Growing up, my mom tended to keep the thermostat in our house set on the lower end of the tolerable spectrum.
One winter, when I was about 4 or 5 years old, I couldn’t take it any more and demanded she at least buy me some warm pajamas.
Despite my melodramatic pleading for her to show the slightest hint of humanity, she wouldn’t budge.
So I resorted to sobbing and crying, hoping to effectively play the pity card. Yet, still she resisted.
I only had one card left to play at this point: faux anger. Now, I’m pretty sure I wasn’t threatening violence. And I’m pretty sure that the Phillips-head1An unnecessary detail. Joke’s on you! screwdriver was already in my hand before the start of this particular conversation.
Regardless of why there was a screwdriver in my chubby little hand, I pulled a Daniel Tiger:
…minus the whole namaste anger-management breathing exercise bit.
I looked at her and proclaimed, “I’m so mad at you, I could bend this screwdriver in half!”
Calling my bluff, Mom retorted, “If you can bend that screwdriver in half, I’ll drive to New York2(from Kansas) tonight and buy you some new pajamas!”
Not one to back down from a ridiculous and improbable challenge, I gripped that screwdriver with both hands, stuck my bare foot in the middle, and straight-up bent that screwdriver in half around my foot.
We both stood there in shock for about a minute before I made some smart-ass comment like “I’ll be waiting in the car…”
As you can imagine, I never got those velveteen pajamas that I had been promised.
But, Mom, if you’re listening (and I know you are), I just want to say, “Where are my ----- pajamas?!?”
J.K. Kidding. I’m a grown-ass man now, and can drive myself to New York to buy some Daniel Tiger pajamas…if they make them in adult sizes, that is.
Nonetheless, the point of the story is: don’t make bets you can’t make good on. And also don’t underestimate the strength of your Kindergartner.
Here’s a fun fact: something you may not know about me is that I’m a Caucasian male.
Not to minimize the troubles I’ve had in this world–I’ve had my share of true sorrow, heartache, and hardship–but sometimes I have to take a step back and acknowledge how being a white dude has affected my life story.
And the point of this exercise is not to come to the conclusion “thank the Lordy Jesus that I was born with a lilly-white tally-whacker1A regional American colloquialism for the male genitalia. in 20th Century U.S. of A!”
Rather, my hope is that my Tales from the Light Side will serve as a sharp and satirically self-deprecating contrast to the real issues that affect the many many people who don’t share the same demographics as I do.
Here’s to dreaming of world where all our kids can be plagued by asinine, non-existential dilemmas…
A few years ago, I flew out to Kansas to pack up my Beloved Mother into the largest UHaul available, and move her back to the small North Carolina hamlet I call home.
I was flying on Good Friday, so it was no surprise that the airports were hustling and a bustling. I had an early afternoon layover in Atlanta, where all that hustle and bustle caught up with Delta Airlines, as my flight to Wichita was overbooked.
Well, what do airlines do when the have too many passengers and not enough seats? They ask for volunteers to take a later flight, occasionally offering airline vouchers as compensation.
Now, I had heard about such things from one of my older brothers, who, being a single basketball coach, travelled often. Critically for him, he often had the flexibility in his schedule to take a later flight–and the $200-$700 in future plane tickets in the process.
I was always so jealous–y’all know how much I love being clever, and getting hundreds of dollars in travel for a few hours of your time always seemed like shrewd economics to me.
Anyways, after multiple calls for volunteers, the voucher reward had gone up to $600. For some reason, as I often have in life, I had initially automatically ruled out the possibility of me being one of the lucky ones to cash in on the opportunity. But once I heard $600, I started to seriously–and nervously–rethink my position on the matter.
I texted my mom real quick and told her about the situation, and asked whether it made a difference if I showed up at 7 pm or 11 pm. She told me to go for it…now I just had to work up the courage to actually take action!
I guess a little context might be useful here, and that is that unless I’m in a situation that I’m fairly comfortable in, I tend to be a shy, timid, uncertain and indecisive chap. So it actually would be quite the big deal if I had the cajones to put myself out there and volunteer for the later flight.
After about 5 minutes of self-pep-talking (and hoping/dreading that they would find all the volunteers they needed in the meantime), I finally worked up the nerve to stroll up to the check-in station2I’m sure that’s not quite the right term, but can’t seem to come up with the proper one in the moment. and casually ask if they needed any more volunteers.
I say “casually,” but I’m actually lying through my teeth. I’m pretty sure my voice cracked into a high-pitched screech mid-sentence, as if my testicles were just now dropping, no doubt confusing the airline clerk3Again, I’m pretty sure this isn’t the right term. in the process.
To my horror/relief, she said that yes, actually, they needed one more volunteer. So I replied with something suave and relaxed, implying that I do this thing all the time: “Uh, I, er, volunteer then. I want to be that last person. Please?”
She graciously smiled and took my info, thanking me in the process.
And then we awkwardly stood there, since clearly I didn’t know what was supposed to happen next.
Again, she was more than kind enough to tell me that I needed to hang out by the gate until boarding time, in case they had room for me on the flight after all.
So, I just chilled right by the gate first waiting for our boarding time to begin, then patiently waiting as all those non-$600-airline-voucher-having suckers boarded the plane.
As the line was slowing to a trickle, I heard the flight attendant call my name, saying that I was cleared to board.
Dazed and confused, I wandered on to the plane, slowly realizing what was happening.
At the same time I was realizing how much I did not want to be on that plane. I had finally worked up the courage to earn a coveted airline voucher, and now it was being viciously ripped from my hands. They might as well have been ripping my heart out while they were at it. Jerks.
I think this accurately describes my innermost feelings in that moment:
I was surprisingly emotional about the situation. As found my way to my seat, I actually had to fight back the tears.
Of course, it probably didn’t help that I had already bragged to the Boss Lady about scoring a $600 voucher, and now I would have to come home to her empty-handed. So not only had I disappointed myself, but I would be letting her down as well.
I was also surprisingly angry with myself, feeling like I could have at least put up a fight had I not been such a pushover panty-waste.
So I just sat there in my seat waiting for take-off, a whole hurricane of emotions and thoughts on the inside.
But as I did, I noticed that a couple of the flight attendants were confusedly counting seats in my area.
And in that moment, timid ol’ me said “Screw4This was supposed to say “fuck” here, but my Censorship plugin didn’t catch it. So here we are, using “screw” instead. Oh well. this. I’m the master of my own destiny, and if I have to manufacture a way off this plane, I will!”
