Category: The Prissy Pet Project

Don’t work hard, work smart!

Though I admit I’m working on something pretty ----- dumb…

“The Prissy Pet Project”–does that ring a bell? Yeah, I know it’s been a while since I rapped at ya about it, so I forgive you if you have no clue what I’m jabbering on about. But fear not! I’ll bring mostly up to speed.

In long, you can read all about it here.

In short–which is the version you were really hoping for–it’s my long-lived and ultimately unsuccessful attempt at becoming an online kimchi broker, but has so far only really ended with me having a fierce hatred for Amazon and capitalism, along with a totally useless Tumblr blog with about 4k followers.

Originally, that “totally useless” blog with a paltry 4,000 followers was supposed to act as the advertising arm of my Amazon store front, kimchiandketo.com, and all the profits were going to be made by getting a small cut of any Amazon sale made by clicking on any of my advertised products.

But thanks to the greedy forces of capitalism, Amazon decided to make that “small cut” even smaller, rendering my business model completely unprofitable. Hence, rendering my (by far) more successful blog as useless as a bull’s teat.

I have to admit, though…it was kinda nice being sorta popular in at least one part of the interwebs. And part of what made kimchi-and-keto so popular was the use of an automated re-blogging widget called Queue+. Basically it would let me reblog other blogs’ posts en masse, randomly, and on a regular schedule.

Of course, the more you post, the more exposure you get, the more followers you gain, and the bigger you ego-concerning-completely-asinine-and-inutile-things gets. Now back in August 2020, I had just about ran plumb out of what was once a rather generous supply of queued posts. Instead of finding new content to refill my queue, I instead found it much easier to reblog all the posts of the one blog I knew would be full of suitable content: mine.¹My Tumblr blog, not this blog you’re reading right now. Recycling all my posts was mildly tedious process, but at the end of the day I had quite a few posts ready to be fired off one at a time, at the frequency of my choosing:

At the time, I made a handy little calculation of when my now-overflowing well of posts would run dry, based on various posting frequencies:

Wanting to make this as passive as possible for as long as possible, I opted to stretch things out and set the interval at every 30 minutes. At the time, March 24, 2021, seemed like forever and a day away. But as you know, that date has come and went, and sure enough, the number of posts in my queue drained to zero.

Given that, really, all this is pretty pointless, I never found the time to try to load my queue back up, because, you know, priorities and all. Yet, it still bothered me that I was the owner of a fruitless blog, just gathering dust and Tumblr-weeds.²In all transparency, this was originally an unintended pun.

This simmering & unjustifiable anxiety finally got the best of me yesterday, when I got so sick and tired of my empty queue constantly reminding me of what a failure that the whole Prissy Pet Project has been that I finally decided to do something about it.

And this time, I was dead set on being popular forever. Or at least as long as Tumblr is around. Though that probably won’t be too much longer now.

Are you ready for some asinine details? Okay, here you go…

“Bottleneck.” That is the word of the day. What process really takes up most of the time for a given task? What is disproportionately slowing things down?

You remember how I described the process of adding posts to a Queue+ queue as “mildly tedious”? Well, in theory it should be instantaneous compared to hand-picking and adding posts one at a time. And by that standard it really is. But let me walk you through the process, and I’ll point out where, in practice, bottlenecks happen–and what to do about them.

The process itself is fairly simple. Just add ‘/archive’ to the URL of any Tumblr blog and you’ll get something that looks like this, which is what happens when you type ‘https://kimchi-and-keto.tumblr.com/archive’ into your browser:

So this is just a thumbnail gallery of all the posts on a particular Tumblr blog, sorted by Month/Year. Now in the pic above, what you don’t see is the additional options a Queue+ Chrome plugin will give you at the top. In fact, I learned that this particular plugin got banned from the Chrome App store (LOL?), and the only reason I can use it is because I still had it on my 10 year old PC, and it still functioned–much to my delight.

Well, if you have that plugin, you can essentially “Select All” posts with one click, and then add them to your Queue+ queue with another two quick clicks. But…

But the problem is that only add the ones that have had their thumbnails loaded, so the bottleneck then becomes “How fast can your old computer load as many thumbnails as possible?”

I know, I know, it sounds so ----- stupid. And it is. But that’s the burden I gotta bear if I want to stay popular on Tumblr for no good reason.

As it turns out, since you have to either scroll down or use the Page Down key to get new thumbnails to load, this takes forever, at least when you’re hoping to re-add all 11k+ of your posts.

Now, as with most things with me, I 1) don’t accept the status quo, and 2) usually let things get out of hand. Let’s see if I managed to stay true to form?

The first thing I realized was that I could speed things up by making those thumbnails as small as reasonably possible. How did I do this, you ask? By just zooming my browser out to ~10%! And I can’t believe it, but this actually worked:

Here’s a time-lapsed gif of loading one month’s worth of my posts (48 x ~30 = 1440), which represents about a minute or 2 in real time:

Ok, but what about the tedious task of sitting there and Page-Downing endlessly? Well I got you covered there too! I just used a little trick I learned by watching MacGyver growing up.

You see that candle in one of the pictures above? Well here’s what is really going on with it:

This is what I call the ol’ “Brick on the gas pedal” trick. That’s right: I took a little wood block I had lying around, put it on my Page Down key, then balanced a candle on it, and voila! I could Page Down without lifting (or, technically, “lowering”) a finger!

Given that I my poor computer could only load a limited number of thumbnails before choking, I had to break my task down by month. I had 14 of these, since the blog had been active from January 2020 up until it ran out of gas at the end of March 2021. This still would take 5-10 minutes per month, but towards the end I just said “Screw it!” and loaded all of February and January 2020 and did that in once shot (I was working backwards in time, if you were wondering).

This put me up to ~24k posts:

At 24k sweet, sweet posts, that should last me upwards of 500 days, or about a year and a half. Nice, but…could I do better?

It was at this point in time that I got another idea…Once I had a batch of post thumbnails loaded–the bottleneck, remember?–why couldn’t I just Select All and Add To Queue+ multiple times while I was already there?

The last batch I had loaded up consisted of about 3900 posts, so I invested another half hour and repeated this process ~10x (remember, my computer is slow–it probably would have gone faster on a more fancy computer).

So by the end of the day yesterday, what did I have to show for my hard work?

That’s right, 57,167 posts, ready to be fired off, 48 per day. If you do the math, that means I shouldn’t have to touch things for about 3 years and 3 months!

I should be happy, right? I should just leave it there, right?

Well, I actually did…but just for the evening though!

If we’re going to automate things, then let’s do it right and make the dang thing run until my 3-year-old graduates from high school at least!

So guess what I did with my spare time today? Yup, in between tasks, I loaded up my posts 2 months at a time, and then reposted them 10 times per batch!

“What do you have to show for it?”, you are most definitely wondering. Well here’s your answer:

269,920 Posts.

5623.3333333 Days

15.40639269406392 Years

It’s not quite forever forever–but it’s close!

The point of the story is: 1) why half-ass things when you can full-ass things? And 2) here’s to all those haters that said that my hours upon hours of watching MacGyver would never pay off. Well, guess which one of us is the most popular girl on Tumblr now, huh?

