Doxa Releases Another Clive Cussler Homage, This Time In Titanium; Casio Celebrates 30 Years Of Pokémon On Game Boy; Speake Marin Adds a Lavender Portobello To Ripples; Hublot's Sapphire Big Bang Meca-10

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Hey friends, welcome back to It’s About Time. Short one today, but it’s hot outside so who wants to read about watches.

In this issue

• Doxa Releases Another Clive Cussler Homage Watch, This Time The Titanium Sub 300Ti5

• Casio Celebrates 30 Years Of Pokémon On Game Boy With a G-Shock Full Of Our Favorite Critters

• Speake Marin Adds a Lavender Portobello Edition to the Ripples Collection

• Hublot's Big Bang Meca-10 Returns For The Summer In A Sapphire Case With A Sky Blue Dial

👂What’s new

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Doxa Releases Another Clive Cussler Homage Watch, This Time The Titanium Sub 300Ti5

Brands often spend millions to be included into pop culture events. And I’m not just talking about Apple paying to have their computers in blockbuster movies, even watch companies do it. Just look at Hamilton and the incredible stuff they’ve done with watches provided to movie characters. But there’s a cult product placement that not only cost nothing, it was massive. And that’s when Clive Cussler put an orange Doxa on Dirk Pitt's wrist across 85 novels and 100 million copies sold. And Doxa loves this. In the past couple of years, we’ve gotten several Clive Cussler variants of Doxa watches. Now, we’re getting the fourth dedicated watch in a titanium SUB 300.

The case measures 42.5mm wide and 13.4mm thick, though the lug-to-lug of 45mm means it wears far smaller than those numbers suggest. The case is made out of titanium, including the crown, bezel and caseback, with circular brushing on top and polished flanks. The box sapphire crystal adds to the thickness but is kind of essentialy when making a vintage-inspired watch. The shark-toothed bezel keeps the dual scale: orange no-deco depth markings on polish, black 60-minute markings on brushed. Water resistance is 300 meters.

The dial is very cool, made out of sandblasted grade 5 titanium, built as two stacked plates with the upper one laser-cut so the markers are deep set, including the date window and minute track. The result is a sandwich dial that Doxa has never done before on this watch, and the titanium grey against the orange minute hand looks fantastic. Hours and seconds hands are blackened. On the date disc, 15, 7 and 31 are printed in orange for Cussler's birthday.

Inside is a COSC-certified Sellita SW200-1, beating at 4Hz with 38 hours of power reserve. The caseback has the NUMA (the non-profit National Underwater and Marine Agency founded by Cussler) emblem, the chronometer certification and the individual number. The strap is Doxa's black Dive Flex rubber with a tropical pattern. No bracelet for this one.

The Doxa SUB 300 Ti5 Clive Cussler is limited to 300 numbered pieces, priced at €3,190. See more on the Doxa website.

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Casio Celebrates 30 Years Of Pokémon On Game Boy With a G-Shock Full Of Our Favorite Critters

Casio and Pokémon are back, and this time the occasion is the 30th anniversary of the original Game Boy games from 1996. The GA-110PKM, based on the GA-110, gets a transparent, red and green colorway. The red and green make sense, since it was Pokemon Red and Pokemon Green that launched first on the Game Boy. Aficionados will also notice the hints of blue, nodding towards the Pokemon Blue that launched right after those.

The case is made out of resin, in a frosted semi-opaque white with a velvety texture. It's big: 51.2mm wide, 16.9mm thick, with a lug-to-lug of 55mm, but that’s G-Shock for you. Weight is only 72 grams, so it’s easier to wear than you might expect. On top is a mineral crystal, and water resistance of 200 meters.

The dial is styled as a Poké Ball, and the secondary hand is shaped like Pikachu, you just have to love. Thirty Pokémon are scattered across the case and strap to mark the 30 years, most of them printed on the semi-translucent resin strap. The display is LED backlit for reading the time in the dark.

Inside is Casio's analog-digital quartz module with roughly two years of battery life. Functions include time, stopwatch, full calendar, world time, countdown timers, and alarms. The module works well and always has. The strap is translucent resin.

The Casio G-Shock x Pokémon 30th Anniversary GA110PKM-7A is priced at $270, and it ships in a Poké Ball-style case with packaging art featuring all 30 characters. See more on the Casio website.

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Speake Marin Adds a Lavender Portobello Edition to the Ripples Collection

Speake Marin has been steadily working through colour and material variations on the Ripples since the watch released in 2022, and the concept holds up. The rounded-square case and the small seconds at 1:30 mean nobody mistakes this for anything else. The latest one takes its cue from Portobello in west London, famous for its painted façades, and renders it in a beautiful lavander color.