Well, it wasn’t that dramatic in reality. But I did indeed take charge of my life in the moment, refusing be the victim of an on-time arrival at my destination.
I wasn’t going to let nobody kick me on to that ----- plane.
I persistently tried to get one of the attendant’s attention until they finally came my way.
“Excuse me, but were you expecting to find an empty seat back here? Because I’m pretty sure I’m sitting in a seat that rightfully belongs to someone else…”
After checking with the other confused attendant, it turned out that indeed, they had prematurely put me on the plane, and was extremely grateful that I was giving up my seat (again).
Once I got the official go-ahead to deboard the plane, I grabbed my carryon and strolled off that plane, ever so high on testosterone, adrenaline, and life. I was brimming with the confidence, like I had three tally-whackers…
And in an even more Caucasian turn of events, shortly thereafter I found out that for whatever reason the voucher would be for $800 instead of $600. ----- awesome.
Given that I now had 3+ hours on my hands to kill, I found my way to one of the nicer restaurants in the Atlanta airport and treated myself to a $70 meal. After all, I was still over $700 richer than when I woke up that morning. Plus, you gotta celebrate life’s little victories, ya know?
Several months later at the beginning of September, me and the family flew out to California for a cousin’s wedding. Thanks to my sweet, sweet $800 voucher, it only cost us ~$500 for the 3 of us to fly non-stop to and from LAX.
While there, one of our freer days happened to align with the first day of back-to-school for the students in Southern California.
Seeing a prime opportunity, I promptly used the funds that I didn’t have to spend on plane tickets, and dragged my family to local, notoriously over-crowded amusement park…on one of the least busiest days of the year.
Yes, my friends, in perhaps the most white ending possible for a story like this…
Okay, so maybe the title is a little misleading, in that I’ve thrown in a bonus kid-centric vignette alongside the couple of dreams that, in telling them, seem to be a totally appropriate way to celebrate the recently observed Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday.
Enjoy!
A few weeks ago, I took our two girls, The Elder (6) and The Younger (2) to the grocery store as per our usual routine.
However, while we normally go right around lunch or early afternoon, this particular day we had gone closer to dinner time and the natives were getting restless with hunger.
As I was loading them up The Elder made a not so unreasonable request.
The Elder: “Dad, do you think we could snack on something on the way home.”
Me: “Sure. Like what?”
The Elder: “Oh, how about some of the nuts you bought?”
Me: “Um…oh yeah, the cashews? Let me get some out of the back.”
Moments later…
Daddy’s nuts! Daddy’s nuts! We want Daddy’s nuts!
The Elder and The Younger, chanting loudly in unison
Me: “Shhhhh! That doesn’t mean the same thing to an adult as it does to you!”
Frankly,1Pun intended? I’m just relieved that happened in the privacy of our car and not in the middle of the store…
A couple of nights ago I had a dream that, for whatever reason, the Boss Lady needed to get vanity plates for her car.
Of course, there are many details of the dream that make no ----- sense–it was a dream after all–so I’ll try to keep it to either the interesting and/or relevant ones.
So she had to get vanity plates. Don’t know why it wasn’t optional, but whatever. We found ourselves in a…billiards parlor? I’m pretty sure that’s not what it was, but that’s the closest I can come to describing it.
We were there with 3-4 other people, most of whom we either knew at some point in our lives, or perhaps recognized from T.V., and we had formed a committee to tackle the dilemma at hand.
…along with an antique fortune-telling gumball machine. Yup. I’m pretty sure one of those was there, too, and was an integral part of the brainstorming process.
when inspiration hit me like a ton of bricks. As I went to blurt it out, the 55-year-old woman in the committee barely beat me to the punch, word-for-word.
I was like, “That was literally exactly what I was about to say! OMG, you stole the words out of my mouth!” Apparently, I desperately wanted credit for the idea.
Upon waking up, though, I realized that the debate over who got credit for option #2 was a moot point. After all, it was my dream, and we’ve already settled the debate over who gets credit in such situations.
Me. T’would be yours truly who gets sole credit for option #2:
I guess my subconscious decided to make no bones about the reality of the financial dynamics in my marriage…
When I awoke in the morning, I couldn’t wait to tell the Boss Lady about my witty AF dream. I was even more excited to see which one she would hypothetically choose.
While she chuckled at both ideas, she has been coy about which one she would actually go with, if forced to decide between the two.
Which is probably all for the better. As you may have noted, the simulated license plates from above are based on a vintage design from a bye-gone era when verbosity and vanity were not forced to be mutually exclusive. Sadly, modern North Carolina license plates are unable to contain the genius vanity-plate making skills I bring to the table.
In reality, her two choices could only be realized as:
or…
Huh…I think the idea gets a little lost in translation…
Damn me, and my unrealistic dreams.
In our last vignette, I hearken back to a dream I had several years ago, one which I tweeted about into the void of Twitter from a secret, follower-less account.
In it I was hanging out with a friend of from college. Since he still lives in Kansas, and I in North Carolina, we only see each other every couple of years.
In the course of catching up, I found out that [the dream version of him] had left his wife for…his mother-in-law.
Needless to say, I was shocked.
I was even more shocked, however, at how much sense his logic made:
Yeah, but I get to live in a really nice house.
dream version of my friend who literally shacked up with his mother-in-law
Editor’s Note: This is a direct follow up to my most recent post, Taking Over the Mean Streets of Tumblr, documenting my attempt to get my piece of the kimchi market pie. Actually, it’s probably more apt to say that I’m trying to expand the kimchi market and then promptly fill that need, but that’s getting ahead of ourselves, now isn’t it? If you feel like you need more back story as to how we got here in the first place, please see Epitaph, The Prissy Pet Project, and Cuckoo for Kimchi Puffs.
As always, it’s good to at least lightly refresh my Dear Readers as to what this whole kimchi/Tumblr pursuit is about.
If you have already the preceding post, you can skip this next bit, as I’m just repeating myself. If you haven’t read that post, and would like to, click here. To get those details without reading a whole ‘nother post, click below to expand that background info.
[expand title=”Yes! Bring me up to speed!”]
One of the Four Pillars of Pointellism1I’m appropriating this term from the art community for my own purposes. Get over it. is to provide resources for people who are interested in non-traditional money-producing ventures, but don’t necessarily want to risk wasting their time and/or reputation in the process.
That’s where I swoop in, to investigate less-than-sure-bets and then expound upon my misadventures at medium length. Then the readers can decide whether or not such schemes are a good fit for them.