HUH?!?

Content created on: 16 July 2021 (Friday)

The wild, bloated kimchi casually sauntered through the driveway. They had no choice but to stab it mercilessly…

Hey, do y’all remember in the Before Times when I was keeping you informed of my scheme to profit handsomely as an internet kimchi ambassador/ salesman/ cartel leader? Aka, The Prissy Pet Project–you recall those dry-ass shenanigans, right?

If you don’t, you can relive all the glory and get caught up to speed here.

So my last official update was waaaay back on February 6th–almost 7 months ago! It feels like we’re probably due for another one…

The latter half of this blog post is dedicated to an abridged version of my project journal, for those who might somehow be stricken with urge to drudge through those details.

For the sake of the narrative, let me give everybody else as brief as a summary of which I am capable.

My business model is 2-fold. First, using automated posting software, I build a following on my obviously-named Tumblr blog, kimchi-and-keto. This is my entire marketing strategy.

Second, I use my Tumblr posts to link to kimchiandketo.com, my website that, in theory, will be a curated kimchi store featuring homemade review videos and extended diet/lifestyle information (keto, vegan, kosher, etc.). The store actually links to products on Amazon, and for every time someone goes through my website to buy some kimchi, I’ll earn a commission of around 5%. Further I will earn commission on anything that person buys on Amazon for the next 30 days.

Now, what has happened since February? Well, I had started to build a basic version of kimchiandketo.com, but hadn’t figured out how to easily (and properly) link to the products on Amazon.

Right when I was on the verge of solving that technical issue…COVID took over the world. ----- COVID. At that point I started directing my energy on more important concerns. You know, like surviving the collapse of society. Or how to actually be productive when I suddenly found myself an overly-chatty office mate (aka the Boss Lady).

Around July, I was finally re-energized enough to pick it back up again, even getting the website into a basic, but functional, state. I even made my first sale! Even if it was to an acquaintance, it still counts.

And that is when I discovered that back in April, Amazon decided to really stick it to the Amazon Associates, the entrepreneurs like me that would drive business to Amazon and receive a commission in return. You can think of Associates as the little guys & gals that had helped build their empire.

And they/we got screwed over real good by Amazon when they slashed the commission rates to insultingly-low levels. Remember how I just said my business model included a 5% commission? Well, for my category of products, Groceries, that got cut to 1%. One gosh darn percent!

For my first sale, the product price was $20 before shipping. Now, instead of earning $1 off that sale, it was a paltry 20 cents! On top of that, they cut the window for earning extra commissions from 30 days to 24 hours.

In short, they blew up my whole business model.

Now I have a couple of thoughts in light of this unpleasant development…but I’ll save those for next week.

For now, I will reward your loyalty with these videos of the Boss Lady’s parents spear-fishing some wild kimchi that wandered into their driveway.

[expand title=”Click here for the actual context of this video.”]Ok, for realz, what happened was her dad ordered a big ol’ bag of kimchi a week before we all went on vacation, but the shipping was slow af. He recruited his neighbor to pick it up when it was delivered and keep it refrigerated until we returned. No problem, right?

Well, the post office decided to hold it instead…for lord knows what reason. Anyways, letting a bag of fermenting cabbage sit in the heat for ~11 days can end in disaster if you’re not careful…hence trying to stab it with an 8-foot pole.

Oh, shenanigans.[/expand]

Optional Reading

[expand title=”Click here for The Official Prissy Pet Project Journal: The Missing Pages.”]

Journal Date: 7 February 2020 (Friday):
Signed up as Amazon Associate, you need to have a pre-existing website for them to check out, so I put thepointofthestory.com on the application. Key detail: I have 180 days to get 3 sales, or else they shut my account down and I would need to set up a new one.

Journal Date: 10 February 2020 (Monday):
Took the plunge and bought & installed the REHub theme¹https://themeforest.net/ for WordPress for $61.

Journal Date: 19 February 2020 (Wednesday):
Tried to “easily” set up a store linking to products on Amazon. This was a huge fail, Amazon and/or REHub had changed some policies back in October 2019, making it much more difficult to get access to the key features that made things easy. Key detail: Either I drop $50 for the Pro version of something-in-rather²Content Egg plugin, if you care about that detail. or figure out how to get 3 sales (see Figure 1) the hard way so I can have access to the API.³Code that does the hard work of interfacing with Amazon. Even in the case of the latter, I will have to hope my programming skills are sufficient to pick up the slack.

Journal Date: 24 February 2020 (Monday):
Was teased with a solution in the form of Content Egg’s “Offer Module”. However, wasn’t able to get it to work before giving up for the day.

Journal Date: 2 March 2020 (Monday):
I found out that the website that “Franklin” had set up in the guide I’ve been following was defunct…Womp womp womp! That is not reassuring, LOL. BUT, I finally figured out how to manually add product (see Figure 2), so I searched for “vegan kimchi” on Amazon and added ol’ Madge’s Vegan Kimchi as my test product. Key detail: I think I can build my store the slow way, but it should allow me to earn those elusive first 3 qualifying sales.

Journal Date: 11 March 2020 (Wednesday):
Welp, it’s official: COVID-19 is about to clean America’s clock.

Journal Date: 15 March 2020 (Sunday):
Here comes COVID quarantine…not so sure that this might be the beginning of the end of functioning society. Key detail: Going to put this project indefinitely on hold and focus on more pressing matters, such as putting a bug-out plan together and learning how to actually start a campfire.

Journal Date: 11 July 2020 (Saturday):
Finally found the motivation to get back to this project. Great news is that my Tumblr following has grown to over 1,100 in the meantime! That might be enough to actually start driving business to my website.

I have about a month to get those first 3 sales! First step is getting a basic website in place that acquaintances can access and formally place a kimchi order that I will get credit for. Then I can think about spiffing up the website and opening it to the public (via my Tumblr followers).

Key detail: I have a live, bare-bones website up with 5 or 6 products that people can order from, and now I need to call in some favors from 3 friends to get my qualifying orders in before August 7th.

Journal Date: 16 July 2020 (Thursday):
Got my first sale from an accomplice who is already kimchi connoisseur! They paid $30 total–$20 for the kimchi and $10 for shipping. So will only earn commission on the $20. Key detail: now to call in those other 2 favors!

Journal Date: 18 July 2020 (Saturday):
While waiting for my first sale to shop in my Amazon Associate account, I decided to refresh my memory as to how much I could expect to make from this historic first sale. I found the following table of current commision rates (see Figure 3):⁴https://affiliate-program.amazon.com/help/node/topic/GRXPHT8U84RAYDXZ

And now, to convey the raw emotion of the moment, I will let my raw & unedited notes describe what happened next:

“FUUUUUUUCK.⁵Sorry about the potty words, Mom. It used to be 5%!

Apparently around mid-April Amazon decided to really ----- their associates over.⁶https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/14/amazon-slashes-commission-rates-for-affiliate-program.html

Also saw elsewhere that what used to be a 60-day cookie was switched to a 30-day cookie and is now a meager 24-hour cookie. Meaning I would only get commission on sales within 24 hours of them following my link.

