What is your "beginnings" story in this hobby of ours?

[hayday]

I whole-heartedly agree that the small, tight-knit nature of this place makes it special, and I don't want to ruin that. I'm also thankful I was invited to the party. Some growth is good because without grows comes stagnation. That said, doctors call uncontrolled growth cancer, which is bad. Perhaps some selective recruitment?
@wschofield3 This was a great idea, Walt. I'm enjoying the similarities and uniqueness of our stories.

[tribe125]

My cheerful pessimism tells me that one day the forum will die, but probably not before I do. But then I’m quite old.

For now and the middle-distance future, it works well. It satisfies the needs of a good number of good people - and for that, much thanks and respect to all. We’re Steady Eddies, I guess, long past any desire to compete or proclaim - if we were ever that way to begin with. We are mostly in the later stages of life, hence my opening remarks, so younger blood would be welcome. A marketing campaign doesn’t feel right, but casual invitations can only be a good thing.

Being reminded of our beginnings, there was some hope amongst the founders that we would be more substantial than we are. However, even some of those founders have fallen by the wayside, and I lament the loss of many good members. But that’s how it is, and it’s to be expected. Lives change, and forums aren’t quite snappy enough for younger people who gravitate to other forms of social media. I see the same thing happening with other hobbyist forums. VerticalScope may not pay as much for forums as it once did.

Things are fine, it suits us, it’s blessedly free from advertising, but I sometimes wonder what the sustainable level of membership is, before inexorable decline.

But until then - cheers!

[Raza]

Thank you for all of your responses, every single one of them a great read!

@Raza - hope your head feels better and looking forward to your "long version", although, your McGuyver one was quite succinct and descriptive.

Now for the full version, which, like I said, isn’t that far off.

When you’re young, you’re dumb. I know we don’t like to admit it, but it’s true. Everything we did when we were young was probably pretty dumb. We do things like sell Patek Gondolos, get frosted tips, and flirt with veganism. But the dumbest thing we do when we’re young is wish away our youth wanting to be grown. Adults are too in their own shit to tell you that being an adult sucks, or even that adulthood doesn’t truly exist, at least not until you’re old enough that you realize that you’ve been pretending the whole time and that’s what your parents must have been doing too. Or, I don’t know, maybe previous generations did actually know what they were doing.

Part of being grown is playing the part and part of playing the part is looking the part. You look at the people around you, you find the examples of the people—the men, in this case—that you want to be and you try to emulate them. The MacGyver thing wasn’t a joke, it was fully true. I wanted so much to be like him—smart, resourceful, quick-thinking, trustworthy, honorable. These are the things I wanted to be, so, short of actually being able to be those things, difficult as a boy, I wanted to do my best to have the instruments I believed would get me there. So yeah, the passport, the pocket knife (man, I wanted a pocket knife more than anything as a kid, because MacGyver had one; I also wanted a Ruger Mini-14 with wood furniture and a folding stock and a talking car and I wanted to live on a yacht with an alligator or a Parisian houseboat with a collection of swords and a beautiful sculptress, but some dreams are more practical than others), the watch; these were all things I wanted because my heroes had them.

I started quite young. My first watch was a Mickey Mouse watch bought for me at Disneyland in 1989, shortly before a 6.9 magnitude earthquake hit California, but that’s neither here nor there, it’s just set dressing. My plane was already wheels up by the time the earthquake started, so I didn’t even feel it. I wanted Donald Duck, you know—I wasn’t as much of a Mickey kid like most kids are, I was always a Donald Duck kid. Something about his unending impotent rage at everything around him appealed as a child, not least because as a child, you have very little agency and no usable tools to deal with the world around you. Incomprehensibly screaming into the void while pounding your fists at your misfortune was very relatable.

I couldn’t read it. The hands were Mickey’s hands, which was quite confusing, because they weren’t the same length. So it was little more than affectation, or perhaps a souvenir from a trip meeting family members I’d only ever see once again in my lifetime (their decision, not mine). I didn’t know how to read an analogue watch at that age. Hell, at 3, I’m not entirely sure I fully understood the concept of time. It wasn’t until I was in 2nd grade, when I got both a pocket knife (Swiss Army, ‘natch) and a Timex Indiglo, in as 90s a colorway as you can imagine—teal fabric with brown leather. The watch and I were inseparable. I slept with it on. I showered with it. I swam with it. I wore that watch until the strap simply fell apart.

