I suppose it's harder to pick and choose the who's who of the specific tasks in hand, when you don't have all the names to fill in the blanks.
Surely this forum makes that simple, no?
Depends on who is giving the information out. At one point, George Wilson in the US landed on the blue forum over there. He'd just retired and was still full of interest in talking craft. He is probably the finest maker I've ever met - as in, he has a great understanding of design, is able to work entirely by hand or with machines, can carve, make metal dies, refurbish machinist tools, make musical instruments, furniture, guns, just about anything.
Some of his work has made it to the queen's residence (or at least some part of the royal property), as awards for PGA tour winners, to heiresses with extremely deep pockets, to the duponts here (who took a shine with things he was making and shopped his output) and to a gaggle of american presidents (at least in contribution of some part of a good if all of it wasn't his trade).
That said, he met resistance from the fanboys and eventually left the forum. So what does this have to do with a list of "real things"? The folks who were upset by his insistence that people can learn the principles of good work remain with some claiming that he's a fraud or flatly saying that he's not as good of a craftsman as someone like Sellers. A statement like that is idiocy. He is a savant. On one of the other forums where this was asserted, the poster finally after badgering admitted that he didn't consider someone a good craftsman if he though they were rude.
I talk to George fairly often. He's 80 now and still sharp, but not full of energy to make things any longer. He is enormously patient and will explain things or help with design without asking anything in return. What he doesn't tolerate well is people asserting that with 3 months of experience, they should be regarded just the same as far as advice goes.
In a straw man scenario, this can be enticing "well, just be friendly, it's not really that important". But when someone comes along making something relatively finely and they want that last kick toward making it finely and not just relatively finely, George is the guy who can look and in 10 seconds tell you the difference between "I can't see what's wrong with it but it doesn't look quite right to me" and "I can't see anything wrong with it, it only looks right".
Forums will chew someone like that up when they assert every so often that something is important enough to get right, or when they are critical of something presented by a blogger. At one point, Chris Schwarz developed a fascination with clenching nails, but he did it unnecessarily sloppily. George, who would've seen hundreds of things clenched with nails and done plenty of it on his own repairing rare good or making for a museum criticized the result as unsuitable. It literally caused folks to register for the forum that he was on just to complain and then post the link over to CS's blog, which caused CS to blow up. This kind of thing is interesting when it comes to folks who like to volunteer "I'm not posing myself as a fine maker" but then when they come up short and it's pointed out, they have the ego of someone who thinks they are and can't look at the criticism and see if it's valid.
This is just one little example - if you're going to follow along and clench nails and it takes the same effort to do them neatly or not, doing them the way "your hero" does them doesn't serve you. Doing them the way "your hero" does them to spite a fine maker doesn't ,either. These last two cases generally win a majority of the time under the illusion that the blogger or presenter is your friend and George, who is turning your wheel a little with no expectation of anything in return is "rude".
It's bizarre, but part of the falseness. That someone who seems friendly in a video where they're there only to get something out of you is actually your friend. Same kind of illusion April Wilkerson going from obvious rank beginner to putting together a plywood cart with 20 brand new triton tools all lined up neat in the background. If they're never discussed, it's not apparent to the newcomer that those just appeared and that it's probably not what she would have bought (the terms of the agreement aren't discussed, so the viewer is working with a curated idea of reality).
This isn't remotely close to being limited to woodworking, of course. Placement of guitars and gear etc. in that arena is rampant, and while most folks will say "we know they're compensated" would suddenly think a little less well when they find out that the pusher of the goods doesn't like them that well, but received 7k to make three videos that had to be approved by a manufacturer and the words the person says in the videos were edited and written by someone else.
All of the sudden, that doesn't seem so genuine and in the spirit of "just keeping the channel going".
