It's a Great Big G-Shock World

Someone who reviews various brands of watches including Casio mentioned, in a recent review of a G-Shock, a change which had been made in the watch. He said that he had urged this change in an earlier review. And he concluded that Casio were paying attention to his reviews and that this change in the watch was because of him. 

 

This is one of many people who review G-Shocks as a full- or part-time job, part-time in his case. How many people? I have no idea, but it seems the number must be pretty huge. There are those like this fellow, who write blogs or present vlogs about watches, including G-Shocks and others. Some review G-Shocks and other electronic devices. Some are runners and review the G-Shocks made for runners. Some are divers and review the G-Shocks made for divers. Some are hikers, some are hunters, some write columns for men's magazines, etc, etc. 

But even if we exclude all of the above and concentrate only on those who concentrate entirely on G-Shocks, and only those who do it full-time and have much larger audiences than this guy, there are so many blogs and vlogs that I couldn't begin to even skim all of the new posts from all of them. 

And that's counting only the reviews in English. And without having gone the slightest bit out of my way to find non-English blog and vlog posts about G-Shocks, in just 3 months' time, the Great Algorithm has shown me posts in Japanese, Chinese, Indonesian, Tagalog, Vietnamese, Thai and Spanish. 

And looking at things from Casio's point of view, I see no reason to assume that the English-speaking market is the most important one to them.  It might be number 3, after Japanese and Chinese. And besides the significant languages of Casio's exports already named, let us not forget Hindi, Arabic, Russian and Portugese in markets which must be pretty huge. Before we get to who knows how many smaller markets. (Not me, is who. I tried hard to find out. This time I failed. Sorry. But surely a lot.)

And the fascination of G-Shocks, which would lead quite naturally to the impulse to blog or vlog about them, does seem to be quite universal. 

My points? That it seems to me that the reviewer mentioned above has no way of knowing that he was the only one who thought of this particular improvement; that, given that probably more than 10 million G-Shocks are sold per year and given the high degree of involvement on the part of G-Shock owners, it seems unlikely that no-one would've independently had the same idea; and that Casio could've gotten the idea from all sorts of sources other than this reviewer. 

In fact, Casio might not have gotten the idea from ANY blogger or vlogger. They do have employees working on things such as improvements to existing products. Presumably as least some of those employees do things other than reading blogs and watching vlogs, hoping to come across good suggestions.

In short, I think this guy is being silly. If I happened to know him personally, and he said in my presence that Casio were reading his blog and taking design suggestions from him, I would quickly excuse myself and run away as fast as I could, hoping to be out of earshot before bursting into laughter. Because I don't want to be mean. 

If I did want to be mean, I would still run away, and not come back until I had calmed down, and then gesture for the guy to step aside with me, and mutter into his ear, "What you're doing here, coming up with improvements which Casio puts into place on G-Shocks? That's a job description. You're a design consultant. Do you have any idea how much money Casio makes with G-Shocks? And they're using you as an unpaid design consultant? It's not right, buddy. They should be paying you a salary. It's only right, what with you being a significant cog in the machine now. What I would do is, I would contact Casio -- no. I would hire an attorney and have him get in touch with Casio, and demand that you get a fair slice. It's only right."

It's a good thing I'm not mean. 

Praise From Obama or a Diss From Trump

I'm not good at making money. I would like to have lots and lots of money, but I never have had much. I think my difficulty with making money is one result of my autism. But I'm not sure about that.

For 9 years, the main thing I've been doing to try to earn money is writing this blog. That may be absurd. But I don't know what else to do.

I don't know how to market my blog. Some days I have very high page counts, some days very low. Some individual posts get many more views than others. But whatever happens, it's a surprise.

I daydream a lot about becoming financially successful. (Maybe that's a big part of my problem right there: maybe successful people never daydream about success. That would go directly counter to all of those motivational speakers and authors telling people to visualize success. But I don't think that necessarily means it's incorrect.)

The nearest approaches to success I've had so far with the blog, the biggest amounts of pageviews, have come when someone with a large readership mentions one of my posts: a popular blogger, or a magazine not terribly far from The Main Stream.

And so I daydream about people like Barack Obama doing things like tweeting about my blog. Seems like something like that could be a big boost toward my having something people would call a career. There are many people who could be a big help to me with a single mention, but I've been thinking -- daydreaming -- that perhaps no single person could help me more with a single tweet, than Barack Obama.

Then today I thought: what if Donald Trump tweeted about me? Would that help me even more than a tweet from Trump?

I can't imagine Obama tweeting something negative about me: either he'd have something nice to say, or, surely, he wouldn't go out of his way to diss a nobody like me. I can't imagine Trump tweeting anything but negative things about me. And as we know, he not above going out of his way to diss nobodies.

