#it pisses me off so much when these long term clients come in multiple times a week for MONTHS and NEVER leave a good review or even verbal

[dancedance-resolution]

i get so pissed when clients leave negative reviews. like i’m sorry but a customer service provider could literally shit on me and i’d leave them a good review bc they’re underpaid overworked and tired! truly what compels a person to be like “there was too much chlorine in the water the pool operator needs to be less lazy” bitch this is literally a saltwater pool what the fuck are you on

[christinaroseandrews]

Marketing Matters - Strategy - Fanfiction

Strategy - Fanfiction

So this is a bit of a taboo subject in the publishing world, but I’m going to be upfront with you all. 

We write fanfiction. 

There, I said it. 

Writing fanfic is also a viable marketing strategy for authors who are choosing to go the self-publishing route and not always for the reasons that immediately spring to mind.  In addition, the skills, fanbase, and tricks learned while writing fanfic can also apply to traditional publishing.  However, I’m going to give you one caveat right up front: many big name publishers don’t like authors who write fic. Or at least they say they don’t. It’s becoming more common, but most publishers and agents want authors to be focusing on original fic not fanfic. Several smaller presses don’t care as much, so long as your author persona and your fic persona are very separate and you don’t rub it in their faces.  But the big name publishers may require you to pull your fanworks. So that’s something to keep in mind.

So now it’s time to break it down.

About Us and What we’ve done:

We’re probably best known as fanfic writers in the Hunger Games fandom, where we have a few well regarded fics.  We’ve also dipped our toes into other fandoms including the MCU, Harry Potter, DBZ, and more drive-by one-shots in various fandoms than you can shake a stick at.

We also both were/are a part of the Sims 2 writing community and had a few well known stories there as well.  ^__^ We may or may not have met in this fandom. LOL

Both of us have been part of these fandoms for years and were active members in them. Lark started in fanfic back in 1994/5 as a beta reader (which she then parlayed that experience into becoming an editor that summer). While Rose discovered fic in college in 2002. In these fandom communities, we met people that we now call friends in real life as well as mentors, betas, advisers, and cheerleaders. We learned skills that apply both to fic and to original writing.  And, most importantly, we learned how to listen to our audience.

Let me stress that again: we learned to listen to our audience. 

When we transitioned, we hit up the people we met in these fandoms to help us with various aspects of publishing life (either paying or trading favors for work done) and we’ve also given status updates about our original writing, along with links to our author tumblr in the authors’ notes of our fics. Nothing that will violate the terms of Ao3′s Terms of use - but links to our professional website/social media.

While we write fanfic less, we still dip our fingers in now and again.

Cost:

Time. 

Straight up time.

The cost of writing fic is time, energy, and creativity.  Time spent writing fic is time NOT spent writing original works that can be published.  Time that is not spent editing or plotting or doing other sweat equity types of marketing. Which is why some authors refuse to write fic once they turn professional and it is completely understandable. Fanfic authors don’t get paid for their work and for some, getting paid is a big deal. Especially when most of your income comes from writing.

It’s a cost we willingly pay sometimes, but if a fanfic author you know also writes original works for publications. It does mean that updates may be slower and there is often less motivation to keep publishing stories -- especially if the stories don’t get much in the way of response/feedback.

It’s about return on investment.

Return on Investment:

I’m going to do this a little differently since sometimes the return isn’t monetary.  This is also likely to sound really clinical and analytical; that’s because I’m trying to be objective and I may be going too far the other way. We write fanfic because we love it, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t give back to us too.

Monetary (Language of Flowers only):

Units sold:  20

Mailing list subscribers: 6

Social media followers:  Twitter - 15, Tumblr - 60, Facebook - 8

Not Monetary but Cost Saving

Editors - 9

Cover Designers - 3

Mailing List Trades - 3

Skills Learned:

Editing (Line, Content, Story Doctoring -- Yes, all of these)

Proofreading (not the same as editing)

Creating Characters

Keeping Characters in Character

Plotting

Engaging an audience

Finishing what you start

How to handle ConCrit

How to handle Trolls

How to write to an audience

How to prevent plot holes

As you can see, the biggest return on investment of the time is in the skills section. Fanfiction is not to be taken lightly.

And as for me, Lark, I literally parlayed my experience working in fandom to actual paying jobs as an editor. I honed my skills as an editor on fanfic which I then turned around and used to get a job editing professionally. I did that multiple times for a bunch of different publishers/clients. I got my start in fanfic.

As an editor, one of the biggest problems I see with developing authors is a “sameness” in voice. AKA all of the characters sound the same.  If you want to see this in traditionally published book action, then look at Laurel K. Hamilton... Her Merry Gentry and Anita Blake heroines sound almost exactly the same. (Which not coincidentally, sounds like how she speaks in real life.)

