Batteries.

I have an alarm clock.

It's one of the little portable ones. I got it for Christmas in 2008 to take to London in 2009. It's red and you can change the color of the display, and it tells you the temperature and the date and the phase of the moon. In my mind, this gives it some electronic complexity, but who knows what that actually means for alarm clock circuit boards. I remember putting AA batteries in it on Christmas day and learning how to set it, and then taking it upstairs with its plug in cord and plugging it in on my nightstand.

That was in 2009. It lived next to my bed until December 2010. Every now and then I'd take it to another room to sleep in another bed, but it always came back to my nightstand to get plugged back in so the batteries wouldn't get wasted. I'm always terrified it'll run out of juice three hours before I'm supposed to get up for work and I'll sleep in and be late.

So I moved in December 2010. My alarm clock was one of the last things to go, so it would waste as little battery life as possible in a bag. I dug around under the bed for the extension cord that powered my clock...and pulled out an unused extension cord. It was plugged in, but nothing was plugged in to it. I thought, there must be another cord under there, so I kept grabbing around the dust bunnies until I pulled out a heavy black plug...and kept pulling until I watched the charge cord for my alarm clock slowly drop from my nightstand and fall behind the bed. My alarm clock was never plugged in.

All this time I've been diligently plugging the charge port into the side of my alarm clock, and the plug itself has been lying in a tangle of dust and tissues under the bed since I first got it.

How is this possible? Is technology so power efficient now that it can live off of two AA batteries indefinitely? Or is it the batteries that have become so advanced they can power an alarm clock for two and a half years that knows the phases of the moon, has two separate alarm functions, and can project the time on the ceiling so you don't have to turn your head to look?

It seems amazing to me. We are capable of so much. Remember all the other stuff that used to be a pain in the ass, just a few years ago? Honestly, I can't. Shit's been awesome for a long time. And I have an immortal alarm clock.

All I'm saying is it's time to make a better Wiimote. It's been long enough, Nintendo.