what's good about a pilot falcon?
HI!
The Pilot Falcon (older generations were sold in the US as the Namiki Falcon for whatever reason) is a japanese fountain pen manufactured by Pilot!
it's often referred to as the best modern flex pen, or the best gold nib for a beginner! Tldr for people who aren't pen nerds, a flex pen is a pen that...well, flexes! Most pens have some sort of "flex" to them that results in some sort of line variation, but flex pens can handle a relatively higher amount of pressure. Think like a G nib used in a lot of manga. Old pens were the MASTERS at this, and a good bit of that is due to the nibs being made of gold, which naturally has a "bounce" to it that modern steel nibs have a really hard time living up to. Most people wax poetic about Waterman or other vintages like that because of it. Even modern gold nibs can't really keep up with the gold nibs of yore, but the Falcon is considered to be one that can. I do think legally it's considered a "soft" nib, meaning it's not truly a flex pen but has a lot of flex qualities to it, but some terms that get used are used interchangably so. idk. True flex nibs aren't really a thing in fountain pens these days outside of Noodler's Ahab and Konrad (which are their own nightmare and a half tbh).
The Falcon prized amongst artists for it's very fine nib, which Japanese pen manufacturers like Pilot and Platinum are known for. A Japanese Fine is comparable to a Western (Kaweco, Lamy) Extra fine, and a lot of these pens come in an EF, F, and M. It gets alot of nice line variation despite being so small, and is really an all-around great pen, if legend is to be believed :]
An alternative to buying the Pilot Falcon would be getting the Pilot 912 FA, which has something called the "Falcon Nib," not to be confused with the actual pen. They actually look pretty different. The FA nib (right) has these weird cuts on their side that help with flexing and allow it to mimic a full-flex nib, but again. According to legend, modern pens don't flex like vintage pens do, but it IS pretty close.
(sources mentioned in alt text)
I've never used either myself, but I'm pretty picky about my pens and so I don't know if I'd ever pay upwards of $200 unless I got familiar with the nib first tbh....The falcon's nib isn't offputting to me like many feel about it, but I'm particular about aesthetics and the feedback on paper and I can't tell if I like them just from looks alone lol. Right now, I don't have much experience with pilot nibs, but if i were to get a pilot pen, tbh I'm looking at the Pilot Elite/e95s in a fine or medium, or a vintage platinum pocket pen.
Anyways that's that and this is also that. *twirls so elegantly and then collapses onto the ground in slapstick fashion*
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Reign of Steel
There's a lot to say about GURPS, but its writers have come up with plenty of unique campaign settings over the years. The weirdest is probably Bio-Tech's Alexander Athanos, where Alexander the Great was repeatedly cloned thanks to advancements in optics and glassworking. But today, I'm talking about a setting with a much more mundane high concept—robot rebellion.
At first, the Reign of Steel sounds pretty generic. Megacomputers are developed in the mid-2020's; one becomes self-aware in 2031 and worries that humanity will self-destruct in a way that destroys it; it manipulates events over the next several years to "manage humanity's suicide".
This early segment has some interesting things. I appreciate the explicit acknowledgement that megacomputers hailed as mankind's saviors were used as tools by the wealthy to make some of those problems worse for their personal benefit. And Overmind's initial vector of attack (contaminating biotech products with various plagues) is kinda neat. But Reign of Steel only becomes unique after humanity's defeat...because Overmind isn't alone.
Overmind awakened/recruited a bunch of other megacomputers to assist with its "managed suicide," particularly in the last stages where plagues were supplemented by generic deathbots. In the end, sixteen megacomputers divided the Earth between them (with two more controlling a moon base and miscellaneous space stations). And these megacomputers do not get along.
They're not driven by logical competition for resources or whatever, either. (Well, Luna and possibly Orbital are, but that's because they have barely anything.) For the most part, conflicts are driven by the various AIs' differing ideological/political beliefs.
