G-Shock

I was annoyed yesterday when I noticed that my G-Shock was running almost a minute fast -- until I remembered that it hadn't been set since early May 2020. 1 minute fast over 10 1/2 months comes out to less than 6 seconds fast per month. Not too shabby. The official specification is within plus to minus 15 seconds a month.

My G-Shock DW9052-1ccg looks like this:

I think the -1ccg suffix refers to it being all-butch black. But I'm not completely sure about that. There are a huge number of G-Shock models, and I'm still new at this. In any case, a DW9052 is a G-Shock which has that same basic configuration, and DW9052's come in a lot of different colors, as well as black with many different colors of accents, besides all-butch black. 

Casio, as far as I know, does not refer to this color scheme as "all-butch black." I made that phrase up to make fun of myself and a lot of other people. 

Besides keeping track of hours, minutes and seconds (in your choice of 12-hour AM/PM or the all-butch 24-hour format which I naturally prefer), day of the week, month and day and year (on a separate screen because there's only so much room and you probably know what year it is), my DW9052 features

-- an alarm, and a chime which sounds every hour on the hour, which I finally figured out how to to turn off yesterday. There are watch aficionados who prize alarms and hourly, or even minutely chimes very highly, and pay huge amounts for mechanical watches which sound them. The charm is so far lost on me. But, mind open must be amen.

-- Countdown timer; input range: 1 minute to 24 hours; measuring unit: 1 second; auto-repeat function,
1/100 second stopwatch; measuring capacity: 23:59'59.99"; measuring unit: 1/100 second (for the first 60 minutes). No, I do not understand what all of that is. I do know that it's a pretty fancy timer and stopwatch.

-- Everything on the dial lights up into nice bright lume when you push the big button marked "G."

Casio has sold over 100 million G-Shocks since 1983. They say that its designer, when a small boy, was given a watch by his father, which he cherished until one day he dropped it, it shattered into many pieces, and he vowed to devote his life to designing a watch which was indestructible. This story strikes me as being very -- Japanese. Perhaps it is also perfectly true, how would I know. 

I still don't know for sure what sort of battery my G-Shock will eventually need. I could screw off the back and look and see, but I'm not going to do that. Not today.

The thing which makes G-Shocks G-Shocks is toughness. They have been hit with hockey sticks like hockey pucks, thrown off of the tops of tall building onto concrete sidewalks, intentionally run over by huge trucks, and come out undamaged. There may be tougher watches than G-Shocks, but I sort of doubt it. In any case, their toughness is legendary.

From the basic all-butch black plastic-and-rubber battery-powered models with their digital readouts, G-Shocks have expanded into a variety of colors and functions, many with analog displays instead of or in addition to digital, some powered by light or radio waves instead of or in addition to batteries. Some are now smartwatches. Some are covered by metal instead of plastic and rubber -- sacrificing some durability, I would imagine. They run from around $40 to four figures, maybe higher in some rare cases.

I  honestly never wanted any of them besides my all-butch black DW9052-1ccg until the day before yesterday. I was set. I was perfectly content in the G-Shock department. 

And then I saw the GM-110RB-2A (Also known as The Rainbow) in a video:

-- O sweet Richard Mille! 

But apparently 500 people felt similarly before I did and it was a limited edition of 500 and it sold out very quickly, months before I knew it existed. I'm trying to make myself want it less by telling myself the truth: that those gold-colored parts on the sides are metal, not shock-resisting rubber, as I had assumed when first seeing it in the video. That's helping a little bit. Transluscent gold rubber would've been even better. And more durable, as one braved the deepest techno raves of California. Tell me I'm wrong. 

Look how beautiful. MSRP $280. All gone. And now I'll be searching the newest G-Shock releases and reading the G-Shock news. Waiting for them to do it again.