Oh I also learned that the Chinese people have a different word for “mansplaining” that when literally translated means “aroma of dad” and that made me chuckle.

GM 🌞 something I learned this week is that almost all Chinese children had to write a mock pen pal letter and sign it as “Li Hua” (basically our John/Jane Doe) to pass their English exams in school. So now that the Americans have shown up on Xiaohongshu, we have been writing “Dear Li Hua” replies to our new Chinese friends saying things like “sorry it took so long to receive your letters” and “as children we all dug holes to try to reach you”, and the response to this has been so precious, I can barely even describe it to you. It’s like our inner children reached across the Pacific Ocean and held hands with each other. 🥹😭 one of my replies said, “What happened in the past few days has given me some hope for the future of mankind. Although we are all ordinary people, the foundation of the future of mankind lies in ordinary people like us. Each of us has a little light in us. If these lights can be connected, the future will not be so dark.” 😭😭😭❤️‍🩹

Mark my words: this moment - the Fall of the Digital Berlin Wall - will be one for the history books. The initiating event was when they tried to take our circus (American TikTok), and as protest we found the most popular social apps in China, Russia, and the Arab world and joined them! And NOW there are American creators using language translation apps to connect with the non-“western” world and vice versa!! And it is the most wholesome collective social bonding moment I have ever seen in my entire life!! It’s quite literally the fall of the digital Berlin Wall. I did not have this on my 2025 bingo card, but I am so here for it!

Happy Friday. Remember when I said the TikTok ban was a big game of chicken? Damn it feels fantastic to be right. Lol.

Shout out to the guy walking down the street in a Buccee’s onesie at 2am in Austin TX who introduced himself as “Richard, like the body part”… you will ne’er be forgotten by my coworkers 🤣

GM 🤡 I hope Mark Zuckerberg is having a meltdown from Red Book being the number 1 social media app on the App Store in America today 🤣 they took our circus, so we went out clowning! #tiktokban

Gm 🌞 just an observation on the subtle workings of TikTok content moderation aka Why We Don’t Talk About Fight Club… If you hate TikTok just scroll on… Certain words on TikTok - whether spoken or written in the comments - are almost definitely bot-bait. This is why I very rarely drop any full govt names while speaking - we call em Donny, ‘Lonny, Joey, Benny, Barry, Georgie, Billy, etc - or use initials like Johnny FK. Or in the case of Luigi - calling him Lou. The reason I don’t like attracting bots is bc using the comments they can get me flagged for community violations (ie inciting hateful speech.) But there are two additional layers of automatic content moderation. The first one is called “folded comments” which is an anti-bullying filter, and the second one is called “filtered comments” and it’s designed to catch bots or people with bot like behavior (aka repeating the same keywords continuously across multiple videos). So now because the spooks have figured out that they will get flagged for the filtered comments if they directly say the keywords that bait the bots, they’ve taken up playing dumb and saying “can someone spell this out for me” hoping that some unsuspecting chatty know-it-all will put the bait out for them. Not on my watch, but honestly the strategy is clever. Keep ya head on a swivel, folks, and don’t talk about fight club. Discretion is the better part of valor. Lol.

I asked ChatGPT if it could make me a vision board, and I’m not gonna lie I’m a little impressed for a v1… 🤣

Exactly. View quoted note →

Every time I talk about TikTok on here I get negative replies about how “nobody on Nostr cares about TikTok” 🙄 but I agree with this OP - most folks have no idea how lucrative TikTok is. I’ve made thousands of dollars on there this year alone using their various monetization streams, with the shop feature being my biggest hustle (and I only make one ad a week for products I already had in my home). There are folks on there making 3-4 ads per day and banking 5-6 figures per month! In my opinion there’s a confluence of reasons TikTok is successful but first is viral potential - which essentially is driven by their social search engine style algorithm (aka what you search for is what you see in suggested feed/FYP based on key words both spoken and written with the post). Second is ease of use and features that support content creators like green screen capability, live-streaming, filters, audio sharing, music suggestions, etc. Then last but certainly not least is monetization potential - they’ve got the creator program which pays opted-in creators for every 1k “qualified views” (my least fav program bc they’re a little shady on this haha), the shop “showcase” with affiliate sales commissions from 5-25%, the sellers shop (for businesses), subscriptions offerings like Patreon with tiers, and livestream gift receiving (like twitch), and ways to connect directly with brands for sponsored posts. It’s a lot going on over there. If we could recreate it as web3, creators would be all about it because the worst parts of tiktok are the censoring (people with millions of followers having to say “Dior Bags” instead of “drones” when talking about recent NJ events or they get stuck at 200 views for example) and the lack of self custody of the content as well as the audience/community that we’ve grown there. Anyway just food for thought, nerd edition. Thanks for coming to my ted talk. View quoted note →

gm again 😉 people from 3 more states have gotten their Garden Variety year round gardening calendar from my blog. 🎉(Gonna work on listing them to nostr while I’m off work this week!) Thank you to Georgia, Massachusetts, and Florida for supporting a garden variety creator! 🌻 if you want a year round gardening calendar for the New Year, you can find mine at the top of gardenvarietyblog.com 🤙 #gardening #newyear2025

GM 😎 if yall ever need #montessori inspired gift ideas, I put all my recommendations on one page for ya! Here she is if you’d like to bookmark her: https://gardenvarietyblog.com/gifts

How to tell me you’re a robot without telling me you’re a robot… 🎶 “don’t be suspicious don’t be suspicious!” 🤣🤖

🤣 I tried to explain the Free Luigi sentiments to someone who is not chronically online, and when I tell you they were so shocked 🤣 and they followed it up with: but my family works for Pfizer, and they help people… and I had to be like: listen you aren’t from around here, but that’s a real hard line to sell in opiate-epidemic country. 😅 Bless em Lord.

GM 🌻 Gave the blog an interface-lift and added a brand new page: the #garden center 🪴😊 You can check her out here:

Garden Variety Blog | Stories of People & Plants

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Garden Variety Blog by Jessica Chasteen: Stories of People & Plants. Learn how to cultivate your best life. Discover natural plant-rich, science-ba...