anybody still here? Wednesdays are rugged for me because I get up at 5:30am, drive half an hour, do CNC machining for five hours, drive half an hour, do The Worst Art Class On Earth for three hours and then pick up my kid. Thus, I've been absent. However, that wraps up in a couple weeks as I'm LA-bound again (ugh). Still. You can't complain much when you're driving around in a Porsche all day switching between making cannon parts on a Haas VF-1 and soldering up cabochon rings. And you can't complain when you can get a year's worth of salary and benefits out of the way in four months. I don't understand Instagram. There's a jeweler in New York with 20k followers and like Annette Bening in their advertisements following me and liking pictures of my daughter fishing. Granted, I appear to be in some thin-ass regimes. There are about a dozen working watchmakers. There are a couple dozen blacksmiths. There's only so many CNC guys. And when I post jewelry it gets shared around. It's weird. What if I'm good at it? We have an employee at the birth center now... and two students. We'll probably have another in September. We'll have still another in October and possibly yet another by December. From a staff of 1 to a staff of seven in eighteen months. I'm paying a designer a thousand dollars to work up a mark. And I paid three thousand dollars for a skookum 4k Xeon Quadro laptop from hell because this summer, I'm bloody well teaching myself MasterCam. Because I didn't spend $15k on a rose engine lathe because I'm pretty well convinced I can do what I need with a Pocket NC if I pull the spindle and fix a graver. I might just be serious about this.
Your mark had better incorporate an Erlenmeyer Flask shape. (Because of science, of course but also because it will look like half an hourglass... which is possibly one of the oldest portable timepieces.) Or maybe the KH-11 outline. Either way, definitely not going to appear in any other watchmaker's mark!
That's weird. I follow some other hikers on Instagram, people I don't know but hike in the same area. There seems to be mutual agreement to like and comment on outdoors posts but not personal life posts. Post about mountain biking? Like. Post of daughter at a track meet? Scroll past. I mostly like Instagram. It's the only social media I use anymore. Nobody I follow posts bullshit text posts (after trimming my list of one friend), so it's mostly a pleasant place to see what people, bands, or certain professional feeds are up to.There's a jeweler in New York with 20k followers and like Annette Bening in their advertisements following me and liking pictures of my daughter fishing.
Instagram is weird. If it's not bots liking my rare posts, it's random fitness gurus following me because I liked a powerlifting video, then unfollowing me within a few hours once my attention has been caught (I assume). In regards to the watches, Do the marks follow a design of a 'letter inside something else' out of tradition or something? I thought maybe it's because if they can get a mark close in likeness to something already well established it may help sales but I'm sure I'm off the mark there.
Yeah the bots are one thing. What amuses me is the persistent ones. There's a machinist in Russia with a passion for Airsoft who's liked my stuff for a few weeks now. I'm not sure what to make of that. The marks are... old. A lot of them were only ever on the inside of the case. But it's like brand DNA - it's the lowest common denominator of brand identification.
That sounds incredible-could you send a link to his profile, or whatever the instagram equivalent is?