In other words, my whole business model just got driven over the side of a cliff.

Well, this is ----- depressing. Will need to look into other associate options, but right now it’s hard to see a profitable path forward…”

Key detail: Welp, I’m glad I hadn’t built an entire empire already, only to have it de-valued by 80% overnight. Suppose I dodged a bullet on this one….

Journal Date: 28 August 2020 (Friday):
My Tumblr follower count is officially at 1,495–not, too bad! Also, I recycled all my Tumblr posts back into Queue+; currently sitting at 10,500 posts and posting every half hour, I should be golden until mid-March 2021. Key detail: Let’s be optimistic: I might be able to salvage this project yet…

[/expand]

Content created on: 28 August 2020 (Friday)

Editor’s note: This is yet another entry in the saga of my Kimchi Baron of the Interwebs aspirations, aka The Prissy Pet Project. Perhaps you need to read the most recent journal entry, Work-From-Throne Job Opportunity Available, to get slightly more up to speed.

The short version of where we’re at in the process is that I’m in the middle of building up a following for my Tumblr blog, kimchi-and-keto. In the meantime, I need to set up an internet storefront that acts as a portal in which customers can buy all sorts of kimchi, etc. via Amazon.

[expand title=”Click here if you want a few more details…”]

Currently I have been following a random online guide to making money via Tumblr.¹Tumblr, a rather popular micro-blogging site

As a reminder here is the basic checklist of such schemes:²All screen shots should be assumed to be from https://www.onlinedimes.com/how-make-money-on-tumblr/

The short version of this strategy is this:

1. Find some niche you like, and start a Tumblr blog related to that topic.
2. 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.
3. Set up a basic Amazon store selling products related to your blog’s theme/brand.
4. Use your automated posting tools to advertise your store on all your posts as they spread through Tumblr like a virus.
5. Profit.³To 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.
6. Repeat Step 5 without lifting a finger.

[/expand]

Last I left you, I was reveling in the fact that my main task at hand–trying to get people to follow me–could be done from the comfort and convenience of my own crapper…

Journal Date: 27 January 2020 (Monday)

After a little over a week of relatively active pursuit of Tumblr followers, I noticed that some of my new followers were ones that I had not solicited at all.

In other words, I was starting to see some “organic” growth in my fan base. I have no idea how they were coming across my blog, but I do offer a lot of pretty pictures of food, so I’m not totally surprised that people are finding themselves attracted to kimchi-and-keto.

I tallied up the new users I didn’t recognize, and concluded that of the 14 new users I had since the last update, I was pretty sure that 7 of them were ones that I hadn’t put direct effort into obtaining. It’s BOGO on new users I guess!

More specifically, it was 7 new users over the course of 7 days, so I’m thinking that if I’m getting 1 new user every day on average without putting in extra work, then maybe I can start shifting my focus elsewhere…

And there are definitely “elsewheres” where I need to start putting some serious effort into. Also, money. I need to start putting money into other efforts.

There were two expenses that Franklin, our online guide, had included in his Tumblr domination plan, but I had originally balked at just dropping money before having an idea of whether or not it was worth it.

However, I think in the back of my mind I’ve finally resolved to just jump right in and go ahead and invest $20 in Queue+ and $70 on a good theme. Glancing at one of the themes previously, I realized that it definitely offered a lot of valuable features that there was no way in hell I would be able to create myself, even I had the skillz already. It’s all about added value, yo.

First, let’s get that theme so we can start building a real website with real products, and at least have a non-zero chance of someone visiting it and patronizing us. Here is the link as prescribed by the aforementioned guide: https://codecanyon.net/item/woozone-amazon-associates-bundle-pack/11240475. Clicking on it now, and…

…that’s definitely not that same site that came up last time I followed that link.

Oh, just great. When I finally get the gumption to pull the trigger on buying a theme, the hosting site decided to experience some downtime.⁴Note that it was back online when I checked the following day. So good news there… Goddammit.

Okay, so maybe that’s I sign that I shouldn’t focus on that just yet. My motivation for paying for the premium version of Queue+, is that with the free version I’m limited to queueing up 600 posts at any given time. Now that may seem like a lot, but when posting one every 15 minutes, that comes out to roughly 6 days of auto-pilot before having to load it up again.

But I’m most decidedly at the point where reloading it is more of a distraction, and also I’m starting to run low, so now seems like a good time to drop $20 and then load the mother ----- up so I don’t have to touch it again for months.

Upgrading now, and…

For the record, it’s $27 a year now (instead of $20 whenever the Guide was put together)…oh well. Okay, time to load this ----- up as much as possible!

OMFG, trying to add from this archive: https://keto.tumblr.com/archive/2016/2/filter-by/photo but it won’t let me select any posts.

Argghh! It won’t even let me select a single one. Dammit. Why me? Why now?

*Does a quick Google search; only glances at results*

Oh GOOD ----- LORD. The second I drop money on Queue+, they get shut down for having an illicit cryptocurrency script running in the background.

I don’t know if they’re shut down for good or what, but sounds like that I could have loaded up my Queue a few hours earlier than when I tried, and at least had that going strong (it seems the extension is the offender).

This is what happens when you hesitate, folks. I’m getting screwed over as punishment for my hemming and hawing, I guess.

To buy me some time, I’ve throttled back how often I post, changing it to every 30 minutes instead of every 15, thereby getting double mileage out of my remaining stock.

Journal Date: 28 January 2020 (Tuesday)

When I search google for news of Archive Poster being taken down from the Chrome Store, I only find articles dating from around December 2017/January 2018, so I’m wondering if that’s a red herring?

But I’m trying it on [a much more up to date computer I have access to] and it’s not working there either…I also try logging out of kimchi-and-keto and logging in as kimchiandketo, but still no dice.  Seriously What The Fuck?

So, good news: the current Archive Poster is not the previous naughty version that got kicked off the Chrome Store. Bad news: it stopped working for no apparent reason.

I’m seriously freaking out here, because having a copious amount of automated posts are the critical marketing avenue for my forthcoming kimchi store. And if I can’t add posts to my Q+ en masse, then the whole project becomes too tedious and time consuming for me to continue…

Journal Date: 31 Friday 2020 (Friday)

I’m down to less than 10 posts in my Q+ and things are looking pretty bleak. Fortunately, I found an instance where the Archive Poster works, although it just lets me add from my current feed…and I’m following so many random-ass blogs, that only about half (or less) of what shows up in my feed is on-brand enough for me to reblog.

It will do in a pinch, and I’ve added enough to last me over the weekend…but only because I’ve throttled all the way back to posting every 90 minutes now. Oof.

I’m actually thiiiiiiis close to figuring out how to reverse-engineer these cursed Chrome extensions, and figure out how to fix the stupid thing, given that I’ve found one similar example where the code actually worked. I’m telling you, knowledge is power, and once I get my web-dev coding chops in order, I’m going to be a ----- god.

But that’ll have to wait, because, yeah, I tried it and I’m definitely in over my head.

