Supporting small businesses is cool and good!
So before I started this up, I had no real idea how things would progress. It was a bit of a leap into the unknown, in terms of how busy it would be, and now look at me! I’m a small business owner in a very weird niche!
That comes with it’s own set of complications – having to do most things yourself does get a bit knackering. You get to be an accountant, website designer, social media manager, SEO optimiser, customer service provider, tea boy and about a million other things before you even finish a day’s work – unless you’re starting off with loads of cash (and I certainly wasn’t) then these are jobs you’ve gotta do yourself! Most of the time I really enjoy it – it gives me an outlet for my bizarre creative side, and also means I can throw money to charity on a regular basis and that’s something I find pretty fulfilling. Plus I’m helping people to get their hands on good quality microscopy supplies, and that is also something that’s important to me.
Anyway, I was sat down last night, doing some administrative busywork, and every order that came in left me smiling. None of them were massive orders or anything, but each one was nice. I remembered all those posts I’d seen on social media about how “when you buy from a small business, you’re making a real person smile” – I’d always thought that was probably a load of waffle, but it’s true! It absolutely balances out the hard parts (you wanna try putting labels on thousands of bags when you’ve got the attention span of a Jack Russell), and every order is genuinely really appreciated. I’m not a big faceless company, I’m one dude working as hard as he can to provide for his family, and you’re a part of that. You’re putting food in my kid’s bellies, and helping out the foodbank, so cheers, dudes! Stay awesome.
Dall-E Mini
There’s this new cool bit of AI I’ve been playing about with, called Dall-E Mini – basically, you just give the AI over at this website a prompt and it’ll draw you nine pictures of whatever you’ve asked for. Sometimes it’s amazing, sometimes it’s a bit off, but guaranteed, every single time, it’s utter nightmare fuel. It’s the kind of thing you remember after a particularly unsettling dream. I absolutely love it! Have a go on it and see what you can knock up – here’s some of my favourites, the captions are the prompts I used.
Is it art? Fuck yeah it’s art! Anyway, have a lovely week, all the best, don’t vote Tory!