Currently I have been following a random online guide to making money via Tumblr.2Tumblr, a rather popular micro-blogging site
Find some niche you like, and start a Tumblr blog related to that topic.
Using some automated tools to post ad infinitum, build up a critical amount of Tumblr followers (50+). Don’t bother with original content–just repost from other like-minded blogs.
Set up a basic Amazon store selling products related to your blog’s theme/brand.
Use your automated posting tools to advertise your store on all your posts as they spread through Tumblr like a virus.
Profit.4To be clear, the profit is via a small commission of 2-7% for everything you sell via Amazon–it’s not actually your products in the store.
Repeat Step 5 without lifting a finger.
[/expand]
Journal Date: 29 November 2019 (Friday)
For a fuller description of my activity leading up and including this day, this was covered in my preceding post.
The short version, though, is that I had set up several days worth of automatic posts to my Tumblr blog, kimchiandketo, and with that rolling it was time to start making some internet friends, whom in turn I could try to get addicted to kimchi with me as their trusted supplier…
Journal Date: 30 November 2019 (Saturday)
Well, the next phase of my Tumblr/Amazon domination plan is to build a Tumblr following. Like most social media popularity contest games, this involves Liking/Following/Commenting/Reblogging, etc.
My Infallible Guide recommends using another automated online tool called TumblrJazz…but that costs $70 as well. There’s no way I’m going to be out $150 this quickly before I have more solid evidence this will be profitable. It’s not so much that I’m doubting Sifu Franklin’s holy money-making methods, it’s more that I pulled the kimchi idea out of my ass, and therefore my confidence in it’s marketability still needs to be proven.
As it turns out, all that doesn’t matter yet, because I ran into my first important lesson related to this project. You see, I had previously set up a prissypetproject Tumblr blog, and so when I went to try to set up kimchiandketo, they noted that my particular email already had a primary blog associated with it.
“But no problem!” they said. “You can set up all the secondary blogs you like!”
And that’s exactly what I did.
However, when I went to Like somebody else’s post (in hopes of them Following me), it would show up as “prissypetproject liked this post.”
The hell?!? Well, after about an hour of going in circles trying to figure out how to exclusively operate as kimchiandketo when Liking posts and such, I finally uncovered a very unpleasant truth: you can only Like/Follow/Comment and otherwise socially interact on Tumblr under the moniker of your primary blog.
No exceptions. No work-arounds. You’re just screwed if you want to do otherwise.
I’ll let a raw quote from my digital journal convey the je ne sais quoi5Yeah…that’s not what that really means… of that moment:
OH GODDAMMIT, I’ve been liking and following as prissypetproject instead of kimchiandketo. Need to redo all these…
According to this article, all my hard work thus far is fucked.
I need my [kimchiandketo] blog to be the primary blog, and you can’t convert from secondary to primary–WHAT A LOAD OF SHIT.
My Evernote “Prissy Pet Project” journal
Journal Date: 3 January 2020 (Friday)
Welp, it’s a new year, and I figured I might as well get around to taking a fresh crack at building a Tumblr brand (don’t want to leave my Dear Readers–and the Boss Lady–hanging too long).
As you can tell from above, I wasn’t too pleased with Tumblr’s asinine rules regarding secondary blogs being treated as second-class citizens…or more appropriately, non-citizens with very few basic rights.
The gap in activity on this project, however, was more due to the hectic holiday season rather than any feelings of ill-will and/or crushed spirits.
This time around I signed up with a virgin email address and staked my claim to kimchi-and-keto.tumblr.com.
See what I did there? I added dashes in between the words, which is actually good for readability, but is a bit more cumbersome to verbally convey the address to a supposedly interested listener:
Yeah, you can check out my butt-health blog at ‘kimchi and keto’ on Tumblr–and that’s with dashes between ‘kimchi’ and ‘and’, and ‘and’ and ‘keto’.
Got it? Good!
That annoying guy who won’t shut the f*ck up about his blog
Also, as a programmer, I abhor dashes, eschewing them for the much more stable underscore (“_”) instead. But that’s another store that I don’t see to have any relation to what is happening here…pardon the digression.
The long and the short of it is that it took about 1 hour, 45 minutes to get back to the point where I was with kimchiandketo, with roughly the same design and posts in my Queue+ queue. Not too bad…
Figure 1. The Humble Beginnings of a soon-to-be Global Gut-Health Powerhouse.
Journal Date: 4-18 January 2020 (Sat-Sat)
These past two weeks has been basically trying to come up with terms to search to find blogs/posts to Follow/Like/Reblog in hopes of steadily building up a following manually–screw TumblrJazz and their $70 ransom!
The game plan is to target an eclectic array of demographics who I think might be possibly converted to the Gospel of Kimchi:
Foodies
Hipsters
People Who Often Diet and Love to Talk About It
Fitness Buffs
Wellness Buffs
People Who Like to Cook
People Susceptible to Fad Diets, and
Gut Health Aficionados
For what it’s worth, here is just a sampling of some of the search terms I’ve come up with in my hunt for Tumblr amigos:
Keto fitness
Muscle-building recipes
Fitness geek (erm, not the results I expected…)
Kimchi
Asian fitness
Workout food
Yoga diet/Yoga for dudes/Yoga fitness/Yoga recipes
Qi gong
Tai chi
Wellness
Healthy snack
Nutrition
Korean food
Mindful eating
Clean eating
Mindfulness
Gut health
…and more!
Not that I’m convinced that the following is the most efficient method, but my basic strategy has been to just run down rabbit hole after another of a reblogged post. By that I mean I will find a post that I think is somewhat on-brand, and then check out who inevitably reblogged it (an original post is a rare find around here). Then I will move on to the blog that they got the post from, and so on and so forth, potentially finding the original source at some point–though that’s not really important in and of itself here.
With each stop along this chain, I’ll try to scroll through that blog’s posts until I find something worth sharing on mine, then Liking that post, Reblogging that post, and then–now that they’ve been deemed worthy–Following the blog as a whole.
On occasion I will add in my own two cents of commentary when manually6In contrast to the bulk of my posts, which are being handled by Queue+ reblogging a post. Interestingly, I’ve found myself really reblogging only 3 types of posts:
1. Artistic pictures of fruits/veggies. Not sure why, but I have definitely noticed that these types of pictures get an insane amount of responses (“Notes” in Tumblr-speak)…like 10k-100k range. Gotta give the people what they want, I guess…and what the want is food porn,7No relation to sexual pornography. apparently:
Figure 2. Strawberries. Nothing but ----- strawberries.