Journal Date: 3 February 2020 (Monday)

On an unrelated note, the Chiefs just won the Super Bowl in heart-stopping fashion last night, so hellz yeah that was pretty awesome.

But back to the crisis at hand. Here is my Queue+ dashboard:

The Prissy Pet Project is at Death’s doorstep here, people.

However, it turns out that the Chiefs’ world championship in football Americano wasn’t the only awesome thing that happened. After checking regularly over the past week, it appears the Archive Poster extension is back to working!!! Have no idea what was wrong…but what I found humorous was that the fiasco was chronicled in the Review section for Archive Poster on the Chrome Store (be sure to read them bottom-to-top, and also at the time of this screen capture, “5 days ago” was actually around the 1st or 2nd of February):

Anyways, to quote Mr. Pacanelili above, “thank you, thank you, THANK YOU.” Time to make hay while the sun still shines!

*Goes to ----- town adding posts to Q+*

Later that night:

I’ve turned back up my posting rate to every 30 minutes, so that comes out to a burn-down rate of 48 per day. So I should be good for another ~137 days. Heck, yes.

Given that I’ve been on autopilot for about a week in regards to working towards my first goal of attaining 50 followers, I figure I would give you an update-update.

But first, I’ve posted my Tumblr dashboard below, tracking the number of Notes,⁵Number of times that people have either liked, commented, or reblogged one of my posts. which is pretty much directly proportional to the number of Posts. You can very clearly see where my posting volume/frequency just fell off a cliff thanks to Archive Poster’s busted ass:

Although I just realized that the picture above kind of spoils the drama of revealing how many followers I now have, I’ll share the New Follower (over the last month) dashboard with you anyways:

I’m up to 44⁶Actually 47 at the writing of this post on 6 Feb. overall, and holding pretty steady at a do-nothing rate of ~1 a day!

Now, FINALLY I can get back around to try putting my kimchi-themed website together.

Wish me luck! I just hope that my next update doesn’t end with the following:

The point of the story is, maybe you should listen to the Universe when it tells you pretty clearly to stop whatever the ----- that is that you’re up to.

If you finally are motivated enough to take long put-off action, only to find yourself thoroughly cock-blocked by God-with-a-capital-D-so-my-Censorship-plugin-doesn’t-bleep-him-or-is-it-really-her-out and/or technology, well, maybe that’s a sign you should have quit while you were ahead…

definitely how I hope to never end one of these blog posts

Content created on: 6 February 2020 (Thursday)

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

As a reminder here is the basic checklist of such schemes:³All screen shots should be assumed to be from https://www.onlinedimes.com/how-make-money-on-tumblr/

The short version of this strategy is this:

1. Find some niche you like, and start a Tumblr blog related to that topic.
2. 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.
3. Set up a basic Amazon store selling products related to your blog’s theme/brand.
4. Use your automated posting tools to advertise your store on all your posts as they spread through Tumblr like a virus.
5. 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.
6. 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…

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:

2. Pictures of meals that are in desperate need of a side of kimchi:

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.

As a reminder here is the basic checklist of such schemes:³All screen shots should be assumed to be from https://www.onlinedimes.com/how-make-money-on-tumblr/

The short version of this strategy is this:

1. Find some niche you like, and start a Tumblr blog related to that topic.
2. 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.
3. Set up a basic Amazon store selling products related to your blog’s theme/brand.
4. Use your automated posting tools to advertise your store on all your posts as they spread through Tumblr like a virus.
5. 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.
6. 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.

Also, some very relevant information I came across in one of the links⁵https://codecanyon.net/item/woozone-amazon-associates-bundle-pack/11240475 found in Franklin’s guide is Amazon’s commission rate for various products:

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 3rd installment of the Prissy Pet Project. While not required reading, it may be helpful to have previously read Epitaph: A Preface to Passive Income Adventures to Come and (more importantly) Prissy Pet Project Parte Primera.

Journal Date: 22 November 2019 (Friday)

To bring everyone up to speed, a few weeks ago I decided to get off my duff and get to developing some of the passive income streams that the Boss Lady had requested.

Trying to avoid the trap of overthinking every little decision, I decided to jump right into some internet maven’s guide to making money via Tumblr.¹Tumblr is a micro-blogging site. My thoughts can’t be contained succinctly enough for a micro-blog. Pfffff.

As a reminder here is the basic checklist of such schemes:²All screen shots should be assumed to be from https://www.onlinedimes.com/how-make-money-on-tumblr/

Last I left you, I had honed in on the illusion of pets living in luxury as my niche–and hence the moniker The Prissy Pet Project.

Two of the primary motivations behind this choice were 1) if I picked something that I didn’t give a flying ----- about, then I could easily develop more passive income streams based around whatever arbitrary niche I or others chose; and 2) I loved how frickin’ absurd the whole idea seemed.

To that 2nd point: Luxury is such a poor investment of resources, why ya gonna go and double down on such a bad life choice by lavishing those little free-loaders who will never contribute to the household? At least with kids, the hope is that your investment will pay off come the day you can’t wipe your own ass and are at the mercy of others.³Been there, done that, and it suuuuucks. That story will most like show up at some point on the NSFM part of the Point’s Patreon page. So I confess that there is something seriously enticing about the idea of making money off a demographic that I feel little regrets looking long down my nose at…

But alas, I’m here today, sorrowful to inform you that we will not be profiting from pampered putty-tats anytime soon. I suppose putting the “ridicule” back into “ridiculous” will have to wait until another day…

Now that I’ve broken your hearts, we can move on to making progress on the overall project.

It’s interesting that I should use the word “progress,” as I haven’t really done anything concrete in either the physical or digital worlds since writing the last article on this topic.⁴@TheBossLady, for whom this functions as a project update: as of the actual writing and publishing of this article, I have made some concrete progress…I just don’t have time to talk about it right now.

However, the subconscious is a powerful processor, and while it may seem counterintuitive on the surface, distracting yourself away from a problem is often one of the most effective ways to solve it.

In fact, I’ve heard of an intriguing practice where you’re supposed to write a letter addressed to “Dear Future Genius Expert” laying out the problem vexing you, then mail it to yourself, having it delivered two weeks later. Then by time you consciously circle back around to the problem upon receipt of the letter, your sub-conscious has had a chance to really digest it, often leading to the pleasantly surprising discovery that you’ve already come up with a solution. I really want to try it out for myself sometime.

Anyways, all that micro-digression⁵Yes, that was indeed a micro-aggression pun. You’re welcome. to say that not forcing the issue with myself has really paid off. In the meantime, I’ve been able to refine my vision for this project, and have much more confidence and excitement moving forward.

Honestly, I think as soon as I said out loud “hey world, Ima be funny and develop a brand around fancy-ass animals” I could feel it in my gut that that would not be the topic of pursuit. Actually, come to think of it, I think it was really when I started doing a basic search on Tumblr for luxury/pet content that I thought “aww, poop. This was not a well thought-out and researched plan. Nuts.”