With fanfiction, you can’t do that. You’ll get called out for being OOC. So you have to learn to adapt your voice. (Or only write characters that sound like you but that gets boring after a while.)

So in my actual job as an editor, one I get paid to do, I legitimately tell my clients to pick a character from a show they like and use them as a template for a character they’re having trouble giving a good character voice to. And unsurprisingly, it works. It’s a good trick and it subconsciously teaches your brain how to create different characters/voices.

They other HUGE takeaway from the skills is in regards to concrit and being able to take it. If you want to publish for a living and not just half-ass it, you have to develop a thick-ish skin. And fanfiction can help with that. I straight up learned to deal with harsh reviews from writing fanfiction. But more importantly, I learned how to listen to what the person was telling me and then become a better author because of it.

In fanfiction, unlike in the publishing world, the reviews are meant for the authors... not potential readers. If someone really hates your work, or worse, is apathetic to it. They just won’t comment. They’ll hit the backspace and you’ll never hear anything. Most comments, especially critical ones, are from people who legitimately like the story that you’re telling but have a problem with part of it. The comment may be harsh, it may even be mean. But it tells you something and it gives you an idea where you may be turning off readers. People aren’t always good at phrasing criticism constructively. We’re not really trained how to do that. But when someone tells you why something isn’t working for them or why they didn’t like something, listen. You don’t have to agree -- we certainly haven’t -- but listening and thinking critically about the feedback will help.

This can be seen in our first novel, The Language of Flowers, which started out its life as a fanfic. The story pissed several readers off. And we realized as we were writing it that we needed to explain something and we weren’t doing a good job of doing so. So the scene that every single one of our readers loved was born of that concrit. Our story is better and reached the top 100 in its categories on Amazon because of the feedback we got as fanfic authors.

Seriously, writing fanfic has gotten us to where we are today.

Takeaways:

My biggest take away is that writing fanfic is a great skills builder and audience builder.

Pros:

Skills. Oh so many skills. But the biggest is that you will be writing and no writing is ever wasted. It’s practice. Like an artist has to sketch or a musician practice. You’re honing and toning your writing muscles. And fanfic is absolutely valid for doing that.

Cons:

Time. Straight up Time.

Rating:

It’s been so long since I’ve done one of these that I don’t remember. But honestly, the rating varies. You get out of fanfic what you put in and what you’re willing to take from it.

(Note: This has been sitting in our drafts for about 4 years. I finally finished it up because I was bored and waiting to go to a doctor and didn’t feel like doing nothing.)

If you like our marketing posts, please consider supporting us here!

[afreakingdork]

Jessica Jones Season 3 A.K.A. Morality

I genuinely believe that the writers of Jessica Jones season 3 have no idea what morality is supposed to mean or how it applies to basic situations. We can start on this, of course, with the friction between Trish and Jessica. The series starts with Jessica doing everything she can to keep ties severed with Trish, while Trish tries in vain to chase Jessica down like a puppy so they can ‘team-up’ like old-new times with Trish’s shiny new powers. Episode 2,  “ A.K.A You're Welcome,” paints a more full picture by showing Trish’s side of the conversation. Overall, the whole thing falls so flat for a variety of reasons. I can applaud Trish’s dedication to really honing her craft, but even this is something she tries to hold over Jessica. She offhandedly remarks that Jessica could train once in a while and hints often at her inferred superiority because she actually wants to be super, or she has the right attitude to be super, or she has the actual drive to be super. All of which, paired with Rachael Taylor’s insufferable acting, makes seeing Trish feel like nails on chalkboard every single time. Trish doesn’t understand that her store bought powers and being a hero aren’t something to play around with or have moral superiority about, but she refuses to listen to anyone or even reason. It’s mind boggling because while, we know Trish has always been jealous of Jessica’s power, she of all people should know about what Jessica has been through. They were sisters against the world their whole lives, Jessica doing her best to protect and support Trish from her mother’s abuse and Trish full well knowing Jessica is basically alone in this world, not to mention all the time and everything else that she lost to Kilgrave. Jessica is a wounded soul and her powers have everything to do with that, but all that just goes out the window because Trish wants powers and Trish thinks she knows better and the show is happy to say both Trish and Jess are equally bad. Even in the end when Trish finally realizes she is the bad guy, she has to go off the deep-end and then even further into the pool before the show will even let her admit it and then it gives no time for the weight of this statement to take affect and instead just moves on.

