New gadgets provide Gabir with Vitamin G, a vital nutrient. His most recent supplement has been a new watch, a category I've been considering because it turns out that they're still a pretty good idea. But modern watches are wrist computers and I just don't need them to do as much shit as they are always doing. I don't wanna mine crypto or some shit. I just want the old Pebble I lost at a con a million years ago.
Three failed campaign items broke my Kickstarter habit and as mad as I'd like to be about that it was probably for the best. One was an Arduino-based espresso machine made by engineering students who'd never made anything even remotely like that before. I guess computers don't want to be installed inside of a wet IED? That one's probably on me.
The second one was a boardgame called Rallyman that I was super excited about, it got made and sent to the distributor, but then they had financial issues so I never got it. I will see the game at retail sometimes, and the urge to piss on it is very strong but thus far I have scrupulously resisted this urge.
The story of Pebble is happy, then sad, then happy again, and the last chapter of it is approaching ecstatic. Initially a runaway success on Kickstarter, one of its eventual manifestations was called the Pebble Round - a more traditional looking device that has the exquisite privilege of being the only piece of electronics that Brenna liked without reservation. They came back with a sequel, to the extent that watches can have sequels, which raised twenty million dollars and then the company shut down before it shipped them. It was very surprising but it was mostly a downer because… I don't know. Smartwatches were starting to become a thing, but most of them genuinely seemed confused about what I wanted from a wrist mounted platform. I don't want a second, smaller smartphone on my wrist. I want something that offers salient phone functionality in a more convenient way while delivering Fuck You battery life.
I was somewhat startled to learn that a new version of that hardware was coming back. It was even more wild to hear that they'd even gotten their mitts on the original Pebble name again, they have a month of battery life, and they ship this year. I understand that it's just, like, a piece of plastic or whatever but it's my favorite one.
(CW)TB out.