In fairness to me, at least I had made it clear in the previous post that my niche of passion was very much subject to change. Indubitably, my spidey-sense was telling me that I would want to explore more reasonable options. ----- you, Pragmatism. Foil me once, shame on you…

So, realizing that I was definitely going to want to keep my options open, in the back of my mind I slowly started ticking through the list of things that at least mildly interested me. With each one I would try to assess the passion others might have for it. Then, if it seemed like the potential candidate could merit a critical mass of consumers, I would try to size up how long I might be able to sustain interest in it.

One that I kept coming back to was what I like to call “Half-Ass Keto.”

Back in March of this year, I had come to a tipping point with my body. Despite working out fairly regularly, my excess body weight persisted, and in doing so was giving me all sorts of fits, particularly with my back and joints. Also, I was turning into a spitting image of my father, except that at 38 I was where he was weight-wise in his mid-40s.

It was at this particular moment in time when I happened to have the chance to catch up with a neighborhood friend I hadn’t seen in a few months. In the meantime, he had trimmed up fairly nicely, and attributed his success to the Keto diet. This mirrored similar success I had witnessed a close co-worker achieve over the previous 18 months using a similar approach.

With these two anecdotal data points at hand, I made up my mind then and there that I had to do something different, and that something might as well be Keto.

Now, surely almost everyone has heard of the Keto diet, where one consumes minimal carbs and primarily gets their caloric intake from fats, supplemented by proteins. Yeah, that one.

The idea is that you get your body into a bio-chemical state called ketosis, in which it develops a preference for burning fat over sugars.

The problem that I have with it is that it is totally bougie, almost as annoying as those Neanderthals amongst us who insist on sticking to a Paleo diet. The other issue I have is that I know myself well enough to know that it is not in the best interest of my mental health to try to force my body to walk a tightrope trying to stay in ketosis.

No, the punk-rock ethos in me insists that I refuse to adhere to the Keto principles religiously. However, by taking advantage of the vast Keto resources and eliminating the majority of carbs from my diet, I have actually been able to succeed in a sustainable manner.

Despite my half-ass commitment to the Keto cause,⁶As one astute co-worker put it, “So…you’re never actually in ketosis? Then aren’t you just on a low-carb diet then?” it has worked out pretty well.

Figure 1 illustrates this nicely, further dramatized by the 8-year window of data. In this view, my Half-Ass Keto adventure has been like driving my body weight off a cliff.

The nice thing about Keto is that although it is something of a fad diet, it seems to have enough staying power that there should be significant interest in it for the foreseeable future. And there is definitely a tendency for those who get into to it to really get into it. Ergo, it checks my first box of something others are passionate about.

And although I’m not whole-heartedly, insanely passionate about Keto, I have enough interest in it to focus on it for this project.

So that’s most of the story of how I switched from luxury pets to Keto.

However, that’s only half the story…

For context for the rest of the story, the Boss Lady is half Korean, and because of this we regularly have our refrigerator stocked with one or two obscenely large jars of kimchi. For those not familiar, kimchi is a very traditional and very Korean side dish consisting of pickled and fermented vegetables. The most familiar of these would be Napa cabbage and daikon radish kimchis.

At some point in my Keto Half-Assery, I upped my kimchi game because, well, as my mother-in-law first explained it to me, “Kimchi: number two healthiest food in the world!”

We all really should be eating more kimchi anyways because it’s probiotic properties works wonders down unders, if you know what I mean.

It helps you poo real good, and healthy-like, too, is what I’m saying. So, while she didn’t intend it when she said it, it was comically appropriate that my MIL described it as the number two healthiest food.

Anyways, it was this particular property that made it a useful compliment to the Keto lifestyle, which–did you know?–is often plagued by chronic constipation. So it seemed like there would be some potential to meld the two concepts together.

Indeed, the point of the story is that my incessant constipation and kimchi consumption inspired the Boss Lady to suggest the great business idea of Keto-kimchi.⁷A surprising number of kimchi brands will add sugar, a mortal sin in Keto-land. And since many kimchis are naturally Keto-friendly, it occurred to me that we wouldn’t need to start a business to fulfill this idea. Rather, it would all be a game of marketing an existing product. Not that am I pro at that, but at least it’s much more conceivable than opening up a ----- factory, right?

With this idea in the peripheral vision of my mind, I realized that this flippant “make money off of Tumblr” project could actually morph into a much better change-the-world-for-good kimchi campaign.

Therefore, the current strategy is to try to build a Keto-centric following on Tumblr, then funnel that audience to my online kimchi shop, from which I can make a modest kimchi commission.

I must day though, I find this to be a rather funny thought: when the Boss Lady told me I should try exploring the idea of being my own boss, it never would have occurred to me to pursue the job title of Kimchi Baron. Yet here I am.

Speaking of titles, this leads to the next important step in monetizing Tumblr: branding. Success and failure can all hinge on nothing more than a pithy brand, so that requires a decent chunk of my attention.

Now, Kimchi King sounded like the first obvious choice, but whatdyaknow? It’s already taken. Naturally, my next thought was to hop onto Google Translate and see what kind of Korean wordplay I could come up with. But even the Korean word for king, wang, was taken. Wang Kimchi, sadly, is a no-go.

This little exercise degenerated incrementally. First I was looking into Korean synonyms for authority. So, king, ruler, lord, etc.

Oh? But then what’s that? Another member of that word family is master. Where have I used that term before?

Ah, that’s right:

(In case you’re curious as to the origins and relevance of that phrase, feel free to check out Paging Dr. Mix-A-Lot.)

At this point, the situation had become full-on degenerate: given that kimchi is so ----- good for your butt-health, an Ass-Master branded kimchi store would be oddly appropriate for the situation.

In my mind I could see the stars are aligning at this point. Remember me discussing asinine Venn diagrams?⁸Of course not. You have some catching up to do, and I forgive you for this. Read about it here. Well, it seemed like the circles of Make Easy Money on Tumblr, Score Major Points with the Boss Lady for Fleshing Out Her Brilliant Ideas, and All Things Ass were all converging to this singular point.

In my head, I couldn’t help thinking over and over: “Could it be? Am I the Chosen One? Am I destined to become the Ass-Master?!?”

Now, the only way to make this situation better is to add a fourth circle to the Venn diagram, Being Witty in Another Language.

I was chasing down all Korean variations of ass and master to see if I could come up with anything that would even roughly translate to my desired phrase.

…and this all led to this discovery:

I hadn’t thought of exploring translations of master’s synonym (kinda), president. But where it really gets good is taking an even closer look at that particular Korean wordage:

So, if we’re in the business of compromising master for president, then we might as well accept what the universe has offered up to us and say that ileum is about as close to ass as we could hope for, right? It’s all digestion-related, so there’s that at least.

The point is that if President Ileum is a good enough translation of Ass Master, then in theory I could run with the brand:

회장 회장

which is latinized as hoejang-hoejang, which in turn can be bastardized as “Hey John…Hey John!”

It’s got a certain ring to it, doesn’t it?

Hey John…Hey John! brand kimchi: you will be president of your ileum in no time!

Advertisement voice-over

Alternatively, we could go off on a tangent and use President Ileum as inspiration for the next iteration of branding.

