dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

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

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.

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.

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.

Yeah, just wait until you get a load of the number of things called “One.” Here’s a hint: It’s a lot more than one.

…No.

I see. Perhaps I misunderstood the format.

I’m not sure I’d use Bill Nye as the example of the asshole atheist, unless that’s the joke. Maybe Christopher Hitchens.

Incorrect, only because you’re still tacitly assuming that science (or anything else) must have some kind of external cosmic significance outside of human thought.

Science is important to us – or at least it ought to be – because it’s the method by which we understand how the universe works. Being important to us is all that matters, because we can’t think with the minds of anything else.

The flaw in all of this sophomoric philosophic whinging is that it mostly tends to start off with the presupposition that all of these concepts aren’t just human constructs. The only reason anything has meaning to us is because we decided it does.

The purpose of life is life itself.

I addressed that in another comment here. The long and short of it (very long, as it happens) is that the volume you’d need is still the same. So your elongated balloon would have to be well beyond what most people would consider to be ridiculously tall. 325.5 meters tall, in fact, given the 0.75 meter diameter I assumed to start with. I figure most people could probably stand in a 0.75m circle provided they didn’t wave their arms around a bunch.

This I am fairly certain we do not have the technology to achieve. Anything vacuum filled that large would need to have walls so thick so as to completely negate any buoyancy effect. I don’t know of any modern material that would simultaneously be rigid, strong, and light enough.

Sure. You could do a cylinder of three quarters of a meter across which seems like a reasonable footprint for someone to stand in. That’d only have to be, uh, 325.5 meters tall to have the same volume.

Absolutely, but the scale of the balloons is a bit off. Nobody would be walking shoulder to shoulder like this. For a normal-ish 170lb/77kg individual your personal balloon would have to be a little under 6.5 meters across assuming it were filled with helium.

Yes, I did the math.

Just pick that fucker up and stick it on the other side of the Toblerone block.

And then revel in the inevitable fistfight with its owner that ensues. (Pro tip: Be sure to win.)

🐧🗡️!

Key word being deliberately. I predict the majorty of people who wind up with either of those ghastly things did so because they were all that was available, easily filched from the supply closet, or it’s all their parents would give them because they are above all else cheap.

I have probably handled and used hundreds of the damn things in my life but I have never once spent a single penny on any of them; they were without exception foisted off on me by circumstance, not intentionally sought out.

I was a Staedtler nerd in school anyway, any time I was not allowed to use a fountain pen.