In Praise of Divers

My SKX013, but not on the pink band I boast about below

We still call them dive watches, which makes sense. They were originally built to dive with. But dive watches have come to mean a lot more, and we love them.

I suspect a large part of why we love them so much has to do with the ISO 6425 standard which defines a dive watch: Have a unidirectional bezel with 5 minute markings, be readable in total darkness at 25cm, and so forth. Those requirements make a dive watch a great tool for diving, but they also make for a plain old great watch. The rotating bezel is incredibly useful as a timer or coarse stopwatch. Being high-contrast and easy to read, glowing a bit, and being supremely robust are all features any chef, construction worker, firefighter, copy machine repairer, photographer… really, just about every profession, value highly in a wristwatch.

Nithin Patel’s Seiko Samurai Blue Lagoon on a metal bracelet

They also look great. I bet if every person who read this posted a photo of his or her diver, they’d all look awesome, and they’d all be at least a tiny bit different. Mine is black and white in a silver case, and I like wearing it with a pink-and-red NATO strap to protests and marches because it looks awesome. James Bond wore his on a NATO with a tuxedo.

Alex Conrad’s Turtle on a NATO strap

That divers, like any watch, can be had at just about any price point, is a cherry on top. Mine is a $220 variation on the Seiko SKX007, but there’s a sub-$50 Casio to be had and we can all hop on Amazon and buy a Rolex Submariner for about $8,000 (don’t do it! There’s a Grand Seiko that’s better and less expensive!).

Mark Bailey’s Orange Monster gets wet about two weeks out of the year

For a lot of us, “diving” means “being pulled on an inner-tube behind a boat” or “jumping in the 8-foot-deep pool at our uncle’s house” and so forth. The deepest I’ve taken mine was a four-foot above-ground pool and also the local water slides. So being waterproof to 300 meters doesn’t matter to us, except that being waterproof we also know it’s dustproof which means we can leave it on while operating a hammer-drill or cutting wood. We know it’ll withstand some hot grease or a broken container of toner.

Mahmoud El-Tawila bought this SKX007 on the same day he got his diving license

Many watch companies have at least one diver in their offerings. And there are as many ways to reimagine and reinterpret what a diver should be as there stars in the sky, and each one has value.

There are, of course, plenty of other work watches out there. Tachometers, chronographs, pilot watches, field watches, and so forth. They’re all great, and each style is worthy of its own essay. But for my money, they’re all very very good second choices to the humble and diverse dive watch.

Nithin Patel’s SKX011 (which is a different color than the SKX007; the 007 and 011 are both just the same as my 013, only bigger) at sunset

The Unexamined Beverage Is Not Worth Drinking

What you drink says a lot about you. In much the same way a Donald Trump bumper sticker tells decent people everything they need to know about the car’s driver, what’s in that glass is incredibly revealing.

Americans’ taste has gotten younger and younger over time. I began putting this idea together when listening to a Radiolab episode that dealt with foxes. Over many generations, a geneticist in Russia domesticated some foxes, but domestication brought along other physical changes. Namely, the foxes that grew to like people seemed to stop developing at their adolescent stage. They never grew up. They never became adults.

I see that same phenomena in humans these days. We don’t become adults. Just big kids with bills. A symptom of this is what we drink. Namely, we don’t want anything to taste like what it is. We put sugar and more sugar into everything because we are overgrown kids and, when we’re honest with ourselves, all we want is an alcoholic juice box.

The most egregious and pure example of this is pure granulated white sugar. It has no flavor in itself. White sugar is pure chemical sweetness with no ambience. All it does is make stuff taste sweet. Unsophisticated children can eat the stuff by the spoonful, but that’s because they’re unsophisticated. And we shovel it into our coffee by the pound.

There is nothing wrong with coffee. Simple hot water over ground up roasted coffee beans. It’s cheap, warms your soul, smells stunning, tastes bold and robust, and has a very handy caffeine kick.

Maybe you can drink Kurig coffee with hazelnut Coffee Mate creamer without shame. But that is a grown American child drink if ever there was one. Unsophisticated palates demand sweetness to such an extent that Starbucks wisely takes your money by selling thousands of coffee milkshakes every single day. You could get a more honest milkshake faster and cheaper at McDonald’s, but we are dumb enough to swallow the idea that calling our milkshake a coffee makes it healthier than a milkshake.

We do the same with our booze, times two. We load it up with sugar while reducing actual taste via vodka. Vodka drinks are the beloved crutch of the adult child, the unsophisticated pallet.¹ Vodka is great if you just want pure intoxicating chemistry, and lousy if you want a drink you can savor or analyze.

Tequila, though. Tequila is an adult spirit. Whisky as well.² Even rum brings some good flavor to the party. You can even make an argument for gin, though I argue nobody actually wants to drink alcoholic juniper bush.

The same goes for beer. Budweiser and its ilk are bland and safe and will do the trick, assuming the trick is getting drunk. It’s functional beer. But it’s not good. I’m not saying everybody needs to drink double IPAs, but there’s a lot of great beer out there. You don’t need to spend your time with Budweiser.

A cup topped with whipped cream at the coffee shop and a bright, primary-colored drink at the bar let me know as surely as a “Make America Great Again” hat that you are not somebody I care to waste my time on. Do I sound judgey? Yeah, well, that’s because I’m judging you, and I find your immature taste to be a useful indicator about your intellectual and emotional state. And if I’m right, then dismissing you is the best thing I can do for either of us.

That’s all there really is to it. I’m not here to convince you to drink something I like or approve of. I have no interest in what you drink except in its utility as an early warning system. No, what I really want is for American adults take to heart one of the few inspirational quotes worthy of the description:

Examine your life. Examine what you do. Do you consume content or do you create? Are you leaving the world any better than it was when you arrived? Are you making good choices about how you spend the one and only life you get?

Some day you are going to die. Do you really want to spend the time between now and your death being an unsophisticated, immature, fully grown child?

I know I don’t want to spend the time between now and my death wading through you. I don’t think changing what you drink will make you more interesting, more of an adult. But I do think if you grow up, so will your tastes. In the meantime, I will judge you by your unicorn Frappuccino and Miller Lite and mojito and will find an adult to talk to instead.

Cheers.