How about…

President Kimchi Jong Ileum brand kimchi: because if you’re going to abuse the Korean language and appropriate Korean culinary culture, you might as well piss off the Korea that has nuclear weapons while you’re at it…

The over-honest voice-over in my head

Well, folks, I’m going to have to leave you on the cliff-hanger of whether or not I fall ass-backwards into racism and/or a nuclear war with my branding.

Believe it or not, though, I have actually made real, concrete progress on the tasks of this project in the time since 22 November, but you’ll need to tune in next time⁹”Next time,” as in “before the end of the month of December.” to hear all about it…see you then!

Content created on: 22/30 November and 1 December 2019 (Fri/Sat/Sun).

As I oh-so-ramblingly mentioned in my most recent post, Epitaph, I have greater plans for this blog than it just being a written repository of every single memory I can conjure up.

I actually hope to provide useful information for my Dear Readers.

I know, I know. It’s a ludicrous proposition. I’ll give you a moment to laugh it out.

Okay, now that you got your giggles out, I would like to get down to business, if you don’t mind.

While I have a couple of alternative-income generating adventures in my back pocket,¹Fear not, those tales will be shared here in due time… I thought I would start off with an undertaking that y’all could be a part of from the very beginning.

With that in mind, let me try to set your expectations to a realistic level.

First, it is entirely possible that this could be, um, less than profitable. A word of caution to those who would be tempted to play along at home: you might want to wait a couple of episodes before trying anything out for yourself. Which brings me to…

Point #2: Mistakes Will Be Made. Let me make them so you don’t have to! Speaking from experience–namely my side hustle as a “small-time ticket broker”–I can say that there’s a pretty good chance that there will be a few pitfalls into which I will pitfall, and in doing so, allow those who follow in my footsteps to side step them with deftness and ease. In fact, I’m actually banking on a certain level of follies, as my mistakes == useful information for the public == maybe some sweet blog-generated coin. With any luck, some of them might be entertaining as well.

And that segues into my 3rd caveat: I also run the real risk of being successful without any interesting incident of which to speak. What if…mistakes aren’t made? I would say this is the worst-case scenario I can imagine: a series of boring blog posts. Oh, the humor-anity.

Finally, the last comment I have before I dive in is an important one: I make zero guarantee that any of my business ventures embarked upon herein necessarily contribute meaningfully to society. However, that by no means mean that they will be devoid of any and all ethical standards. It’s just that we all need to be okay with the idea that we’re not probably going to be curing cancer or solving world hunger any time soon.

In the bigger picture though, there’s a chance that I might fall ass-backwards into doing something halfway noble. Our²Our, as in collectively between me and the Boss Lady larger strategy is for me to develop passive income streams on an ongoing and, eventually, full-time basis.³I’m actually My Own ----- Boss for half of the work week; I still daylight as a scientist the other 20 hours/week. Though it might take a year or three, in time the Boss Lady will be able to quit her 9-to-5 job as well and be able to pursue her more refined passions.

So, in the beginning, I’m comfortable with just about any legit income, as my focus is to cover the lower levels of my family’s Hierarchy of Needs (see Figure 1).⁴As first mentioned in Epitaph: A Preface to Passive Income Adventures To Come.

Importantly, though, if I’m doing the whole “passive” thing correctly, then in theory the amount coming in on a monthly basis will be cumulative (gray arrow in Figure 1). As I complete projects and move them into their minimal maintenance phase, that base monthly amount will cover higher and higher levels of our Hierarchy of Needs pyramid, allowing more room to take greater risks on projects that are more high-minded and virtuous, despite having less certainty of a financial pay-off.

When we get to the point where the minimal-effort monies reach the top level, Self-Actualization, that’s when the real fun begins. You can imagine this situation as sort of a boot-strapped MacArther Genius Grant: without having to worry about making money, our Inner Clevernesses (me) and Kindnesses (the Boss Lady) will have full freedom to flourish to their fullest potential and beyond.⁵…the grave! (See sentence following for context).

What’s my secret ambition, you ask?

Well, I’m a bit sheepish to say this out loud…but the most ridiculous thing I can think of–and therefore aspire to–is to find the cure for ghosts.

Altruism so great that it needs multiple planes of existence to contain it? All I have to say is: Suck on that, Bill Gates!

Genius, my ass.

Okay, so I kinda got far afield there. In the process of writing this, I’ve realized that all that I’ve said so far is actually what I was hoping to say in the Epitaph post before I got distracted with that online headstone simulator. So I guess it’s fitting that somehow it circled back round to the topic of mortality.

Anyways, I have a working theory for the reason I spent several extra paragraphs trying to convince you that I’m ultimately going to do something super awesome for all human-kind: I’m over-compensating for the vapid and asinine nature of what is about to happen here.

Without further ado, let’s begin, shall we?

Prologue

As I mature in years and accumulate life wisdom, one thing that has changed significantly is my understanding of what truly constitutes “hard work.”

Growing up as an indentured servant to the family farm, I’m no stranger to working hard. Hell, I’ve even pulled a 72-hour shift while drilling an irrigation well with my dad. That’s a story you’ll get to hear more about eventually–though, surprisingly, it’s just going to be used as a pretext for me to philosophize about pancakes. Go figure.

Anyways, for the longest time I couldn’t figure out why it was so difficult for me, armed to the tooth with an eager willingness to labor intensively, to parlay that enthusiasm into a stellar scientific/engineering career.

You need someone to help you move? I’m your go-to guy!

Do you have to dig up your back yard and fill it in with gravel before bricking it over, but live in a condo and therefore have to traipse through the condo to deliver the gravel one bucket at a time? You can bet your ass I’ll be there for you, Friend! Even if I have chronic back issues for the rest of my life because of it!⁶Yes, this is yet another story whose time to be told is yet to come.

Well, at some point in time within the last 5 years, I happened to borrow a book from my scientific mentor approximately entitled “Getting Shit Done” (or something close to that). I’m pretty sure that it was from reading this that got my mental wheels turning, eventually coming to the conclusion that I’ve grossly mischaracterized hard work my whole life.

It’s decision making that is truly the exhausting activity in which one could engage. Once that lightbulb went off, I immediately understood why CEOs and other business executives get compensated so very handsomely: they’re being paid to constantly make decisions on matters of consequence. Over and over…endlessly…with minimal time to really mull them over.

Good gravy, I’m plumb exhausted just imagining that.

The point being, this insight largely drives a guiding principle of our current exercise: don’t waste disproportional amounts of energy trying to make the perfect decision. Good enough! shall be our battle cry. We need to get shit done and get money rolling in.

I’ve got ghosts to emancipate, and have only so much time before I become one myself…

Below are the first several journal entries of my inaugural Point of the Story Passive Pursuit, with more to come in future blog posts as the adventure plays out in real time.

21 October 2019 (Monday)

With the bulk of the effort of getting this blog up and running behind me, and nearing the end of wrapping up my other main project, optimization of the extended familial real estate situation, it is time for me to set my sights on focusing on bringing new money into the family coffers. In reference to the guiding principle of good enough just laid out above, it’s not important that I pick the perfect pursuit now–it’s more important that I’m doing something.