However, let’s move back to respective family histories, there’s a line that really enraged me in episode 5, “A.K.A I Wish,” where Gillian says “I'm sick of people throwing away friends and family like there's plenty more where that came from,” because Trish and Jessica won’t talk out their issues. There are some things that you can’t come back from with family and friends, especially when they aren’t willing to move their opinions on it. There are plenty more people that you can become friends with or even make your new family (it’s called found family and is huge especially in comic books) because it’s insanely toxic to stick with someone just because you’re related to them or have been friends for a long time. It’s really hard to play along with this sentiment, especially when in episode 6, “A.K.A Sorry Face,” you have Trish and her mom, Dorothy, really go head to head about Dorothy’s abuse towards Trish. Trish’s whole life has been shaped by her mother’s abuse. She never had a moment to think for herself because Dorothy was always controlling every second of it and it was the reason Trish has resorted to drug use and relapsed multiple times, but the moment Trish, justifiably so, tries to mention this her mother flips out and still has the gall to make it about herself. When Dorothy storms out you can see that from Trish’s weak attempts to roll back on it, again a completely justifiable comment, that the show thinks that Trish is in the wrong here. Sure, Dorothy’s points on Trish’s flippant attitude towards her own safety were, in my opinion, needed; Trish is heading down an insane path where all she can see is the glory of supering and can’t see how dangerous or miserable it is (which is crazy because she’s been Jessica’s sister basically their whole lives and seen all the horrific shit Jessica has had to go through, but I’ll get to that later). Good and bad aren’t so black and white, and this show refuses to play with that. Just because Dorothy and Trish have the most precariously stable relationship now, doesn’t mean Trish isn’t still allowed to be upset about the lifetime of verbal and physical abuse she’s had to endure. 

When you compare that matter to Trish telling Jessica that she needs to get over being upset that she shot her mom, it adds a whole new layer of ‘what the actual fuck?!’ to Trish that the story isn’t particularly interested in delving into. The story seemingly wants you to agree that both Jessica and Trish are equally at fault for what’s happening. Jessica is being too callous and gatekeeping Trish, while Trish is acting rogue and playing like being super is fun. It’s insane because we see Jessica already struggling with her mother’s influence. She was already destroying herself in season 2 because her mother was evil, but also she was the last vestige of her family who still happened to be alive. In her last moments, Alisa was going to turn herself in to the police and imparts on Jessica that being a hero is worth it. It’s almost comical looking back on it now, seeing how holier-than-thou Trish has become, and knowing that she shot Jessica’s mother in cold blood because she believes it was right. Sure, Jessica doesn’t seem to have told Trish the full details of her mother’s turn in those final moments. The show fails morality yet again, when even the question comes up in conversation between Jessica and Trish, Jessica only goes so far as to say ‘it was my mother.’ Jessica completely neglects to mention that her mother turned good in her last days after getting a taste of heroics and instead plays the ‘she was my family and you didn’t give me a choice in whether or not I should keep them’ card, that makes no sense to the total overarching argument to who is in the moral right. You can say that Jessica is a terrible negotiator when it comes to getting her point across verbally, and you’d be right, but that isn’t what the show is trying to illustrate and it’s beyond irritating.

This piss poor morality spread and infects other characters in season 3 also. We have the manifestation of morality with the introduction of Erik, who gets a physical response to evil. Nothing has bothered me more than when Malcolm scores a 3 on Erik’s bad-o-meter. Malcolm is grappling with the bad things he has done for Jeri because he thought he could justify it with the money and experience he would get now to fund him fighting for justice later, but even that wasn’t enough. Long before Erik pinged Malcolm as bad, Malcolm was already trying to atone for what he had done, physically might I add, he should have gone to the hospital for peeing blood after getting in a car accident to get a drunk driver off the streets. It makes Malcolm physically and mentally ill and he even takes time off work to consider his position and this is the moment that he pings a 3 (and, not to mention, Trish doesn’t ping at all)!? How can someone who feels guilt, knowns what he’s doing is wrong, and even takes a break to take a look at himself ping at all on the scale when Jessica is supposedly so good that she is anti-bad-dar for Erik and acts like aspirin for his bad guy headaches?! To add insult to injury, Malcolm cheats on Zaya with Berry because he’s... struggling with maybe becoming evil for some reason, but only long enough for him to immediately roll back and work as a double agent for Jeri so he can actually help Jessica put Sallinger away. Even that is short lived, when he just comes clean and quits to clear his conscience and starts to atone. It’s like the show realized that the tension between Malcolm and Zaya wasn’t enough of a morality issue and they had to have Malcolm do something extra bad to justify, again, that both parties are equally wrong in the matter. In the end though, they end up just reinforcing multiple times that Malcolm was the bad guy and Zaya never had an issue. Progression is a good thing, right?

