Watches, Stories, & Gear: A Chris Nolan Summer, a New Pen from Tactile Turn, and a Look Back at a Classic Seiko Diver

“Watches, Stories, and Gear” is a roundup of our favorite content, watch or otherwise, from around the internet. Here, we support other creators, explore interesting content that inspires us, and put a spotlight on causes we believe in. Oh, and any gear we happen to be digging on this week. We love gear.

Toronto Is Getting Serious About Christopher Nolan Summer

I don’t know about you, but I was obsessed with Greek mythology as a kid. So much so, that my librarian had to call my mother to stop me from checking out D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths from the library each week, so other kids could have a chance. It seems that, with Christopher Nolan’s much-anticipated The Odyssey on the horizon, the Toronto International Film Festival has caught a similar Hellenic-induced fever.

This Summer, Canada’s largest city will host Christopher Nolan: Grand Designs, a retrospective at TIFF Lightbox running from July 8 through August 20. The series brings Nolan’s oeuvre to the big screen in 35mm and 70mm, beginning with a live taping of The Ringer’s The Big Picture podcast and a 70mm screening of Tenet, followed by titles including Memento, The Prestige, Inception, Interstellar, Dunkirk, Oppenheimer (with Barbie playing directly before as a nod to the Barbenheimer phenomenon of 2023), and, of course, the Dark Knight trilogy.

Now this is the kind of stuff that should get us talking about The Odyssey, not the (frankly dumb) criticism of Lupita Nyong’o playing Helen of Troy.

NASA unveils next steps to build permanent Moon base

Do you ever sit back and think about how, right now, we’re living in the future? Or, perhaps more appropriately, at the precipice of all those sci-fi films we grew up on? Tech billionaires with their hands in government? Check. International corporations with unchecked power? Check. Living in a surveillance state with another endless war among three global superpowers? Check and check. 

But there’s also some good – or, at the very least, incredibly interesting – news that comes from living in the future, like the new moonbase NASA wants to build. The agency has released new details for its plan to create a permanent base on the moon, including robotic landers, hopping drones, and vehicles that could help prepare the lunar surface for humans to live and work there long-term. The base is planned for the moon’s south pole and would be powered by nuclear and solar energy, with NASA aiming to have it built by 2032. For better or for worse, Blue Origin, the space company founded by Jeff Bezos, is among the companies selected to help build the equipment, as the U.S. pushes to return astronauts to the Moon before the end of the decade while China works toward its own crewed lunar landing by 2030.

Tactile Turn Clip Action Pen

By now, everyone probably knows that my full-time job is in the pen industry. And by now, you (hopefully) also know that I’m not one to shy away from telling you that a well-made pen is better than any luxury pen. To this effect, the Tactile Turn Clip Action Pen is a pen that, in my very professional opinion, one can get behind. Long known for its almost industrial designs and reliability, Tactile Turn’s latest release shows a slight update to the design with their Clip Action addition.

For this new model, it’s all about the eponymous clip-action mechanism, which uses a milled-and-bent titanium clip with a relief cut that keeps it slightly off the body, giving it just enough tension on dress shirts and denim jeans alike. Inside, a two-piece, dovetail-slotted carrier secures the clip, resulting in a mechanism that, we’re promised, feels satisfying to use. 

The Clip Action Pen is available now in three colorways and two sizes (standard and short) for $119.

CZAPEK – An Unexpected Renaissance

Often – though not always – a watch brand’s success comes through the story it sells. Being able to sell a watch is, in a sense, a simple thing. But to anchor a brand into the emotional is another thing entirely. With the release of Czapek & Cie’s documentary “An Unexpected Renaissance”, we see another side of the little-engine-that-could that is this haute Swiss indie. Starting with the early life of François Czapek, the 19th-century founder who later inspired the revival of the brand in 2015, we are then shown footage of Xavier de Roquemaurel (one of the founders of the brand’s relaunch), interviews with team members, highlights of milestones in the ten years since the brand’s revival, and a walk through a few of the collections from Czapek. At 50 minutes, it’s a pip of a documentary whose goal isn’t to polish the brand as a PR push; but instead works to do something that’s a bit rare these days: tell a real story.

From the Archive: Our Review of the Seiko SPB149

When brands continue to refine their most popular models, one is reminded of Darwin’s theory of evolution. With the right pressures, the right conditions, and the right amount of time, small tweaks to the overall appearance can have a larger impact on the silhouette. 

Take, for instance, the Prospex HBC005, which was recently released to celebrate Seiko’s 145th anniversary, and updated the date window of the SPB143 and has a clean brushed silver dial and blue bezel. But with every instance of evolution, one must look back in the family tree, so to speak, and find its ancestors. For the HBC005, we’re reminded of our earlier review of the SBP149, which in turn, modernized the 62MAS’s proportions and wearability. It’s here that we aren’t looking for something that’s unrecognizable just for the sake of a new release, but a continuity that (at the risk of stretching this metaphor too far) doesn’t shock a delicate ecosystem.

And when put all together with the different iterations of Seiko’s dive watches, we see a perfect illustration of just how the brand continues to be one of the top watchmakers in the industry, 145 years on.