That something turned out to be me Googling “how to make money on Tumblr”, which in turn led me to a decent in-depth tutorial,⁷https://www.onlinedimes.com/how-make-money-on-tumblr/; it is implied that all further screenshots in the post are attributed to this website. which shall be our project’s blueprint.

I mean, hey, why not, right? The less decisions, the better, and I might as well stand on the shoulders of this internet giant. —>

Looking over his page, I did notice that is hard to tell how old this post is and if things will work exactly as described.  I couldn’t find a date indicating when it was published, nor any dates associated with the comments. I did see one screen shot showing the date 2015, so it’s not older than that, but it is still unclear at what point in time it was published since then.

That notwithstanding, he fairly quickly lays out the main ingredients to harness the power of Tumblr for capital gains purposes:

Let’s try to assess how my skills and experience match up with this list, and identify those tasks I think might either require significant effort and/or are unfamiliar enough to me that it is hard estimate the required effort.

• Okay, so of these, I have experience setting up Web Hosting. At least I got that going for me.
• Setting up a Tumblr Account should be fairly easy, and with this guide, the Automated Posting System should be no problem either.
• I don’t know how much work will go into setting up an Amazon Associates Account, but I guess I’ll find out!
• It really seems the most decision making–the real drain of mental energy–will go in to deciding on “A Passionate Niche”.

Fortunately, the article goes on to provide some guidance:

On a side note, I find it curious and amusing that adult content is conspicuously absent, but it is just as well.⁸Not that I would have seriously considered it, its just that given that it is indubitably a highly profitable for those who choose that path, one would expect it to at least get a shout out… You see, I need to have an endeavor I can fully stand behind, and perhaps even bring my girls onboard so they can start building their own ----- college fund.

So, sex & drugs are out of the question.  Rock n’ roll, however, is NOT out of the question, but my spidey sense is telling me to pocket that idea for now, and maybe use it later if I decide to develop several of these types of projects.

Back to finding a niche: well, when I think about it, it is not immediately obvious what I am passionate about, so I’m going to need some divine inspiration here. This list is a decent place to at least start forming some ideas…

Now, spoiler alert, I’ve already skipped ahead and got a fuller idea of how Tumblr shenanigans can be monetized, and a key aspect of this guy’s strategy is that people will buy things related to that niche. More importantly, other purchases they make on Amazon somehow get credited to you and you make commission off of these non-niche sales.

With that in mind “Luxury” caught my attention. Why? Well, it’s all about correlation right? I want to find a niche in which people who tend to buy items related to that topic are likely to make large & expensive unrelated purchases.

Fancy people be buying fancy stuff, yo. So I’m thinking going with luxury might be something that will pay dividends exponentially.

Now, this article goes on to describe various ways to find your own personal niche, particularly ones that are profitable.  It is left to the reader as an exercise to go through this process for themselves. For me, I’m sticking with the principle of good enough, remember?

After reading through the whole article, I’ve decided to leave my mind to percolate over ideas for a while. At this point in time, I’m not even sure I’m to take any action or even make a plan. For now, I’m doing just a quick read-over of what this method entails and think a little bit more if it’s worth the time investment.

Really, though, without knowing what niche I want to pursue, it is hard to take any concrete action.  And without concrete action to take, the details of the scheme are hard to retain without the immediate context.

5 November 2019 (Tuesday)

It is becoming clear that I need to really just start trying different revenue streams and see which ones actually are viable sources of income.  Most of the candidates I’ve considered pursing would largely be described as internet entrepreneurship, in that they don’t involve me handling much physical items (inventory, etc), and are largely done via the internet.  Amazon drop shipping, online tee-shirt shop, etc, are examples of these. Another common key factor I’m taking into account is minimal risk, so again, anything with actual inventory in my possession is out, as is real estate.

A key contextual clue as to why I’m currently motivated to worry less about specifically what I do next, and focus more on doing anything, is that it is becoming painfully obvious to me that the sooner I am able to replace at least half my previous income with passive income, I will be a much, much happier man.

Given that monetizing Tumblr is something at least within my periphery, and that [as described in the referenced post] it has the potential to be highly passive (nothing is truly 100% passive), it seems like I should see if I can come up with a niche and then just plow forward from there.  Again, making this decision appears to be the real wildcard in the process, and I get the feeling that there is a fair amount of room for error for all the other tasks without killing your chances of getting a decent return on your effort.

Now remember, my initial impression was that I would need to look outside my particular interest set to find a good niche market. This sounds like we have a grand opportunity to perform sort of an experiment here…

I set forth an arbitrary goal of making it this method work in a niche for which I have ZERO passion–i.e., make it an objective, logical, and by-the-numbers pursuit.  This is particularly relevant because I tend to have interests and tastes outside the normal distribution of the general population. And also emotions aren’t the best guide when it comes to business, so it’s best to leave them at the door.

The third and final motivator for this approach that I will note here is probably the most important: repeatability and reducing overhead. If I can do it for any given niche, then why not try other niches, especially since I’ve already gone through the motions and it will be easier and easier each time?  Also, I could offer my services to my IRL friends and family, helping them convey their passions into passive revenue.  In that case we could both enjoy a cut of the income in an equitable manner. Spread the gospel, right?

Anyways, the main point is to try to do it such that I’m not constrained by my particular passions.

…

Later this evening I found myself in the shower at the gym, thinking about my blog and other non-traditional work efforts. I’ve noticed this is a trend for some reason.  I’m almost always thinking about what to write next and how I’m going to write whilst scrubbing away in ye ol’ Planet Fitness locker room. Today was no different.

Now, not too long ago I remember coming across an example of someone starting their own small business in the pet supply market.⁹I believe it was a book I had checked out from the library, 100 Side Hustles, but I can’t be quite sure at this point.. I recall seeing the value of said market and having my jaw hit the floor. People spend an INSANE amount on their pets.

That little speck of inspiration apparently had been forming into a beautiful pearl in my head, because “pets” kept popping up in my mind as I thought about the Tumblr niche problem. Now that I think about, pets seem like a solid bet because huge swaths of the population love the shaggy l’il rascals–especially kids.  The Boss Lady would be particularly pleased if I chose such a family-friendly and universally-embraced topic, no doubt.

But, just one problem…pets by themselves seemed to be a little too bougie for me to just run with it.

My mind naturally wandered into the realm of the absurd, and it was there when I knew I found my diamond in the rough…

Well, I already felt like I was in AbsurdLandia, given that my too main candidates were “pets’ and “luxury”, and…wait just a hot minute! Holy schnitzels, of course, that’s it–double down on the absurd factor!

What could be more ridiculous than spending excessive money on yourself? SPENDING IT ON YOUR ----- PET!

And, tada! The Prissy Pet Project officially has it’s name!

It turns out that that little speck that formed into a pearl was wearing a pearl necklace itself! Now that’s getting meta for ya.  God, I love me some absurd images…

6 November 2019 (Wednesday)

Well, now its time for the rubber to meet the road. Let’s do this! Of course the first order of business is this–a blog post about it kicking things off, that way I get double the mileage for my efforts.  I mean, if you’re not here to hear about all my misadventures, then why are you here?