Fast forward to 7th grade. I was a bad kid, by Asian-American child-of-immigrant-parents standards, which meant I got good grades, but I didn’t always put my toys away and I was starting to form my own opinions that weren’t in lock-step with my parents’. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen; I was an A student, who didn’t do drugs, didn’t drink, and was sent to a summer program at a military school to teach me some discipline because I left my GI Joes on the floor and talked back occasionally. I wore a Fossil. A smart black digital watch that I wore with my “uniform” (white t-shirt with Valley Forge Military Academy’s logo, blue shorts, white sneakers, black VFMA hat optional). Unfortunately, I chose that summer to experiment with wearing it on the inside of my wrist and after many, many pushups on the pebbled parade ground in front of my barracks, the acrylic crystal was fairly well chewed up. The plan backfired, of course; in fact, Valley Forge actually kickstarted a dormant rebellious nature in me, and fed a lifelong distrust of authority and a moral imperative to question it at every turn. Eventually, the traits my mother wanted to quash were the ones she became proud of; but there were some rocky years in between, I’ll tell you.

That was the last time I went without a watch. From then on, I’ve worn a watch everyday of my life. A few Seikos, a Kinetic, a Perpetual Calendar, then a Bulova, then a Seiko Flightmaster in college and a Chase-Durer UDT that I bought with money that I earned during my internship at the company I’d eventually work at for 5 years; all while wanting a Rolex Submariner. The internet was around by now, so I could go to Rolex’s site and look at what they had to offer. Boy, did I want a Submariner.

Jump again to my junior year of college. I was, by this time, full blown obsessed with watches and my love of cars had only grown deeper. Add to that a love of film, and you get a perfect cross section of Steve McQueen. I know most of you know the story of my Monaco already, so I won’t give you the details again, but suffice it to say, after a wistful trying on at a local Littman Jewelers of a limited edition TAG Heuer Monaco Vintage LE in a motif patterned off McQueen racing suit in LeMans and a clandestine act of incredible generosity by my brother, a year later, I got my Monaco as a graduation gift.

A few years later, my mother mentioned again, one of many times, about her father’s Omega; it was always her wish that her sons had Omegas like her father. For my 25th birthday, I received another gift that I will cherish for the rest of my life, my Omega Speedmaster. I never met my grandfather, though I spent my whole life being told I was like him. I drank whiskey like him, I felt a deep connection to the military because of him (he was a major in the Bengali Army, KIA), and to this day, Omega is my favorite watch brand because of him. I wish I’d gotten to know him; I’m told he’d have liked me. For a military officer in Bangladesh in the 1950s and 60s, he was incredibly liberal and forward thinking—with four daughters, he didn’t want them to be in a world where all their decisions are made for them. He was a good man; someday I hope someone will say that about me.

The final piece to the puzzle, I suppose, came when I graduated law school, and I finally, after much dancing around what to choose, got that Rolex Submariner I lusted after for so long, as a graduation gift from my mother. While Omega is still and will always my favorite watch brand, when I look at my Submariner and my Speedmaster and my Monaco, there’s no way I’d be able to choose one among them (though, if you run the numbers, it’s the Submariner I do wear the most).

Everything else is just butter on a biscuit. My Monaco Cal 11 completes my McQueen collection, my Tudor Black Bay GMT puts the romance of the world travel I so desperately hope to be able to do again back into my mind on a daily basis, my Hamilton Khaki Field reminds me of the military heritage in my family. The numerous micro divers along the way that I convince myself weren’t a waste of time and money, but necessary steps in refining my tastes to the undoubtedly, indefatigably, unquestionable levels they are today, they were just extras in the movie, unfortunately for them; destined to drink imaginary coffee from empty cups in the background of the shot. Still, important, or else the whole thing won’t feel real.

It’s a small thing—it ticks away, tells time, which, as far as I can tell, is a thing someone made up a long time ago to explain why today feels different from yesterday and everyone just went with it. I love mechanical watches over quartz, because that sweeping seconds hand reminds you that no matter what you do with your time, it always marches on, with or without you, whether you while it away, kill it with impunity, or gracefully try to make the best of it while always wishing for more. Because it’s a little mechanical thing that someone made once and people have been perfecting ever since, like humanity itself, ever striving for some sort of perceived perfection, evolving bit by bit. Because it needs me to survive; perhaps this is to make up for the greatest lie I tell myself, but knowing that it needs my motion to keep it ticking makes it feel like a living thing, a symbiotic machine that lives on my wrist.

