Dearest readers, this month we have reached 500.
In my own personal version of numerology (I know nothing of ~real~ numerology), “rhyming” numbers are a good thing. This is something like a total of $36.36.
500/500 fits, too.
The growth on this blog continues to astonish me. Frankly, it’s inspired me to put aside an entirely different online business idea to build out Batfort to what I’d like it to become.
If you’re reading this, thank you.
I held a garage sale today.
It’s a natural fit—I just moved and had some stuff I didn’t want to move. My neighbor had been doing some cleaning, and she had stuff to sell as well.
We did not make a lot of money.
Here’s what I learned:
I didn’t plan it this way, but selling IRL was a good dry run before selling online. There’s something helpful about the immediate feedback and the feel of counting cash in a cashbox that helps solidify these lessons.
Anyway, make it easy for people to buy. Otherwise, they won’t.
Not rocket science but it’s something that I’m liable to forget in the quest for really good copy or optimized demographic segmentation. (Or whatever.)
Recently W Korea released a photo spread featuring members of EXO, and it’s basically a visual representation of EXO-L waiting for the next album.
I feel you, Chanyeol.
Exo has released a full-length album, a repackaged album, and a winter mini-album each year since debut.
Last year’s album, The War was released in August 2017.
It’s now nearly October 2018.
No new music.
Over the years, the members have been getting busier with external activities. Kai, Sehun, and Chanyeol go to fashion events. Suho is starring in a musical. DO is starting a serious acting career, and is currently the male lead in a drama. CBX exists. There are variety shows. Collaborations happen.
Still, no new music.
Members are starting to stare down Korea’s mandatory military enlistment.
(I believe Xiumin is required to enlist this year.)
Military service time is 18 months.
There is a deadline.
Here’s what I think is going down:
SM is “testing” the fans, to see if they’ll wait patiently for more than a year between albums. (It’s been 14 months and so far nobody has gone crazy yet.)
Sometime this fall, maybe in November at this point (after NCT 127 and Lay), EXO will finally release new music.
The repackaged album will take the place of the winter album, to be released in December.
After that, all the members will enlist at the same time. During that time, SM slow-drips content. They are getting the hang of YouTube, and fans would 100% love another dedicated EXO variety show, especially when the members are in the military.
Or perhaps they stagger into 2 groups separated by 6-8 months, and we are treated to a new subunit or two.
When they are discharged and back together full strength, EXO head directly into the recording studio an through the magic of the SM production machine, have new music ready to release in a ridiculously short amount of time.
One of the many things that SM Entertainment does well is learn from its mistakes. Super Junior has been taking a long time to get back on its feet now that its members are trickling out of the military. I doubt that SM wants to inflict that on EXO.
Anyway, I really hope we get new EXO music soon. The end.
Today is one of those days when I don’t know if I want to watch the world burn, or if I want to break down in tears, or if I should go up in flames myself.
You probably know how it feels, too.
I’m out for the night. See you tomorrow.
“The Mind of Jake Paul” debuted yesterday.
I would have watched it yesterday, but my internet wasn’t set up yet. Gotta love moving.
Shane Dawson—who has been on a tear recently with his recent documentary series on Grav3yardGirl and Jeffree Star—is also someone I don’t really know or care about. (Sorry, Shane—but I did subscribe!)
I love internet culture, and I love it when interneteers get introspective on what makes the internet so weird and so great. Shane is investigating that kind of stuff right now, and I can’t dislike it.
One of the driving questions behind Shane’s documentary is shaping up to be “Are there sociopaths on YouTube?” with the obvious follow up “And is Jake Paul one of them?”
From my perspective, the answer to the first question is “DUH.” Yes, of course there are sociopaths on YouTube. There are also narcissists and people with depression. YouTube is great because it lets all sorts of people produce content, many of whom have alternate mental or physical states.
I once started playing “spot the sociopath” at work. When it becomes clear that there are low-level sociopaths in normal, everyday places (hint: they don’t always act the way you see in movies), it’s not surprising at all that some of them would gravitate to YouTube.
One of the problems of doing business online is that the stuff that gets clicks—out of curiosity, or outrage, or shadenfreude—is not the stuff that leads to long-term virtue and happiness. The most perverse of incentives.
If someone isn’t firmly grounded in themselves or some form of truth, I could see how a huge audience, lots of positive reinforcement, and wads of money would lead you down a path of delusional self destruction.
It’ll be interesting to watch how Shane’s series plays out, mostly because these things are just as much about Shane as they are about the actual subject. Literally half of the Jeffree Star series was Shane being self-conscious about how poor and inadequate he felt. Jeffree was super-gracious about everything, and I don’t know if Shane played it up for laughs, but it did not add any value to the series.
Either way, I’ll be watching the Jake Paul series.
Maybe by the end of it I’ll know the difference between Jake and Logan.
We turned a corner last month, and I didn’t realize it. I should have known when one weekend this blog organically got 58 views in a day.
