run it:

Fair enough, on my old PC I only had a Sandy Bridge i7 2600K and a GTX1080Ti. Maybe I was below the recommended requirement even though I played through the entire campaign just fine.

Well, I just built a new PC containing a Ryzen 9 9900X, a Radeon RX 7900 XTX with 24 gigs of VRAM, and 64 gigs of system RAM.

And I still get that dumb "low memory" popup.

This game came out four years ago, Valve. What the hell did you expect people to play it on? A Cray EX254?

More noodling around with Overture glow PLA.

I tried to tweak the exposure a bit this time to make it look more like how you perceive it in reality.

I'm finally getting around to messing with this stuff. Now I can balisong in the dark.

Step 2 is determining how badly all the particles of gumf in this filament negatively impact the mechanical strength.

Edit: I probably should have said this in the first place, but this is Overture green glow PLA.

The model is my Rockhopper balisong utility knife. Go check it out -- it's fully printable, even the hardware.

NPD.

Actually, that day was several weeks ago. I've been putting off writing this all that time because I've been dreading doing so. You'll see why.

We've discussed the Majohn A1 and A2 several times in the past, up to and including my own previous take on the matter.

Did you know that there's an A3 now?

Well, in what's now apparently my ongoing quest to own at least one of every retractable fountain pen on earth, here it is.

This is the white variant, so chosen because I felt I needed to achieve the maximum level of irritation that's physically possible by attempting to take detailed photographs on a white background of an object that is not only also stark white itself, but also extremely glossy and all the parts of it that aren't white are mirror finished. Genius!

Anyway, the A3 is indeed yet another entry into the small but growing pantheon of retractable fountain pens.

As proof, here it is with the point retracted.

Like the A1 and A2 before it, the A3 is ostensibly a clone of a model from Pilot's Vanishing Point or "Capless" series, depending on what they're calling it this week. Except this time, the A3 is a clone of the new (ish) Vanishing Point LS. (Yes, the one that had that big recall.) I don't think you can buy the original from Pilot anymore, but there are a few third party retailers who allege to still have it in stock.

But instead you can have this right now for about $45. Jury's out on whether or not you'd want to, though.

The A3 is neither a click nor twist mechanism. Or rather, it's... half of both?

Just like the LS it mimics, the A3 has a strange and unique dual action extend/retract system where you click the long plunger on the end to extend it...

...But twist the knurled section on the end to retract it. You can't retract the point by clicking the plunger again, no matter many times you diddle with it. Unlike the previous click-action only pens the plunger stays pushed in when the point is deployed. And you can actually deploy it by twisting the tail end as well rather than clicking the plunger if you feel like it. But there's not a lot of point in doing so.

The action is... weird. The first thing you'll notice is that you turn the tail clockwise to retract the point, which feels backwards. I know why this is -- it's because the body unscrews in the middle in the usual righty-tighty fashion and this prevents you from unscrewing the body if you go overboard retracting the point. But it still feels wrong. Here's how it works:

Hark! For I have obtained a big sheet of black construction paper.

(Why didn't you take the rest of your pictures on it, I hear you cry. Good question, is my response.)

With a bit of practice it is possible to both deploy and retract the A3 one handed, but it's just not as convenient as a regular clicker pen. You have to consciously remember to twist the end rather than try to click the plunger again, but clicking the plunger is always the tempting default action because it's right there. It just doesn't do anything.

Pilot billed the original LS on its novelty factor, and it certainly has that. It makes for an excellent fiddle toy, but it's kind of annoying to actually use as a writing utensil.

That's because there's a major problem, and getting the point in and out isn't even the start. If you've been paying attention, you've already spotted it.

The clip is in the middle of the pen.

I have absolutely no idea why this is the case, because on the original Pilot the clip is mounted much further up, a centimeter or so from the nose of the pen. And that's how it is on the Majohn A1 and A2 already. So obviously they know how to mount a clip there, so why not copy the Pilot wholesale like they've done before, i.e. the correct way? Whoever was drafting up this thing must have just slammed an entire bottle of stupid pills that morning.

This means that if you try to pocket your A3 like a normal person, roughly half of its length is left sticking out. The point of balance winds up quite close to the top of your pocket hem and thus the pen tends to want to flip over even when by all rights you should have it securely stowed. It'll also tower well over anything else you have in your pocket and make you look like a colossal goober.

Yes, the clip is removable. As a matter of fact, it might be a little too removable. It just slides over the highly polished and tapered body of the pen relying on nothing more than its own spring tension to hold it in place. It's very easy to slip it down and off the front end of the pen, and as soon as you nudge it just enough to get it to let go from its rest position it'll take care of the rest positively leaping off on its own accord.