I hope this was as interesting as the MacGyver opening sequence.

[OrangeSport]

I've always worn watches I think. In my earliest memories I have a watch on. It started with children's cartoon character watches and as I moved through primary school I hit into digital watches. As we moved away from the "push to read" red LED screens I measured watches by the number of buttons they had. I remember my first "3 button" Casio very well!

Watches were "toys" too. Setting off the alarms and dropping them to the bottom of a swimming pool then pretending I was locating them by sonar was a game I remember.

This was my first expensive watch.



Got it for my 21st and I still have it. It was between this and RW at time (although back then a Rolex was only a few hundred pounds more!)

I guess it's just continued from there...

[wschofield3]

Now for the full version, which, like I said, isn’t that far off.

When you’re young, you’re dumb. I know we don’t like to admit it, but it’s true. Everything we did when we were young was probably pretty dumb. We do things like sell Patek Gondolos, get frosted tips, and flirt with veganism. But the dumbest thing we do when we’re young is wish away our youth wanting to be grown. Adults are too in their own shit to tell you that being an adult sucks, or even that adulthood doesn’t truly exist, at least not until you’re old enough that you realize that you’ve been pretending the whole time and that’s what your parents must have been doing too. Or, I don’t know, maybe previous generations did actually know what they were doing.

Part of being grown is playing the part and part of playing the part is looking the part. You look at the people around you, you find the examples of the people—the men, in this case—that you want to be and you try to emulate them. The MacGyver thing wasn’t a joke, it was fully true. I wanted so much to be like him—smart, resourceful, quick-thinking, trustworthy, honorable. These are the things I wanted to be, so, short of actually being able to be those things, difficult as a boy, I wanted to do my best to have the instruments I believed would get me there. So yeah, the passport, the pocket knife (man, I wanted a pocket knife more than anything as a kid, because MacGyver had one; I also wanted a Ruger Mini-14 with wood furniture and a folding stock and a talking car and I wanted to live on a yacht with an alligator or a Parisian houseboat with a collection of swords and a beautiful sculptress, but some dreams are more practical than others), the watch; these were all things I wanted because my heroes had them.

I started quite young. My first watch was a Mickey Mouse watch bought for me at Disneyland in 1989, shortly before a 6.9 magnitude earthquake hit California, but that’s neither here nor there, it’s just set dressing. My plane was already wheels up by the time the earthquake started, so I didn’t even feel it. I wanted Donald Duck, you know—I wasn’t as much of a Mickey kid like most kids are, I was always a Donald Duck kid. Something about his unending impotent rage at everything around him appealed as a child, not least because as a child, you have very little agency and no usable tools to deal with the world around you. Incomprehensibly screaming into the void while pounding your fists at your misfortune was very relatable.

I couldn’t read it. The hands were Mickey’s hands, which was quite confusing, because they weren’t the same length. So it was little more than affectation, or perhaps a souvenir from a trip meeting family members I’d only ever see once again in my lifetime (their decision, not mine). I didn’t know how to read an analogue watch at that age. Hell, at 3, I’m not entirely sure I fully understood the concept of time. It wasn’t until I was in 2nd grade, when I got both a pocket knife (Swiss Army, ‘natch) and a Timex Indiglo, in as 90s a colorway as you can imagine—teal fabric with brown leather. The watch and I were inseparable. I slept with it on. I showered with it. I swam with it. I wore that watch until the strap simply fell apart.

Fast forward to 7th grade. I was a bad kid, by Asian-American child-of-immigrant-parents standards, which meant I got good grades, but I didn’t always put my toys away and I was starting to form my own opinions that weren’t in lock-step with my parents’. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen; I was an A student, who didn’t do drugs, didn’t drink, and was sent to a summer program at a military school to teach me some discipline because I left my GI Joes on the floor and talked back occasionally. I wore a Fossil. A smart black digital watch that I wore with my “uniform” (white t-shirt with Valley Forge Military Academy’s logo, blue shorts, white sneakers, black VFMA hat optional). Unfortunately, I chose that summer to experiment with wearing it on the inside of my wrist and after many, many pushups on the pebbled parade ground in front of my barracks, the acrylic crystal was fairly well chewed up. The plan backfired, of course; in fact, Valley Forge actually kickstarted a dormant rebellious nature in me, and fed a lifelong distrust of authority and a moral imperative to question it at every turn. Eventually, the traits my mother wanted to quash were the ones she became proud of; but there were some rocky years in between, I’ll tell you.