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1. A notable exception here is the martini. The vodka martini is vastly superior to the gin martini, and the vodka martini is a robust and adult drink. Want to make your own? Check this recipe out. ↩
2. Fireball is absolutely excluded from the whisky category. Fireball is to whisky what a Frappuccino is to coffee. Same goes with any other flavored or “flavor-infused” spirit. ↩

Seiko 5: The Humble Giant

My Seiko SKNE61 on a Barton quick-release brown leather strap

Mechanical watches are amazing devices. They’ve come a long way in the last few centuries, but nowhere is that more evident than here, in my humble new Seiko 5, model SKNE61.

Mechanical watches work because a spring inside them unwinds. There are no computers. No batteries. Just gears and springs and, well, clockwork. They work because a huge number of tiny parts were engineered with exquisite math to allow a spring to unwind at the right speed, pushing gears that turn hands and, in the case of my Seiko 5, move the day and date wheels.

That five-minute video explains all that, and every second of it is engaging. Even my skeptical family ended up glued to the screen when I turned it on. I suggest you watch it full-screen. Even if you don’t care about watches much, the music is wonderful and the video beautiful.

What the video shows is a gross oversimplification, of course. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of pieces and parts inside a mechanical wristwatch. They’re all made to exacting tolerances and assembled precisely. My watch has 21 jewels inside it. Twenty-one synthetic rubies, made specifically for use in watches.

Even the case of this watch is awesome. It’s made of stainless steel, and the finish on it is a bright, shiny polish, except on the top of the lugs, where it’s brushed. I picked this watch in no small part because I like the hands. Many watch hands are straight sticks. These hands have a lovely sword shape to them. They come to a sharp, precice point. The indicies are printed upon the face, not manufactured separately and applied, but they’ve been painted with a thick luminous substance that makes them pop up above face, giving the face a little more depth than it might otherwise have. Adding to the layers are the day-date complication sitting below the face and the Seiko 5 logo, which seems to have been applied to the top of the face.

Suffice it to say that this watch is a very fine piece of functional art. It is a piece of high quality jewelry which looks great in its own right but also performs a specific function requiring craftsmanship and manufacturing. It would be amazing at nearly any price, but this one cost less than $100 shipped.

My new Seiko SKNE61 on a blue leather Barton quick release band.  Look at that logo looking bold and gorgeous.

So, yes, it’s an awesome value and saved me a ton of money when compared to other watches (I’ve got a couple $300 watches on my list, and also a $1,000 one), but “easy on the pocketbook” isn’t the point I’m making. The point is that it’s astonishing that Seiko was able to create something this good this inexpensively. It’s a miracle of mass production, of scale, of refinement. Working for minimum wage and from detailed plans, I could not make this watch for this cheap. Seiko grew rubies for it, for crying out loud!

A lot of people in the watch forums I lurk in say they don’t like the Seiko 5 logo. What I think they don’t like is that the logo tells anybody who knows that despite looking like a million bucks, the watch was inexpensive indeed. That’s part of what makes it amazing, though. I didn’t buy this watch because I couldn’t afford more, but because its inexpense is, in addition to its very existence, testament to the amazingness of human ingenuity. The Seiko 5 logo seems almost like a dare to other watchmakers: “can you make this astonishingly unlikely thing at this price?”

No. Of course, no.

And that’s why, even when I own a mechanical watch with a $1,000 price tag, I will still wear my double-digit Seiko 5 with pride and a sense of wonder.

My New Favorite Local Metal Band

Militant Civilian is an Atascadero-based heavy metal band that’s been around in one form or another for more than 10 years. In that time, it seems they’ve really honed their craft and, despite the stigma of the word “local”, give professional performances of world-class songs.

I got to see them – a classic 5-piece – play at the bar attached to the nearby bowling alley this last Friday night. Through their setlist, I kept thinking about Testament and Exodus. Vocalist Jeremy doesn’t sound like either of those bands’ singers, but the music is certainly in the vein of classic thrash. So when, mid-set, they played Slayer’s Raining Blood, it didn’t feel out of place at all.

In fact, I saw Slayer play live a few months ago. It was a mostly very good show. But Slayer has the air of a king who is well practiced at wielding his power. They weren’t lazy, exactly, but they’d played these songs before and that is what they do, they play these songs and play them they did. But Militant Civilian played Slayer’s song with a sense of urgency and fury that Slayer themselves lacked when I last saw them. What I saw Friday night was a hungry band who honored a great song by a great – if tired – band, they owned it, arguably more than even Slayer did.

Fans of Dream Theatre will understand when I say guitar player Randy had a Mike Portnoy-like joy of playing. He sounded like a musician on top of his game and looked like he enjoyed the hell out of the show. Drummer Kris was as good a drummer as I’ve ever seen on any stage. He looked like a craftsman at work, and sounded sharp. Bassist Ethan and guitar player Brad stood together on the left and appeared to me to be a team; each clearly fed off the energy of the other, and they sounded like men who know how to play. Singer Jeremy was great. I don’t know how to describe him. The band’s music felt familiar while being unique, and so did Jeremy’s voice, despite not sounding like anyone I can think of. Maybe like a less-growly version of Testament’s Chuck Billy? A less-screamy version of Tim Owens? I don’t know best who to compare him to, but he’s got a hell of a set of pipes and his delivery is awesome.

The acoustic at the bar were fairly awful. Militant Civilian sounded as good as could be under the circumstances. They had their own mixing board, so were able to fine-tune to a certain degree, but awful acoustics are awful acoustics. I sincerely look forward to seeing these guys play in a place that makes them sound as good as they will be able to in a better venue. After all, if they were this good in that room, then I can’t wait to hear them someplace made for their brand of metal.

I’m not friends with the band yet, but there’s still a feeling of ownership: Militant Civilian is my local world-class metal band. They’re as good as anything; certainly they’re better than many much larger bands out there. If you’re local and not afraid of having your face torn off by heavy metal, don’t miss seeing Militant Civilian play live. They deliver.

Critical Creig rating: 7 out of 10 earplugs, with expectations of 9 out of 10 next time if the venue is better.

My Top 5 Favorite Horror Movies

It’s Halloween weekend, so here’s my top 5 favorite Halloween movies. This is totally subjective and also mostly in order of what I would drop everything to watch right now.

