Yeah, the party thought the same thing. But there are accounts of at least one beholder city in the Underdark...

I used a cartridge-refillable Rotring ArtPen for years and considered it the Holy Grail of pens, but eventually I ran into problems replacing the ink cartridges. I'd order direct from the manufacturer (for some reason even the big art stores never kept the cartridges in stock) and invariably the ink would be low-quality, diluted, and prone to leaking right out of the pen. I had the same problem with the Rapidographs. Cleaning the pens didn't help. Replacing the pens/nibs didn't help. Storing them nibside-up didn't help. About $100 later in cartridges and new pens, I finally gave up. Now I use Sakura Micron disposable drawing/drafting pens (they come in .8, .5, .3, .1, and .05 mm thickness) and they work fine--no bleeding or blobbing, but I still pine for the smoothness of the Rotring pens (the Microns "feel" just a bit too dry to me, but I'd be willing to bet most people aren't so picky about their pens as I am). Maybe I've just had bad luck, though. Certainly a number of commenters seem to be having great experiences with the Rapidogaphs, so perhaps it's time to try again.

There do exist models (the Koh-I-Noor, I think) that connect the pen to an inkwell with a miniature hose, but I've never had a chance to try them.

A perfect example of flavor text invented to explain game balance--a beholder mage with the anti-magic eye intact would have been an absolute nightmare. Even in the Forgotten Realms.

/it's okay, we're all nerds here...

Except that the lack of women in computing is a new trend in the West (consider the gender near-parity in computing in the 1960s). If there's a biological reason, it developed in the last few decades.

And it somehow managed to avoid women in countries such as Malaysia, where IT is not a male-dominated field.

Care to give an example or two of factors in the IT workplace that "women don't like" (i.e. enough for significant numbers to avoid/abandon lucrative careers in what was once a very gender-balanced field), but are not themselves sexist?

Your flippant comments about potpourri and color coordination imply that you haven't researched the issue very thoroughly. Or maybe at all.

With pepper spray.

It almost never helps, either.

During my phone monkey days at a broadband ISP, it was common for customers who happened to own more than one computer to introduce themselves in the first thirty seconds as "network administrators." Invariably they'd left something unplugged or mucked up a default setting, which made for some frustrating calls when said "network administrator" refused to check the basics. After all, they were "network administrators" and would never make such a noobish mistake.

After enough calls like this, the phone monkeys learned to interpret any statement like "I work on networks for a living" merely as a forecast of how obnoxious the customer was likely to be.*

Little did the network administrators know that they were being transferred back into the regular queue. Where, more often than not, the issue was resolved.

*The real shibboleet was mentioning in the first 30 seconds that you were on a Linux box. That'd get you a real technician every time.