PEN 15 Club: rubbing one (competitor) out

It's come to our attention that other people are writing about pens. This is, clearly, completely unacceptable.

That said, the errors and failures of others can help us understand our theoretical contradictions and then revolutionize them in practice by eliminating the contradictions. So in that spirit, let us examine The Strategist's piece on ... the 100 Best Pens. JFC. That is a LOT of pens. To have opinions about, that's a lot of pens. Therefore, let us examine two things: their theoretical underpinnings / methodological preliminaries; the pens they talk about that we have already talked about.

What matters to The Strategist.

• Smoothness
• Smudging
• Bleed-through
• Feel (they mean hand feel)
• Looks

The first three of these make fairly little sense without considering the writing surface, of course, and their strategy for dealing with this is to wave their hands standardize what they're writing on to one single notebook (and not an inexpensive one at that). That this makes their testing a pernicious parody of what it's like to take one's pen(s) out into the world is an unintended, indeed, unacknowledged consequence of an obvious, and complete, failure of theory.

They discuss "Smudging" at a number of junctures, but never is waterproofness mentioned, an omission for which an appropriate epithet has yet to be discovered. I mean, writing a check? That's an important activity to me, yet nowhere in their 100 reviews is this prosaic activity present. And this is relevant, because if you follow the recommendations here, you're gonna need to write some serious checkage: there are at least three pens in the three-figure range here, which seems an odd juxtaposition against $13-for-50 Big Cristals. To say nothing of their catastrophic lack of notes on which pens can versus can not be spun, debate-kid-style, across one's thumb. Even to consider their rankings, founded on such an incoherent and incorrect mishmash of criterions, must be accorded no more, yet no less, than an act of charity.

Let's get down to it, boppers.

Our most compendious previous write-up included the following pens. I shall list them below, helpfully ordered from top to bottom, each pen annotated with our ranking, followed by The Strategist's placement in their list of a hundo, and finally, a brief disquisition on the relative amount of insanity displayed by the strategery reviewed.

1. Bic Cristal
   Reviewiera Ranking: 9/10
   The Strategist Ranking: 63/100
   Insanity Ranking: These clowns. These ridiculous, perverse clowns. I'm not saying everybody has to rank "Availability, reliability, incredibly cheap price" as highly as I do; nor am I claiming everybody ought to enjoy ballpoint pennery: but to rank by my count some twenty-two ballpoints as better than this one? is an act of actual depravity. And every character of the following passage makes me angrier than the last: "The angular, hard plastic body quickly becomes uncomfortable in the hand. It’s a reliable, affordable pen for jotting down quick notes, but not something you would want to write with for an extended period of time".
2. Pilot V5
   Reviewiera Ranking: 8.8/10
   The Strategist Ranking: 16/100
   Insanity Ranking: I'm now thinking I might have overrated this pen slightly: it's a good, even excellent, pen, but it writes a tiny bit too fast, contributing to my handwriting losing what little legibility it has to this point retained. But top-20-percent of all pens deffo sounds right. Into it.
3. Le Pen
   Reviewiera Ranking: 8/10
   The Strategist Ranking: 18/100
   Insanity Ranking: Everybody loves these! Everybody's right.
4. Micron ~art pen~
   Reviewiera Ranking: 7/10
   The Strategist Ranking: 34/100
   Insanity Ranking: Basic agreement here, but bonus points for the most insane thing I have read this week: "but because it’s shiny plastic I think it might make my hand sweat a little.". (Note that this is the third consecutive pen on my list that can correctly be described as "shiny plastic"; my hand sweating on my pen is ... not an issue at this time.)
5. Pilot G2
   Reviewiera Ranking: 6/10
   The Strategist Ranking: 31/100
   Insanity Ranking: Predictably, Strategist types, like the entire rest of the world, overrate this pen enormously. Typical.
6. Uniball Vision
   Reviewiera Ranking: 5.5/100
   The Strategist Ranking: 61/100
   Insanity Ranking: We seem to agree on this one.
7. Paper Mate
   Reviewiera Ranking: N/R
   The Strategist Ranking: 53/100
   Insanity Ranking: I didn't rank this one for complicated reasons having to do with the only one I have on hand dating back to my father's funeral, but, honestly, middle-of-the-road/pack seems about right for this extremely reliable but hardly fancy option. Plus, I think I just like ballpoints more than the next guy, which I have learned via this exercise.

But nobody, and I mean nobody, could like ballpoints enough to justify this ... monstrosity.

(Calling ... this an acceptable writing experience, let alone calling it the dozenth-best writing experience available is legitimately revolting. Feel: 4!? LOOKS five?? This ... is madness.)

Anyway, my current load-out is just: Bic Cristal; Sharpie®|Pen.; Pentel 205 .5 MM mechanical pencil. Total cost: somewhere under twenty Reviewieran yua (often known as (American) "wing-wangs"); total effectiveness: off the charts.

Anyway, The Strategist, welcome to the PEN 15 Club.