Five (5): The Devil’s Rejects, 2005

There are more disturbing movies out there, but thanks to Rob Zombie writing and directing, none with as wide an audience as The Devil’s Rejects. This movie is challenging. Though it’s a sequel, but you don’t really need to watch House of 1,000 Corpses first for it to make sense. In fact, Corpses is more horror-comedy. This is straight horror, straight disturbing. But it’s also not without some comedy. I want a little bit of comedy in just about every movie I watch because life is inherently funny, and if movies are about life, there should be some funny parts. Here, the comedy works perfectly and isn’t distracting.

Mom and Dad, if you’re reading this, don’t watch this movie. It’s not for you. In particular, the scene in the motel is not for you. Everybody else, watch and enjoy one of the more moving, bleak, and total-commitment endings you’re likely to see in modern film. You’ll never hear Freebird the same again. Streams on Starz.

Four (4): Event Horizon, 1991

On its surface, Event Horizon is a quality science fiction movie. The director, Paul W. S. Anderson, is best known for directing the Resident Evil movies. I saw one of those. It was fine. He also directed Mortal Kombat immediately previous to Event Horizon, and that was awful. Based on those movies, I’d never guess Event Horizon would be any good, but it’s superb.

The movie starts out looking like an Alien clone: a crack team has been sent out to rescue a long-missing ship. They find the ship abandoned and things get weirder and creepier until it’s a full-blown horror movie. It’s only got 24% at Rotten Tomatoes, but critics hate horror movies, so that’s ok. If you haven’t seen, do yourself the favor this Halloween. As of today, it streams on Starz.

Three (3): Dawn of the Dead, 2004 version

Oh yes. In my opinion, this is the high point of zombie movies. It’s a near-perfect movie; there’s almost nothing I’d change about it. You’ve got great characters (including a pretty girl who kicks ass, a nice guy, a colossal asshole or two, and Ving Rhames), you’ve got excellent zombie effect, great jump scares, some legit awful tension, and there may even be a couple parts where the feelings make you feel things.

Seriously, though, the two assholes in this film are worth the cost of entry alone. You absolutely hate them. They’re such awful people! And the poor decision making! It’s amazing. And educational. When the zombies come, I will have learned from this film and will do better. Doesn’t stream anywhere. You gotta pay for it. Or I can lend you the DVD.

 

Two (2): Cabin in the Woods, 2012

This is one of the best horror films of the last 20 years. It works as a horror film, and it works as a clever play on the horror film trope of, you guessed it, the cabin in the woods.

I don’t want to give anything away. If you’ve seen it, you know what I mean. If you haven’t — I’m looking at you Mom and Dad — then you absolutely should. It’s so fun and inventive and delightful, I can only say that I wanna watch it again right now with you, whoever you may be. Streams nowhere.

 

One (1): Evil Dead II, 1987

I have been watching this excellent, important film for more than 20 years. If I’m lucky, I will continue to watch it for 40 more.

Part sequel, part reboot, Evil Dead II is all evil, all dead. I don’t know if this movie would make it onto my desert island list, but it’s the movie Cabin in the Woods is making fun of – but when Evil Dead II was new, the cabin in the woods wasn’t a horror trope yet.

You think I’m being funny when I say this is a fine film, but I’m not. Bruce Campbell carved himself a permanent and prominent place in B movie… um… history, I guess, with his next-level performance here. Through most of the movie, he’s the only character, acting against nothing but props and absolutely killing it (see what I did there?). Director Sam Raimi got amazing bang for his buck with this low-budget production. And lucky us, 30 years later, Bruce is back in a stellar TV show on Starz called Ash Vs. Evil Dead, which scratches the itch we all had beautifully.

It’s pretty late. I need to go to bed. But if you came over to watch Evil Dead II with me, I’d stay up and watch Evil Dead II with you right now and work be damned. We can watch the show on Starz, but can’t watch the movie anywhere. I’ll lend you the DVD.

How iPod Changed My Life – Again

iPods came along at an interesting time. The first one only worked with Macs was released in October 2001. My first iPod was in the third generation model in 2003. It had a black and white screen and only played music. I think it might have had a klondike solitaire game on it, but music was its main thing. And I loved it.

What I remember the most about using it in those days was a feeling of self-containedness. I was 23 and had my backpack and my iPod¹ and that was everything I needed to get around and live life. Funny, now that I’m thinking back, I realize how much the backpack contributed to that feeling of self-containedness. I hadn’t thought about that stuff in years and years. I know for sure I kept a notebook and a camera in there.² Not a very good camera, but a camera. I remember I shot a photo of a cup full of urine near my bus stop in San Francisco. Digital photo organization wasn’t what it’s become, and those pictures are pretty much gone forever. Sad, too, because it was a charming time and I got some bonkers stuff back then.

Perhaps the best way I can explain that feeling of the time is by describing flying by yourself. If you’ve ever flown — or, to a lesser degree, bussed or trained — then you know the feeling of being your own isolated bubble. It’s you and your luggage and your carry-on and nobody else. It’s up to you to get through security without support and find your gate without help and then it’s you in the air for four hours with no connectivity. Until recently, you couldn’t text or Facebook or stream content or anything. You just had the book or magazine you brought and whatever media you’d downloaded specifically for the trip. It felt like you were on pause while you were in the air; the world continued, but you were disconnected from its events.

That’s how it felt using an iPod and an awful Nokia cell phone back in the day.

Mostly, back then, phones were good for phone calls. Yeah, you could text, but texting on one of those things sucked. And using the Internet was a joke. No phone at all had good Internet until the iPhone, not even Blackberry. Though I will grant that Blackberry was the Coors of phones in that it was the best of the worst, but it wasn’t good.

Besides, not everybody even had a cell phone back then.

Today, your iPhone is a do-everything device. It’s a distraction machine. It’s introduced new complexities into life. If I go on a hike with my dog and bring my phone for music, I’m not just bringing music, the way I did back in the day. I’m also bringing Facebook and Twitter and text messages and Instagram opportunities and the stupid alerts that everybody gets for stuff you didn’t even want alerts for.

You can circumvent this a little bit by downloading the songs you’re gonna listen to on your hike and then putting your phone on airplane mode. But really, that’s pretty hard to do. All you gotta do is take it off airplane mode and all those distractions are back! Besides, you’ve still got the selfie camera.

I’m not saying iPhones suck. They don’t. What I’m saying is that as a culture, we haven’t quite figured out how to deal with them. And the hipster part of me yearns for a simpler time. Well, the yearning is sort of cherry-picking the best parts of the simpler times. Driving/walking directions in my pocket might have made my 8 months living in San Francisco a lot better. I know for sure it made three months living in Denver a lot better.

