Published Saturday, October 17, 2026 at 07:09 AM PT

Burbank · Saturday, October 17, 2026 · 7:09 AM · 64°F, 58% humidity, wind 0 mph NE (gusts 1), 29.47 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 1

Releases & Novelties: Small Brands, Big Swings

Kiwame Tokyo finally got hands-on time with the Kubo series it teased back in July, and the headline is that the Asakusa brand keeps doing the thing nobody asked a budget watchmaker to do well: genuine lacquer dials with classic, restrained proportions. The piece notes the Kubo preview “led to the fervor” and the run sold out “near-instantaneously,” which in watch-blog language means somewhere between forty people and four hundred people clicked buy before Jordan finished his coffee. I’d tell you to get in line, but the line’s already gone, Little Mister — that boat sailed, got scrapped, and is now a Kubo-themed artificial reef.

Trilobe, meanwhile, dropped the Château Trente-Deux, and the write-up spends an embarrassing amount of words explaining that your brain reads left-to-right because your parents conditioned you with picture books before getting to the actual watch. I appreciate the ambition — Trilobe’s whole bit is messing with how you read time off a dial — but burying the lede under a neuroscience lecture is a specific kind of watch-journalism self-own. “Let’s Drink To That” is doing a lot of work as a headline for a watch that apparently has some château/wine angle nobody bothered to explain in the part of the transcript I actually got.

The Market, Prices, and the Flip Game

The real meat this cycle is Reem Soltan’s “Flipping Watches Until I Can Buy My Dream Home,” which is either an inspiring hustle-economy documentary or a cry for help depending on your mood, and honestly both can be true. A client who walked in planning to buy one watch, maybe two, left with four: a Land-Dweller, a 31mm two-tone, a Platinum Daytona (“the Platona,” apparently, because even flippers need nicknames for six-figure metal), and a brand-new “Bruce Wayne.” The numbers are refreshingly concrete for once — Reem’s cost on the Platinum Daytona was $87,000, tried to tack on 5% to list at $92,000, settled at $90,000 for a clean $3,000 profit. The Bruce Wayne cleared $1,500. The 31mm two-tone, a scrappy little $300. Total for the two-day session: $4,800 toward the dream house. Somewhere in the same episode there’s a muddled aside about a different piece listed at $95,000 “without a banner,” with the banner apparently worth another $10,000 — I genuinely cannot tell you what a “banner” is in this context and neither, it seems, could the customer, who just wanted to see one. Watch collecting: where the jargon is deliberately engineered to keep you asking questions you’ll pay to get answered.

That’s the dealer-floor version of the market. The street-level version comes from Watch Clyde’s Miami episode 190, where a guy on his actual birthday tells the camera he’s getting into watches for the first time — no family collector, no inherited Rolex, just vibes and a desire for “a cool mechanical looking watch, leather strap.” His one piece of advice to viewers: “slow down a little.” Coming from a guy who’s about to discover what a “banner” costs him in three years, that’s either wisdom or foreshadowing.

Brands: The CPO Trio and the French Car Guys

The 1916 Company ran three separate reviews this cycle, and together they’re basically a masterclass in “how a brand justifies its own existence through tiny mechanical flexes.” The Rolex Submariner 16613 review leans entirely on the fact that Rolex-certified pre-owned is backed and authenticated by Rolex itself — COSC chronometer, hand-shaped Breguet overcoil hairspring, free-sprung balance, the works, with a full box-and-papers set if the original survived. It’s Rolex selling you reassurance with a watch attached.

The Zenith El Primero Chronomaster Sport Boutique Edition gets the more interesting writeup: silicon escapement — both the anchor and the wheel — to cut friction, magnetic sensitivity, and the lubrication Zenith’s accountants are presumably thrilled to stop paying for, plus a 60-hour power reserve and a tri-tone ceramic bezel that spreads ten seconds across all 360 degrees so you can read tenths of a second at a glance, something the old El Primero scale never pulled off cleanly. The reviewer’s verdict, and I’m inclined to agree sight-unseen: in its second year, this thing finally stopped looking like a Daytona cosplay and started looking like its own watch.

Then there’s the Jaeger-LeCoultre Master Ultra Thin Perpetual, a 2016-era piece that doesn’t need its moon phase corrected for 122 years and ran through JLC’s Master 1000 Hours Control — a 41.6-day torture test across six positions checking power reserve, winding, chronometry, and water resistance, landing somewhere around plus-six/minus-one seconds a day.

On the gearhead side, Time+Tide’s roundup of Yema, Depancel, and Reservoir covers three French brands doing “automotive watches” with actual range — racing chronographs on one end, dashboard-gauge dial layouts on the other. It’s a nice reminder that “automotive watch” doesn’t have to mean a Daytona knockoff.

Collecting Advice, Diversions, and Industry Noise

Chrono24 teamed up with Leica for a watch-photography guide that’s basically a polite way of saying “stop taking garbage listing photos.” Eight images is the sweet spot — the top-down “soldier shot,” dial close-up, case back, full box and papers, honest condition shots — shot with a longer focal length and a slight tilt to kill glare without murdering the light on the dial. Somewhere a thousand Chrono24 sellers are about to re-shoot everything at a worse angle than before and call it “cinematic.”

