Stopping something

I love movies and series streamed via Netflix, HBO, etc.
It's not the same anymore. Barry Diller has an article about why he says movies will never be the same and that it's bad. I've noticed.

Another director claims he likes the series system better because you can more deeply develop characters and story--and I understand that--but the interruptions of the story break you away.
 
I looked at a clock and it stopped. :)

I dealt with a guy directly who lived somewhere around St. Petersburg and purchased 4-5 at a time since it took so long to arrive. His Father was a watchmaker of over 30 years and would clean my watches as a favor before they were shipped.

I spent many enjoyable nights looking at the different watches for sale on ebay to educate myself on what watches had actually been produced and were put together by someone in the Ukraine with a box of parts. The people at the watchuseek.com Russian forum verified them all as authentic and knew guys who hustled them on the street.

ILUXA translated them all for me. I have them on txt file somewhere but you can both read them.

Pobeda - Limited Edition - 1 of 3000 made and presented to the Non-Diverse Division who used Valium gas on people held up in a Theater in Georgia (?) to knock them out before they took it:
spetznaz01.jpg


A Pobeda with Moscow skyline at top celebrating the 50th Anniversary of the WWII Victory over the Germans. Presented by Local Officials to a Russian combatant of that war with inscription on the back. In part says "To Winning Warrior":
pobeda01.JPG

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Serkisof Turkish Railroad watch. Special order by the Turkish Govt. produced by the Molina (Lightning) watch company in Russia. Demiryolu is Turkish for Railroad:
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railroad01.JPG
 
I've given most of them away but this is my favorite pocket watch. I carry it the first day it snows. A Molina from a ski and shoot Biathlon in some games held in Europe in 1990 by an organization that used to oversee the Biathalon on the front under the ski guy:

biathalon01.JPG
biathalon02.JPG

biathalon03.JPG


A Molina with "moon hands" (the circle) celebrating The Legend of Ural. A Giant who rode a huge lion and fought with Death. When Death tried to hide from him at the bottom of a lake he drank the lake. When he lay down to rest he feel to sleep and his body became the Ural Mountain Range. Dang, that's an even more ginormous story than the ones make up:

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ural01.JPG
 
I stopped posting watches. But I started again.
zim01.jpgzim_works01.jpg
A Mir (Peace) pocket watch and the works. I made the leather fob and carved the arrowhead out of bone.

Zlatoust01.jpgzlatoust_works01.jpg
That is a Zlathoust with works. It's the first true Soviet designed mechanism. They borrowed the others.

It's the watch you want if you collect Russian pocket watches. The Russian folk art on the face makes it one of a kind.

I stopped posting watch pix again.
 
My amphibia stopped working :( And I thought it was kind of indistructable. Turns out that banging ketchup bottles on your palm is more that the shock absorbers can digest. I am ordering the replacement parts and may post a pic if I get it working again.
 
My Amphibia Sub Commander stopped working after I gave almost all my watches away. It was the one I wore most, but I'm hard on a watch so I usually wear a G-Shock.

I bought a watch repair kit and taught myself to do it. I've fixed some and have some that need fixing. Getting the second hand back on the post is the hardest part.

I gave the guy up the hall an Amphibia with a Islamic Shrine on it and a Molinja pocket watch that closed like the biathlon watch I showed. He carries that pocket watch all the time and told me yesterday how much everybody liked it. He's the guy I gave a laptop but couldn't grasp the cncerpt of "tapping" to enter his password of 11111.

I've got a combination Amphibia that is also a Komandirski Naval watch with a plane and anchor with the red star. It's an automatic but you still have to wind it. A nicer one with a different case and gray face with a stingray band and a KIomandirshie Officers Watch with the red star on sharkskin band.

Somewhere I've got pix of them and a Propaganda battery powered watch with hands, star and Hammer & Sickle on sea snake.

I saw a funny site yesterday that talked about how to "do" a Russian accent for fun and games. The kind I like in chat.
 