2. Pictures of meals that are in desperate need of a side of kimchi:
Figure 3. I award myself bonus points for the The More You Know reference.
3. And, for some reason, I think it’s humorous to pretend I have yoga ambitions (as indicated by adding the tag “#mangoals”):
Which, by the way, Assy McAsskins here leads me to another interesting point. People–mainly females–like to show off their booties in the fitness realm, so I actually have to actively work to minimize that type of content on my Tumblr. That’s not so much the image I’m aiming for.
However, once I get my ass in shape like that, I’m sure as shit going to be posting ironic recreations of such posts like you see above. I fancy myself humorous…but really I’m probably just bougie in that regard.
Journal Date: 18 January 2020 (Saturday)
Ass-bombing aside, I do need to figure out the magic formula for gaining users. Recall that 50 followers seems to be my main goal initially. I’m guessing that there’s some internal Tumblr algorithm that uses that as a threshold, and once over that it starts automatically recommending your blog to random passer-byes.
I took a few days to get the first few followers, but as of 13 January 2020 these were my Tumblr stats:
And by the time of this writing I was up to 17:
Also…that‘s my top post? Spinach butternut squash pasta? Whatevs, People of Tumblr, whatevs…
Okay, so back to trying to figure out how to reel in the critical Followers. Here’s what I was thinking (but yet another unproven theorem): who’s most likely to follow me? Probably someone just like me, newer to Tumblr and desperate for any Followers, and more than willing to engage in some good ol’ quid pro quo.8Don’t even act like you don’t know that means. Don’t even.
In other words, I should be preying on those thirstiest9I believe the youths use this as a synonym for someone desperately longing for something, such as dick. of us Tumblr citizens. At this point, I’ll spare you another litany of screenshots, so for those you who are actually reading this to inform their own Tumblr Takeovers, I hope your imaginations suffice.
The strategy: when I search for a particular term, instead of having the most popular posts pop up, I can select the most recent posts to appear. The key here is that it doesn’t do any good to follow an inactive blog–if the owner of the blog doesn’t pay it any attention any more, they won’t see that I’ve followed them and be inclined to follow me back. Plus, they would obviously be past the point of caring about how many Followers they have.
Ideally, I would Follow someone who would see it in relatively short order–within minutes to hours, preferably–and, in the heat of the moment say, “What the heck–you scratched my back, so I’ll go ahead and scratch yours” and Follow me out of the pursuit of our mutual benefit.
The second thing I would be looking for is posts with less than 20 Notes. In other words, not too many people have responded to that particular post yet. If I’m able to be one of the first people to appear to find value in another Tumblr’s post, that’s bound to earn me a lot more good will with them than, say, being the 23,119th person to Like that post. It’ll give me a chance to stand out enough to maybe get Followed by them.
Okay, so again, that’s my logic for going that route. I’ll need to get back to y’all about how effective that this actually turns out to be, or if I “sTumbl”10rim-shot upon a more efficient method.
One last important thing to note is that for the first few days of trying to gain followers, I would do it during what I would call official “work” time. This is time that I’ve been able to carve out and minimize the precious distractions, such as my darling daughters, and get the chance to focus on getting intense work done (this is typically after the girls have been put down for the night, in case you were wondering).
Each night it would eat up 30-45 minutes of valuable time in which I really needed to focus on other things, such as writing blog posts, arranging real estate transactions, or honing my web development skills.
Fortunately, I realized fairly quickly that using this work time for such games was going to make this whole endeavor a losing proposition. I would have to invest waaaay more time than would be worth it to get up to enough Followers to get this show on the road.
But I had a secondary Eureka moment: I can waste time with this Tumblr game that I’m already wasting elsewhere…namely when taking care of, er, bodily wastes. And riding the bus to/from my other day job. Sometime I need to do mindless stuff, and currently that stuff tends to be playing FreeCell on my phone. But of course, that is just time sucked into a black hole of No Return On Investment, so it makes sense to spend it doing something equally mindless, but at least moving my independent career forward, if possible.
So, yeaaaaaah…that’s where I am at right now with this project.
Though in a way, it’s sort of a dream job. Forget working from home–this Kimchi Kingpin is working from his throne.
After all, as our current president has so eloquently demonstrated, sometimes you only need a toilet and a smartphone to really change the world…
Content created on: 15/17/18 January 2020 (Wed/Fri/Sat).
Editor’s Note: This is a continuation of my pursuit of passive income via slanging kimchi on Tumblr. Now that I think about it, I guess I’m sort of an aspiring internet drug dealer–but the GOOD kind of drug dealer, like, say, an anesthesiologist. You can read about my descent into the light underbelly of the internet in Epitaph, The Prissy Pet Project, and Cuckoo for Kimchi Puffs, if need be. Or if you have insomnia and need to get some sleep…
As always, it’s good to at least lightly refresh my Dear Readers as to what this particular not-exactly-shooting-for-the-stars pursuit is about.
One of the Four Pillars of Pointellism1I’m appropriating this term from the art community for my own purposes. Get over it. is to provide resources for people who are interested in non-traditional money-producing ventures, but don’t necessarily want to risk wasting their time and/or reputation in the process.
That’s where I swoop in, to investigate less-than-sure-bets and then expound upon my misadventures at medium length. Then the readers can decide whether or not such schemes are a good fit for them. With any luck, I’ll make some money along the way myself. Or at least gain Life Experience Points…
Currently I have been following a random online guide to making money via Tumblr.2Tumblr, a rather popular micro-blogging site.
Find some niche you like, and start a Tumblr blog related to that topic.
Using some automated tools to post ad infinitum, build up a critical amount of Tumblr followers (50+). Don’t bother with original content–just repost from other like-minded blogs.
Set up a basic Amazon store selling products related to your blog’s theme/brand.
Use your automated posting tools to advertise your store on all your posts as they spread through Tumblr like a virus.
Profit.4To be clear, the profit is via a small commission of 2-7% for everything you sell via Amazon–it’s not actually your products in the store.
Repeat Step 5 without lifting a finger.
Last I left you, I had been in the process of trying to settle on a brand, and I had just abandoned the idea of a luxury pet brand, The Prissy Pet Project, in favor of an untitled kimchi/keto wellness brand.
This brings us to…
Journal Date: 29 November 2019 (Friday)…
You may be relieved and/or disappointed that I decided against incorporating Dear Leader Kim Jong Il into my brand image.