That was the last time I went without a watch. From then on, I’ve worn a watch everyday of my life. A few Seikos, a Kinetic, a Perpetual Calendar, then a Bulova, then a Seiko Flightmaster in college and a Chase-Durer UDT that I bought with money that I earned during my internship at the company I’d eventually work at for 5 years; all while wanting a Rolex Submariner. The internet was around by now, so I could go to Rolex’s site and look at what they had to offer. Boy, did I want a Submariner.

Jump again to my junior year of college. I was, by this time, full blown obsessed with watches and my love of cars had only grown deeper. Add to that a love of film, and you get a perfect cross section of Steve McQueen. I know most of you know the story of my Monaco already, so I won’t give you the details again, but suffice it to say, after a wistful trying on at a local Littman Jewelers of a limited edition TAG Heuer Monaco Vintage LE in a motif patterned off McQueen racing suit in LeMans and a clandestine act of incredible generosity by my brother, a year later, I got my Monaco as a graduation gift.

A few years later, my mother mentioned again, one of many times, about her father’s Omega; it was always her wish that her sons had Omegas like her father. For my 25th birthday, I received another gift that I will cherish for the rest of my life, my Omega Speedmaster. I never met my grandfather, though I spent my whole life being told I was like him. I drank whiskey like him, I felt a deep connection to the military because of him (he was a major in the Bengali Army, KIA), and to this day, Omega is my favorite watch brand because of him. I wish I’d gotten to know him; I’m told he’d have liked me. For a military officer in Bangladesh in the 1950s and 60s, he was incredibly liberal and forward thinking—with four daughters, he didn’t want them to be in a world where all their decisions are made for them. He was a good man; someday I hope someone will say that about me.

The final piece to the puzzle, I suppose, came when I graduated law school, and I finally, after much dancing around what to choose, got that Rolex Submariner I lusted after for so long, as a graduation gift from my mother. While Omega is still and will always my favorite watch brand, when I look at my Submariner and my Speedmaster and my Monaco, there’s no way I’d be able to choose one among them (though, if you run the numbers, it’s the Submariner I do wear the most).

Everything else is just butter on a biscuit. My Monaco Cal 11 completes my McQueen collection, my Tudor Black Bay GMT puts the romance of the world travel I so desperately hope to be able to do again back into my mind on a daily basis, my Hamilton Khaki Field reminds me of the military heritage in my family. The numerous micro divers along the way that I convince myself weren’t a waste of time and money, but necessary steps in refining my tastes to the undoubtedly, indefatigably, unquestionable levels they are today, they were just extras in the movie, unfortunately for them; destined to drink imaginary coffee from empty cups in the background of the shot. Still, important, or else the whole thing won’t feel real.

It’s a small thing—it ticks away, tells time, which, as far as I can tell, is a thing someone made up a long time ago to explain why today feels different from yesterday and everyone just went with it. I love mechanical watches over quartz, because that sweeping seconds hand reminds you that no matter what you do with your time, it always marches on, with or without you, whether you while it away, kill it with impunity, or gracefully try to make the best of it while always wishing for more. Because it’s a little mechanical thing that someone made once and people have been perfecting ever since, like humanity itself, ever striving for some sort of perceived perfection, evolving bit by bit. Because it needs me to survive; perhaps this is to make up for the greatest lie I tell myself, but knowing that it needs my motion to keep it ticking makes it feel like a living thing, a symbiotic machine that lives on my wrist.

I hope this was as interesting as the MacGyver opening sequence.

Wow, @Raza! Thank you, that was so much more than the truncated version. If you had not become an attorney, I do believe writing would have been a perfect vocation for you.

[Raza]

Wow, @Raza! Thank you, that was so much more than the truncated version. If you had not become an attorney, I do believe writing would have been a perfect vocation for you.

Thank you, Walt.

[Raza]

My dad and grandfather both wore Seiko quartz on bracelet when I was young. My dad used money from his first post-collegiate paycheck to buy my grandfather his. My grandfather was verbally upset, I heard him complain about that money.....but he wore it every day and carried a Sears pocket watch as well

The pocket watch had me enamored, and it was left to me. Sadly it disappeared after he passed, but I still enjoyed watches.

