Classic SF With Absolutely No Agenda Whatsoever…

[james_davis_nicoll]

Classic SF With Absolutely No Agenda Whatsoever…

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

ahahaha.

No.

[elusis]

So when NEXT year's Hugo nom comes along, please put this in your packet.

[(Anonymous)]

Huh. I was sure there was a new 'smart sarcasm' font that dynamically changed appearance based on an integer value for sarcasm level. And it certainly would properly handle the case where the sarcasm level value overflowed...

Riderius

[(Anonymous)]

Does Tor give you a click/comment breakdown or analysis? I'm very curious how fragmented their readership is. Judging from the comments, your readers seem like they are (coughs lightly) middle aged; is that the same as the readers of the articles on tv & comic adaptions? Jo Walton? The links to upcoming novels?

Stay safe; these are terrifying times.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm one of the commenters - I'm three years less babyboomer than James is (I get into that generation because I'm the eldest child of a WWII veteran - how could I be anything other than a boomer).

[fred_mouse]

Good thing I wasn't drinking when I read that post title.

[rdm]

I was eating!

[fred_mouse]

Oops. Hope your keyboard isn't full of crumbs...

[rdm]

There may have been spluttering and the odd cough... :-P

[dormouse1953]

For the record, I am old enough to remember when the inkwells on desks had ink in them. We were issued with wooden pens with metal nibs. The teacher kept a huge bottle of ink in their desk. It had a metal spout attached so you could fill the inkwell without getting ink everywhere. (This would have been around 1960 in the UK. We were encouraged to use fountain pens or cartridge pens after that. Ballpoint pens were banned from use at my secondary school still when I left in 1970.)

[beamjockey]

I am older than Mr. Nicoll. Some of my classrooms had the empty inkwell-holes James describes.

I recall ballpoint pens being fairly common (click! click!). But beginning in third grade, to learn cursive writing, we were obligated to purchase a transitional form, the cartridge pen (briefly mentioned by Dormouse1953). Its nib was like a fountain pen, but its ink supply was contained in a disposable polyethylene cylinder. Less messy, I presume, than fountain pens, but occasional accidents were still possible.

I don't know when cartridge pens came along; the plastic suggests post-WWII. Have schools stopped requiring them?

[dormouse1953]

My memory is that cartridge pens were a bit of an innovation when we started using them. No grades in British schools and I can never remember the conversion from US grades to age, but I'm sure I was in juniors school at the time. (English schools we had primary schools, secondary schools and tertiary education, the last being university and the like. Primary schools were age 5-11, secondary 11-18. And primary schools were divided into infants, 5-7, and juniors, 7-11. And in those you had years, so juniors first year would be age 7-8, secondary third year would be 13-14.)

I was in junior school from 1960-64, so that was when I first started using cartridge pens. And I remember, if you didn't have any spare cartridges on you but did have a bottle of ink, you could improvise by squeezing the cartridge and sticking it into the bottle to suck up the ink, just like a fountain pen.

Also, being left-handed, I found the left side of the nib would wear away. You could get left-handed pens, but that didn't seem to make a difference.

[rwpikul]

The general relationship between age and grade in US/Canadian schools is:

Grade = Age - 5

With age being as of Dec 31st.

[dormouse1953]

In the UK, as I recall, the cut-off date is 1st Sept. And as my birthday is in July, it meant I was the youngest in my year for my entire academic career. And that was compounded by my school hot-housing me so I went up to university a year early. (I got my degree two days before my 20th birthday.)

[princessofgeeks]

Coming back to say that at first I did not realize that the post was a link to your latest Tor column!

I am an idiot!

Now that I have read the column I say, well done sir. I was so sorry for the commenters who showed up wondering, "Is this sarcasm? Or what?"

[ba_munronoe]

To be fair, it's true that being downtrodden is no indicator of virtue. Those who claim their status is their own fault are pretty reliably dicks, though.

[dragoness_e]

I thought you laid the sarcasm on just a tad thick, but I notice there was at least one clueless commenter who was wondering if you were being sarcastic. Jeez, James, you weren't exactly subtle!