Nuclear War, Averted! (With North Korea, at least…)
The sad fact is, I’ve taken pretty much the most boring, uncreative route possible and gone with a rather utilitarian name, kimchiandketo. Sometimes things are best left un-overcomplicated…unlike this sentence. Anyways, it was available both on Tumblr and as a regular internet address, so I felt pretty good about the ability to at least have a consistent brand.
Within minutes of each other, I had staked my claim to both kimchiandketo.tumblr.com and www.kimchiandketo.com. Nice.
The former was free and the latter cost me about ~$20 for a year. However, I should note that was cheaper than usual because I could just piggyback off of this site, and not have to pay for website hosting.
Speaking of “$20,” I think this is a good time to broach the topic of exactly how profitable do I expect this to be? I guarantee you my Board of Director is going to be asking me that question.
Well, I finally got around to watching the video that Franklin, our esteemed guide, had included on the webpage that I’ve been referencing, and fortunately I was paying attention. He happened to mention almost in passing that he had made “like $20 in just 24 hours” shortly after his store was live online.
Now, this was a bit lower than I had anticipated, but there are 2 things that should be pointed out in regards to this: 1) if that actually holds steady, that’s roughly $600/month, which is not too bad given how little work I would be putting in on an ongiong basis, and 2) it seemed like he cited that figure only 2 days into trying to monetize his Tumblr following, so he might have actually hit a much higher steady-state amount.
If you’re wondering, it looks like his store specializes in selling tie-dye shirts with low-level humorous phrases on them to recreational drug users. Which, honestly, sounds like an easy sale, so I’m not exactly expecting to be making $600/month any time soon.
I really wish I would have done this research before even thinking about what I would want to sell in my store. Here’s why:
Assuming Dead-Head t-shirts fall under “Amazon Fashions (Men),” then Frankie-boy would be making a sweet 10% commission on his sales. As for my decision to go from luxury pet supplies to kimchi, it looks like my commission rate will go from 8% down to 5%. Dammit.
Oh well, I guess that’s the price you pay for trying to improve the gut health of all wealthy-ish mankind, right?
Anyways, I was going to get my online version of Kim’s Convenience setup while I had the momentum of ambition on my side…until I found out that both of the WordPress themes (super-helpful pre-made website templates) that Franklin was recommending were about $70 each. That’s a big enough of an investment that I decided to hold off on dropping 700 dimes on it until I knew I had the Tumblr audience to send over there. Also keep in mind that a key principle in my quest is to minimize bandwidth-draining decisions, making it not worth my time to find a free or at least cheaper alternative. So setting up the Amazon store is temporarily on hold for now.
But in the meantime I can get my Tumblr presence up and running. Yee-haw! Let’s get this rodeo on!
The auto-posting software that was used in the guide is called Queue+, and the free version allows one to add, en masse, 600 posts from other Tumblr blogs to be queued up and be automatically reposted by your account on a regular interval.
If this project proves to be something continuing for the longer term, I’ll probably drop the $20/year to be able to set up an unlimited number of posts across multiple Tumblr blogs. In that case I probably could spend 1-2 hours one afternoon to set up a year’s worth (or more) of blog posts, and not invest one red-blooded cent of my time on the project for another 365 (or more) days. That’s pushing 98%+ passivity!
During this proof-of-concept period, though, I’m stuck with queuing up 600 at a time. Given that I’ve set it to post every 10 minutes, that means it can run on auto-pilot for 4 days, 4 hours before needing to reload (though I would later change this to every 15 minutes, giving me 6 days, 6 hours of a break).
I found a handful of relevant and interesting blogs to populate my queue by searching such terms as “keto recipes” and “kimchi recipes.” I got up to 526/600 spots filled, so that it’s more than enough to get me up and running!
And though I haven’t got the store up and running yet, I decided to drop a link to it in all my posts (as prescribed by The Almighty Franklin):
Not exactly the proudest of my little tagline there, but I can always work on that later.
Welp, that seems like a hard day’s work, done and DONE!
*dusts off hands*
My Creation will take over Tumblr in no time! Nothing could possible go wrong in any asinine and boring way.
…or could it?
To Be Continued in Sunday’s post…
Content created on: 15/16 January 2020 (Wed/Thurs), and as noted.
Editor’s note: This is the companion post to But I Still Love Technology-The Evens/Number Five, and, with their powers combined, form a complete version of The Top 5 Times Technology has Screwed Me Over at the Point of the Story. If you haven’t read The Evens yet, you can do so here. For Number Five, click here.
Editor’s additional note: This countdown list is admittedly a bit meta–i.e. a blog post about adventures in blogging. As such, it may be of particular interest to those who are starting up a blog themselves. For the rest of the world, I hope that I’m not getting into the weeds so much that you can’t appreciate the stupidity/frustration/absurdity of these situations. Enjoy! (I’m hoping you do, at least.)
To reiterate what I’m up to:
In the process of getting the Point of the Story up and running, I’ve had a few, er, “technical difficulties” that should serve as a reminder that, while technology and automation can be pretty great, without proper human guidance they can lead to some real shit-shows/comedies of error.
And that–spoiler alert–is the point of this story. Let these serve as cautionary tales to those who dare put their social lives in the hands of a hand-less machine.
But I Still Love Technology-The Evens (2020)
Without further ado, I present to you:
The Top 5 Times Technology has Screwed Me Over at the Point of the Story.
#3: That time my blog thought it was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Back when this fiasco originally went down, I had shared some of it via the Point’s Instagram and Facebook pages, so this might sound familiar to some of you.
Over the summer, I had spent a couple of months putting the Point of the Story together before releasing it into the wild. One of the first things I needed to do was set the time zone for my server.
No problem! It was an easy decision to select Norfolk, thinking “Hey, perfect! That’s only a 3 hour drive from here!”
After that, the first order of business was to put up a “Coming Soon” page–replete even with a countdown timer–for anyone who tried to visit it before the Appointed Time Unto Which All Would Be Made Known.
And that Appointed Time, which all future historians will know by heart, was Thursday, August 29, 2019, precisely at 10 p.m. EDT.
When that day rolled around, and shortly before we went live, I had texted my good friend, known in these parts as “The Doctor,” and asked if he would test things out once the clock struck 10. You know, make sure all the links were functioning and that it wasn’t a general shit-show, etc., etc.