Malcolm and Zaya are at each other on the ethics of lawyering, something that was handled much better in Daredevil and even that show had it’s faults, but nothing will enrage me more than Jeri’s line in episode 7, “A.K.A The Double Half-Wappinger,” of “...it is not our job to assess guilt or innocence.” While that is technically correct, there is a huge glaring problem with how the show is using it. The show is obsessed with the alleged portion of Sallinger’s guilt, in that he is so smart he leaves no evidence behind and is always multiple steps ahead of investigators trying to find a mistake on his trail. Only criminal defense attorneys do not decide if the client is innocent or guilty. While that is Jeri’s position as Sallinger’s attorney, this type of attorney's concern is whether there is sufficient evidence to prove that someone has committed a crime since the jury or judge will be the one’s actually deciding the verdict. The thing is, especially based on her past history with Jessica, is Jeri does have this information, albeit not as evidence, but she still tries to proceed as if Sallinger is still innocent until proven guilty. It’s a complete implosion of Jeri’s character when she already is grappling with everything falling apart with her ALS and Kith. It’s mind boggling to think this is the same Jeri who entrusted Jessica in episode 1, “A.K.A The Perfect Burger,” to take her life when she can no longer make the choice herself due to her illness. Jeri then goes on to declare war on superheroes, for what? Short term retainer of Sallinger could distinguish her firm from it’s accused ties to powered people, but long term she knows he is in truth a serial killer and having taken his case knowing so will destroy her firm a million times more than Peter Lyonne’s suicidal statement ever did. She feels like supers are undermining her as if Jessica is trying to take advantage of her ALS and make her look weak? This is a far cry from the Jeri Hogarth that was accused of murdering her first wife or the Jeri Hogarth that was ten steps ahead to blackmail her partners from trying to force her out of the firm she helped build and get her fair share. This isn’t the Jeri we love to hate, this is just hatred to put more pressure on Sallinger’s inane hatred of super people. She’s somehow, even though she never showed interest and expressively talked back to him when he was spouting his drivel, bought into the weaker man philosophy of supers having cheated to better positions in life and has, in her mind, made her whole existence of failures hinged on them trying to make her feel weak. An unfathomable turn for her character indeed, but this is a show that thinks that digging up dirt on someone and releasing it to try to get with their wife is equivalent at all to a man pushing his wife into an open marriage to cheat and skimming money out of their dead daughter’s non-profit foundation. Jeri should have told Kith no question. I don’t think she should have done it the way she did or for the reasons she did, but we are operating on a 20% bad scale vs. an 80% bad scale. Also, Peter Lyonne was such a shithead that he would rather kill himself and blame Jeri in the process than deal with a little jail time for being a fuckface. Crying that he should have had his chance to tell Kith like he was planning on it. Through Laurent they insinuate that the show absolutely makes Jeri out to be the monster in that situation. It honestly makes me think these writers need to take a course of morality or even just watch a few episodes of The Good Place so maybe they could have a real actual human opinion on what is good and bad. I’m worried about them.

[trashcatsnark]

1, 14, 19, and 30 for the ask game. I'm curious, especially about the last one

Ahhhhhh thank you so much for the ask, I really appreciate it, it was so nice to wake up to, thank you! 1. what radio station(s) do you listen to?

Personally, I switch around the radio stations a lot, i think the Vexelstorm(?) and Dirge are the two I flicker between the most. I like the rock music and having a chance of hearing Samurai tunes. One time black dog started to play while I was cruising the highway and it just had such a cool vibe; if only I hadn’t immediately crashed into a wall. 

My V though, doesn’t actually fuck around with the radio much especially if someone else is in the car. She’s deaf, has been since around the age of 9, and while she uses hearing aids and can hear, even “listens” to music in her apartment (though she takes her hearing aids out and feels the music rather). But when she has hearing aids she sometimes feels overwhelmed by being able to hear, so she’ll keep music off to quiet, and when someone is in the car she prefers the radio off so if they talk its not two loud sounds at once. Ironically, given this, when she takes her hearing aids out to “listen” to music, she prefers the loudest rock music because it provides the most bass and vibrations to feel it. 

14. what quest/sidejob/gig made you happiest? (again, multiples allowed)

God, I have so many I can think of; I like the rescue gigs a lot, like saving Bugbear, Wakako’s favorite netrunner, Hwangbo, the one where you save the doctor (there are actually technically two doctors you save in two different quests i realized). Those make me really happy, because they’re kind of a reminder that the work V does is not all thievery, revenge, and dealing with dark shit. I love the monk mission, um seeing that poor monk with the forced implants made my heart shatter, so being able to help him and his brother made me really happy.  The Ballad of Buck Ravers made me grin because its one of the ones thats just pure fun and seeing how Johnny interacts with V. I love the boxing missions, especially with Cesar the Valentino and that I can choose to help him out because lbr he needs the cash and car more than V does. Delamain and his quests makes me happy. The only other one I’ll say (tho I do like a lot of gigs and side missions) is probably a specific Cyberpsycho one, where the game just takes a sudden hard dive into horror which I love. Cause its like a maelstrom cult and you’re investigating corpses in a bloody pentagram, as you start hallucinating the cyberpsycho, who then comes out of a ice filled tub in the center. Like it has an energy to it that I just fuck with. 