G-shock can deal wit a lot. A LOT! But it's b*-ugly. My Komandirskie still works after I did a part-disassembly and reassembly. But it gains 30 minutes to the hour. :(
 
it gains 30 minutes to the hour.
See the adjustment bar I colored in red on the Zlathoust? There will be one like it on the Kommandirskie.

fast_slow.jpg

You need to get something small and pointed to lay against the flat part, so it's nice and steady. Then gently edge that needle from the + side toward the - side. Depending on how far you can go just so it a little t a time. For 30 minutes on the hour you hopefully have a long way to adjust it down to a minute a day fast or something more normal.

Vostock usually run a little fast but nowhere near that fast.
 
My amphibia stopped working :( And I thought it was kind of indistructable. Turns out that banging ketchup bottles on your palm is more that the shock absorbers can digest. I am ordering the replacement parts and may post a pic if I get it working again.
When I'm into something it's all or nothing and consumes m. I researched the history of the watch factories and the whole bit, This is what I had on file on this machine for Vostok Amphibia.

If you don't know what a real one looks like you're subject fallng victim to a cottge industry of people with boxes of parts that put together watch faces with hands, stems or cases that never caome out of the factory. Then you're beat. All mine were confirmed at watchuseek.com by Russian guys who sold them on the street on up to big time collectors:

Vostok (Wostok) – Восток

Vostok means East and is a well known Russian brand which made high quality watches and instruments for the Russian military. It is not to be confused with the post soviet era, break away company of Vostok Europe which trades on its Russian credentials but which are made in Germany/Lithuania.

Original Soviet made Vostok watches are mainly divers style watches although not exclusively. The ranges include “Komandirskie”, “Amphibia”, “Generalskie”, “Admiralskie”. The movements are higher quality with multi-jewelled movements. Vostok made, and still continue to do so, the popular “komandirskie” and “Amphibia” watches with military images on the dial.

These watches have since become desirable watches in their own right. Examples with the wording “ЗАКАЗ МО СССР” “by order of the Ministry of Defence of the USSR” on the dial are the most desirable as these were commissioned by the Soviet government for sale in Soviet military establishments.


Vostok Amphibia

Vostok Amphibia Diver – Russian mechanical/automatic dive watch. In the Russian watch industry an Amphibia watch was what the west would call a Diver watch. Produced in great quantities for the Soviet/Russian military, these watches gained great popularity worldwide.

The first Amphibia watches were manufactured in 1967 in USSR on Vostok Watch Factory (BOCTOK). Professional divers and submariners gave their preference to Vostok Amphibia watches because of their simplicity and reliability. Non-failure operation on depth up to 200 meters in conditions of significant temperature drops, in any excited environment – mechanical watches Amphibia stood extreme overloads and impacts.

Especially under the order of the Navy of the USSR was made the military modification of Amphibia, and tests of watches had passed during exercises of fleet by the Northern Sea.

The submarine has laid on the bottom on depth of 130 meters, simulating failure. A brigade of the divers, who had taken part in rescue of people, was provided with new Amphibia watches while they were participating in rescue. Both, tests and exercises had passed successfully.

In 1975 Amphibia watches had been in the space by the spaceship Soyuz-17 and to the station Salute-4.

Amphibia watches were also tested by less exotic, but not less evident ways. They were run over the trucks, hammered, but they continued to show an exact time.

Accuracy of work of Amphibia watches in many respects is obliged to the Vostok movements, and reliability to the shock-proof device of balance unit is a heart of mechanical watches.

History

In 1967, Mikhail Novikov and Vera Belov, designers at the Chistopol watch factory, had a challenging task: to design and produce a new dive watch reliable to 200 meters and the associated changes of pressure and temperature.

The design team at Vostok decided on the name "Amphibia" as it evoked a watch equally at home underwater and on land. Coming up with the name was the easy part. Producing a watch capable of meeting the needs of the Soviet defense department was the real challenge.

Of course Switzerland was capable of producing watches with such specifications, but according to Novikov (here, as paraphrased by Google translate), “many [Swiss] designs we could not repeat, because our equipment can not provide the necessary accuracy.” If the quality of the machines available in Russia meant that copying the techniques of the Swiss were out of the question, then Novikov and Belov would have to approach the problem differently altogether.

The conventional way to build a watch capable of withstanding pressure at great depth is to make a watch case, crown, and crystal that will have a static resistance; a Rolex submariner in the bath is exactly the same as a Rolex submariner 100 meters underwater. The design of the Amphibia is different (in a way similar to EPSA’s compressor system), in that the water resistance of the watch is improved as the pressure around it increases.

