TLDR; Follow me on Instagram, YouTube, and Mastodon.
Hi. It’s been a while. I have obviously not been maintaining this blog like I should. This is an update of where I am and what’s going on.
Twitter has been a place where I’ve spent a significant amount of time over the past 15 years. It’s been a great source of community, and a good source of news and entertainment. With the changes of the past few months that has radically changed. Most of the people I chatted with are gone which left just the news part. Now 3rd party twitter clients have been killed off the platform, I think I’m done. I’ve always used a 3rd party client to connect to twitter (primarily Tweetbot), mostly because I’ve found the native client to be a disaster. After the API was turned off last week I tried out the native client for a few minutes and quickly realised this isn’t what I’m looking for. So I’ve decided I’m going to avoid twitter for now. I won’t be deleting my account, and I’m not going to say I’ll never return. Changes have forced me to leave, but changes could just as easily make it a more palatable place to return to one day.
So where am I online then? Mostly I’m on Instagram these days. I’ve curated a good community of people to follow. It’s a nice mix of watchmakers, artists, food, and cats. This is also where I tend to post most often. I find it a better place for sharing what I’m up to. My biggest complaint is the lack of links in posts, so I’m considering posting stuff here more often when it requires links to be useful. I’m also on YouTube although not consistently. A few changes happening in ‘23 should facilitate posting there more often. If you’re not subscribed to the channel, you can find it at http://insidethe.studio.
A bunch of people I know from twitter have left for Mastodon. I’m not in love with the service at this point, and there aren’t quite enough people over there for me to visit regularly. Something which may facilitate that move is Tapbots (the fine makers of Tweetbot), launching their Mastodon client Ivory. The native Mastodon client isn’t great and that is one of the large barriers to me visiting there regularly. If you want to follow me over on Mastodon I’m @silver_hand@mastodon.art. No guarantees I’ll actually end up using it though. I think that will depend heavily on Ivory and how good it is. Frankly I’d love a better place than Instagram to post images and video of what I’m working on.
What’s up with Off Hours? It’s been a year since Jon and I last published an episode of Off Hours. It was a good conversation with Daniela Marin. If you haven’t heard it, I highly recommend it. But it’s also been a year since that went out. We weren’t recording a whole lot before that episode, and not at all since. It’s been tough to find the time to get together to record, and also tough to find the time to edit. That may change this year, but it may not. I’m unwilling to say Off Hours will never come back. It may come back a bit different. We’ll see. I did enjoy the conversations and it was a good place to think out loud. That doesn’t mean you can’t find me on podcasts. I have been asked to record an episode of another podcast so stay tuned for that.
Other work is progressing slowly. My first series of watches is crawling towards completion. All the hand finishing work has been completed, and I’m waiting on Schwarz-Etienne to finish assembling and timing them. In the mean time I am working on the cases and hope to have those finished by the end of February. This project has been several years in the making, and I’m excited to be close to the finish line. I do have a few other projects on the go which I should be able to reveal later in ‘23.