However, around that same time, when I tried going directly to a particular post from a different computer, I wasn’t seeing the “Coming Soon” screen as I had expected. So I pinged the good Doctor to check on it for me:
(Tries tweaking some settings, hoping to somehow get a different result…)
That last line there is an example of “careful what you wish for,” because that was one hope that was definitely fulfilled…apart from the Doctor’s testing, I don’t think I had a single visitor that first day. Womp-womp-womp!
Anyways, as you can tell, I had a prime suspect in mind as to what was causing my woes. Apparently I hadn’t caught on to the fact that the timezone menu was segregated by region:
So yeah, it turns out that there was another Norfolk–the Pacific kine, in fact. And apparently it’s living 16 hours in the future. No wonder the floodgates to the Point were opened early. The ----- thing is happily living its life under the delusion that it’s out in the middle of nowhere in the Pacific Ocean.
So, one would think that since I had a number one suspect in mind as to what was causing me yet another time-traveling woe, that I would be able remedy the problem lickity-split and go on my way. Right?
Of course I popped on over to my WordPress dashboard and set my server time to New York City. I figuratively dusted off my hands and said to myself, “Welp! Mission Accomplished! I made quick work of that pesky problem!”
Yet, to my dismay, I kept suffering from premature blog-post-jaculation. Without fail over the next 2 weeks, instead of being published on Sunday morning at 7:15 am, my latest posts would go out to the public at 3:15 pm on Saturday–whether they were in final form or not.
For the sake of those who would come after me, I feel it is of utmost importance–albeit boring–that I reveal just what the hell was going on with my server time, and how I finally fixed that bastard for good.
Eventually, eventually, eventually, after much pulling of hair and gnashing of teeth, I found the answer in the stupidest of places.
You see, there is very popular and powerful WordPress plugin called Jetpack that almost everyone uses. It’s got what every blogger/webmaster could ever need for basic site analytics, security, backups…and more!
Well, it turns out that for some reason, Jetpack also lets one set a server time, and who the ----- knows why it’s not automatically the same as what one sets in their WordPress dashboard.
In Summary, the wrong “common-sense” way to set your server time:
…and the correct elitist, No-You-Don’t-Know-What-You-Want-Let-Me-Fix-That-For-You, way to set your server time:1At least in the case where you’re using the otherwise useful Jetpack–made by the WordPress people themselves (hence why the setting is hiding at wordpress.com.
The point is beware of all the fancy “helpful” plugins you may be tempted to install. You never know which one of them asshats–ahem, I’m looking at you, Jetpack–might be a control freak, overriding your settings and then hiding the One True Setting in some obscure place.
And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for…
#1: That time I tried to solicit an erotic photographer on Facebook.
So far, the dumb predicaments that errant technology has put me in have been without much real-world consequence. However, there has been one glaring exception to that rule.
A while back I told a tale of attempting to land a Craigslist gig of debugging a treasure hunt, as recounted in Blog Like Nobody’s Reading.
For those of you have read it–and those of you who just now hopped on over there to read it–you may recall the bonus story I just could not resist including.
In it I shared the tragic tale of some poor chap who had a perpetual Craigslist ad in the Gigs section, who for the life of him could not find someone to take erotic photographs of him at the behest of his wife.
You know, nothing fancy, just something low-key and tasteful like this:
And since I know you’re all dying for an update on his status, I came across his ad AGAIN just a few days go, meaning that he has been critically under-erotically-photographed for at least 7 months now.
It’s somehow one of the saddest yet most hilarious things I’ve personally witnessed on Craigslist. So of course I couldn’t deprive the rest of the world of the chuckles to be found upon reflecting on his situation.
But as I’ve already well established, Karma is one bad-ass beach and pity anyone who should provoke her justice.
Things started to go sideways for me when I first had the idea to even include this beautiful vignette. Originally, in an early draft of the post, I had rudely interrupted myself in the middle of the main story and dropped it right in there. You know, train-wreck-of-thought/stream-of-consciousness and all that jazz.
And of course I had to include the critical piece of evidence, a screenshot of the ad. Again, to be clear, this is NOT my ad, NOT my words, NOT my marriage that is hinging on some tasteful male erotica:
Although later I would move that story to a bonus addendum at the end of the post, I had set the post up to be published while it was still in its first draft form, in case I didn’t have the chance to go back and revise it before my self-imposed deadline. So at the time, this screenshot was the first picture in the post, a detail that would come back to haunt my lily-white ass later on.
A neat feature on WordPress is that you can connect your social media accounts–Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.–and have an announcement go out on those platforms concurrently with your blog post when you have it scheduled to be published at a certain time (as I regularly do):
Automation sure is great, isn’t it? Thanks, Technology! Because of you, I don’t have to wake up at 7:15 on Sunday mornings and hop frantically from WordPress to Facebook to Twitter just to blast out my latest liturgical3I’m pretty certain that that does not mean what I’m trying to make it mean, but just don’t have it in me to do 5 second of internet research. offering.
If I recall correctly, I stayed up until around 3 in the morning the Saturday night/Sunday morning before Blog Like Nobody’s Reading was set to be published, indubitably trying to get it ready to be unveiled to the world, as is par for the course around here.
And thanks to all the publishing bells and whistles WordPress offers, I could get some much needed rest and sleep in late, knowing that all would be shared at the appointed time without any need for further human intervention.
It wasn’t until around noon that Sunday before I decided to check in on my Facebook post to see if was getting much action from my followers.
To my dismay, this is what I found being planted in their Facebook feeds:
Did ever express to you my insistence that context matters matters matters? If not: click here or here.
And now how meta is it that we have ourselves a real-live example of its importance, in the flesh!
Not only did stupid WordPress/Facebook decide to grab the first image from the first draft, but it decided to nicely crop it such that, even if you happened to notice the link and preview at the bottom of the picture, it sure looks like I’m straight-up pleading with everyone I know on Facebook to please, please, PLEASE, oh please take some nudie pics of me.
After this, this will be the image of me burned forever in their minds:
*Face-palm-emoji*
Although, I’m not sure whether I’m relieved or disappointed that no one took me up on my offer…
Anyways, as you can imagine, I immediately tried to edit it and change the picture, but you wouldn’t believe how unimaginably impossible that was. After 30 bonus minutes of that inaccurate solicitation continuing to pepper people’s Facebook feeds, I finally had to give up and just delete it, and post a new one altogether.
The lesson I learned here is trust nobody: if you want to embarrass yourself right, you’re going to have to do it yourself.
And that is also why you always see some poorly cut-and-pasted image with my Big Lip logo plastered on it accompanying ever ----- post I publish. No matter how tangentially related to the story, I always make some picture to be set as my Featured Image (another WordPress setting–I’ll spare you the screenshot for now), that way I know exactly what will be showing up in people’s Facebook and Twitter feeds.
