Papermate Sharpwriter #2 Mechanical Pencils = Garbage

Wow…what a piece of engineering garbage.

There are literally 8 minute videos trying to describe how you have to take this device apart Papermate pencil refill video and put it back together again in order to simply add pencil lead to it when the need arises. I never would have bought these plastic landfill clogging devices if it had been described accurately as not being refillable in any reasonable manner. One can EASILY strip and reassemble an AK-47 in less time that it takes to put a new section of lead in this contraption.

Yes, others will claim that the pencil is “technically” refillable and not disposable…don’t believe them. If a pencil requires multiple disassembly processes taking more than five minutes in order to accomplish, the designers didn’t WANT the pencil to be refillable. They know if they make it cheap enough people will just give up and purchase 1,000 more plastic pieces of garbage and toss the originals in the trash.

Hell, they only contain about a couple pages worth of writeable lead to start with before you move on to another device as they contain a single 3 inch section before they run out unlike better mechanical pencils that autofeed multiple sections.

Are they comfortable to use while usable? Yes. The “cushioning” of the lead is good and firm without being so solid that it breaks frequently.

The inability to rapidly and easily refill however is a complete dealbreaker. If in government I’d take the communist position of outlawing these items entirely…they may be worse than nip-bottles in terms of the trash they create. They serve only a single purpose—to use up oil for the production of their plastic and then be discarded on a roadside, incinerated, or taking up space in a landfill. I have rarely been so grossed out by a product as this. Abhorrent. Return to a wooden pencil or obtain a real, refillable pencil that you will use for extend periods of time and not waste resources while saddling the rest of us with unneeded waste…whatever you do, do not feed the machine that is “big pencil”. And if you think I’m being sarcastic in how over the top this is? I’m not. I’ll literally shoot anyone I find pitching these abominations against our world. No cap.

Book Review: The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle

I can’t, I just can’t.

I just can’t spend time on books that are clearly sub-par. And boy is this ever one.

So much of its general pretense is simply cribbed from Star Trek its laughable. Oh, you’ve got a Scottish lead engineer who speaks in an appropriately Scottish accent where no one else in the novel has any distinguishable accent though they come from various defined ethnic backgrounds? You’ve got it.

A giant cross galactic “empire” as a controlling government keeping the peace? Sure

Mysterious and unexplained methods of interstellar travel via McGuffin like technology and “points” in space? Got that too.

Positing the events over a 1000 years in the future but with humanity still falling along US/Soviet lines of influence and outcome along with entire planets populated by ethno-factions that align with Earth circa 1975? Got it.

Warships populated by beer drinking and still-creating staff hiding such creations from their superiors? That’s here too!

And that’s even before we get to the nonsensical “aliens” who are capable of speaking English in the first few moments of interaction, are bipedal in nature and have “faces” and other near human features as well as similar gravitational and atmospheric requirements…

Its all just so hackneyed as to be laughable. Maybe the core idea of first contact and the light-sail on which the aliens first arrive are solid foundations for a sci-fi work but the character development (or lack thereof) is a massive failure with the overall prose of the work leaving one to wonder just how far past elementary school the authors had progressed.

Gross in its waste of my time and cut short at 200 of its 500 or so pages never to be picked up again.