Cuckoo for Kimchi Puffs

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).

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