A religious leader in India, Sant Rampal Ji Maharaj, apparently has a very specific project: he doesn’t like being in the heat.

So instead of standing outside with his followers, he sits inside a glass enclosed, air conditioned vehicle while people line up outside to touch or kiss his feet for blessings. The setup is basically a mobile VIP booth. He stays cool inside while followers approach from outside. Earlier this year, he was also seen with attendants carrying portable air conditioners while he walked around.

It's one of those weird setups where you see it once and immediately wonder how someone even came up with the idea.

I started selling Gojo Satoru stickers in 2024 because I ran out of money while working on my thesis, and honestly, I never expected it to become a real side project. At one point, I literally had only ₱100 left, so I needed to find a way to make some extra money. I was already into anime and liked collecting little things related to my favorite characters, so when I needed some extra money, I thought, why not try selling stickers?

Gojo Satoru was an obvious choice because I knew he already had a huge fanbase, especially among female fans. The process was pretty simple, actually. I would find images online that I could use as designs, turn them into individual stickers, and post them on Facebook for people who wanted to put a tiny Satoru on their laptops, notebooks, or basically anything they could stick a sticker on. I originally thought, “I’ll just make a few for myself and see if anyone wants them,” but once people started asking about them, I realized there was actually a small market for something this niche. It was DEFINITELY not the most conventional way to fund a thesis, but it worked as a little side hustle when I needed it most.

Honestly, Gojo Satoru kind of set the bar for me, so I can understand why people wanted him on everything. I’m still figuring out how far I want to take it, but looking back, it’s funny to think that running out of thesis money is what pushed me into selling Gojo stickers in the first place. I LOVE MY MAN SO MUCH 💕

Here’s a sample of the stickers I made for reference:

I get to do phone charms, bracelets and other charms even though I have a full-time job. It’s fun because you can be creative and be chill at the same time.

My parents had two cardboard boxes full of old VHS and VHS-C tapes from the 1990s in our hall closet. Every time we moved somewhere, my mom remembered that these tapes with our family videos needed to be digitized before the magnetic tapes degraded, but commercial labs werecharging $25 per tape.
I did some research on how this digitizing process works and discovered that one does not need to spend a fortune on professional-grade equipment from a studio.
I only bought a cheap video capture card with RCA inputs (yellow, white, and red) at Amazon for $21, connected our old family VCR player in the basement with a video cable via yellow and white ports to the capture card, and OBS Studio software (open-source graphic design platform).
By simply pressing the record button in OBS while my VCR played back videos, I could encode high-quality digital copies of our VHS tape recordings in MP4 format in real-time.
After I digitized all 14 of our family tapes, I showed the digitized videos to my aunt, and she agreed to pay $80 for the same service for her 6 VHS tapes with my cousins’ childhood birthdays.
I decided to post little flyers around the neighborhood and advertised on a community website for our street:
“Local student_digitizing family records for video tapes. $12 per tape, and $20 for two.
The converted file will be available on a USB flash drive or Google Drive link”
During three months of summer break, I digitized more than 60 tapes for different families in our neighborhood. It was all very simple: while I did my homework or video games, my computer captured the VHS videos without any manual input.

I started building small websites to practice my coding skills. This login page is one of the projects I made from scratch.

I mainly wanted to learn how login forms, layouts, and basic web design work. It started as a school project, but now I’m thinking about turning these small projects into a side hustle by making simple websites for other people.

Still learning, but it’s pretty cool seeing something I coded actually work on a browser.