Even if you do remove the clip there's a square alignment and anti-rotation nub permanently molded into the body of the pen which will remain there, mocking you, forever. Theoretically this a concession for keeping the pen from rolling away when its clip is removed, and it would be if it weren't for the fact that Pilot already built a fin into the rotating tail section for that exact purpose, and Majohn dutifully copied it. So the nub is in reality completely superfluous.

The A3 has an inset equatorial band that the head of the clip fits into. Here you can see the other major problem with the clip, which is that the anti-rotation nub has square corners which will snag on your shirt something fierce. The nub also rests in a hollow on the back face of the clip, positively ensuring it will be in the way 100% of the time. It is therefore practically impossible to actually clip the damn thing to your pocket in the first place. That means all the other complaints about the clip and everything else have to get in line and wait their turn until you can actually manage to get the blasted thing situated.

It is possible to get it done if you grab the end of the clip with your fingernail and lift it away from the pen body. But that's stupid. Even if Majohn had to use this idiotic clip system they should have at least chamfered the corners on the anti-rotation nub. There is no mechanical reason they need to be square to work with the clip itself.

So no matter which way you go you can't win. Either the clip will irritate the hell out of you, or you can take it off and be stuck with the left over nub annoying you forever instead. I guess you could try to grind it off, but good luck retaining the finish in that spot.

The Pilot Vanishing Point LS is billed as a "luxury" pen and thus the A3 is as well -- up to a certain extent, anyway, with Majohn positioning it above its peers with verbiage like "upgraded version" and "quiet and smooth operation." Here it is compared to an OG Vanishing Point (top) and an A2 (bottom). If you ignore all the mechanical details it actually does look quite nice from a distance. It's also much denser than the plastic variants of the previous A1 and A2 and feels like it should be more expensive if you judge it by the Jurassic Park Binoculars Method. The body is noticeably thicker and feels less hollow than the A2 despite still being made largely of plastic. It weighs a full 41 grams or 1.45 ounces, roughly twice as much as the standard A2 which is 20.8 grams or 0.73 ounces.

It actually even weighs more than a normal clicker model genuine Vanishing Point, which is 29.9 grams or 1.05 ounces. That's pretty remarkable considering significant portions of the latter are made out of brass. I don't have a genuine Vanishing Point LS to compare to, though, so I can't tell you how it stacks up against one of those.

There is a new "Majohn" script logo on the tail section whereas the previous models were completely unmarked. Maybe that's where the luxury is hiding. It's only silkscreened on, though, not engraved, so it'll surely wear off over time.

Inside, the A3 uses the same nib and cartridge carrier as the A2 and A1, which is itself a clone of the internals from the Pilot Vanishing Point. A genuine Pilot assembly is compatible with this and vise-versa, and the assemblies are also interchangeable between all three versions of the Majohn pens. It takes Pilot cartridges, and also comes with two clean and empty cartridges plus an inkwell converter. The spread of included accessories is the same as the other Majohn retractables, so you also get a little pipette bulb for either cleaning or transferring ink to one of your cartridges, and a little rubber bung to reseal a spare cartridge which I absolutely would not trust to remain sealed if you tried carrying a full spare cartridge around with you.

How does it write, then?

Exactly the same as every other Majohn pen.

At present the A3 is only available in an "extra fine" nib width. Majohn do make a normal "fine" nib assembly available and even sell the A2 pre-equipped with it, but not the A3.

The nib is plain stainless steel and is very rigid rather than responsive. Functionally no line width variation is possible. I measured the output of mine as 0.5mm if you press hard, and 0.45 if you don't. The difference is basically unnoticeable.

The point is a little scratchy, probably just owing to being so sharp. It will drag noticeably on cheap paper, more so if you tend to press hard when writing. It feels nicer on better paper with a finer grain, but ultimately this may be putting pearls before swine.

At least mine feeds just fine without skipping, even including the perfunctory few drops of Parker Quink I put in it just to test it out, and immediately syringed back into the inkwell because I hate this pen's mechanism and stupid clip so much.

Since somehow we've never looked at one of Majohn's nibs in detail before, here it is:

The nib is marked "Moonman." Moonman and Majohn are the same entity, and the Majohn retractables were originally sold in the West under the Moonman name but now they aren't. Search me as to why; this is one of those baffling mysteries of Chinese branding that may never make sense.

The nib itself is crimped to the feed and is functionally not removable. I've read of people accomplishing it and I suppose you could get the two apart if you inflicted enough violence on one or the other, but there's not much reason to bother considering Majohn will sell you an entire new assembly for $19.

The Inevitable Conclusion

Don't buy this. Get an Majohn A2 or A1 instead.