But still, in yearning for a simpler time, I cracked open the shoebox in the garage that’s got old broken iPods in it. I ordered some interesting little parts, and I got a 4th generation iPod — the last one with the black and white screen — working.³

This is the actual iPod in question, and I’m actually listening to an album by a band called Death.

This thing is remarkable. It’s absolutely wonderful. It scratches my nostalgia itch beautifully and when I walk the dog with it, leaving my phone at home, it frees my attention. I can feel my attention shift from the phone to my internal monologue. I come up with photography ideas. I come up with woodworking project ideas. I come up with solutions to my daughter’s less desirable quirks. In short, I’m able to focus my attention to where it needs to be instead of where the phone demands it to be. I feel better for it.

I absolutely feel like a hipster saying so, but my new go-to hiking-the-dog kit has turned into a 12-year-old iPod, a Field Notes notebook with a pen, and water (or beer!). It’s my sincerest wish to convey how good it feels to disconnect from the world and reconnect with yourself on a regular basis in the hopes it’ll inspire you to create your own bubble of self-containedness.

And if you have a small dog to share it with, so much the better.

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1. Previous to my iPod, I (and everybody else) had to keep a player and its media: a Discman and CDs. The iPod changed all that by being the media and the player, and was the size of a deck of cards. But since it fit in my pocket so easy, I scratched my brand new iPod by having it in the same pocket as my keys. I’d owned it less than a week. That was when I decided that my tech went in the left pocket, keys and such in the right. Tech in the left, by the way, is a fun little Satan reference. You know, technology being down the left-hand path and all that. I still carry my iPhone in my left pocket and my keys in the right to this day. ↩
2. That wasn’t all I kept in the backpack, of course. Like the good guy with a gun fantasy, I kept the stuff in my backpack that would keep me going in a short-term disaster. I had some Clif bars, a flashlight, spare money, a toothbrush, a notebook, the novel I was reading, some business cards (I’ve had cards since I was about 15; so much better than writing your name and number on a napkin), and I’m not sure what else. Maybe the remaining space was useful for groceries or something. ↩
3. For you nerds, I didn’t have any hard drives; they go bad thanks to all the moving parts. But I did have compact flash cards. So I got a CF to 1.8-inch hard drive adapter and a battery. I happened to have a 4gb CF card, so that’s what I used. I’d really like to get a 64gb one in there, but as a proud dozenaire, it’s a little hard to spend money on that kind of thing. That said, the fix to your old broken iPod is surprisingly cheap: $5 for a battery, $5 for a CF to hard drive adapter, and then however much money you want to spend on storage. Extra bonus, because it no longer has a hard drive with moving parts, the battery lasts significantly longer and there’s hardly anything to damage if I drop it. ↩

Review: Seiko SKX 013

My Seiko SKX013 with Barton blue leather band.

I cannot overstate how much I love my Seiko SKX013. It’s one of the best things I possess.

It isn’t the first automatic watch I’ve owned. I bought an Invicta dive watch previously. It was a Rolex Submariner clone and I never loved it. It had a stupid logo engraved on the side.  I sold it and bought the Seiko instead, and it was a great decision.

Like the Rolex, the Seiko SKX013 is a dive watch, but is a distinctly different approach to the concept. Since the moment it arrived from the Post Office, I’ve been enamored of it. Whereas previously I would wear a different watch every day — even a couple per day, depending — I now pretty much just wear one, and it’s my Seiko.

There’s a ton to like about the SKX013. It’s got an automatic movement, which means it winds itself with the motion of my body — no batteries required. I’ve written previously in praise of quartz, and while I still feel that quartz is rad, I’ve never had an emotional connection to a watch like this before. Mechanical watches really are a pinnacle of human achievement. This thing tells time because a spring unwinds itself slowly, moving hands across a watch face. It keeps very good time, and I got it for less than $100 including shipping. That, too, is a pinnacle of human achievement.

I love the bezel, which can act as a countdown timer or a very coarse stopwatch, and is more handy than one might imagine.

I love the day/date window at the 3 o’clock spot. From what I’ve read online, some people don’t like the day/date being white and would prefer it black; I do like it. It makes the face more symmetrical with the 9 o’clock marker. I love the crown location at 4 o’clock. It’s slightly weird, but it prevents the crown from pushing into the back of your hand. And who am I kidding: I like the weirdness. I love the strangely stretched out second hand. I didn’t think I would love, but do love the hour and minute hands. The hour hand in particular is an odd shape, but extremely readable. All the small unusualities add up to a very charming little timepiece indeed — one that’s surprisingly easy to read with the briefest of glances.

This next paragraph is going to be about how big the watch is. Here’s a handy graphic I thought hard about recreating but then just decided to use the one I found on the Internet¹.

My SKX013 looks familiar because it is the smaller sibling to the SKX007, which is more popular and also larger. I generally like my watches to be 40mm in diameter and have 20mm wide lugs². Finding a dive watch that had those specs was hard. The Invicta had it, but was full of other problems. This may be the only somewhat modern Seiko with 20mm lugs. Everything else they make has either 18mm or 22mm. The larger and more popular 007 is 42mm in diameter and uses 22mm bands. Besides, dive watches are kind of chunky, so tend to feel a little larger than they actually are. And since I’ve already got a collection of 20mm bands, so I picked the smaller Seiko. Boy, am I glad I did. This watch is perfect on my wrist.

That’s me!

I don’t like huge watches. I once owned a 45mm ∅ Fossil. It was gorgeous. I loved it so much, but it was too big. I sold it. I’d like to borrow somebody’s SKX007 or perhaps a 42mm flight watch to see how they fit in real life. I know the 42mm Apple Watch is too big for me. When I get back to running, I’ll likely pick up a 38mm.

Which reminds me: the SKX013 doesn’t care how many steps you’ve taken or flights you’ve climbed. It doesn’t notify you of your messages. It doesn’t know if your heart is beating. It tells the time, and then, only if you look at it — no haptic feedback here.

