• Monday, 07/10/23 ** 13:24 Raised my yearly budget by 460 bucks with the subscription costs of Adobe, Google Drive, and domains. Time to eat some more sandwiches.

The warning from Google about a 'fraudulent' business confused me. Was it because my 'business' doesn't have an LLC or physical location? I own the domain with the name of the 'business'. Being a small fish has its drawbacks - if you're the biggest customer of a service, then your needs are guaranteed to be catered to - especially if you're your own customer. If you're relying on a huge service and your contribution to them is inconsequential, they can drop you or ban you without reason or consequence. Amazon's track record of banning multi-million dollar storefronts is a bit frightening.

I'm hoping Google doesn't go that way too - their cut of Google Domains from the business model is a bit frightening, as is the potential for more cost-cutting practices at this point in the game - but if it does, I now understand how to set up personal infrastructure comparable to the Google suite myself, just without the big tech employees and privacy warnings. Paying for storage and redundancy at reasonable speeds, though, will be insanely slow unless you're able to host physical infrastructure - and right now I travel far too much for that.

I'm still trying to get 'lejakechvatal@gmail.com' back. One day I'll be able to prove that it's mine. Does Google still have my data stashed there?

I'll launch Uln on January 1, 2024. 'Content creation' as a tool for operating as an independent creative is completely unsustainable - how many TikToks would I have to make a day? How many times would I have to let a camera get in the way of time spent with friends and family? How often would I have to be 'on'? All the time. I'm a creative person, but I'm more interested in long-term work - work with staying power, work that pays off in the long run.

Really impressed by Justin's work in Chicago - one incredibly well-orchestrated video really paid off. I'm sure he has tons of business now; at the least, he found over 20k followers within a day - not by posting on a schedule but by planning and executing an idea that took a ton of time and effort. That's where I want to be. Each idea should be bigger and better than the last - or at the least show that I learned from the previous work. Progress upwards.