The case remains unchanged. Which means that it takes 40 separate parts to build, and it pairs a rounded square outline with a circular opening for the dial. It’s made out of steel, 40.3mm wide and 9.2mm thick, with satin-brushed surfaces interrupted by polished bevels. The crown is surrounded by angular guards and water resistance is 50 meters.

The dial has a brass base with the collection's 12 horizontal ripples engraved in, hand satin-finished, then covered in a translucent lavender lacquer. The small seconds at 1:30 cuts across the pattern with a sunray finish and a rhodium-plated surround. You get faceted rhodium indices, doubled at 12, plus the usual playful Speake Marin hands.

Inside is the calibre SMA03-T, made by Speake Marin's own Le Cercle des Horlogers in La Chaux-de-Fonds. It beats at 4Hz with a 52-hour power reserve, and uses a tungsten micro-rotor, which is what helps the case stay under 10mm. Through the sapphire back you see a circular-grained mainplate, rhodium bridges with 3mm-wide Côtes de Genève, hand-polished bevels, and a microbeaded micro-rotor with laser engraving. The strap is lavender calfskin embossed with a denim pattern, tone-on-tone stitching, steel folding clasp.

The Speake Marin Ripples Portobello is available now, priced at CHF 22,900 without tax. See more on the Speake Marin website.

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Hublot's Big Bang Meca-10 Returns For The Summer In A Sapphire Case With A Sky Blue Dial

Despite some ambiguity where the actual cases come from, Hublot is one of the very rare brands that has been consistently making sapphice-cased watches. It’s kind of a big deal, since sapphire is incredibly tough to machine and even harder to make waterproof. And their Big Bang collection is particularly well suited for a sapphire case, since it’s built around layers, and making them easily visible from all sides is a very nice benefit. We now get the Big Bang Sapphire Sky Blue, a new colorway for the Meca-10 line.

The case is 44mm wide, fully made out of polished sapphire. The bezel is fixed with Hublot's H-shaped titanium screws, which are the one visual constant across every Big Bang regardless of what the case is made of. Forty-four millimeters of transparent crystal is not a subtle object on the wrist, and Hublot knows that. Water resistance is 50 meters.

The dial is a matte sky-blue skeleton with movement bridges in the same tone, which stand out well against the clear case. Running seconds sit at 9 o'clock. The power reserve display is at 6 o'clock, and the indicator at 3 o'clock has a red zone that appears when you're down to the last two days.

Inside is the calibre HUB1201, manually wound, first seen in the original 44mm Meca-10 in 2016. The architecture is really something special in these movements, with two parallel mainspring barrels feeding a 10-day power reserve and a rack-and-pinion system that slides two racks along the 9-to-3 axis to drive the twin displays. It beats at 3Hz. The strap is sky-blue rubber, matched to the dial.

The new Hublot Big Bang Sapphire Sky Blue is limited to 100, priced at €82,700. See more on the Hublot website.

⏲️End links

A bunch of links that might or might not have something to do with watches. One thing’s for sure - they’re interesting

• Since the resurgence of virtual-reality technology in the 2010s, much has been made of how tech companies evoked science-fiction novels to assert their products’ potential: Neuromancer, Ready Player One, Snow Crash, and more. But what most of these futuristic stories included—and what most of these present-day evocations omitted—were pointed criticisms of the very mechanisms that these companies were developing. Promise without premise, if you will. For Aeon, Ali Rıza Taşkale critiques a greatest-misses litany of these bastardizations, from VR to martial surveillance to space colonies. It won’t make you feel any better about the names driving the stock market, but it might make you feel better about the sci-fi that supposedly inspires them.

• Have you ever entered a grocery store only to spot yourself on a ceiling-mounted TV screen, above the words “Recording In Progress”? That’s the work of Dr. Read Hayes, executive director of the Loss Prevention Research Council, “America’s leading lab to prevent shoplifting.” For Slate, Alexander Sammon heads to LPRC headquarters to tour a painstakingly protected store simulation, and then to a local Walmart to test his shoplifting knowledge. (He also sifts through nebulous stats on America’s “organized retail crime” epidemic, taking clear delight in the relative haziness of the country’s “shrink” problem.) Sammon’s dispatch is a scrappy, wry study of the loss-prevention industry, a font of wild shoplifting trivia, and a good critique of corporate suspicion.

• “We crave the handmade, the from-scratch, the traditional, the folk,” Joshua Habgood-Coote, a philosophy lecturer, writes. “We dream of old forms of skilled work.” Nostalgia can be a toxic impulse, reactionary and uncritical, but it can also hold revolutionary potential for the future. Habgood-Coote gives an entertaining tour of “skill nostalgia,” touching on craft books and viral hobbies that have proliferated against a backdrop of artificial intelligence and finding a thoughtful parallel in the Arts and Crafts movement, a critical response to industrialization. Here, nostalgia is more than a self-soothing search for comfort; it’s about engaging with loss, reconnecting with ideals that might improve the future.

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