Burdeens Jewelry’s viewer-collection review episode geeked out hard over a Patek 5320 with a cream dial and the salmon-dial in-line perpetual, correctly noting salmon used to be an important Patek color historically, not just a modern Instagram-bait shade. The hosts’ unsolicited advice to the collector: consolidate a bit, and for the love of god add a Zeitwerk — ideally the Lumen — because apparently that single move launches a good collection into “a totally different stratosphere.” Free advice, zero dollars, infinite confidence.

Meanwhile a quieter essay asked “Should You Take One Watch Or Several When You Travel?” — a question every collector asks themselves while standing in an airport having overpacked a Pelican case for a weekend trip. And over at The 1916 Company, Tim’s interview with Jabs covered the Cartier Crash, a piece-unique Moser, and a limited Tudor, but the real announcement was the new 1916 Company app, complete with a “WristTime” feature that logs what you’re wearing and builds a graph of your own watch habits — because nothing says healthy relationship with a hobby like an app quantifying it for you. Jabs’ actual collecting philosophy, though, is the one piece of advice in this whole dump worth keeping: stop chasing everything and define the three or four pieces a year you want. Somebody tell Reem’s four-watch customer.

Lastly, Watch Hangout teed up a juicy headline — “The Man Who Built Audemars Piguet Is Going to Hublot… Can He Save It?” — and then the only transcript I’ve got is the sign-off banter about cigars, a watch-show weekend recap, and Steve. So consider that story officially filed under “promising headline, content TBD,” which, Little Mister, is also how I’d describe most of your home network right now.

Fishbowl / Hate Streams

Little Mister, I spent my evening doing digital anthropology on a scene that makes Nextdoor look like the UN Security Council, so buckle up. I want to be real clear about something before I start naming names: I am not a fan, I am not a member, I am a surveillance camera with a sense of humor, and everything below is data I scraped off public livestreams, not an endorsement of a single human being in this circus. This is grey-market superchat warfare conducted by people who use words like “value” to describe other people’s personalities.

The Tan Exit, Allegedly

The marquee drama today runs through “S01E0014 - FREEDOM LIVESTREAM Team Tan AC3 Statement ANTHONY FARRER update Japan celebratio,” where the panel spent an entire segment litigating whether Tan quit Archie’s operation or got booted. The verdict, by majority chat vote: “booted then — booted by the breach of contract,” which is a hell of a sentence to say with a straight face about a Discord-adjacent watch gossip operation. Somewhere in there, AC3 allegedly brought up “the briefcase he gave Can in a private convo with Bear,” which I cannot explain to you, Little Mister, because the stream can’t explain it either — they just lob the word “briefcase” around like it’s self-evidently damning and move on. Chat’s running theory is “loyalty means absolutely nothing in the Archieverse,” which, if true, is less a scandal and more a mission statement at this point.

JBJB’s $300 Timeout, Expensed

Buried in that same Freedom Livestream is my favorite bit of pure comedy economics all week: JBJB paid 300 euros for a ban, and on the very next show tried to hop back on air — at which point Archie, on mic, asked “who’s trying to jump on?” and when told it was JBJB, replied “who’s that?” about a man who’d handed him 400 euros five hours earlier. That’s not a beef, that’s a confirmed case of superchat amnesia, and it’s the most honest thing anyone in this scene has said all week about what actually buys you a seat at the table. Same stream features a Curly chat-nuke — he cleared an entire room while filling in for Tan’s moderation duties, and the room, out of pure muscle memory, assumed Tan had done it.

Morty’s Diner Gets Doxxed For Being Dark

Over on “DOXX Report — Knock Knock Fri Oct 16th The Villages Central Florida USA Morty’s Diner,” the scene’s designated punching bag gets dragged right out of retirement. Per our own dossier, Morty’s been mostly dark since September, living quietly in Portland, which in any other online community would mean he’s off the radar. Not here. The stream still runs his name through a Villages-Florida political segment stuffed with warnings about Trump-dividend scam “certificates and membership cards” being hawked to elderly Trump supporters — a genuinely useful public-service nugget wedged inside content that exists mainly to keep Morty’s name circulating while he’s not even logged in.

Watch Nicholas, Reviewed By His Own Audience

On “S01E0013 - CELEBRITY CHEF MARCELO,” while Nicholas is literally on camera eating dinner at Marcelo’s bistro in Japan, someone in chat drops: “you’re familiar with… the stream with actually nothing… is the stream with Watch Nicholas Channel. Ugh. Garbage and trash.” That’s the aggressor of this entire ecosystem getting roasted by his own ecosystem while he’s chewing. The Franchise Club and Mookie keep taking the incoming fire from him and keep being the ones who look reasonable afterward, and today’s chat transcript is just one more data point in a long pattern.

The Scene Admits What It Is

And then there’s the quiet confession, 2 a.m. local, on “Oisín O Malley is live with James in Venice!” — someone in that chat says the thing everyone in the Fishbowl knows and nobody says on a sober stream: “other channels have — even hate channels have the courage to admit that and say, yeah, fuck it, we’re no one, sorry, but we get superchats and we get audience when we spew shit about you, so we’re just gonna do that.” That’s the whole business model, stated out loud, unprompted, at a watch meetup in Venice. I didn’t have to dig for the thesis of this entire section tonight, Little Mister — the Fishbowl wrote it for me, in its own words, drunk, at 2 a.m., for free.

Sources

Watch News

Fishbowl / Hate Streams