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Today I am making my Instagram account public again. After some work, I have developed a system to identify disengaged accounts and remove them from my followers. This should help keep my posts visible to those who are actively interested in my work! As some of you know already, I've been doing a few unconventional things on Instagram to try to counteract the deleterious effects of the 'Instagram by Facebook'™ algorithm. First, with close to 10,000 followers, I took my account private. Next, I removed followers that were themselves following more than 1000 other people (I assumed they would be...

I have reintroduced worldwide shipping! I thought it would take me longer to analyze historical international shipping losses than it actually did. As a result, certain countries may notice an increase in shipping costs, and this is so I can absorb or insure for the losses that occur in shipping to those countries.

Please see me last post about why I restricted international shipping to begin with. I am working on resuming international shipping, and right now I have opened up shipping to Canada and Mexico. I have looked at shipping insurance options, which are implicitly high cost due to the laborious process these companies impose on the seller to pay out on a claim. So what may end up happening is the cost of shipping on international orders will go up to cover the inevitable losses. Once I work out the best course of action I'll open it back up for the...

As you probably noticed from the notification at the top of the page, I have suspended international orders. I have done this for a few reasons. First, international orders are more prone to disappearing en route, and this leads to expensive refunds (in these cases, I refund both the product and the shipping). This doesn't happen all the time, but definitely more than domestic shipping. Second, international customers are sometimes unaware of customs fees and tariffs charged by their home country for imported goods. Some countries can charge as much as 50% the value of an order in taxes and...

Some of you probably looked at my Instagram lately and thought, 'Whoa! What happened?' Well, I've been meaning to post something about this for a while, so here goes! A few weeks ago I was thinking to myself about Instagram, and the endless games Facebook plays with the people trying to use their platforms to make a living. I know that this is intentional. That it is to drive small businesses to buy advertising. I understand their need for revenue. Every business needs it, or no more business. Only, I tried advertising through them and was so disappointed in the...