The oldest watch I actually remember wearing is a Timex Datalink, connected to an IBM Aptiva. No actual memories of the functions remain, but connecting it to the computer was awe inspiring lol

After that I wore a Fossil or Timex Ironman for years, always had on a watch


After college, myself, I used funds from my first signing bonus (first corporate gig too) to buy an ecodrive. 18 years later I still have it, wore it last week. It was my only-wear for a few years. Man is it scratched up lol, but it still works. It is incredibly comfortable too

A few years later I got promoted and received my first annual bonus. After using some of it to buy my first automatic Swiss watch, an Oris Williams F1 which I still have, it was all down hill from there.

I remember reading about the Times Datalink series when “smart watches” were starting to become a thing, I think it was in WatchTime. I had no idea watches like that existed. Apparently one of them had a function where you could point it at a computer screen and it would digitize the material into the watch or something? Proper spy stuff there.

[OrangeSport]

I remember IOL, I exchanged some PM's with him at the other place - and I think he was fairly active here at the beginning for a couple of years. Wonder what happened to many that came here and left.

The trouble is that this is a nice forum, but it is a bit, well, quiet.. I've been a member from the beginning and have been through periods of actively posting and periods of not visiting at all. I guess with such a small active membership it is inevitable that at times there is a lack of new topics...

[mlcor]

Now for the full version, which, like I said, isn’t that far off.

When you’re young, you’re dumb. I know we don’t like to admit it, but it’s true. Everything we did when we were young was probably pretty dumb. We do things like sell Patek Gondolos, get frosted tips, and flirt with veganism. But the dumbest thing we do when we’re young is wish away our youth wanting to be grown. Adults are too in their own shit to tell you that being an adult sucks, or even that adulthood doesn’t truly exist, at least not until you’re old enough that you realize that you’ve been pretending the whole time and that’s what your parents must have been doing too. Or, I don’t know, maybe previous generations did actually know what they were doing.

Part of being grown is playing the part and part of playing the part is looking the part. You look at the people around you, you find the examples of the people—the men, in this case—that you want to be and you try to emulate them. The MacGyver thing wasn’t a joke, it was fully true. I wanted so much to be like him—smart, resourceful, quick-thinking, trustworthy, honorable. These are the things I wanted to be, so, short of actually being able to be those things, difficult as a boy, I wanted to do my best to have the instruments I believed would get me there. So yeah, the passport, the pocket knife (man, I wanted a pocket knife more than anything as a kid, because MacGyver had one; I also wanted a Ruger Mini-14 with wood furniture and a folding stock and a talking car and I wanted to live on a yacht with an alligator or a Parisian houseboat with a collection of swords and a beautiful sculptress, but some dreams are more practical than others), the watch; these were all things I wanted because my heroes had them.

I started quite young. My first watch was a Mickey Mouse watch bought for me at Disneyland in 1989, shortly before a 6.9 magnitude earthquake hit California, but that’s neither here nor there, it’s just set dressing. My plane was already wheels up by the time the earthquake started, so I didn’t even feel it. I wanted Donald Duck, you know—I wasn’t as much of a Mickey kid like most kids are, I was always a Donald Duck kid. Something about his unending impotent rage at everything around him appealed as a child, not least because as a child, you have very little agency and no usable tools to deal with the world around you. Incomprehensibly screaming into the void while pounding your fists at your misfortune was very relatable.

I couldn’t read it. The hands were Mickey’s hands, which was quite confusing, because they weren’t the same length. So it was little more than affectation, or perhaps a souvenir from a trip meeting family members I’d only ever see once again in my lifetime (their decision, not mine). I didn’t know how to read an analogue watch at that age. Hell, at 3, I’m not entirely sure I fully understood the concept of time. It wasn’t until I was in 2nd grade, when I got both a pocket knife (Swiss Army, ‘natch) and a Timex Indiglo, in as 90s a colorway as you can imagine—teal fabric with brown leather. The watch and I were inseparable. I slept with it on. I showered with it. I swam with it. I wore that watch until the strap simply fell apart.

Fast forward to 7th grade. I was a bad kid, by Asian-American child-of-immigrant-parents standards, which meant I got good grades, but I didn’t always put my toys away and I was starting to form my own opinions that weren’t in lock-step with my parents’. That’s right, ladies and gentlemen; I was an A student, who didn’t do drugs, didn’t drink, and was sent to a summer program at a military school to teach me some discipline because I left my GI Joes on the floor and talked back occasionally. I wore a Fossil. A smart black digital watch that I wore with my “uniform” (white t-shirt with Valley Forge Military Academy’s logo, blue shorts, white sneakers, black VFMA hat optional). Unfortunately, I chose that summer to experiment with wearing it on the inside of my wrist and after many, many pushups on the pebbled parade ground in front of my barracks, the acrylic crystal was fairly well chewed up. The plan backfired, of course; in fact, Valley Forge actually kickstarted a dormant rebellious nature in me, and fed a lifelong distrust of authority and a moral imperative to question it at every turn. Eventually, the traits my mother wanted to quash were the ones she became proud of; but there were some rocky years in between, I’ll tell you.