I’ll project and say my V is in a similar boat of liking the rescue missions, she likes feeling like she can do some good in the world despite being a merc. She also likes the ones that are avenging people or helping folks; killing corpos who fucked people over, tracking down the raw bd of a boy who was murdered to help solve the case, and things of that nature where it feels like she might actually be doing something good.  19. how do you feel about revenge? is it a worthy fighting to achieve or something that sucks you in too deep?

This is all on my V, cause I feel weird talking about my personal feelings of revenge. Given her job, V has seen a lot of kinds of revenge and is often asked to be the one to deliver it. And there’s revenge she gets and revenge she doesn’t get. She’s actually far more selective with what work she’ll do and isn’t afraid to blatantly go against what she’s suppose to do in order to do what feels right. Which sometimes pisses off her fixers, but they begin to understand that they just shouldn’t send her certain jobs. But she’s all for revenge against people who genuinely did wrong; because her logic is if she lets the corpo agent who killed an entire nomad family for scientific trials just go, the corpo will do it again. She sees it as taking them out before they can hurt others, like cutting out a cancer in society. But when it comes to shit like, go kill a guy for loving a girl in a rival gang???? No fucking way, she’s not killing someone for falling in love, eat a dick, she’s telling the kid to run. In terms of her personal life and revenge, she struggles a bit more, because when you add in your own feelings it feels a hell of a lot less black and white. And she sometimes struggles with the fact that her feelings don’t always make sense, she’s definitely not morally opposed to revenge and despite usually being more calm, there is always kinda this underlying layer of anger in her that when something makes that come to the surface she loses herself in it. She could have killed Dex, would have if she had gotten the chance, because he brought her into this mess, she vouched for him to Evelyn, trusted him as much as he supposedly trusted her; then everything went to shit and he threw her under the bus. She’d kill for that, for that hurt, that loss, that pain; it’d be revenge she’d get happily. Her nomad family for example though is more complicated...cause despite everything...she loves them, but they’re actively trying to kill her, that hurts but she can’t bring herself to be angry... or vengeful...just hurt. 

30. does Rogue Amendiares scare the shit out of you or are you weird

Controversial take, I guess I’m fucking weird. I’m not scared of Rogue, yet, I feel I should preface. And I do project this on V, so take it as the answer for both of us. I feel like the two biggest things that contribute to Rogue’s ability to scare/intimidate is her social standing in the fixer community (which comes with power of course) and something Johnny says when you go to talk to her, that she can see right through you, don’t waste time lying. And the first aspect of that, doesn’t mean shit to me. Like, while I know Rogue was badass in the past and eventually is actively doing shit later on in game, the fact of the matter is fixers aren’t shit. Don’t get me wrong, most of them are cool people, and its nice to be hooked up with clients. But they’re getting a large chunk of cash for being a middle man who’s too big of a baby to go get their hands dirty. Like, fixers aren’t scary to me even if they’re powerful ones, like what, you gonna send someone else to axe me while you sit around??? terrifying, kill me yourself, coward. 

As far as the other aspect of why Rogue is propped up to be intimidating, the idea she has built in bullshit detectors. I/my V don’t bullshit a whole hell of a lot at least not in the current context of how I’ve interacted with her (haven’t done tapeworm missions and her stuff with Johnny yet tho tbf). Like, i don’t have a reason to lie about needing Hellman, so why the fuck would I? However, if this bullshit detector also helps her pick up on emotional shit, like if my V tries to hide her feelings about stuff...thats gonna suck and be scary if Rogue like picks up on what V is really feeling. Because emotional vulnerability is a thousand times more terrifying than a fixer who could make V disappear with a snap. 

*Small fun fact when I first did the Panam mission, Johnny told me I had balls to go ahead and do the mission without telling Rogue first which I didn’t even know I was suppose to do but also why the fuck should I, she sent me to do the damn thing, I gotta call her everytime I sneeze too????? How is that ballsy????

SORRY ONCE AGAIN FOR SUCH A LONG RESPONSE, BUT THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THE ASK, I APPRECIATE IT SO MUCH!!!!!

