After Cpl Upham's fellow soldiers got killed because of his cowardice...at least he killed the dude, but I have a hard time forgiving him.
Ballpoint pens. All of them. They produce so much waste. And, when you think about it, all ballpoint pens are disposable ones. The expensive refillable ones are just fancy holders for a disposable pen – if you 'refill' them, you exchange always the ink and the actual writing engine (the tip with the ball.) And the cartridges are badly recycable, being mostly made out of multiple different plastics and metal, and being so small that collecting and disassembling isn't economically feasible. Ink rollers (or whatever they're called) that take fountain pen ink cartridges are better, in particular when you use a converter that you can actually refill with just the ink. But, they are mostly cheaply made, for a reason. The ball point tip doesn't last very long, and cannot be replaced unless you replace the whole large front part of the pen. Makes much more sense to use fountain pens, with tanks or converters. Actually refillable, nibs last quite long, and they can usually be repaired and exchange small bits and pieces. There are some modern developments for nibs and inks that remove a lot of the annoyances I had with them when I went to school (here in Germany, where writing with fountain pens was and still is mandatory in schools.) And there are damn good ones available at low cost. Or use pencils. It's probably not a huge environmental impact, but the (plastic) waste of ballpoints still annoys me. (There's also that annoying habit of ballpoint pens that the ink on the front part of the ball that remains after writing dries up and forms these sticky and stainy blobs of gunk if you do not write with the pen often enough. My grandma tends to go through masses of pens because she writes so little that the pens stop working because of it, long before there's measurable loss of ink in the tank.)
Pointless emails. Doesn't get much better than this, to my mind: And yes, this is a genuine email from my inbox. I wish I was kidding.
I can't find pens fine enough for me. I use ballpoints like the Pilot G-Tec-C which writes a 0.25mm line, or the Uni-ball Signo DX, which writes a 0.28mm line. I keep notes in small Moleskine notebooks and lines any heavier severely limit the number of words I can fit on a line. Not efficient! I like fountain pens, but I feel I need to be writing on huge sheets of paper to justify it. There's no way of writing small text with a fountain pen, if you're me. If you can find a fountain pen that writes a very fine line, I'd love to hear about it. As for pencils, they're too ephemeral. I use them for working math problems or designing circuits, but not for writing.
Japanese fountain pens have smaller/finer nibs, but I'm not sure if you (I mean really you, minstrel!) could actually write smaller with it. There seems to be a size limit based on viscosity and flow of the ink with fountain pens. Fountain pen inks are water based, and water forms droplets of a rather fixed size, such as at the tip of the nib. You'll have to find a suitable ink for the finer nibs, anyway. The smallest I have found I could be writing with is actually a pencil: The Pentel Orenznero with a 0.2 mm thick lead. Like all Pentel Orenz, it keeps the protecting tube around the lead at all times, and exposes just enough lead to write, so the small diameter leads can actually be used. But that is actually too small for me, and the leads are too hard to find (I stick to the 0.3 mm variant). And, since it's a pencil, it's probably not for you. How about a fineliner? There are some really small ones out there that make lines smaller than 0.2 mm... Again from a Japanese company, but don't recall which since I like fineliners or felt tips even less than ballpoints. Sakura, maybe?
Painkillers. Yes, taking away this pulsating pain is great. Putting me into a coma afterwards though, goddamn, how am I supposed to do anything but sleep? Bah.
Electronics. I experiment with basic radio circuits, and sometimes I have to get into digital microcontroller stuff for professional reasons, even though digital circuit design is generally boring. Analog, though, is magic, and very cool!
Using logic, he's the band, he'll want his audience to stay. But that's just intuition on my part. As for what he actually said ...well, that's a bit of a mental pretzel.
Wrong typography. Specifically, some thing I notice increasingly, mostly in advertising: There's an inverse apostrophe (so it's like an English single opening quotation mark, or maybe an okina*) where a normal apostrophe should be. Some notes: 1) A lot of people don't know what I'm talking about. Even people who work in the field and should know! 2) It could be accidental, from software trying to guess curly quotes. Along with (1), people do not know which symbol they actually enter. Even I should train myself to actually enter the apostrophe, and not use the quotation mark key and hope the word processor gets it right.** 3) Sadly, in two of the instances I encounter most often, it could be intentional. As a joke. But, since there's (1), it's a joke that gets completely lost and just spreads bad typography further. *The word "okina" should have an okina-symbol at its beginning. But not all fonts have that glyph, so I'll omit it here because I don't know how it will come out. Same with the common word-around of using a single opening quotation mark. **Along the same lines, whenever someone reads out an URL with a dash in it, they say "minus" (here in Germany, in German). No, that's not a "minus" that is displayed, and what is entered when you hit that key: It's a hyphen. Again, there's the problem that software knows magically which symbol you want to enter and replaces it accordingly (or not), and most people don't know the difference.
Teeth whitening. There’s teeth whitening toothpaste, teeth whitening gel... you can have it done professionally. Teeth shouldn’t be white!! They should be a nice ivory colour. Know this; when you have teeth the colour of virgin snow you look like a fucking knob!!
Movie car chase scenes where, when the bad guy is careening the wrong way down a one-way street at three times the speed limit, all the oncoming drivers have the time and presence of mind to flash their lights and honk their horns.