That was the last time I went without a watch. From then on, I’ve worn a watch everyday of my life. A few Seikos, a Kinetic, a Perpetual Calendar, then a Bulova, then a Seiko Flightmaster in college and a Chase-Durer UDT that I bought with money that I earned during my internship at the company I’d eventually work at for 5 years; all while wanting a Rolex Submariner. The internet was around by now, so I could go to Rolex’s site and look at what they had to offer. Boy, did I want a Submariner.

Jump again to my junior year of college. I was, by this time, full blown obsessed with watches and my love of cars had only grown deeper. Add to that a love of film, and you get a perfect cross section of Steve McQueen. I know most of you know the story of my Monaco already, so I won’t give you the details again, but suffice it to say, after a wistful trying on at a local Littman Jewelers of a limited edition TAG Heuer Monaco Vintage LE in a motif patterned off McQueen racing suit in LeMans and a clandestine act of incredible generosity by my brother, a year later, I got my Monaco as a graduation gift.

A few years later, my mother mentioned again, one of many times, about her father’s Omega; it was always her wish that her sons had Omegas like her father. For my 25th birthday, I received another gift that I will cherish for the rest of my life, my Omega Speedmaster. I never met my grandfather, though I spent my whole life being told I was like him. I drank whiskey like him, I felt a deep connection to the military because of him (he was a major in the Bengali Army, KIA), and to this day, Omega is my favorite watch brand because of him. I wish I’d gotten to know him; I’m told he’d have liked me. For a military officer in Bangladesh in the 1950s and 60s, he was incredibly liberal and forward thinking—with four daughters, he didn’t want them to be in a world where all their decisions are made for them. He was a good man; someday I hope someone will say that about me.

The final piece to the puzzle, I suppose, came when I graduated law school, and I finally, after much dancing around what to choose, got that Rolex Submariner I lusted after for so long, as a graduation gift from my mother. While Omega is still and will always my favorite watch brand, when I look at my Submariner and my Speedmaster and my Monaco, there’s no way I’d be able to choose one among them (though, if you run the numbers, it’s the Submariner I do wear the most).

Everything else is just butter on a biscuit. My Monaco Cal 11 completes my McQueen collection, my Tudor Black Bay GMT puts the romance of the world travel I so desperately hope to be able to do again back into my mind on a daily basis, my Hamilton Khaki Field reminds me of the military heritage in my family. The numerous micro divers along the way that I convince myself weren’t a waste of time and money, but necessary steps in refining my tastes to the undoubtedly, indefatigably, unquestionable levels they are today, they were just extras in the movie, unfortunately for them; destined to drink imaginary coffee from empty cups in the background of the shot. Still, important, or else the whole thing won’t feel real.

It’s a small thing—it ticks away, tells time, which, as far as I can tell, is a thing someone made up a long time ago to explain why today feels different from yesterday and everyone just went with it. I love mechanical watches over quartz, because that sweeping seconds hand reminds you that no matter what you do with your time, it always marches on, with or without you, whether you while it away, kill it with impunity, or gracefully try to make the best of it while always wishing for more. Because it’s a little mechanical thing that someone made once and people have been perfecting ever since, like humanity itself, ever striving for some sort of perceived perfection, evolving bit by bit. Because it needs me to survive; perhaps this is to make up for the greatest lie I tell myself, but knowing that it needs my motion to keep it ticking makes it feel like a living thing, a symbiotic machine that lives on my wrist.

I hope this was as interesting as the MacGyver opening sequence.

Frosted tips--isn't that a breakfast cereal?

Seriously though, you write too well to be a lawyer.

P.S. I shall magnanimously ignore the Gondolo reference. Or not.

[Mediocre]

I remember reading about the Times Datalink series when “smart watches” were starting to become a thing, I think it was in WatchTime. I had no idea watches like that existed. Apparently one of them had a function where you could point it at a computer screen and it would digitize the material into the watch or something? Proper spy stuff there.

I had an early Ironman model that had the visual sensor, but I just used the cable. The only thing I actually remember putting on the watch is phone numbers lol