Previous records had always been set my specific referrers, like when I tagged an inspiration on Twitter. That would cause a spike in traffic.
Lately though, there’s just been an uptick of folks. The daily average is higher. It’s that slow, steady growth.
This month, we’re going to pass 500 views.
It’s nothing compared to what can happen with website traffic, but it’s a huge win for me, starting from zero.
The growth has been steadily increasing these past few months, which is both flattering and humbling.
I want to make better content for y’all.
Thank you for stopping by. I hope that you get something out of this little blog.
Here’s to the future.
Now that I’m a little bit older, a little bit more established, a little bit more financially stable, I have more resources to put into impulse buys and hairbrained schemes.
Most of the time, I try to confined those to supporting various Kickstarter projects, but sometimes there are actual creative endeavors in the real world.
Such as recent developments toward my life goal of “sleep like a princess.”
I rigged myself up a bedchamber, courtesy of an extra-long tension rod and some velveteen IKEA drapes. My bed is now super-private (kind of helpful in a 3-room house).
It will be easier to enforce the “no cell phones in bed” rule.
The curtain divides my bed from the rest of the room, which is now a dressing room that happens to have a reading chair in it (where I am writing this post). I love it.
I’m a sucker for nooks and crannies and weird little spaces. When they don’t exist, I create them.
For a long time now, I’ve considered starting an indie fashion magazine. This is because the fashion magazine I want to read doesn’t actually exist.
And really, it would be more than a fashion magazine. It would be a style magazine.
I don’t want to read propaganda. I don’t want to read something that will tell me what to wear or think or watch or read or buy. I want a magazine that will get me to think, that will offer depth, the “why” of things.
At first, I thought this magazine could be a stripped-down, low-fi affair. No stylists, no photoshop, just real women. Darling magazine is already doing that.
Yet while I’m 100% happy that Darling is doing their thing, it’s not the magazine that I crave. It’s polished and clean, and based out of LA. I’m looking for something darker, willing to dig for things, more like a carpet of leaves on a forest floor.
No to succulents, yes to ferns and mushrooms.
Back then, even when I imagined this magazine, I couldn’t conceptualize how one would go about running or financing such an endeavor. Now that I’ve been sniffing around the indie publishing scene for a while, I have a better idea of how that would work.
And of course, the timing of this blog post is brought to you by synchronicity in the simulation: a random retweet of a 2015 article on indie fashion magazines on Business of Fashion.
Many indies still rely on traditional advertising, which is a good reminder that often fashion people just want things to look prettier—not be all that different.
The most obvious revenue stream available to titles is the cover price of the magazine. “It has been my number one rule here that we never ever sold a magazine at a loss,” said Masoud Golsorkhi, founder and editor-in-chief of Tank magazine, an innovatively-designed, ideas-focused, independent fashion title. “If we couldn’t rely on copy revenue, I would just close shop immediately,” he continued.
This model could be facilitated for niche publications by crowdsourcing websites like Kickstarter and Indie-go-go. It’s working for sci-fi journals—why couldn’t it work for another genre?
Other magazines capitalize on the publisher-as-retailer format (the exact opposite of content marketing, I suppose):
A number of independent publications, including Inventory and Kinfolk, a quarterly magazine based in Portland that celebrates the ‘slow lifestyle’ and features contemporary illustrations, charming photography and intimate interviews with creatives, have also been able to leverage their brand and point of view as curators of products, tapping transactional revenue by setting up online and brick and mortar stores.
Really it’s the same endgame as content marketing, just starting from a different side. A really high-end merch store. The more I think about it, the more that the publisher-retailer dualism seems to be the most viable way to sustain an operation online. Advertisers are fickle, platforms like YouTube are fickle, and right now even payment providers are fickle (see also: PayPal deplatforming InfoWars), but an group of people who support your cause—those people can’t be bought.
Other funding models seem to follow standard ways to make money online: advertising, consultancies, sponsorships, etc.
Finally, an observation on the increasing rarity of printed magazines:
“Paper is a luxury material and I think that consuming our magazine is a luxurious experience. It is very different from the way that you engage with online content,” said Martin, who said that working in print builds a different, more desirable relationship with readers than online. “It extends to things like the quality of the photography and the production and the way it is graphically designed — it’s a very time-consuming operation, which extends to the way we want to engage with our readers.”
There is something to be said for this—the luxuriousness—but also the exclusivity. It’s how Ben Settle runs his copywriting empire. The best stuff is in the hard-copy-only format.
I have too many ideas for projects at all times, but this one makes me hmmmmmmmm a little bit hmm-er.
Are you the type of person who writes “notes to self” on random pieces of paper? I am.
My past is littered with random back-of-envelopes, receipts, scraps of paper, pages torn out of magazines, and all sorts of other miscellaneous objects. I’m working on corralling all my random ideas in a bullet journal. Post-it notes are a step up for me—at least they’ll stick to something permanent.