Central to this elegant design solution is the Amphibia's caseback. Rather than a more usual screw down caseback, the Amphibia utilizes a bayonet style caseback with a threaded locking ring. This caseback system alone does not provide adequate resistance, so the Amphibia also has a very large gasket made from sintered rubber (an innovative process Novikov and Belov cribbed from Russian space programs). At greater pressures the case back is actually pushed into the rubber gasket, making the water resistant seal tighter and more effective as depth increases. The thick acrylic crystal operates in a similar fashion, flexing at high pressures. The ingenuity of the designers was to factor this distortion into the tolerances of the watch.
 
When I'm into something it's all or nothing and consumes m. I researched the history of the watch factories and the whole bit, This is what I had on file on this machine for Vostok Amphibia.

If you don't know what a real one looks like you're subject fallng victim to a cottge industry of people with boxes of parts that put together watch faces with hands, stems or cases that never caome out of the factory. Then you're beat. All mine were confirmed at watchuseek.com by Russian guys who sold them on the street on up to big time collectors:

Vostok (Wostok) – Восток

Vostok means East and is a well known Russian brand which made high quality watches and instruments for the Russian military. It is not to be confused with the post soviet era, break away company of Vostok Europe which trades on its Russian credentials but which are made in Germany/Lithuania.

Original Soviet made Vostok watches are mainly divers style watches although not exclusively. The ranges include “Komandirskie”, “Amphibia”, “Generalskie”, “Admiralskie”. The movements are higher quality with multi-jewelled movements. Vostok made, and still continue to do so, the popular “komandirskie” and “Amphibia” watches with military images on the dial.

These watches have since become desirable watches in their own right. Examples with the wording “ЗАКАЗ МО СССР” “by order of the Ministry of Defence of the USSR” on the dial are the most desirable as these were commissioned by the Soviet government for sale in Soviet military establishments.


Vostok Amphibia

Vostok Amphibia Diver – Russian mechanical/automatic dive watch. In the Russian watch industry an Amphibia watch was what the west would call a Diver watch. Produced in great quantities for the Soviet/Russian military, these watches gained great popularity worldwide.

The first Amphibia watches were manufactured in 1967 in USSR on Vostok Watch Factory (BOCTOK). Professional divers and submariners gave their preference to Vostok Amphibia watches because of their simplicity and reliability. Non-failure operation on depth up to 200 meters in conditions of significant temperature drops, in any excited environment – mechanical watches Amphibia stood extreme overloads and impacts.

Especially under the order of the Navy of the USSR was made the military modification of Amphibia, and tests of watches had passed during exercises of fleet by the Northern Sea.

The submarine has laid on the bottom on depth of 130 meters, simulating failure. A brigade of the divers, who had taken part in rescue of people, was provided with new Amphibia watches while they were participating in rescue. Both, tests and exercises had passed successfully.

In 1975 Amphibia watches had been in the space by the spaceship Soyuz-17 and to the station Salute-4.

Amphibia watches were also tested by less exotic, but not less evident ways. They were run over the trucks, hammered, but they continued to show an exact time.

Accuracy of work of Amphibia watches in many respects is obliged to the Vostok movements, and reliability to the shock-proof device of balance unit is a heart of mechanical watches.

History

In 1967, Mikhail Novikov and Vera Belov, designers at the Chistopol watch factory, had a challenging task: to design and produce a new dive watch reliable to 200 meters and the associated changes of pressure and temperature.

The design team at Vostok decided on the name "Amphibia" as it evoked a watch equally at home underwater and on land. Coming up with the name was the easy part. Producing a watch capable of meeting the needs of the Soviet defense department was the real challenge.

Of course Switzerland was capable of producing watches with such specifications, but according to Novikov (here, as paraphrased by Google translate), “many [Swiss] designs we could not repeat, because our equipment can not provide the necessary accuracy.” If the quality of the machines available in Russia meant that copying the techniques of the Swiss were out of the question, then Novikov and Belov would have to approach the problem differently altogether.

