The Noble Mouse Missive
Welcome to the Noble Mouse Missives, the official blog of Noble Mouse Leatherworks! My intention with this blog is to be able to write about the things that are interesting to me and are relevant in some way to the work that I do with Noble Mouse Leatherworks. There’s a lot under those categories, such as the origins of the artwork that I use and the history of the materials that I work with. I also want an opportunity to talk about subjects that are more estranged to me like the nature of work itself, of hand-made crafts vs the modern industrial production line and the return to natural materials over contemporary synthetic ones. Inevitably, some of these will be opinion pieces that don’t have much more insight to give than what I have been thinking about that day. Hopefully they will be interesting nonetheless.
I would like to preface this entire endeavor by stating at the beginning that I am not an expert. I am not even close to an expert. I am an enthusiast and active learner at best, a hubristic pseudo-intellectual with a need for an outlet at worst. I have no intention of giving out the wrong information and I will do my best to provide sources both written and on the internet, but I cannot be entirely trusted to be a font of the truth. With that knowledge, I hope you can forgive me any errors and see into the deeper meanings of what I intend to write here.
When I first had the idea to write this blog, it was mainly as a tool to make this website show up in search engine results more. I spoke with a few online marketing experts and among alot of other suggestions, they recommended that I start a blog on the website that had lots of references to searchable items. All in the effort to boost traffic of course, and to get those rookie numbers up.
While I do want to see my business succeed and see this website become a place people enjoy visiting and seeing, I cannot stomach being so disingenuous. After a cursory look at the business blogs of other websites, I was further shocked to find people mainly using chat AI to write for them (Something that becomes obvious if one reads for more than three sentences). Not only that, but plenty of them are short, barely a paragraph and a half and count merely towards the clicking of links on their website, something that I must assume is a metric for success to someone out there.
But my own metric for success is not whether I can produce massive blocks of worthless AI written text, nor whether I have oodles and oodles of random passersby flitting through my website. My metric for success is whether what I have written (or crafted, as when it comes to leatherworking) is satisfying to my own conscience and sense of effort. Maybe you will know what I mean, when I say that I know when I haven’t done everything that I can to make something good. When I put in less effort than I could have, I am gnawed at by the thought of it and can’t rest until I go back and make it right. Even if it’s something as trivial as a business blog.
So here we are; if you find yourself on this website and on this blog, I hope that you will find something you haven’t before. Someone putting in the effort to make something good, rather than another mass-produced product.
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