One term in high school I put a laptop bag strap on a hanging file box and used that as a bag for a semester. It made me nuts that teachers hand you stuff you need to hold on to that has no holes in it, but you're supposed to store it in a 3 ring binder. Everything you are supposed to bring with you to class is the shape of a rectangle, but a backpack is a blob that lets your stuff fall to the bottom. Best grades I ever got. Ended up hurting my back so I went back to a backpack. I got a lot of "why don't you just…" questions for a day or two and then it was chill.
This bag shape seems far superior for the purposes of carrying paper hither and thither than any other bag shape I've seen.
Rectangular prism-based storage FTW.
I carried a briefcase for my last three years of high school (in the early 90s in rural Ohio). After the jokes subsided it became "just a thing" and, wow, was it nice. I ended up being able to get by w/o using a locker (beyond stowing my coat in the cooler months). Being able to lock it was a treat, too.
I assume it would never fly today because "security".
> It made me nuts that teachers hand you stuff you need to hold on to that has no holes in it, but you're supposed to store it in a 3 ring binder.
That is why pocket folders exist.
Right? The classic Trapper Keeper!
I was super cool for a week when other students saw I had a three-hole punch that fit into a three ring binder.
this was written with at least the help of ai- it’s still a good article and idk if i’m the only one who can tell or we’re beyond the point of needing or wanting or caring to point it out. idk
I was trying to ignore the classic tells of LLM writing, but I still find them irksome when reading an otherwise informative article. There is just too much fluff in the language
Yeah it’s seriously shady to not disclose it at the beginning of the piece.
It's also an ad. Also dk if I’m the only one who can tell or we’re beyond the point of needing or wanting or caring to point it out.
> The thinking was straightforward: if every child wears essentially the same bag, you can’t read household wealth
These bags are like $400-800 lol
I'd love to see a Saddleback Leather take on these.
Yes I'd happily buy one if it's quality matched the price and I'm sure in Japan it often does.
I have done some simple leather crafts, and I think the design clearly is suitable for building with rivets and full grain leather, if they do use that today then it'll be a spectacular product.
It drags on a bit and is rather verbose, which is what made me notice it was AI-assisted.
My favorite part is a bland photo every two sentences.
Possibly AI-generated too? I can't tell.
>That’s not an accident; it was the point.
I stopped reading in anger at "That’s not an accident; it was the point."
It's pretty disrespectful imo -- it feels like the reader's time is worth less than the author's.
full slop indeed but at least the japanese emperor cited really existed
>That’s not an accident; it was the point.
Article SmeLLMs
I enjoyed it despite this.
I found it broke me out of my "purchase this for my son immediately" fugue state the article had me in.
It looks gorgeous. I would love to have one, and I'm not even close to primary school age :D
I loved the making-of video: https://youtu.be/lSochjb6ovI
Before reading the article I was surprised to find them similar to old german Sout backpacks.
They are really sturdy and durable: your kid needs just one of them for all primary school (grundschule).
They are explensive (not so much considering 3-6 years of continuous abuse by kids), but when the kid gets tired of it, some people put them on sale.
I have one that I know was resold at least 2 times and it still in perfect shape...
Great for airport travel, btw.
For me the iconic school bag will always be the JanSport.
I bought a black JanSport backpack from my university bookstore in, I think, 1998. It was the first version that had a laptop slot in it because laptop computers were still a rarity then. I got it because my job at an dotcom startup bought me a bright orange iBook. Still one of my favorite laptops.
That JanSport lasted me 20 years. It outlasted that dotcom started, the entire dotcom bubble, the Great Recession, and three jobs. It took on dozens of flights and road trips. On long hikes in the Smokey mountains, and sleepovers at several girlfriends' apartments. It was an absolute tank.
What finally gave out was the rubberized coating on the bottom started to get gummy. But, wow, did I get my money's worth with it.
LL Bean for me. Original at first, then the deluxe later as I got more homework. And I used an accordion folder, one slot for each class, for holding handouts etc. in addition to the notebooks and binders.
I was an Eastpak kid. To me, the quality was the same with the added bonus that you were less likely to get robbed for it.
I second this - mine has lasted me 15+ years at this point. Which is not something you can say about a lot of the things on the market today.
> The government has taken the issue seriously enough to study it and to encourage lighter materials, reduced textbook carry, and the use of digital teaching tools. Some manufacturers have responded with more synthetics and lighter reinforcements.
I guess they're so married to the traditional design that they just refuse to add a frame and waist strap to offload the weight to your hips.
I would say that school bags that incorporate kevlar to be bulletproof are much more unlikely actually: https://edcwarehouse.co.uk/product/guard-dog-scout-bulletpro... (there are many other brands)
Funnily enough before opening the article, having heard of the japanese backpacks, I was wondering if it was going to talk about bulletproof ones or japanese ones.
Only an LLM could liken a first-grader to a scholar: "In a stratified society where the imperial family sat at the symbolic center, that gesture mattered. The randoseru moved, almost overnight, from battlefield to classroom, from soldier’s kit to scholar’s gear." This is an interesting topic, but this kind of AI writing gets very, very grating. Additionally, though this is somewhat unrelated, I feel like LLMs tend to argue points through gaslighting, rather than actual argumentation; they prefer to stack a bunch of tangential, or parallel, evidence and then assert that it proves their point when, in reality, it does not have any logical coherence—unless, perhaps, one reads it at 2am, in which case it might make sense.
Interesting read. The title made me think of Catholic School Book Bags that everyone in my city who went to Catholic Schools used. Public school kids (me) just carried the books to school, rain, snow or shine. No school busses back then.
I could not find a picture, but there were like small army duffel bags, dark green with a yellow fabric strap. You held the strap and slung the bag over your shoulder.
Every generation accidently recreates the same object with newer materials and better marketing. This is basically the modern equivalent of a satchel, except now it comes with aerospace fabric, limited drops, and a Discord server.
LLM comment? The link is about randoseru, which are not satchels and predate the existence of both discord and powered flight.
Definitely LLM, see their other comments. Should be banned.
Every generation thinks it invented sex.
--Robert Heinlein
