I’ll bet you it does, but you’ll need to put a new battery in it.

And tearing. Until it is done.

Unless you’re an American Indian we’re all immigrants, eventually.

I bought it on Dealextreme back in the day, which was kind of the precursor to our current Aliexpress/Wish/Temu/Shein arrangement. It’s therefore possible that it is a knockoff (or a knockoff of a knockoff?) but the fact remains that it was absurdly cheap, is fully mechanical, and against all expectation and reason it continues to function and also keep pretty good time. It’s actually just a hair fast, and requires me to knock a minute off of it about once per week.

If you’re not squeamish you can get a thoroughly generic – or perhaps heavily “inspired” by some particular name brand – wind-up timepiece from any of the usual suspects for pocket change. $10-20, and other poster in here mentioned they bought theirs for $5.

There probably actually isn’t an alternative. Whatever piece of software you might otherwise use to encode or convert video is probably using ffmpeg behind the scenes anyway.

That’s okay, I’m also unfirable and the highest paid person in the building.

Nice. It is astounding what you can get for just a couple of bucks, and even more astounding that they genuinely work.

I just took a more detailed look. They do still make quite a few mechanicals but they have indeed shot up in price. $80-90 nowadays, it seems.

My old one is definitely mechanical. I wind it up every morning.

It’s also approachably yet suspiciously cheap. I think I paid $20 for this close to 15 years ago, and Sinobi is apparently still at it making mechanical watches in the $30 range.

This one does two things: Tells you the time, and does so while not needing batteries.

If we’re doing watches today, here’s what I’m rocking lately.

I stopped using my Garmin smartwatch because they finally fell into the enshittification trap and recently tried adding AI slop and a subscription scheme into their watch app. That’s a big old nope from me, dawg.

Marbles are too inconsistent in diameter and most of them are too small for paintball guns, and certainly wouldn’t chamber or feed right. What’s more likely is that these punks were using one of the myriad crop of nylon or aluminum “jawbreaker” ammo sold online these days specifically for use in paintball guns.

In addition to the dubious legality of this sort of thing if you actually did light somebody up with a hopper full of them, for anyone considering these for deterrence of ne’er-do-wells in the night, I’d give it a second think only because mostly what you’ll accomplish is holes in your drywall and denting up your own stuff.

Decades of the Catholic church demonizing birth control methods and claiming condoms cause AIDS will do that do a continent.

No points for guessing. The Irish and the Spanish have already been considered “not white” at points in recent history. So have the Italians.

Some dude named Tyrone apparently had my phone number at some point before I did. For a couple of years at first I got a sporadic but persistent litany of calls before I managed to finally convince all of his debt collectors, parole officers, and/or babymommas that this was no longer his number.

It sounds stereotypical, but it’s true. I thought somebody was pulling my leg the first time.

Anyway, I don’t answer my phone for anyone who isn’t on my contacts list anymore. If I don’t know you, you don’t need to be calling me.

I’ve posted this story in various guises before, but back in the '90s a friend of mine had a dedicated phone line for his modem (yes, this was before residential broadband of any stripe was readily accessible) which was the inverse of the local Dominos Pizza. Like, ###-###-0101 vs ###-###-1010.

Tons of calls from a wide cross section confused, stupid, angry, and belligerent would-be pizza seekers arrived at the telephone he had plugged into that line, and many many more must have gone into the black hole of the perpetual busy signal.

Christ.

You reminded me that I had to waste like an entire hour of my day a couple of weeks ago convincing my boss that yes, we absolutely can eBay off the four or five unopened toner cartridges we have lying around here for a printer we no longer have. It’s fine. Just let them go. We can use the money for some other operational expense. “But already paid for them and that means we’ll take a loss on them.”

Sure, genius. Versus what, exactly? Leaving them mouldering on the supply room shelf until the day the sun burns out? An 80% return is better than 0% return.

It’s not even a contest how easy it is to determine an incoming text message is marketing bullshit and ignore/blocklist it versus the time sunk into getting to the bottom of a phone call.

I essentially have no reason to own a telephone anymore, for any reason whatsoever, including at my work except for the fact that dimwits incessantly keep calling me on the damn thing. And for added bonus points, they insist on getting salty any time we can’t instantly answer their phone call. Which for the record is because I already have all four other lines lit up and staff on all of them, wasting 15+ minutes each on some inane query or complaint that could have been a 10 second email.

Everything could easily be conducted over SMS or email, and in fact I prefer it to be because this leaves a paper trail. I’d much rather send one of my vendors a nasty email than have to call and yell at them, because when I need to refer back to that previous communication I have an exact date and time and I have what was said right there in black and white. If I give a client everything in writing they can’t conveniently “misremember” what they were promised to try to scam more out of us. What I wrote is what I wrote. It’s all right there. If somebody tries to ask me to do something stupid and demands I do it anyway even after I told them it was stupid, I automatically have documentation of that order and my objection for when it all inevitably goes pear shaped.

Etc., etc.

Bury the telephone. Its time has passed.

𝚈𝙾𝚄 𝙰𝚁𝙴 𝚂𝙴𝙶𝙵𝙰𝚄𝙻𝚃

We had to constantly remind people not to leave their disks on top of the monitors in those days, because on some models the degaussing pulse was enough to erase a floppy disk.

I was also proud of my ownership of a large speaker magnet which had a highly directional magnetic field, and could cause tube monitors and TV’s go all paisley from about 20 feet away. I kept it stuck to the back of my steel garage door when not in use to keep it well away from all monitors, disks, and tapes.

It’s the only way to be sure.