After all, I have a meticulously manicured public image to maintain…
Content created on: 4/6/10/11 January 2020 (Saturday/Monday/Friday/Saturday)
At least in the case where you’re using the otherwise useful Jetpack–made by the WordPress people themselves (hence why the setting is hiding at wordpress.com.
Editor’s note: This is a companion post to But I Still Love Technology-The Evens & But I Still Love Technology-The Other Odds, and, with their powers combined, form a complete version of The Top 5 Times Technology has Screwed Me Over at the Point of the Story. If you haven’t read The Evens yet, you can do so here. The Other Odds will be forthcoming in a few short days.
Editor’s additional note: This countdown list is admittedly a bit meta–i.e. a blog post about adventures in blogging. As such, it may be of particular interest to those who are starting up a blog themselves. For the rest of the world, I hope that I’m not getting into the weeds so much that you can’t appreciate the stupidity/frustration/absurdity of these situations. Enjoy! (I’m hoping you do, at least.)
To reiterate what I’m up to:
In the process of getting the Point of the Story up and running, I’ve had a few, er, “technical difficulties” that should serve as a reminder that, while technology and automation can be pretty great, without proper human guidance they can lead to some real shit-shows/comedies of error.
And that–spoiler alert–is the point of this story. Let these serve as cautionary tales to those who dare put their social lives in the hands of a hand-less machine.
But I Still Love Technology-The Evens (2020)
Without further ado, I present to you:
The Top 5 Times Technology has Screwed Me Over at the Point of the Story.
#5: That time I accidentally warped the fabric of space and time.
Shortly after debuting the Point in late August 2019, I was chatting up one of my friends, “Sonny B.,” whom I was hoping to include in an upcoming post, Shotgun Wedding, set to be published September 15th.
To my delight, she had been binging my content, and after she told me what all she had read, I pointed out that the only post she had missed was Bum Sandwich, which was the next-to-most-recent post of mine.
However, she didn’t know what the hell I was talking about…
Now, I don’t have a screenshot to demonstrate this, but I’ll recreate the issue just for y’all.
Let’s just say you type in thepointofthestory.com directly, and go to our homepage. When things are amiss, instead of getting the latest post (“The Evens” post), you see a very judgmental ----- Clark1Did “D1ck” just get censored?!? I bet it just got censored, didn’t it. ----- this ham-fisted Censorship plugin! instead:
Here, I’ll zoom in so you can actually see it:
As you can see, January 5th, 2020 is clearly “more recent” than December 29 or 31, 2019.
Apparently, I had managed to break the fundamental linearity of time as we experience it…
Part of the reason this was particularly frustrating is that potentially my new posts would never show up on the home page, leading most visitors to believe that I’ve stopped posting–and in turn losing critical new readers! (No one wants to read a stale blog, right?)
Anyways, no matter how much I tried tweaking the publishing date, unpublishing/republishing, etc. I could not get the most recent post to show up.
Well, I spent at least a good two weeks of Googling “WordPress posts out of order” and other similar searches to absolutely no avail. I could not find any evidence at all of anyone else in the rather-large WordPress community (millions+) ever having this problem.
Seriously?!? Not one other person had had this egregious problem?
Over and over, all the posts said the same thing: get your dates straight, and all should be copacetic, as this, and this alone, determines “post order.”
As you can (maybe) see in the screenshot of my Posts dashboard, The Evens have the correct date and everything, yet will still show up in the wrong chronological order…arggghhhh! This Universe doesn’t make any ----- sense any more.
I even bravely forged my way into the underlying code, and the function that was mis-fuck-tioning (translated simply into lay-terms) was simply “get next post” or “get previous post.” There was nowhere where the stupid thing could be breaking especially just for little ol’ me…could there?
One evening, when I was staring blankly at this dashboard in daze of hopelessness and despair, I noticed something tiny yet oh-so-slightly off:
It may not seem like much, but that’s my cursor showing up as a 4-directional arrow instead of your regular old pointer arrow.
Suspecting that this was a clue to this ridiculous madness, I clicked on the trouble-making post, and sure as shit, found that I could drag it and freely re-order the posts in such a manner.
I dragged that little bastard to the top of the list where it should be if it were chronological (i.e. FIRST), reloaded my homepage, and held my breath:
HUZZAH! Problem solved! Insanity averted!
But one mystery remained: why was nothing of the sort ever mentioned when I went in search of an answer on Google?
Well, it was on account of a perfect storm of being too clever for my own good coupled with my naiveté when it came to how WordPress functioned.
Long story short,2Who are we kidding, that ship sailed LONG ago. when I was trying to figure out how to make The Complete First Season binge-able from oldest to newest, I had installed a plugin that gives the blogger a bit more control over the order of posts, Simple Custom Post Order. What I didn’t realize is that most people using WordPress don’t have this god-like power to arbitrarily re-order their posts willy-nilly, i.e. the ability to click ‘n’ drag is not normal behavior.
Thinking that publishing them at the appropriate times would make the posts appear in the appropriate order, I was unaware that–under these new rules that I accidentally set up just for me–I needed to drag the newest post to the top of the list.
In summary, it was something of an unforced error due to having given way too much power someone way under-qualified to handle it responsibly.
Interestingly enough, my calendar-rearranging issues was obfuscated by another confounding screw-up. Later in that same conversation with Sonny B., she kept referring to the post which included her–which I had not published or otherwise shared with her.
I was simultaneously confused and impressed by her clairvoyant abilities to read a future post:
It turns out you can’t always blame the machine for bouts of unwanted technological tomfoolery.
Sometimes, there’s just a dipshit behind the wheel who can’t read a calendar…
Content created on: 4/6 January 2020 (Saturday/Monday)
Although we’re officially into the new year, and the time for countdowns is behind us, there was one last Top 5 list that I wanted to share.
In the process of getting the Point of the Story up and running, I’ve had a few, er, “technical difficulties” that should serve as a reminder that, while technology and automation can be pretty great, without proper human guidance they can lead to some real shit-shows/comedies of error.
And–spoiler alert–that is the point of this story. Let these serve as cautionary tales to those who dare put their social lives in the hands of a hand-less machine.
Without further ado, I present to you:
The Top 5 Times Technology has Screwed Me Over at the Point of the Story.
J.K. Kidding! Before I present it to you, further ado is in order.