A tweet from Obama, something along the lines of:

"Here's a blog written by Steven Bollinger, an interesting writer who's not very well known. Essays on all sorts of topics, from wristwatches to renewable energy to politics to ancient Latin, and many other things. Thoughtful, witty, fascinating writing."

-- would almost certainly catapult me into what is known as a career. But what if Trump tweeted something like:

"Small-time creepy loser disabled autistic blogger, sympathetic to loser NYT and loser MSNBC and lib Dems, takes pathetic potshots at me. A complete loser in life, jealous of my huge success. What a pathetic jerk! Sad!"

? Many, many people now say up whenever Trump says down and night whenever he says day, and who can blame them? Almost certainly, many people would praise me and my writing just because Trump dissed me, without ever actually going to the trouble of reading something I'd written. Many others no doubt would actually read my blog because of Trump's tweet, and some of them might like it.

I wonder whether there's some action I could take which would lead directly toward my having financial success, something which has never occurred to me, but would've occurred to almost every non-autistic person in my position?

I wrote above that almost every reaction to a post on this blog is a surprise to me. There is one exception: posts like this one, in which I write about how badly I want fame and fortune, almost always get far fewer pageviews than my average post. That makes me sad for several reasons, one of which is that I think these posts are very interesting and entertaining. It's okay to laugh at these posts, it doesn't necessarily mean you're missing the point.

Dream Log: Travel Blogging Project

I dreamed that I was one of around a dozen bloggers chosen to participate in a corporate-sponsored project, one of the corporations probably being General Motors, because each one of us was put as a passenger into an identical boring new GM car. Starting in a parking lot in downtown Detroit, the cars took off together, following identical GPS routes hundreds of miles east.

My father, my mother, my brother and I were in my car. We were all decades younger than we really are, although it was still 2017. As it was decades ago, my Dad was driving.

The GPS route took us over a variety of roads, from Interstates to rural dirt roads to streets going through the middle of towns.

Only a couple of the bloggers blogged mainly about cars, and only a couple were travel writers. The rest of us represented quite a variety of approaches to writing. We were told that we could blog about the cars, or about the journey, or not, just as we pleased. We could link blog posts by the other bloggers -- current posts about this road trip, or posts years old. We could critique posts by the others. Or we could do none of the above. In fact, we were given no requirements whatsoever about blogging, only suggestions.

All the traveling expenses, gas, meals, hotels, everything, was being covered by the project's sponsors. Whether we bloggers were also actually being paid, or whether this was a blogging contest, with the blogger judged best by some experts or by any randoms readers who expressed an opinion, won a prize, I don't recall.

It was also stressed repeatedly to the drivers of all the cars that this was not a race. On the contrary, we were all encouraged to take our time and enjoy the trip.

It's a good thing we weren't racing, because the driving got hairy enough without us racing. In northwestern Ohio, just a few dozen miles into the trip, on a stretch of Interstate full of construction and detours, three lanes full of high-speed bumper-to-bumper traffic were suddenly required to merge to two lanes. This was impossible to do, of course, and many of us screeched to a stop and a few cars were rear-ended, although thankfully it seemed that there was no major damage done to humans or cars. As we waited to get rolling again, I said, "I just hope whoever's re-designing this stretch of road isn't done yet."

The trip had started late in the afternoon. Just as he had been decades ago, on this trip my Dad was a bit of a leadfoot, and we soon were out of sight of the other cars with bloggers. Shortly after nightfall, on an uncrowded multi-lane stretch of Interstate near Cleveland, we were suddenly zooming up toward a brown Corvette with some body damage motionless and sideways in the right lane. (Although he drove above the speed limit and never used his turn signals, Dad respected some other good-driving habits such as staying to the right except for passing.) Dad calmly reacted, turning to pass the stopped car on the smooth paved berm to the right, then put us back into the right-hand lane, all with no lurching, no screeching of the skinny entry-level tires, no danger of flipping the car. "Good driving, Dad," I said. Then I said, "Should somebody call 911 and report the stopped car in the road?" But none of us did.

Driving through the gentrified-looking downtown of small town in western Pennsylvania, on a narrow old two-lane road, with everything well-lit by streetlamps, traffic was stopped coming the other way. People had gotten out of the cars and were standing around looking angry. I wasn't sure whether this was a traffic jam or a demonstration. The angry people and their cars looked much less prosperous than the surrounding downtown area.

In another town, a stretch of road which was much less well-lit twisted through and under -- overpasses -- some interesting-looking architecture, buildings lit mostly just fleetingly by our headlights. Red-brick and concrete, all curved, very few angles, no right angles, just like the road twisting through it. Here and there a corporate logo was fashioned of the red brick and concrete. Except for the corporate logos it could have been a university or a hospital. I wondered whether an expert on architecture would find it interesting or hideous or neither. While I was honestly trying to think what I thought of these red-brick and concrete buildings -- the corporate logos struck me as rather hideous, but they were far from the whole. They could be removed rather easily -- I woke up.