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the turtle moves
Earlier today, on the local buy-sell-trade group for fountain pens, a listing went up: a Nakaya (fancy brand) raden ("decorated with lots of tiny chips of iridescent shell, arranged by hand") Milky Way (i.e. intended to evoke the experience of looking at... the Milky Way).
... with a pair of sterling silver turtles as the roll stop (a decorative adornment in the place you'd normally expect to find a clip on a pen lid, except it doesn't clip and instead serves purely to ensure that the pen doesn't roll off whatever flat-but-not-100%-level surface you put it down on).
The Turtle Moves, I thought. AND APPARENTLY THAT WAS INTENTIONAL.
Totally unrelatedly, obviously, today Duolingo gave me the sentence "this pen is very expensive" to translate into Turkish! And I have now finally worked out how I am going to remember the Turkish word for "pen", which is kalem; my brain was only willing to supply "kelime", meaning "word", which is sort of conceptually related but also, crucially, Different. But. I remembered. That poking around in pen fandom had introduced me to the term qalam, "a type of reed pen ... used for Islamic calligraphy"! and Turkish likes Arabic loan words, so hopefully that one can now move into my active vocabulary.
But also: good grief this pen is indeed Very expensive...
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(Also now I want a skull rollstop....)
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If it helps any, this kind of nonsense is available on much cheaper pens than the Nakaya urushi line...
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True that XD I've also been contemplating experimenting with pen mods because I really like the form factor of the Pilot Vanishing Point but the colors/surface design is decidedly meh on most of them - there's a few ultra-limited JP-only releases that are nicer but also like, impossible to get. But Moonman/Majohn makes compatible bodies that are much cheaper.....
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YEP. And I just got to try one this afternoon and it is very definitely on my list...
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Oh yeah no of course, it is very much a small piece of art with "writing implement" as its secondary purpose!
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Those pens are very very expensive. I'd be afraid to write with one.
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Right?!
But on the upside most of the expense is the artwork on the body rather than the nib, so...
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*handwobble* Consensus in Pen Fandom is that over ~£300 you're paying for the art/portable sculpture rather than any improvements in function. Up to the £300 mark, there's lots Stuff that some people consider worthwhile and others emphatically do not: filling system (cartridge only? convertor? one of the other filling systems that give you a higher ink capacity but makes it harder to change colour?), how well the cap seals (how long can you leave the pen unused before it won't Just Write when you pick it up?), durability and comfort (balance, weight, length of section, diameter, ... all have more choice in more expensive pens) and, of course, The Nib (where more expensive nibs come in a greater variety of grinds for a greater variety of lines, are generally smoother to write with, sometimes have some amount of line variation, ...).
So. For most people, for most purposes, not... really? I do find the sensory experience of using my more expensive pens much nicer than that of using my few-quid-from-WHSmith pen (more comfortable to hold, much smoother nibs to write with, less prone to breaking because I am clumsy) but this is something that is of subjective value only. :-p
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I've been joking for years that the mostly-useless sentence "this is a pen" is a language-learner's go to. Was deeply amused when Duolingo finally offered it up in Japanese!
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... XD THANK YOU FOR POINTING OUT
A'Tuin for Art's sake
... So you're not going to shell-out for the turtles, then?
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* Qalam - Wikipedia
* قلم - Wiktionary
* κάλαμος - Wiktionary
* קולמוס - Wiktionary
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HEE. Excellent! Thank you for telling me!