Having a bit of an analogue moment

In a lot of ways, a watch like this is a subtle reminder of how fleeting we are, and how disposable technology is. I read a book by Stephen Baxter and Arthur C. Clarke called Sunstorm a while back. In it, a solar flare threatens to destroy all life on Earth. We shielded the earth from the worst of it, but were still left with crazy weather and the equivalent of a worldwide EMP which took out a lot of technology. Quartz watches were not discussed in this novel, but I’m fairly certain that were I to survive the gamma ray bombardment of Sunstorm, I’d still be able to tell the time.³

If you already understand that watches are a representation of human achievement, are a great piece of jewelry, a valuable tool, and can become something of a friend, then you likely already have a watch at least as good at my Seiko. If not, please fix that immediately. I got this watch for less than $100 on eBay. So even if you don’t believe me about the emotional connection and unexpectedly deep satisfaction it brings, it’s fairly low risk, and I urge you to pick up one of your own. If I’m right, I’m sharing something very good with you. If I’m wrong, sell it to somebody who will wear the hell out it.

 

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1. I went to the website watermarked on the graphic, and it takes you to a weirdly text-dense Asian porn page. ↩
2. Enormous watches are fairly popular at the moment. I reckon they’re popular for the same folks have giant lifted trucks or make an awful racket with their motorcycles. ↩
3. Were I a character in that book, the team and I would, thanks to synchronized watches, ensure that the thing happened at the right time, thus saving human civilization. Thanks, Seiko! You’re welcome, humanity. ↩

Name Calling and Social Media

A few years ago, I was helping build the haunt my friend Chris put on at his house when a guy got angry at my daughter and ended up bellowing “fag” at me as though it were his nuclear option. It was funny then and it’s funny now. And it totally reminds me of how people fight on social media.

The haunt was amazing then, and since then, it’s grown to its own building in downtown Atascadero, and it’s world-class awful/awesome.

Back then, it took up the entire bottom floor of his house and back yard. We’d start building in September, and it would run all October. I was over there helping assemble rooms or make the bats in the bat cave do what they do or whatever. My then-11-year-old daughter and her friend were at the haunt, hanging out. They found a cat and were petting it, it was purring, and they picked it up to cuddle.

Well, the cat’s owner didn’t think it was cute. He, an adult man named Roy came out screaming at my kid and her friend, and even dropped the C-bomb (rhymes with “hunt”) on them before an adult could come out and get between them and Roy.

As a dad, I was pretty pissed, and demanded he yell at me, not her, and what’s the problem anyway, cats are made of durable stuff.

That was when Roy dropped his nuclear weapon on me. You could see him winding up. You could see him loading the weapon. And when he fired, he fired big and he fired loud.

“FAG!”

He just stood out in the street yelling “fag” at me. For a long time, if I’m remembering correctly. And that’s not even an insult to me. Literally every gay person I know in real life is somebody I like and respect. And even if that’s not true, being any flavor of LGBTQ is perfectly fine to me. I can say the same thing about firefighters or plumbers. And that’s kind of funny. I imagine Roy shouting “PLUMBER!” at me at the top of his lungs. Bonkers.

He ended up rushing the cat off to the animal hospital for literally nothing and then threatened to sue me. I told him ok.

Because here’s what you don’t know: Roy was a drunk. He and his wife would yell and scream and hit each other. The entire neighborhood would come out and watch on Friday or Saturday nights. It was entertainment. There are stories of folks actually pouring an extra glass of wine for a friend to sip while watching the cops come and take care of ol’ Roy.

And that’s how it is when you fight on social media. Any time you call an ex names, or hint around about how “some people” this and “some people” that or worse, call them out directly and call them bad names, you’re Roy. When Roy was bellowing “FAG” at me, the whole neighborhood knew that Roy was a dumb asshole, not me. The assumption was that I had done nothing at all, just been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and was unlucky to be the one getting shouted at. That’s the important thing here: Roy didn’t change anybody’s mind about me. Not one. Not even a single person watched that exchange and thought, “I bet that blond guy is a total asshole/gay.” But everybody knows that Roy is an idiot, and everybody in the neighborhood is ramping up for his Saturday night performance.

Everybody knows who the Roy is, and everybody knows who doesn’t deserve it. So before airing your dirty laundry on social media, remember instead to keep your mouth shut. Do anything but shut up, and you’re Roy, and everybody knows it.

iOS 11’s App Store Icon Sucks Bad

It’s a small thing, and I don’t want to be hyperbolic. It’s just an icon, it’s not a big deal. The rest of iOS 11 is pretty solid. But man, the App Store icon sucks.

iOS 10’s App Store icon

iOS 11’s App Store icon

The old icon has the ruler, a pencil, and a paint brush. It’s evocative of tools to make cool stuff. It’s crafty! It’s creative! It’s art! It’s science! It’s the App Store!

In fact, it’s even cooler than that. The icon has been around for a long long time in one way or another.

Image borrowed without permission from the Macintosh Repository

Pretty cool, I think. I like that Apple’s continued using this idea for so long. But there’s really nothing to like about the new one. It’s ugly in and of itself — what is it? A crappy teepee? A campfire? A sort of picnic table?

But aside from its stand-alone ugliness, it’s done what I think of as a sad design decision: it’s still the same shape as the old icon, it’s paying homage to the past, but it’s removed everything that makes it charming. It’s three popsicle sticks in the shape of creation, but not the tools of creation themselves. What we’re left with is a janky semi-broken A. Hell, it looks like an incomplete and sort of soft and round and safe anarchy symbol.

I hope they fix it in future editions. Not that it matters or makes a difference or makes iOS 11 worse or anything, but still.

Review: Canon 17-35 f/2.8 L

One of the things about being a poor photographer is that it’s a stupid combination. Photography is an expensive hobby. You can spend as much as you want on equipment. Canon has a camera body — that’s body only, no lens — which costs $6,000. One of its most popular pro lens’ is about $1,700.

So what am I doing making photography my primary hobby and creative outlet?

Buying used, that’s what.

Really, that’s pretty much the big secret to my success. I know how I shoot. I know what my subjects are, I know what my requirements are, I know what equipment is important to me. At present, my equipment consists of one camera body and just three lenses:

• Canon 5D original camera body

• Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 USM Macro lens

• Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 USM lens

• Canon EF 17-35mm f/2.8 L USM lens

I also have a flash and tripod and stuff, but for the purpose of this review, that’s my gear. Also, I rarely use the flash, so I don’t know why I bother mentioning it twice. Flash.