[dcnativegal]

In which I change jobs and listen to the people of Lakeview

Back in August, (it’s now early March, 2019) my boss called me up in my office in Christmas Valley and asked if I’d consider moving my work to Lakeview and joining the Lake District Clinics’ staff as a therapist. I pretty much said, you bet, when do I start? It’s not that I haven’t loved the people I work with as colleagues and as clients in Christmas Valley. It’s more that I have spent most of my 30+ years as a social worker basically embedded in medical teams, working on the psychological and practical issues that come up for people who are medically ill. The prospect of going back into a busy clinic at a bustling, though tiny, hospital, excited me. And so it was that I said goodbye to my clients, and to my work buddies Hayley, Jama, and Geri, and started driving south instead of north from Paisley, in late September.

It's now been 5 months, and the metaphor I use is that we are building this airplane while flying the thing, since this is the first time this hospital has had such a role: ‘Behavioral Health Consultant.’

Behavioral Health Consultants are culturally competent* generalists who provide treatment for a wide variety of mental health, psychosocial, motivational, and medical concerns, including management of anxiety, depression, substance abuse, smoking cessation, sleep hygiene, and diabetes among others. (definition brought to you by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_Care_Behavioral_health)  

*The better term than culturally competent is ‘culturally agile’, but the idea is the same: to be agile is to establish rapport with anybody, including people from the ethnicity called “white” and the culture of “taciturn cowboy.”  

The new job has an aspiration: “Primary Care/Behavioral Health Integration” whereby “mental health” is not taken care of in some other place, complete with another building, parking lot, and stigma (because when the town’s population is 2,300, everyone knows your rig.) If a patient comes to their primary care person for high blood pressure, or a miscarriage, or very high blood sugars, and the primary care person hears that your marriage is disintegrating, or you have nightmares, or your child killed her/himself, then there’s an immediate referral to me. If I’m busy with another patient, a referral gets made electronically, a receptionist calls this person, and boom, they are on my schedule. If I’m not busy, I’m brought in to meet them right then. Perhaps this person is crying, and I sit and listen, and maybe it’s just a bad day, or a sad anniversary, and what I do is provide compassionate listening. And my card. Perhaps we start a conversation and they schedule for a longer session because they hadn’t figured on being gone from work so long. See you soon, I say.

Behavioral Health Integration is new to much of the country, and yet it makes so much sense. Mind and body are connected. The trauma someone experienced as a child contributes to both his anxiety now and his high blood pressure. Her alcoholism might be worsened by her spouse’s infidelity: however, her liver is for sure. Let’s get this addressed, mind/body/spirit. Teamwork, people.

There are two other populations I get referrals to see. The folks who are taking an addictive substance that really isn’t good for them long term: either benzodiazepines like valium, or opioids.

The second group are the frequent flyers: folks who use the emergency department a great deal. There’s a team of people who try to help them. Are they anxious? Anxiety causes a lot of emergency department visits. So does a life that is very disorganized. Who can keep track of the day of the week, let alone an appointment in a clinic? There’s a meeting of people from many disciplines who meet weekly to brainstorm about how to create a supportive, educational web of services so that this person doesn’t use the most expensive health care resource available, (the emergency department) or bounce back into the hospital because being at home wasn’t safe.

I’ve had some interesting encounters. I meet people who are so much pain that they rock back and forth while they talk to me. I hear about a family where every single member has a serious disability but only one member will come in to talk to me. I finally went out with them to meet another relative waiting in the car and basically said, Hi, I don’t bite, come in to see me sometime, okay? It took 3 months but it worked.

A child came and sat at my table, proceeding to play with my wooden robots, then the magnet marble sculpture thing, and then color a mandala. All the while, a biological parent tells the story of their predicament, and the child corrects and fills in, holding the memory of all that has happened to this family. I find myself wishing multiple times a day, “if only the adults would adult.”

Another child is having panic attacks. Perhaps the addicted parent and the chaos at home are factors? You decide.

There is a funny thing that happens as I work in the arena of mental health while in a small town, and it will keep on happening. I assess one member of a social network, which may or may not be related to one or four of my other clients. The jigsaw puzzle of the situation becomes clearer and more recognizable while I listen to the stories. I can’t reveal that I already heard that story from someone else, with significantly different plot points and antagonists. I simply make note. Later that same day, the client has become the guy or gal behind a counter: well hello! And then I see the client’s mother in town: she peered at me through narrowed eyes, told me she was glad to know who was talking to her son. Sounded like I passed muster.

pass muster

be accepted as adequate or satisfactory.

synonyms:

be  good enough, come up to standard, come up to scratch, measure  up, be acceptable/adequate, be sufficient, fill/fit the  bill, do, qualify

I met with a rather desperate patient, in chronic pain, and super pissed off about everything. That patient died unexpectedly and sadly a few days later. On the same day I learned of this death, two of my other clients came in, separately, and cried about the sudden loss of this person. Used up all of my tissues. We are part of a tightly woven web.

