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eccentrix

Press H to call Norm.

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Count Your Sheep Before They Hatch

And by "hatch" I mean "are made unavailable for purchase due to the closure of the 3DS eShop".

Sleep Clock, a DSiWare app, is the best alarm clock I've ever used. How good is it? I wrote about it in 2014 when I started using it and I've legitimately used it every single day since. It's the only alarm that hasn't eventually become annoying to me and it wakes me up immediately every time I use it. It just beeps and tells you the time. It has some basic sleep logging stuff, but the thing I love it for most is how consistently and painlessly it wakes me up. It's the lack of sleep that hurts in the mornings, not the annoying alarm sounds.

I haven't needed an alarm every single day, but I still log my sleep every night, which helped me discover I probably have non-24-hour sleep-wake disorder, a circadian rhythm disorder which means my sleep schedule doesn't match up with the planet's 24-hour day/night cycle. This is not a normal sleeping pattern, apparently:

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The app retains the past 750 days of sleep records and you can rate how you feel when you wake up, which means you can look back and see what time of day is most comfortable for you to wake up (later) and how much sleep feels best for you (longer). It's a pretty rudimentary system, but it achieves its goals. A drawback of this system is that the 3DS clock doesn't seem to support daylight savings time and the app doesn't account for it, so twice a year the sleep-wake data will be inaccurate if you're in a part of the world affected by dumb chronological systems.

Mr. Sheep, the game's mascot, will be there with you in the morning to share an anecdote or suggestion for the day, like a lucky color or telling you to touch some grass. I'm usually too disoriented in the morning to read these (I actually log my sleep and close the app/3DS before I've properly regained consciousness a lot of the time) but I think I've read them all anyway; there doesn't seem to be much variety.

Wikipedia says Sleep Clock was never released in North America, which is a real shame, but this is a PSA to get this thing while you can if you can, because in my experience, alarm clocks don't get better than this. It's not free, but the price is so low it might as well be. Especially if you use it for a decade like I will have done in a couple of years. And I guess if you start now, you'll have used it for one decade when I'll have used it for two. You'll never catch up to me, never!!! Okay, I'm going back to sleep...

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