Prime lenses are an incredible value.¹ Zoom lenses have to look good throughout their entire focal range, and zooming requires more glass from the manufacturer. Zooms also have more moving parts. But because primes only have to look good at one focal length, and because they have fewer moving parts, the physicists and engineers who design the lenses can make them better for cheaper while also widening apertures. The end result is inexpensive yet very high quality optics. I’m hugely happy with my 50mm and 100mm lenses.

Yet I still have this zoom. Why? Because it is the lens that occupies the position at the intersection of cost and benefit.

I needed a wide lens for shooting action indoors. I needed the widest aperture I could get so as to let in as much light as I could manage. There aren’t a lot of choices on the wide end of things.

Anything wider than the 20mm f/2.8 lens costs thousands of dollars. The 20mm f/2.8 itself, though, pretty much got panned in reviews. It needs to be updated with a mark II version.

There was also the (now discontinued) Canon EF 20-35mm f/3.5-4.5 USM lens, but it’s just not very good either.

The 24mm f/2.8 IS got very good reviews, and 24mm is pretty wide. I may have been able to persuade myself it was wide enough.

There was the relatively inexpensive 17-40 f/4 L, but f/4 just isn’t enough to capture indoor action when shooting with an older camera body such as, you know, the one I shoot with.

Then there’s the expensive 16-35 f/2.8 L lens. When I was researching, the newest version was the mark II. That lens is still available brand new, for the low low price of only $1,200. And the even newer mark III is $2,000.

L lenses are Canon’s highest quality — and thus most expensive — lenses. Generally, I feel that Canon’s prime non-L lenses are of comparable optical quality to their L zoom lenses, but L primes are, by and large, both magical and magically expensive.

So I went old. It’s not like lenses wear out, after all. I bought the discontinued 17-35 f/2.8 L for about $500 — about the same price as the 24mm f/2.8 was new — on eBay, and it was a gloriously good choice.²

I figured since I couldn’t get wider than f/2.8 in a prime anyway³, and since prime non-L lenses seem to have about the same quality as L zooms, I might as well get the zoom, the advantage being a wider focal range than a straight 24, with no downside. It may well be the best choice I’ve made in my photographic life to date.

The photos I get from this lens are crisp and clear. The color is excellent. Turning the zoom ring feels smooth. The lens itself is sturdy and looks good.

But what this lens does more than anything else is it allows a nearly wacky amount of creativity. I can shoot <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/creigpsherburne/30051041060/in/album-72157673633960082/“>the haunted house I’m a part with it; the rooms we build are tiny and the super wide focal length allows me to capture the pure horror.

But it’s incredibly diverse. I’ve also captured some gorgeous landscapes with the same body and lens.

And not only that, it’s fantastic for portraits.

Honestly, this lens is good at everything I do. I have no idea what people are talking about when they talk about landscape lenses or portrait lenses or whatever. Lenses are lenses — what really matters is the photographer. My 17-35 won’t really shoot birds very well, though, so there’s that to consider.

I don’t want to get hyperbolic here, but this lens is just about perfect for me and the way I like to shoot photos. About the only thing that’d make it better is opening up to a wider f/2.0, but Canon doesn’t make f/2 zoom lenses, presumably because they’d be even more prohibitively expensive than they are.

Back in the day, somebody bought this lens new and took stunning photos with it. When it was new, there was no better choice for wide lenses. And my copy at least is as good today as the day it was built. And when compared to its successors, I’m not actually convinced there’s been an improvement in image quality.

I would not hesitate to recommend one to anybody looking for a wide in a similar situation as … no, I guess I’d just recommend it to anybody, even someone using a crop-format camera.⁴

While I shoot with a full-frame camera (and will never go back to a crop-format), I also acknowledge that the camera isn’t what makes the photo. It’s the photographer and the lens. I own only three lenses, and those three lenses make my vision come to life. But this lens — with its superpower wide end, traditional long end, and reasonably fast aperture — is the one that lives on my camera. It’s the lens I take off when shooting with something else. It’s the lens that, more than any other, gets me the shot I was trying for.

Critical Creig rating: You should go on eBay to buy one immediately.

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1. Prime lenses don’t zoom. They are also sometimes called fixed lenses. If you want to zoom, you have to do it by moving your body. ↩
2. This is not strictly true. While I shopped for it, my parents bought it for me as a graduation gift when I earned my Batchelor of Arts degree. The very first thing I used it for was shooting my dad’s first art show. That felt pretty dang good. ↩
3. Again, not strictly true. Prime L lenses open all the way up to f/1.2, but they are also prohibitively expensive, especially at the wide end, and especially wider than 24mm. ↩
4. When buying a T5i or similar, one usually gets an 18-55mm lens. The 17-35mm f/2.8 L and its close cousin the 17-40mm f/4 L have similar focal ranges, but better apertures, better build quality, and produce vastly better photos. ↩

Review: Free $139 Watch

I took Facebook up on an offer for a free watch — “just pay shipping!” — and now that it’s here, I feel ripped off.

The Sharper Looks Invictus Geneva¹ watch is not good. This is a bad watch. A very bad watch indeed. Sharper Looks doesn’t think it is. They think it’s worth $139. They are mistaken.

People use the phrase “I don’t know where to start” when they want to convey the idea that there are many, many things wrong with a thing. I mean it literally — I actually don’t know where to start. Everything about this watch is so egregiously bad. One usually picks the biggest problem to complain about first and then goes down the list to smaller and smaller problems. I cannot pick only one biggest problem, so I’ve decided to work from the outside in.

The band is awful. It is imitation leather, but worse than that. It’s like some awful paper-rubber-Naugahyde material that’s imitating imitation leather.

I took the band off and put on one of my nice Barton leather bands. The end result is a lot like putting salt and pepper on your boiled sawdust to make it taste better.

The case is also not good. Watch cases are generally made out of stainless steel, robust plastics, sometimes even wood. This is made out of terrible Chinese screwdrivers. You know when you buy something cheap and shiny and Chinese and it feels like plastic, but you’re sure it’s metal? That’s this. I asked my dad what it is, and he said it’s some zinc alloy, and they just call it pot-metal.

Once, not so long ago, there was a big pile of pot-metal in China somewhere and all the little pot-metal atoms wanted to be something good. They wanted to help people build awful furniture and get turned into a hex wrench or a single-use screwdriver. Some of the pot-metal got turned into this stupid watch, and all its pot-metal screwdriver friends won’t talk to it any more.