And I can’t talk about any of it except to clinical supervisors or my therapist. Which is fine. Thank goodness I can take notes. My brain gets very full.

I no longer have the Roarks, Hayley the amazing therapist and her husband Tom the amazing police deputy, who could give me the back story and the full list of felonies for most of North County. I exaggerate only slightly. I do get perspective at the team meetings where we talk about the frequent flyers: everyone has a piece of the patient’s history. And everyone knows everyone else, and what they did last summer. I will never have that deep knowledge of this community that natives of Lake County do. There is a chaplain who seems to have the same deep, back stories of everyone in Lakeview. The primary care providers know a great deal, too. Perhaps my fresh perspective has a benefit: at least three clients have told me they are glad I’m not from here. They have a chance, a clean slate, instead of me having assumptions based on last name, what side of town they live on, etc. And I try so hard not to judge. I sit and listen, always humbled and amazed at the stories that are shared.

I can’t share specifics, but I certainly see themes.

Let’s talk for a minute about step families. There are an awful lot of step families and second and third marriages and many times, live-in sweeties who act like step parents, all of which is very confusing to children. There are a couple of rules that I thought everyone knew, but apparently not. Such as:

·         Do not, under any circumstances, tell a child, ‘you are so much like your Mom/Dad’ if those qualities you are calling out are negative. Please, please. You are not getting back at the miscreant, who is a conniving/cheating/meth-dealing/flake. You are hurting your child. (See, self-fulfilling prophecy. See, shitty legacy.) STOP IT.

·         Grownups need to do the adulting. Children are not go-betweens. Period, end of sentence. Also, children best not play one parent against another: the only way to make sure THAT isn’t happening is to …

·         Co-parent. If your kid has left your home to live with grandma, or step-father, or aunt, whomever, guess what? You are now co-parenting with your mother or step-father or sibling. You are coordinating school meetings with teachers, immunizations, and team schedules. You are consulting with the ‘other parent’ on whether the kid gets a smart phone, or can date, and whether they need condoms. Circle the wagons and parent the kid, whatever the old painful history. For the kids’ sake.

Right?

How about grief. People feel grief about all kinds of things, and especially the loss of other people. One grief hooks up with all the other losses, and sometimes, the heart just breaks and the mind stops and the tears flow. My all-time favorite quote about grief is this one:

People, usually, the conscientious ones, have very high expectations of themselves. They will plod on, and keep it all up, until the tears overflow, and they are horrified when they cry at work. Perhaps the long-dead person was the only one who ever stood by them, which explains why the ‘little’ loss that happened just the other day flowed into this biggest loss, and they are overcome.

I do some ‘grief education’. That it comes in waves. That patience with oneself is critical, and kind: if you can’t stop crying, then you need to cry, and go ahead, take the rest of the day off. You are not a slacker, or a malingerer. You are giving your mind and aching heart a break, and that is a healthy thing to do. We talk about options like writing a letter to the one you miss, so that you can tell them what you’ve been wanting to share. Who knows, maybe they are listening. Whatever the metaphysics of the matter, they exist in your experience. In psychoanalytic terms, that’s called an “introject.”  Write freely, as if they will hear your words.

Or maybe write a song, or draw a picture, in their memory, in their honor. What would they have told you to do, if they knew they were about to leave this mortal coil? Go forth and find another lover? Get back to playing that guitar and never mind how bad it sounds at first? Go dancing. Go bowling. Have a beer, or stay sober, in my name.

And know that you cannot push through grief, there is no shortcut:

It is an alteration of self that we would not choose, and it is excruciating. We are altered without anesthetic. I’m sorry. I have been so altered.

Let’s talk about social isolation. I found this quote in the New York Times and had it made into a canvas hanging in my office: (via EasyCanvasPrints.com)

Most of the clients I see are deeply disconnected from people, especially the men. Maybe there is a wife who connects him to the rest of the family, or a mother. But no one else. He doesn’t speak to his children. He’s estranged from a sister or a brother. No cousins, lost track of them. Don’t care to reconnect. Old pain, betrayals, lots of good reasons to stay mad. Except for the loneliness.

I encourage clients to call up an old friend and say, I was thinking about you, what the heck, I thought I’d call, tell me what’s going on, if this is a good time. Once the person gets over their shock, the content of what your old co-worker/ cousin/ younger sister tells you is refreshing. At least it isn’t the same old thoughts going around like a trapped gerbil in your mind. And then you’ve strengthened an old bond. Why not? Doesn’t cost anything.