Okay, so where was I in the article.  Let me get back to that.

Skimming over the article, let’s pick out the major action items.:

• Set up Tumblr with relevant URL
• Populate blog with niche-related pictures (unsure of how many I need here)
• Acquire ~50 followers via whatever means (manually following other blogs, or using bots, etc).
• Set up automated posts (still unsure of where I’m supposed to get such copious amounts of content from)
• Set up Amazon Associates account
• Setup online store (BlueHost website hosting, WordPress, WooCommerce, etc)
• Edit all Tumblr posts to include link to store.
• Profit.

Now that we have a brand in mind, the next step is getting a Tumblr blog name with a related URL. But first, is “Prissy Pets” already taken?

Wait, is there already somebody profiting handsomely from this exact idea? But clicking on the Amazon link only needs to nothingness:

So it is currently unclear whether or not I could actually have an Amazon store with that name…

Meanwhile, over on Tumblr itself “Prissy pets” returned exactly one result. The term “luxury pets” has more results, but does make me question whether this is actually a good choice.

I’m going to go ahead and move forward with the “Prissy Pets” concept, but I’m willing to openly change course if it doesn’t generate much income and/or content is hard to come by.

Anyways, I’ve signed up to Tumblr with username “prissypetproject” because, hey, why burn more creative brain cells on this? In the setup process, Tumblr will ask “what you’re into,” and “Pets” was option so I obviously selected it.

However, “Luxury” was not an option, so…Home & Lifestyle? Fashion? I’m racking my brain trying to figure out what a good algorithmic proxy for luxury would be. I almost went with Home & Lifestyle, but it turns out that when you click on each category, their sub-categories are revealed, and looking over these I realized that clearly Tumblr and I were not using those terms in the same manner.

I decided to throw in “Handmades” because, hey who doesn’t like to knit fancy-ass sweaters for their pooch? And also because, jeez, I’m not finding anything that would appear to be the mystical portal to Luxury Tumblr.

In the end, I was quite unsure of how to the get “luxury” included…and I ended up with the following: Pets, Handmade, Crochet, Nature, Wildlife.

I’m starting to wonder if fancy pets was such a good niche to settle on after all…

Welp, I’ve ran out of time for this project for the day and several days to come, so will have to figure out a better way to refine later.

I guess that is all for now…stay tuned to find out how exactly I fumble my way through all this!

Here’s an interesting thought experiment for you: when you shed this mortal coil and pass on to whatever you hope is next, what do you want those whom you have left behind to write on your tombstone?

Now, the even more important question: what are you doing right now to earn those words of immortalization?

It shouldn’t come as a surprise, but yes, I have put some thought into this matter. After a decent amount of contemplation about what seems to drive me the most, I believe I have an answer that I can solidly stand behind.

When I die, I want a simple one-word epitaph inscribed on my headstone:

“Clever.”

I imagine that conversation with my local undertaker will go something like this:

Well, that at least answers the first part of the experiment.

Earning an undisputed reputation for being “clever” is a whole ‘nother ball of wax, though, you see.

I’ve had my moments of inspiration here and there–some of which I may or may not have been legally advised to never speak openly about–but nonetheless it’s not like I’ve totally fallen down in my efforts to prove to the world that am indeed a clever boy.

However, becoming a family man (or woman) tends to change one’s perspective on what metric really is a good measure of what you’ve done with your life.

Let’s visit our good friend and esteemed psychologist, Abraham Maslow, and his seminal legacy, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (see Figure 2).

If you’re not familiar with this concept, basically it states that one’s lower level needs have to be met before a person can effectively focus on higher level needs.

I mean, have you ever tried to thinking about sex when you have debilitating stomach cramps accompanied by a proportional volume of diarrhea? Not that it’s ever happened to me, per se, but you can easily imagine how in this case Love/Belonging needs pretty much don’t exist when you have such, er, “pressing” Physiological needs.²Interestingly ‘sex’ is considered a base-level need. I could see how this might be true, while as the same time I would argue that it could also very well be placed in the “Esteem” category. In reality, nothing says that it can’t be part of each of those levels. Just a thought…

Anyways, you may be wondering “What in the high hell does this have to do with being a clever family man?”

Fair enough question. Let me go ahead and try to tackle that.

Seeing as how “creativity” and “problem-solving” belong in the top-tier of Self-Actualization, I’m pretty confident this where “being clever AF” would land as well.

But no matter how many wheels I re-invent,³This is such a recurring problem for me that on several occasions. I’ve been very close to printing business cards proclaiming “Re-inventor of the wheel” as my profession. guess what? If it doesn’t put food on the table for my kids, a roof over my wife’s head, and a handgun in the Bible case of my beloved mother, than what in hot Hades have I been good for?

Sure, I can be clever all day long and pat myself on the back. I’ll admit that, like good cocaine, it sure does give me a rush.

But, if my kids are hungry and destitute⁴Don’t worry, they’re not, thanks to a highly competent sugar momma. because of my pursuit of “clever”, then I might as well admit that I have just as much of an addiction as a cokehead and check myself into rehab. Just another self-centered prick hurting the ones they love…

Welp.

I gotta say that I really do need to stop blogging after 11 pm. That, um…that’s not exactly where I expected to end up with that train of thought. But hey, close enough, right?

The point of the story is this: if I’m such a smarty-pants, then riddle me this. Why do I work so darn hard for so little of the monies? I mean come on, I got mouths to feed and 529 Plans to fund, yo!

And honestly, I don’t have an easy answer for you on that one. But fear not! You shall not be left so unfulfilled!

The answer I have for you is instead hopefully much more interesting than a pithy one-liner: I have for you an invitation.

Come along with me, as explore the Wonderful World of Working Wisely!⁵In truth, I don’t know if that’s an actual thing or not, but that pretty much captures what I’m up to.

One need not work hard so much as they need to work smart, amiright? And to that end, I will be pursuing a variety of passive income streams, side hustles, investments, and other such not-quite-shady shenanigans…and of course sharing those adventures here in full, glorious detail.

As always, I hope that you find these tales entertaining, but more importantly, maybe my experience will inspire others to find their own creative paths to financial security and beyond…to financial love/belonging! To financial esteem! And to financial self-actualization! Okay, okay, I’ll lay off the Maslow humor for now…

But seriously though, while money isn’t everything, the lack thereof sure the hell causes a lot of anguish and strife.⁶I’m uncertain if that is original, but I doubt I came up with it myself. If I can leave this world with a little bit less of those things, then I maybe all my cleverness won’t have been in vain.

I suppose in that case I better revise what I want on my tombstone:

There. That’s better. My original answer totally misrepresented me…didn’t have nearly enough words.

Though…hmmm…do you suppose I’ll be able to find a cemetery that will allow one grave to have two headstones? I always hoped to be some sort of trailblazer, but this is not quite how I imagined it…

Anyways, Dear Reader (and Boss Lady), jeez Loiuise do I digress! Stay tuned for upcoming adventures…⁷Don’t worry though, I’m still going to overload you with all the many asinine anecdotes from my mildly amusing life! Let’s make some fat coin together, yo!