The Invictus has buttons on the side. The buttons don’t push. They’re decorative. When a button doesn’t push, it’s a bump. There are dials on the face. The dials don’t move. They’re decorative. The parting line on the casting hasn’t been filed, so the decoration looks awful.

That the dials don’t do anything is amazing to me. The fake hands are printed on the face the same way the incorrect Roman numerals are printed: imprecisely. Somebody liked the look of a watch with a chronometer, but didn’t know what the dials actually did.

As we all know, the Olson twins were created by space aliens who’d had attractive women described to them, but had never actually seen one.

Similarly, this watch was designed by somebody who had no idea how watches actually work or what the things do.

The Roman numerals don’t line up with the numbers around the inside rim of the watch. It is impossible to know precisely what time it is by looking at the Invictus because it has two scales.

The hands have white paint on them. This is presumably because Seiko and other good watches watches have white paint that glows in the dark. The Invictus is not a good watch and consequentially does not glow in the dark.

I genuinely believe the raw materials that went into this quartz-powered pile of junk are worth more than their presently assembled whole. I paid nothing for it, and it wasn’t even worth that. Don’t waste nothing on getting one for yourself. This review is the best thing about the Sharper Looks Invictus wristwatch.

Critical Creig rating: They owe me $6 for this review.

 

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1. The email confirmation they sent me says Invictus Geneva, but the website says no such thing. ↩

Review: Barton Silicon Watch Bands

Watch band maker Barton has a near-perfect product in its quick-release silicone bands.¹

Barton makes watch bands and watch band accessories, and their specialty is making it supremely easy to change out your watch band to give your watch a new look or different vibe depending on what you’re doing. These bands have a quick-release tab which makes swapping them in and out a piece of cake.

I own Barton’s spring bar tool to help out with a couple of leather and metal bands (not that kind) I love, but quick release is one of the best things to come to watches since quartz.

But that’s only half the story. The other half is the silicone band itself. It’s kind of amazing. It’s comfortable for all day use and defies dirt. I manage a warehouse for a construction company, and it is generally a very filthy job. I’ve thrashed a handful of nylon NATO watch straps working there — they get so dirty so quick, it’s just no fun. Barton’s silicone bands seem to repel dirt.

If there’s a downside — there isn’t — it’s that the inside seems to collect skin cells over time. I generally find this to be a non-issue as they clean up quickly and easily with a baby wipe. Here’s a before and after:

I wear my watch all day long at work in winter and summer with a silicone band on, and it’s a non-issue. I’ve owned the above band for about a year now, and wear it to work in my disgusting warehouse regularly. While it doesn’t look as perfect as the day it arrived in the mail, I’d still give it an A rating. It just looks great. Its color is still even and rich, the quick-release spring bars work just as good as they did brand new, and while the clasp has the micro-scratches of daily use, it’s not bent or gouged. I have no idea how it managed that, based on how hard I am on all the other stuff I use at work.

Black 20mm silicone quick-release band on Invicta automatic dive watch; Barton sticker on hard hat because their silicone bands are genuinely the only bands I wear to work.

I know that, being a type of rubber, it shouldn’t be able to breathe on my wrist, but it’s so flexible and soft, it’s somehow just not a problem.

While all mine are, at present, gray and black, Barton makes a variety of colors, including a gorgeous red I want to get when I get paid. You can also get different colored buckles. All mine are stainless steel colored, but they also have black, gunmetal, gold, and rose gold. They also come in all the standard strap sizes: 16, 18, 20, 22, and 24mm; I’ve got 16, 20, and 22mm bands. Thus, every word I’ve written here applies to those sizes.

I tend to really like NATO style watch straps; they just fit my personality and look great dressed up or down and I love wearing them; thus, I generally stay away from the silicone ones in the evenings and on weekends. For my life, they’re sort of earmarked for work; but that’s just me, my wife rarely wears a watch during the week at all, but she rocks a Barton silicone band on her watch most weekends.

Finally, they’re a fantastic deal. They’d be great at twice the price, but for only $14 with a stainless steel buckle you simply can not beat these straps.

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1. I have no skin in the game. I’m not sponsored by or affiliated with Barton. I’m writing about this because I like sharing the things I feel passionate about with the people I love. ↩

I Will Fight You

Hey, Universe. You’re bumming me out. I am positively exhausted with, frustrated by, and plain old sick of the constant metaphorical kicks to the groin.

Every day at work is a no-win situation for me. I don’t do a good job. I can’t do a good job. All I can do is not screw up.¹ That’s the situation I’m in. I’d quit, I’d leave, except this job is so physically demanding that I don’t have any energy left at the end of the day to do the things I need to to move on, so here I stay. Because I require the paycheck. In exchange for that paycheck, I trade pain and failure. I wake up in the morning and my feet ache. Oh, and I’m obligated regularly to spend an entire extra shift’s worth of overtime per week there, this place I don’t want to be anyway in the best of times, because the work must be done and I’m the only one there to do it.²

But here’s the kicker, here’s the thing that’s got me really down, Universe, the thing that’s got me so disappointed in you. My boom box got stolen yesterday. I left it outside the door in the alley at work, and drove home. I got home and found it wasn’t in the car, so I turned around to go get it, and it was gone. I was away 20 minutes. It’s just gone, nowhere to be found, nobody fessing up. Man, Universe, I bought this thing to pep up the rotten afternoons and late evenings. It was good for morale. I’d let my coworker pick a song and I’d make fun of him for picking Uncle Cracker or something, and it’d lighten the mood and make a 7pm exodus hurt a little less. And it’s not like I can afford to buy another. It’s just gone.

This loss, by the way, is on the heels of my daughter’s iPhone being stolen from her backpack in the last week of school. I managed to get it back, but not without damage, and it cost $100 for a replacement and $35 for a new case. Why? Because you sent some dumb kid to steal it, causing disruption and hardship to my family. I hate that kid and I resent you.

Here’s the thing, Universe. I’m not beaten. Today at lunch, an old lady with a walker was fighting with the restroom door, so I dove in and held it for her. And I’m not going to stop. I’m not going to stop opening my house to people when fire threatens their home like I did earlier this week. I’m not going to stop being generous with my time and resources, volunteering for roller derby and dog-sitting and photographing. I’m not going to stop erring on the side of kindness. And you know why? Not because I even believe in you, or in karma. But because we only get to live once, and I don’t want to spend the time between now and when I die being shitty. I’m not here to earn points, Universe, I’m here to fight you. You’re beating me down pretty solidly right now, but I’m moving forward and moving up and I’m not going to get shitty. Well, no shittier than I already am by all the stuff in the first paragraph. Well, I’m going to hope and try not to get any shittier, and I’m going to lean on the people who love me so I can fight your entropy and fight your indifference and fight against your awful shitty awfulness.

