Comment by Swizec
4 days ago
> In France, back when I went to school, not sure now, though I hope it hasn't changed, as a child, you'd only be allowed to use fountain pens. Kids learning to write have constantly stained hands while they learn to use it properly, almost as a rite of passage. I'm very thankful to have learned it like that.
In Slovenia, back when I went to school, we all learned with fountain pens and cursive. From 1st to 8th grade you were required to write in fountain pain. If you turned in an assignment written in pencil, it was legit for the teacher to use their eraser and give you an F for turning in empty paper. (They never did this but threatened it a lot).
As soon as high school hit, the restriction lifted and we could use any utensil and whatever font as long as it was legible. Everyone switched to ballpoint pens and some bastardized combination of print and cursive.
I still use my specific combo of print and cursive today, it's like encryption. Very fast to write, very slow sometimes impossible to read. And that's okay, it turns out that anything I write down by hand gets etched into my memory forever. Just seeing the rough shape of the letters brings it back. Sometimes just seeing roughly what page of my notebook it's on is enough to remember what I was thinking.
> it turns out that anything I write down by hand gets etched into my memory forever
That's an exam cramming technique regardless of handwriting quality :)
> If you turned in an assignment written in pencil, it was legit for the teacher to use their eraser and give you an F for turning in empty paper. (They never did this but threatened it a lot).
I find this slightly amusing/ironic because many (most?) fountain pen inks are not waterproof. I had a sheet of paper that was full of (fountain pen written) writing on my desk when I spilled a glass of water -- after the paper dried there was hardly any evidence that there had been writing on the paper. I know that's not the parent's point, but something turned in that was written with a fountain pen would be easier to remove: a teacher would just need to dunk the paper in water!
> many (most?) fountain pen inks are not waterproof.
I assumed this was for child friendliness - you just know kids are going to get ink on their fingers etc while changing cartridges from time to time.
It could partly be that, but I've generally read that the default inks are not waterproof.
I was curious about this so I just did a quick non-scientific perusal of one fountain pen enthusiast shop's offerings. It shows 118 of the ink bottles they sell are water-resistant ink while 935 are not (looking at the Yes/No filter counts for "Water-resistant" at https://www.gouletpens.com/collections/bottled-ink). There's a lot of duplicate inks that can be purchased in multiple bottle sizes, but picking the three most represented bottle volumes (20ml, 30ml, and 50ml) it drops to 24 water-resistant inks and 578 inks that are not water-resistant.
The above includes a lot of "interesting" colors; further restricting to black ink only ends up with 3 that are water-resistant and 26 that are not.
Apparently the inks used in antiquity were not waterproof either. Even though vellum or high quality parchment could last several centuries (if not eaten by moths or other bugs), a single slip of a beverage could erase an entire scroll. Perhaps that's a primary reason that 90% of the works written before the fall of Rome have been lost.
Indeed, pencil is one of the best writing implements for archival purposes. As long as one doens't deliberately try to get the graphite off, it'll probably stay on.
> From 1st to 8th grade you were required to write in fountain pain.
Fountain pens or ballpoint pens?
(I do believe it was a fountain of pain either way :)
The trick is to realize that you never even needed to write it at all
Writing while thinking is more productive than prompting a Markov chain. Also it's free and benefits your brain.