Hey, I’m Jules- or, jbonesberg if you’re nasty (and probably a Janet Jackson stan).
I’ve been floating around the periphery of most of the other keyboard-related places for what feels like a while now and I guess now’s as good a time as any top step up my game and like actually introduce myself and get more involved in the community, right?
Technically, I’ve been a mechanical keyboard fan pretty much all of my life, a gen y baby in a family full of gen w nerds, I taught myself to type on an m0116 and then for much of the90s, used an AEK on the family computer. I got into keyboards ‘officially’ as an adult a few year ago thanks to my old laptop deciding that it’s internal one was no longer worth keeping on life support (to be fair, it was 6+ years old, and had seen me through most of art school which definitely involved a lot of solvent-related spills, a bunch of bashings from unwieldy camera lenses in my backpack, and at least enough swisher guts run through its insides to fill a five gallon jug). Research reminded me that mechanical keyboards were awesome, I bought a magicforce 68 cause it was the ideally priced board for my aesthetic (and workflow, but as y’all clearly understand, aesthetics are everything) and figured that’d be that. Fast forward to a few months later, I chop off the top third of my right index finger making stretcher bars on a table saw and suddenly my casual interest in keyboards had become a weird obsession with finding the ideal switches and layout to take stress off of my gimp-finger (affectionately known these days as scrampy) while I adjust to re-learning to type that really just turns into just a regular obsession.
These days, with my hands working just fine again, I’ve been moving more towards fabrication- I love to build and restore boards, but I’ve been wanting to bring my own hand (sorry not sorry, I love bad puns!) into keyboard design, and while CAD is definitely something I’ll get around to learning, right now I’m more invested in creating one of a kind works of art, if you will. So, currently, I’m sculpting a 75% case by hand in clay that will eventually either be cast if I like it enough, or just fired and then electroplated in copper and given a good patina. Suffice to say, I’m a masochist.
If I’m not working (I’m a graphic designer- I freelance, hit me up if you want things!) you’d likely find me screenprinting, taking urban hikes with one or both of my tiny dog sidekicks, or actually, these days, probably just sitting in front of my AC unit drinking a sour beer, crying about how hot my apartment is. My non-keyboard related dream for this year is to start and non-male smiths cover band. This is probably all way more information that you actually wanted to know.
Anyway, the TL:DR version of this is really just ‘hi, I’m Jules, I’m very verbose and I like to make things that include keyboards’.