The conventional way to build a watch capable of withstanding pressure at great depth is to make a watch case, crown, and crystal that will have a static resistance; a Rolex submariner in the bath is exactly the same as a Rolex submariner 100 meters underwater. The design of the Amphibia is different (in a way similar to EPSA’s compressor system), in that the water resistance of the watch is improved as the pressure around it increases.

Central to this elegant design solution is the Amphibia's caseback. Rather than a more usual screw down caseback, the Amphibia utilizes a bayonet style caseback with a threaded locking ring. This caseback system alone does not provide adequate resistance, so the Amphibia also has a very large gasket made from sintered rubber (an innovative process Novikov and Belov cribbed from Russian space programs). At greater pressures the case back is actually pushed into the rubber gasket, making the water resistant seal tighter and more effective as depth increases. The thick acrylic crystal operates in a similar fashion, flexing at high pressures. The ingenuity of the designers was to factor this distortion into the tolerances of the watch.
Honestly, not that many in Russia would be THAT into watches...
 
Yeah, it's such a tiny country...everybody knows each other on a first name basis. And who else in the World would care about some old Soviet watches?

Joseph Stalin gave the watch Pobeda it's name. It means Victory.
You didn't know that? It is Siberia for you! Waiter, cut him off. At shoulders.


You're just not hip unless you've got one. Johnny Depp has the tankist.
Don't worry though, I'm going start posting shuffle dance videos to teach you all how to shuffle dance. That will more than make up for it.

Some exercise will help relieve some of that tension in your neck.
 
The Russian Federation was my second highest site visitor next to the US before I took it offline. I like the Russian people and had a free site with AwardSpace about my watches before I became a paying customer.
 
Stopped drinking in May 2014 (from one day to the next).
At that time, i knew i had a problem (i was a really heavy drinker).

I stopped because of the fine-print on the registration-form for my (then) "new" hobby: Skydiving (which is still my passion!)
The fine-print read: "No Alcohol for 12 hours prior to jumping"
Stone-cold-sober since then. I think in the last seven years, i had maybe 3 or 4 alcohol-free beers.
i consider it as one of my biggest achievements in life
 
Stopped drinking in May 2014 (from one day to the next).
At that time, i knew i had a problem (i was a really heavy drinker).

I stopped because of the fine-print on the registration-form for my (then) "new" hobby: Skydiving (which is still my passion!)
The fine-print read: "No Alcohol for 12 hours prior to jumping"
Stone-cold-sober since then. I think in the last seven years, i had maybe 3 or 4 alcohol-free beers.
i consider it as one of my biggest achievements in life
In Hawaii, I saw a bumper sticker that said, "Friends don't let friends surf drunk".
 
Stopped drinking in May 2014 (from one day to the next).
At that time, i knew i had a problem (i was a really heavy drinker).
You have all my respect. 🪨

In April 2021 I had 25 years in since I stopped drinking, 26 years next April.

The longer you go without drinking, the less a part of your life it becomes, the less the thought of it occupies your mind and the easier it gets.

There came a time in my life when stopping drinking looked better than continuing to drink, so I stopped. But it took a long time, a lot of painful life lessons to get to that point and only wish I'd stopped sooner.
 
You have all my respect. 🪨

In April 2021 I had 25 years in since I stopped drinking, 26 years next April.

The longer you go without drinking, the less a part of your life it becomes, the less the thought of it occupies your mind and the easier it gets.

There came a time in my life when stopping drinking looked better than continuing to drink, so I stopped. But it took a long time, a lot of painful life lessons to get to that point and only wish I'd stopped sooner.
I know what you're saying.
To me, it was also the fact, that i was a "pedestrian" for 11 years, since i "graduated" twice with 1.6 promille.
So nothing stopped me drinking during that time, which evolved into my problem.

Stopped drinking in 2014, got my driving license back in 2017.
Really happy now. Never felt so good physically and mentally.
Never looked back.
I still get some weird looks when i state "I don't drink", but i just ignore them
 
It sounds like congratulations are in order. (As they are for all the people here who had to face and stop drinking). There's a lot of inspirational stuff in this thread.
 
I stopped consuming animals and egg products back in 1996, and finally gave up dairy as well in 2004. For the usual reasons. Yes, I know, I'm one of those people ...


I've tried quitting alcohol a couple of times, but have not succeeded yet. But I only drink rarely, and I have sworn off the hard stuff.
 
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