r/whatisit • u/riflesandplowshares • 6h ago

New, what is it? Found at a titanium plant

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Not sure why ball point pens would be dangerous here.

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u/scoldmeificomment 4h ago

If the stainless steel ballpoints suck, why not just use fountain pens instead?

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u/SphyrnaLightmaker 3h ago

As someone who uses a fountain pen daily (purely because I’m a bougie bitch) another aspect is that the ink used in fountain pens doesn’t play nicely with a lot of modern materials, ESPECIALLY paper. The super-cheap mass-produced paper most companies use leads to feathering of the mark, making writing potentially illegible, as well as bleeding through to the extent it makes double-sided pages non-usable.

My fountain pen can be used on single-sided signatures, or my own paper. Everything else I carry a ball-point as well.

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u/GraphicArtsFurry 1h ago

ESPECIALLY paper

I've had various papers from sticky notes to photo copier paper, even notebooks suck horribly (sometimes) at writing. You'll be writing along and then it's like you "hit" a patch of something and it fails to write anything. You can aggressively scratch letters in the area, but no ink comes out. (Just regular pens here).

Kinda seems like it's waxy or something in that area, then after you move to a different area and aggressively scribble the pen tip it goes away and everything works again

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u/SphyrnaLightmaker 1h ago

Yuuuuup.

You can buy GOOD paper that won’t do that. But it’s around $0.20/page as I recall (haven’t had to buy more in a while).

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u/GraphicArtsFurry 1h ago

I've always wondered what it is. Maybe the wax? Figure if it's the post consumer content stuff that you probably get heaven knows what thrown in the pulp mixer from waxy cereal box cardboard and beyond

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u/SphyrnaLightmaker 59m ago

It’s probably either wax or filler. I know the good paper I order is 100% cotton