I can imagine that people reading the last articles are trying to figure out the reasons why I wrote them. They are not very complicated. Biljana opened her gaming laptop to play Witcher 3 and the Windows basically kept it under lockdown with all the stupid updates, making it impossible to actually run what she wanted, until she told it to lay off with the updates for a week; then it ran fine. It got me thinking – Microsoft behaves as if the computer belongs to them first and user last, and the actually important stuff is all about installing updates and running things the OS thinks should be ran, and you get the leftovers, if you’re lucky and it doesn’t just do the reboot-update thing where the system is completely useless for hours. Also, it doesn’t actually bother to ask, because it knows better. I was thinking about it and concluded it’s not an accident, it’s a long-standing company policy. It’s the way they understand the computers, the users and the world. What they want and think matters; what you want and think is irrelevant, because they know better.

About the watches; I already mentioned I have issues with allergies. My nose is completely blocked and this impairs my breathing and elevates my stress level in addition to all the other things that are making my life miserable, such as filtering the astral equivalent of global sewage until it’s Evian. Well, it’s not just my breathing; my wrists are slightly swollen too, and my watch has a metal bracelet that’s adjusted to my normal wrist size, and the extra links for it are somewhere in Zagreb in a garage, and one would have to dig it out, mail it to me and then I’d expand the bracelet so that it doesn’t dig into my flesh, and that would solve the problem, but until then I can’t wear it. As you can see, it’s a whole to-do list. The obvious solution was to just wear another watch, with the leather strap, but my second watch is a battery powered quartz, and the battery just happened to die a month ago. Yes, I have a third watch, a twenty year old Casio, and it’s also quartz and the battery also died. That’s what got me thinking about watches, especially considering the fact that my main watch, the mechanical one, needs servicing since I’ve been wearing it non-stop for 8 years or so, and I’ll do that when I go to Zagreb in November to put the winter tyres on the car. So, considering I would have to be without a watch until then, I decided I had to do something and just bought a quartz movement Seiko with a leather strap, and the watch happened to be so nice, Biljana commented that she can’t actually tell how expensive it was – it doesn’t look worse than something like a JLC Master series in stainless steel, for instance.

This got me thinking about what are we actually paying for in watches, especially since I know that JLC Geophysic, released in the geophysics year along with the Sputnik 1, was intentionally designed to tick at true seconds, making it look like a quartz watch, only there weren’t quartz watches in the 1950s so people thought it was fancy. So, the thing that now makes people think a watch is “cheap”, the ticking at true seconds, is something JLC invented an expensive complication for in the 1950s. And yes, the Seiko I bought looks almost the same; only more accurate, and all for 230 EUR. The honest answer is that we are paying mostly for illusions and bullshit, and only somewhat for better materials and tolerances. We’re definitely not paying more for accuracy, or resistance to shocks or magnetic fields. So, that got me thinking and I wrote the article about it.

Also, I was thinking how a watch is just physical matter until I bind spiritual energetics to it, which is the point where it actually becomes something special and precious, and overpaying for matter that pretends to be something special just so that I would have to turn it into something actually special is pointless. And while we’re at that, since I was too exhausted and brain-dead from the spending to do anything complicated and elaborate, I merely punched a hole from the watch to the “God realm”, in order for it to create a feeling of presence when I wear it. I expected nothing from it, but a very old and dear friend paid me a wordless visit through that thing. It helped, my Lord. Thank you. I hope to see you soon for coffee.