conspiratemus1

Not “kinda like” at all. That could cause novices to think that spoke threads are reverse threaded.
When I’m building a wheel, I’m looking at the rim, spoke, and nipple in such an orientation that I am clearly turning the nipple clockwise, from my vantage point, to tighten it. Even truing a built wheel while it’s in the bike, I’m looking down on the top of the rim. I’m always looking at the front of the clock.

The important thing for learners is that when looking at the back side of a clock, turning the gears in a clockwise direction makes the hands move backwards. This comes up when considering both ends of a traditional hub axle with a locknut and a cone at each end. If you don’t have an axle vice, you loosen the locknut closer to you by first putting a cone wrench on the far-side cone as a fixator. Then when you apply c-cl torque to the near-side locknut, the counter-torque that your other hand is applying clockwise, as you look at it, tries to drive the far cone against its locknut, preserving the tightness there so the only thing that moves is the locknut on the near side. Both threads are right-hand-rule threads and both parts move away from you when turned clockwise. In this case, though, the far cone is being driven in a direction that would loosen it, from the point of view of balls in the bearing, were it not for the locknut.

(Yes I know you put a cone wrench on the near-side cone too, to immobilize it so the c-cl torque breaks the friction between cone and locknut. You really need two cone wrenches and three hands. My point is that you don’t put the fixator wrench on the far-side locknut because the counter-torque would tend to loosen it away from the far-side cone, a case where it’s “righty-loosey ” even with a right-hand thread.)

Reading Tom Cuthbertson’s description of this in Anybody’s Bike Book nearly 50 years ago was an epiphany for me.