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And finally, what one writer’s attempt to sell a used mechanical pencil on TikTok says about how the platform is changing.

With the width of a thin mechanical pencil lead and the length of a sewing pin, it’s easy to see how this tiny, thread-like snippet of an invertebrate has gone unnoticed — until now.

The video equipment has improved, but even now researchers often take waterproof notes by writing on pieces of PVC pipe with a mechanical pencil.

His penmanship was a sure indicator that he would have had a future at MIT, the minuscule mechanical pencil marks designed to maximize the amount of cryptic data a genius could record on one page.

“The mermaid caught his eye. I told him it was a mechanical pencil. He was very excited about that discovery. He said it was ‘the right gift for Lucy.’”