I feel like I over posted talking about Swatch .beats and decimal time today,
and about watches and time more generally of late. I know that some people
follow my main mastodon account because I like to talk about unicycles, the
Vivaldi browser or other things besides just, weird watches. I don't want to
bore those people or scare them off.

~ Masto thread about .beats and decimal time:
https://velocipederider.com/@ruari/112121565804535479

And yet I have more things on my mind that I would like to write down, so I am
reusing this often forgotten journal, given I suspect I am the only person the
world who ever looks at it! XD

Anyway, background aside, over the last couple of days I have been wearing the
F-91W with a Sensor Watch module and firmware to display the time in .beats. I
had suspected beforehand starting that this would not feel too alien to me given
that I have worn a decimal watch on and off for well over a year.

~ My original post about getting a decimal watch:
gemlog/2022-12-15_decimal_watch.gmi

I was wrong, it is weird and the digital .beats do confuse me! I suspect in part
because my use case for the decimal watch was to get a daily overview of where I
am. I view the face much like a sundial and while I do look at the markings,
these days I tend to think of them more like percentages of the day. With a
digital watch showing .beats I find myself without that total daily overview. In
addition I started making mistakes and interpreting those numbers in classic
sexagesimal time terms. So for example, if I see a time like @759 I start to
think it is one .beat away from @800, when of course that is not true (next
would be @760). On my decimal watch with an analog style face you can see you
are not close enough for it to be 8.00/@800 (80% of the day) so soon.

That said, if .beats became widespread I can imagine that for meetings with
others and other pre-agreed times, the precision that the digital affords
compared to my single hand watch would mark it more suitable. However that is
not a world we live in and I know nobody else personally who uses any form of
decimal time. Thus... for me (personally right now), my original decimal, single
hander is better. It'll be interesting to see if I change my mind over time and
how things eventually pan out. Either way part of my interest in these watches
is to try out different ways of using and thinking about time, so the new .beats
watch does serve its purpose and I am enjoying confusing my brain again! ;)

-- 

Mastodon: @ruari@velocipederider.com