I promise that this is indeed a Top 5 list. However, since apparently I have zero ability to keep things short and simple, I decided to break it up into two posts out of respect for the Dear Reader’s time.
This week I present to you The Evens (#4 & #2)–be looking for The Odds (#5, #3, & #1) next week!
#4. That time I pretended I could time-travel.
No, I’m not talking about the time I took artistic liberties with a personal narrative in A Degenerate Family Christmas. This really happened–sadly much more boring, though.
You may have noticed at the end of many of my posts a time-stamp indicating when I actually created the content. For example:
Content created on: 23 October 2019 (Wednesday)
WordPress has many handy bits of code to make it much easier to efficiently build websites, one of them being “Reusable” blocks as seen here:
So of course I thought this would be perfect for always dropping the content’s creation date at the end of my blog, with the same formatting, etc. and only changing the date(s) as appropriate.
Every time I created a new post, I would add the “Content_creation_tag” block at the end and change the dates. Easy-peasy, done and done! Right?
It wasn’t until late October and after publishing 4 months worth of posts that I noticed something odd in an older post:
So…I guess a future me somehow wrote the post on the 23rd and sent it 3 days back in time to be published on the 20th? Wow. Sometimes I even impress myself.
But it turns out that’s only the beginning of my time-travel skillz:
BOOM! I can send information back at least 10 days in time. Ironclad proof, right here, ladies & gentlemen!
Upon closer inspection, it appears this is a skill I only developed exclusively for the month of October:
Poop. I really thought I had something special going there.
I’m J.K. Kidding of course–I don’t really believe I was able to manipulate the laws of physics so stupendously.
What it looks like is that my usage of the Reusable block–and ergo, these shenanigans–only started in the beginning of October. Though I could have sworn that I had been using them much longer than that…I’m starting to feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
Obviously what was happening was that every time I updated that block with the creation date of a new post, it would retroactively update the older instances in the previous posts with that same date.
The bad news is the original dates were lost in the process (not that it matters that much), and I’ve been way to swamped with more important things to try to go back and correct this one stupid little detail.
The good news is that in putting together this post I discovered that Google’s all-seeing eye still remembers those posts as they were in their heydays:
But wait…
Arrrgggg. ----- this shit. I know for a fact that that is not accurate information for that post (which when visited, of course, says 23 October).
For the record, I’m basically live-blogging my research here, so you’re getting to see my sanity ----- with by technology in real time–again.
I give up.
This whole “content created” baloney is soooo asinine. I’m done wasting your time and mine on it.
Moving on, then…
#2: That time I tried to censor the contracted form of the F-bomb.
All y’all long-time readers of the Point know that swearing and the self-censoring thereof is a central theme around here.1See, for example: The Alpine Stranger and/or Hello, Mother F*ckers! For the sake of expediency, I have been using a WordPress “Censorship” plugin that will take a list of black-listed potty words, and then any time they show up in a post or comment, those words are replaced with dashes (i.e. something like “- – – -” will show up in place of the world-famous f-bomb).
In theory, this approach would allow me to change how the blog is censored in the future–or to turn it off all together–without having to edit every ----- post I’ve ever written. Also, it let’s me cuss to my heart’s content when writing, while minimizing the number of minor strokes my dearest mother experiences when reading my handiwork. Everybody wins, right?
Anyways, the Censorship plugin doesn’t quite always do its job. There is one particular off-the-rails example that I need to show you, because the absurdity only happens behind the scenes.
I believe it was when putting together A Pound Casual Asshat that I felt particularly compelled to write:
If all that seems like an atypically optimistic outlook coming from yours truly, then I applaud your keen sense of What the Fuck’s Up (emphasis added).
A Pound Casual Asshat (2019)
As of this writing, you should be able to see an uncensored version of the f-bomb.2There is an off chance that I’ve implemented my own censorship plugin by the time you’re reading this, in which case it may be properly censored.
Oh, for fuck’s sake people…CONTEXT! (again, emphasis added)
A Most Excellent Life Lesson (2019)
Well, interestingly enough, for the life of me, I could not get Censorship to detect and censor “fuck’s”.
Mom, I feel like you deserve to know how valiantly and bravely I wrestled the machine to try to protect you.
For those of you with a bit of coding/computer science background, you may know that the humble apostrophe–aka a single quote–is often a special character which is interpreted as signifying the beginning or end of some exactly quoted text, as opposed to be taken literally as an apostrophe that should appear in the text.
In most cases, special characters can be made literal–as I needed in this situation–by putting a so-called “escape character” before it. This is typically a backslash (“\”).
So when Censorship didn’t bleep out “fuck’s” after I had add it to the blacklist, I tried escaping the apostrophe, and thus typed into the software as “fuck\’s” (without the double quotes).
When that didn’t work, I added several variations, hoping to empirically find something that would work and spare my poor mother’s eyes of beholding the horror of “fuck’s.”
Well, something in the Censorship code tells it re-process all the potty words every time one is added. Each time it does this, it tries to be smart and add an escape character in front of any special characters it finds.
Guess what? The backslash is also a special character–it is the escape character, after all. Pretty ----- special, I would say.
The best part is that it has no way to know which backslashes it had automatically inserted the last time a word was added to the list. Therefore, each time it doubles (at least) the number of ----- backslashes it thinks it needs to look for.
Let me just show you how ----- out-of-hand it has gotten–just consider the fact that I had to take two screenshots and then turn them on their sides just to present the following to you in any comprehensible manner:
That’s 256 backslashes in the longest instance, for those of you keeping score at home.
I’m pretty sure if I add just a few more words to this list, that that initial instance of “fuck’s” will break my entire website…
Actually, according to my math, if I add 12 words, that “fuck’s” alone will be 1 MB, and 10 more words after that it will be 1 GB.3Uncompressed–this particular type of information can be compressed with almost infinite efficiency. Another 10 words and the Censorship code running on the server hosting this website will attempt to compare a 1 TB (1000 GB) string against every word of every post it loads. OOF, Le OOF.
In America, you censor “fuck’s,” but in Soviet Russia4I wrote whole post on this topic: In Soviet Russia. Read it today! the Censor ----- you.
Wait, wait, that’s not how the joke is supposed to go…
…but in Soviet Russia “fuck’s” censors you.
Screw it–they’re both accurate descriptions.
My inner Yakov Smirnoff going off on a tangent
Don’t forgot to tune in next week as we hit #5, #3, and, of course, #1!
Content created on: 3/4 January 2020 (Friday/Saturday)
The latest word on the street