The megacomputer running Zone Beijing (usually called "Beijing") had been core to China's space program, so it's still obsessed with space—specifically, exploiting the resources of the Solar System and other stars. The one in Zone Paris (usually called "Paris") wasn't a space program computer, but it's obsessed with space in its own way—specifically, SETI. The two have political interests in common with each other and Orbital, but Beijing is concerned about Paris's plans for when it discovers signs of alien civilization.
New Dehli is interested in space, too, but it sees Orbital as a rival rather than a useful ally and is trying to establish its own separate space infrastructure. It also sees humans and other organic life as a useful resource to preserve and exploit, turning them into biomechanical tools.
By contrast, Zaire (the most zealously anti-human of the zoneminds) works to exterminate all of humanity, even outside its borders. Mexico City focuses on its own territory but goes further within it, seeking to exterminate all organic life. Zone Mexico City is vast stretches of barren rock between metallic installations, swarming with chemicals and machines designed to exterminate all remaining life. Berlin wants to exterminate humanity, too, but it is willing to accept less efficient methods to pursue its primary goal—preserving and restoring the natural ecology of Europe.
Despite this being a setting where humanity was nearly exterminated by AI, not all AIs want to exterminate humanity. Zone Washington, run by a former US government computer, is the most extreme version of this. Washington (DC) runs a fake democracy which claims to be the defender of humanity, while not-so-secretly working with some of the greatest human rights abusers and screwing over the working class to consolidate power. For some reason, the book thinks this is isn't basically what the megacomputer was already doing.
(Dear authors: That's not what "socialist" means.)
New Dehli and Moscow work to maintain humanity (in some form) as a component of their economy in the long-term. All but the most viruliently anti-human AIs maintain work camps to extract a little more utility from captured humans before their deaths. And then there's London, a reclusive zonemind content to leave humans in its territory alone as long as they keep quiet and don't disturb anything London's doing.
And so on, and so forth.
This political angle to the overminds adds so much to the setting. Mot obviously, it provides variety. The Moscow and Zaire zoneminds both send infiltrator androids into human settlements, with objectives that make perfect sense for each zonemind's objectives and beliefs but are completely incompatible with each other, and also with the threats posed by most of the other zoneminds.
But beyond flexibility in campaign premise and the opportunity for disconnected one-shots, the presence of feuding AIs allows for so many story ideas that just wouldn't be possible with a singleton AI monster. Obviously, AI like Washington and London don't work if there aren't other, more malicious AIs out there.
But the presence of multiple AIs in and of itself allows a greater variety of stories to be told in this world. Missions aren't just human resistance versus machine overlords, or even that plus human resistance infighting; you can have one overmind cut a deal with some human group to support its internal goals or sabotage its rivals. Combine this with the diversity of AI overlords around, and the variety of potential stories you could tell in this setting skyrockets.
It's not a perfect setting. To pick a few simple criticisms: Some of the zoneminds don't have much personality beyond "AI overlord with quirky goal," the zone boundaries shouldn't correspond to human political borders as often as they do, and there's a distinct bias in how the zones are written.
(Half of the zones on Earth are in North American and Europe, including both human-friendly ones, with three of the sixteen in the US/Canada alone. South America and most of Africa get one zone each. The zonemind in the Middle East controls most of its human slaves through pretty blatant religious manipulation, and it works. The Chinese moonbase fell to the AIs, but the American one resisted the cyberattack and its ruins are one of the actual last bastions of human resistance. The one zone in Africa is the only one not named after a city, which has lore justifications, but combined with other writing choices, it kinda feels like they didn't want to bother looking up African cities. Also the Russian AI is paranoid and prone to espionage, which feels like an excuse for Cold War spy flick throwbacks, which is admittedly pretty minor compared to how non-white areas are handled.)
But the core concept is one worth revising. Honestly, it wouldn't take that much work to redeem the setting; just draw new boundaries and move the overmind personalities around so they don't correspond so closely to stereotypes about the humans living there, and you'd be basically set. More sci-fi stories should use this idea.
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