Still wish I had my boom box though.

 

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1. Example: my primary coworker is special needs. My only coworker is special needs. This in itself is fine, except that we are a growing company (except for my department) and I am responsible for the trucks, which is where we are the most vulnerable. So the single most vulnerable aspect of the entire business is in my hands, and I am overworked, understaffed, and the staff I do have is special needs. I get busted a lot. ↩
2. They talk about us all being a team, but it’s a straight-up lie. I’m on everyone’s team, nobody’s on my team. I have literally worked two hours overtime on days my higher-ups leave two hours early to go to happy hour. Morale is for other companies. ↩

Happy Wife, Happy Life

It’s become a stupid cliche, but the cliche is just the tip of the iceberg of truth lying beneath the surface.

This is an essay for the fellas. I hope you’ll read carefully.

Women’s brains work differently than men’s. You know it, I know it, your aunt Becky knows it. But most of us don’t give any thought to what this means. We have different priorities: it’s been my non-scientific experience that men have their priorities — or more specifically, they have a list of things that aren’t important to them. You know, if they can be bothered to make a list at all.

Ladies, though, they have a lot of weird things that are important to them. They like to have a clean kitchen. They like the laundry to be done. Even if they don’t care too much about the bed being made, they seem to like clean sheets.

Fellas don’t care about that stuff. We’ll clean last week’s egg pan — well, mostly clean — now that it’s time to cook sausage. We’ll wear a dirty shirt while we wash a load of uniform shirts, leaving socks and extremely attractive Adidas underpants remain strewn about the floor. We’ll sleep in a bed with sheets stiff from sweat and grime. We know that pillowcases exist, and that should be enough. After all, there’s so much to be done.

We don’t want to do those chores. They get in the way of doing real stuff like woodwork or restoring a car or practicing the bass. And if we’re honest with ourselves, we know that our ladies will take care of the dishes if we don’t. They’ll do the laundry if we don’t. They’ll change the bed if we don’t.

And this is the important part here, guys. This is the part where, if you hear me and evolve, it will make your life better.

If you man up and do the laundry without fail, you’re freeing a big chunk of your lady’s mental bandwidth. Don’t make a big deal out of it. Just demonstrate to her that laundry is a ball she no longer has to juggle, ever. She’ll have more capacity for the things that are important to you: going to your band’s practice, watching movies, even sex.

Because she doesn’t actually want to do laundry or dishes. She just wants them done because women need the chores done before the fun starts. I don’t pretend to know why, I just know it’s true. So if you do it, it’s done. She won’t be thinking about laundry if she doesn’t *have* to think about laundry. And if she’s not thinking about laundry, it’ll free her to think about cool stuff, like you. And don’t you hate the idea of her thinking about laundry while you’re being intimate?

There’s a small caveat though, and it’s this: you must be consistent and you must not fail. It’s not enough to do laundry a couple times. You have to know you’re in for the long haul. In this home, you do the laundry. Sometimes you’ll get sick or go for a dudes weekend and she’ll do the laundry, but they’ll be the exceptions. Fifty weeks out of the year, you’re the laundry king. Also dishes. Also sweeping and mopping the floor. Also washing the dog.

If you man up and put on an apron from now on, you will get laid so much more. And the more stuff you pick up, the weirder you can ask the sex to be. Really. The less she has to worry about, the more concerts you can go to. The more date nights you get with that lady. The more band practice you get with your guys.

In short, happy wife, happy life.

Good luck.

The Non-Practicing Writer

I am better at writing than many people are at anything.

At one point, I was on the hook for writing 10,000 words per week. I was practiced. I was dialed in. I could go talk to anybody about anything, and write not just competently, but compellingly about any topic. I once wrote a story about a local transmission shop(!) which my mom enjoyed to the very last word.

Writers talk about how hard writing is. Hemingway rather famously said that “writing is easy. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” I don’t share that outlook. I find writing to be reasonably easy and very rewarding. Points well made and a fancy turn of phrase are enormously satisfying. I identify more with Issac Asimov than with Hemingway: “Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.”

What happened? Why is it months in between essays instead of days or weeks?

I was fired from my position as a writer at the local newspaper. That was a blessing and a curse, of course, because the pay-to-responsibility ratio was awful there, and there was really no way to get ahead or win. It was a grindhouse. But I got to meet wonderful people in that job. I got to do very cool things, including going on two helicopter rides. So yes, it hurt to be canned, but it was a relief as well. I was treated awfully there. (So bad, in fact, that a former coworker approached me later and offered me a job. I declined, because working for a newspaper was so awful in retrospect, I chose not to write again.)

I lost my audience.

Why’d it matter? I was a writer before I got paid (poorly) for it. I should be a writer still. But no; I gave up. This thing that I’m so good at, this important thing that’s part of how I think of who I am lost a lot of value. I’m still not sure if it actually has any value. I’m not sure if it’s something I want to pursue.

A man once said that blogs get the attention they deserve. My blogs get precious little attention. I don’t know why. Perhaps I’m awful at promoting. Perhaps the insecurities every writer has are all true, and I’m not actually interesting.

A few people are lucky; with hard work and brilliant ideas, they can become writers. They can even get paid for it, make a living at it. I stopped writing because I had my chance, and there’s no value in continuing if there’s no money and no audience.

But in my heart I’m still a writer. A non-practicing writer. I’m also a non-practicing bicyclist and non-practicing runner. I know that when I stop working the intensely physical job I work right now, I will run again because the act of running feels good. I like the feel of the pavement on my feet, the air in my lungs. The same with bicycles: I like them for their own sake, and I love the way pedaling feels; the way a great single-track trail feels as I tear down it. I don’t do those things because all my energy goes to the job. But I’ll do it again.

When I think about writing, my first thought is invariably “why?”. And when I have no answer, I don’t write. And the world isn’t changed. And I do something else.

I wish I knew how to find meaning in this thing that so many people find difficult, which I find easy, and which I am good at, and which nobody seems to want from me.

I wish it were different. I wish I were different. I wish I wanted to write.