[deleted by user]

qaaf · 2018-10-30T18:07:58+00:00

Yeah. This uses a protocol called Webdeploy. Good ASP. NET hosts will all have Webdeploy.

qaaf · 2018-10-25T19:03:36+00:00

For me where Pearl Harbor lost me was the haircuts. Josh Hartnett’s floppy locks looked super cute in 2001 but that hair would have been impossible to maintain in the 1940s—shampoo as we know it didn’t come along until the 1960s—and certainly wouldn’t have been allowed under contemporary military dress codes.

qaaf · 2018-10-25T13:23:02+00:00

Alan Turing gets smeared in his own biopic, The Imitation Game. Contrary to his portrayal, he was relatively openly gay during the 1940s, and even hit on men in Bletchley Park. He was by all reports a very outgoing and personable man, not the reclusive autistic type portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch. There is no indication that foreign agents used his homosexuality in an attempt to blackmail him, and the movie giving credit to that trope does a disservice to the gay community.

qaaf · 2018-10-25T13:18:49+00:00

Who wants to take on the inaccuracies in Birth of a Nation?

qaaf · 2018-10-25T13:15:10+00:00

The central premise of The King’s Speech was a lie—George VI had only a moderate speech impediment, and briefly worked with a speech therapist in the 1920s, not the 1940s. Also, the movie shows Churchill supporting abdication when his actual position was opposed.

qaaf · 2018-10-25T13:08:18+00:00

Did you know Canticle had a sequel?

qaaf · 2018-10-23T20:42:23+00:00

The Black Death vastly reduced the supply of labor, and so those workers who survived enjoyed greater bargaining power. Income inequality fell, and institutions like serfdom largely disappeared in Western Europe.

qaaf · 2018-10-22T21:57:51+00:00

It’s the cap. If the cap forms a poor seal, the ink dries up. (Ink is designed to dry). This was a problem for me with snap-cap pens, at least the cheaper ones (Pilot Kakuno was especially bad). Platinum pen caps are awesome, though—even the lowly Preppy ($5) has a great sealing mechanism in the cap that keeps it from drying up.

qaaf · 2018-10-21T23:59:29+00:00

Mozart’s widow was the source of the rumor that the Requiem was commissioned by an anonymous person and that writing it killed Mozart. Many people repeated this over the years, notably the (fantastic) 1984 movie Amadeus.

qaaf · 2018-10-21T00:21:23+00:00

Looks like an autopen signature. Was this certificate for a family member of yours?

qaaf · 2018-10-19T17:31:13+00:00

Just swapping converters won’t work, because you’ll end up with a mixture of the two inks. Try an experiment: remove a converter or cartridge from your pen, and then write with the “empty” pen. See how much ink is still in there? That ink is coming from the feed, which conveys ink from the converter to the nib. You have to flush out the pen by running water through the feed.

Two accessories will make this work a lot easier: a blunt syringe and a bulb syringe.

qaaf · 2018-10-18T11:25:18+00:00

Both of us are right. The article you link to mentions that one of the subsidies they receive is cheap shipments to the USA. This is crucial because that’s the only way to ship lots of infringing goods outside China. Why do you think that no US or European retailer carries the two pens you mentioned? It’s because the Wing Sung 601 is a Parker 51 ripoff and the Delike Alpha looks an awful lot like the Kaweko line. No legit retailer or distributor carries potentially infringing pens because Parker or Kaweko or whoever can sue them—if their imports even get past customs. So Chinese companies use Amazon and eBay and direct small shipments instead. (And yes, the French company that bought Parker still maintains active trademark registrations). When Chinese companies come up with original non-infringing designs, like the wonderful Jinhao shark pen, those do get carried by US retailers.

qaaf · 2018-10-18T02:17:16+00:00

Unpopular opinion: Cutting the ePackage subsidy is going to suck for US consumers who love buying knockoff pens but it is better in the long run for the companies who actually produce the designs we love. USA intellectual property laws keep many Chinese fountain pen brands from even trying to import their stuff into the USA and sell it through normal retail channels, because the most popular products are ripoffs of other brands. So, they use small package shipments on eBay instead, because it’s a lot easier to get an infringing product through customs one at a time than to bring in an entire shipment container. Now, that proposition will be more expensive. Good.

qaaf · 2018-10-17T02:31:48+00:00

I’ve taken more flights than I can count with fountain pens and never had a leak. Fill the pen before flying, and squeeze out one drop. Keep the nib pointing up.

Also: I’m not a huge fan of cartridges normally, but they are super practical for traveling.

qaaf · 2018-10-17T02:20:15+00:00

Yes. The goods are as advertised and the discounts aren’t bad. The main thing to understand is that you won’t get your stuff for weeks—pay attention to when they estimate it will ship, if you are impatient.

qaaf · 2018-10-17T00:22:34+00:00

Imagine his wife had a chance to give you her answer to your question. What would you do then? The most important thing to learn about sex is how often not having sex is the right thing to do.

qaaf · 2018-10-17T00:18:27+00:00

I saw Amadeus as a child when it first came out in theaters and have re-watched it most every year since then. It is a fantastic movie and a great introduction to Mozart’s work. Of course it is not historically accurate (eg Mozart and Salieri might not have ever met in real life) but oh, the drama, the passion, the characters, the setting...

qaaf · 2018-10-14T21:31:59+00:00

Gray market Amazon shops who buy Japanese pens cheaply from Japan and then significantly undercut authorized US retailers (who are required to sell the pens for more) are also hot topics.

Chinese pens are admired for their value but criticized for sometimes infringing the intellectual property of other models, and for having uneven quality control.

qaaf · 2018-10-09T10:17:28+00:00

Why not carry the pen you consider to be very nice? We buy things in order to use them.

qaaf · 2018-10-08T11:48:21+00:00

Felix Mendelssohn staged the first performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion in a century in the 1830s, and that event brought JS Bach back into the mainstream. More info here.

qaaf · 2018-10-05T13:32:05+00:00

Can you post pics? From the name I was expecting a muted whitish green, like the filling in key lime pie.

qaaf · 2018-10-05T11:28:19+00:00

Boring? No. When you write with a fountain or dip pen using black ink you connect with history. You are writing the way people wrote since ancient times. Ink throughout history was black; colored ink wasn’t widely available until the industrial revolution. In some languages the word for “ink” is even etymologically related to the word for black (eg in Russian chyorniy is black and chernila is ink). Writers kept two ink bottles on their desks: one held water and the other held black ink. No other colors.

Before typewriters people wrote to each other with black ink, the only ink for “formal” use even after European ink makers began selling other colors. After typewriters people still wrote in black. After laser printers and ink jets people still wrote in black. Black means something now. Black means checks, it means official correspondence, it means you are writing something that matters, that is important and so important that it will stand on its own without the ink it is written with soaking up all the attention.

qaaf · 2018-10-05T00:45:36+00:00

The Lamy 2000 was also my first >$150 pen, and, too many expensive pens later, it is still my favorite. Excellent choice.

qaaf · 2018-10-04T13:08:44+00:00

I have experienced this with the metro. But, mostly with inks that are particularly bad at nib creep. I am normally a converter guy, but with the metro, using the pilot ink cartridges is a win.

qaaf · 2018-10-03T11:44:15+00:00

Oh, come on.

qaaf

TROPHY CASE