I’m packing today, and pulled a treasure-trove of post-its off my fridge, where they have been for months and which I have not looked at since I put them up. Let’s find out what my past-self’s idea for self improvement was.
I say I want to live on property with trees and mountains and a creek. But is that what I really want? Better to test it with an Airbnb than to go all-in with a huge loan and a bunch of property that I don’t actually want.
Make your home 200% you—functional and interesting to look at
One thing that I’ve always regretted from every placed I’ve lived is that I left it unfinished. There were always plans for what I could do with the space that I never carried out. Now it is true that these days I have 200% more energy than I used to, so it is time to turn that extra energy toward making a cohesive living space. The defining idea is me and my goals–healing, investigation, creativity, hospitality.
I often don’t want to go to sleep at night (case in point, I’m writing this post at a time when I should be in bed). Some nights, I can’t wait to go to sleep—usually those are after days of hard work or hiking, when I’m physically exhausted. My intellectual brain thinks that it would be a good idea to tire myself out more, either through physical work or through creative work. Not sure how sustainable this is, but it’s worth a try.
Working out 3x per week has certainly helped with this.
Some of the boxes I’m packing are full of art supplies. Sewing, embroidery, drawing, painting, printmaking, calligraphy. I like doing art, in theory. But I don’t make it an everyday practice. At some point in the past few months I set an absolutely insane goal of doing a gallery show of my own work in 2019. If I’m going to meet that, I need to get to work.
And if visual art isn’t something I should be doing, I should bid goodbye to my supplies. Buying art supplies is like buying crack, though.
Though my health has improved considerably since my switch to an all-animal products diet, my body composition is not where I’d like it. I’m not fat, but I’m fatter than I’d like to be. Building muscle has helped, but I’m still dialing in a good meat/fat/fast ratio for my goals. One strategy would be to eat leaner meats for a while. (However, I’m considering putting myself back into ketosis.)
I’m good at starting things, and less good at finishing them. I have to push myself if I’m going to cross the finish line with dignity.
Weekly Sunday ritual (singing hymns, nature)
When one can’t (or won’t) find a suitable church, one starts to come up with all sorts of excuses and rationalizations for what one could be doing on a Sunday to center oneself on the Lord.
I know that no church is perfect, but its looking like my bar for “good enough” is too high.
A few online guru types have recommended this. Start an actual inspiration board for the life you want. This is one of those ideas that’s so obvious that it hurts, and yet it’s so obvious that I don’t want to do it. Maybe I need to do this before spending a week in an Airbnb in the woods.
Oftentimes when I socialize with people I get disillusioned. I’m often socializing with people because “it’s good for me” or because “It’s just something that you do,” rather than because I genuinely want to. I try to avoid those types of social interactions.
This is a boundary I want to set up in other areas of my life.
Do ballet again even if you’re fat
Back in the day, I started lifting weights because I wanted to get in shape enough to do an adult ballet class. Lo and behold, I’ve never reached an “in-shape enough” stage to feel comfortable doing ballet again. I took a class a few years ago, but had to quit when I got pneumonia. It’s time to try again.
I’m a very task-oriented person, who tends not to focus as much on the clock as I do on what there is to do. As such, I can sometimes get distracted at work and forget to leave on time. If I want to succeed at my out-of-work pursuits, I have to spend time on them. That means leaving work on time.
This is a good list. It’s very much influenced by self-improvement Twitter, but it’s my list. I like that. It makes me want to put these into action.
Collages are popular to do on Instagram these days, when you take one large image and break it down into a series of smaller ones that–when posted in the right order–create a collage.
SM Entertainment has used this technique for quite some time, and they oftentimes do something fun with it. When Red Velvet was promoting “Rookie,” the promo pics were curated like a game of Where’s Waldo, with something fun in each of the pieces that added up to a really cool picture when you went to the profile page.
With NCT 127’s “regular irregular” promotion, SM has upped their game again.
Now, not only do the collages make a cohesive picture, they have individual member photos underneath. Looking at these is like a fun game of Memory or a comeback-specific Advent calendar. It’s like a 3D puzzle.
Also personal bonus points for a black-and-white photo with shots of chartreuse and teal, aka some of my faves.
Underneath, the member photos are also collaged. When you swipe, it’s like the image just shifts slightly–not like you are swiping to an entirely different photo.
When you post them vertically, you can see how much overlap there is between the two photos. Half of the collage is shared between the two. It makes for a very different experience, which I’m sure is the whole point.
Mark’s collage is simple and classic — like Mark himself.
Haechan’s, on the other hand, is much more busy. It’s great because his “close up” is oriented at a fresh angle. It suits his off-the-wall personality.
I really enjoy reverse engineering stuff like this. SM puts a lot of thought into how they conceptualize and promote each comeback for their idol groups. They’re industry leaders for a reason, and it shows through in everything they do.
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