I know it feels awkward. I called up my first cousin, out of the blue, after texting her to make sure I still had the right number, and in my text, I said, could you chat? She called me right away thinking something was wrong. We hadn’t spoken on the phone since I moved to Paisley. I didn’t mean to scare her. But I didn’t do our usual calendar/Christmas thing this year, and she’s my first cousin. We’re friends on Facebook, but we don’t share the whole truth on Facebook. We were candid. Life is imperfect. And I renewed that bond with this bright, hardworking woman with whom I share DNA.

I also hand-wrote several letters to old friends. I got lovely texts or emails back saying a letter will come in reply but give them time. I’m totally fine with that. And even if nothing comes back, I sent forth a bit of love, and story, to distract them from their mind-gerbils. There was a woman at St. Stephen’s, whom I got to know when I worked as the Parish Secretary and she was a volunteer. She would send a lovely note or postcard to someone and stamp it with “GUILT FREE MAIL.” How wonderful is that. Edith Eder, you were a gift to the world. She would wait to give baby blankets to newborns, and I think she waited because she’d had a stillbirth at one time, and knew the pain of having no baby for all the cute clothes and rattles that had been gifted.

*****

Ultimately, for the anxious and depressed, I hope I can convey some information, some strategies and tricks, a wee tincture of wisdom that they can hold onto, when they hit a bad patch. I have my own therapist, in Bend, 3 hours away, whom I see once a month. I take my anti-depressant dutifully and gratefully. I approach my very own bad patches and slip and fall, like I did over thanksgiving. I try to spot the bad patches, like drivers look for black ice this time of year, but sometimes the slipping can’t be helped. And kerplunk, we are in the ditch and need a tow. Best to minimize the damage, do what needs to be done and chalk it up to ‘When Bad Things Happen to Good People’, which is the book I recommend most to clients.

There’s the awesome quotation by Anais Nin about the blossom:

I see entering into psychotherapy this way: it is a risk, because the familiar misery feels safer, at first, than the bright new possibilities of change, which are scary, but then, occasionally, breathtakingly glorious. And in any case, patience is required. With ourselves. Again, Anais Nin, who is an incest survivor by the way:

Amen

[anctilbrayen]

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[reticexce]

RETICEXCE’S RP PLOTTING CHEAT-SHEET

Want new-and-exciting plots for your character? Long to reach out to more of your followers, but don’t know where to start? Fear not! Fill out this form and give your RP partners both present and future all the of juicy jumping off points they need to help you get your characters acquainted.

Be sure to tag the players whose characters YOU want more cues to interact with, and repost, don’t reblog! Feel free to add or remove sections as you see fit. Template here.

Mun name: birdie OOC Contact: instant messenger and asks ( bc im always on mobile ) or sky.pe and k.ik, if we’re close mutuals 

Who the heck is are my muse muses anyway:

alison clair: a fashion designer who used to be a prostitute and has experienced various toxic relationships in her life and still feels the effects of them even now ( self-hate, think she’s inadequate, thinks the toxic relationships are her fault in a way ). has lots of love to give, very creative and artsy, wears a lot of pastel colors and can probably make you an entire outfit if you ask her nicely. 

emile clair: ali’s twin brother ( he’s older! ) who is an overgrown boy scout but can’t go outside as much as he wants because he has an office job ( legal aid ). has a soft spot for plants, hates the other two male muses on this blog, awkward af around attractive people, hella gay but has been hiding this fact about himself for years and has only recently come to terms with it ( sort of ).

cedric privett: alison’s first boyfriend in high school; wealthy and sort of bratty but lives more humbly than people might think. is best friends with nate and teased emile for being gay in high school. verbally abusive to alison in high school. is currently a bartender who reads a lot and has to deal with drunken fights at his bar more often than he likes. will probably flirt with you muse a lot.

nate cain: a terrible person. ali’s second “boyfriend” in high school. took advantage of her in high school and her virginity. physically abused her and verbally abused emile for being gay. hates his parents because they treated him like shit and was in foster homes all of his childhood and early teen years. has bipolar II disorder. is currently djing for money and has a fucked up sleep cycle. 

Points of interest:

alison: is super nice and bubbly, loves cats and flowers, wears mostly pink, will scrapbook and take a lot of photos, will probably love your muse or grow really attached , can be super self conscious about silly things, pls take care of her.

emile: will probably invite your muse to go hiking or bird watching, loves the rain and succulents, stutters a lot when talking to strangers and does embarrassing things, is tol and can help your muse reach stuff. 

cedric: sarcastic, speaks in a proper manner, dresses like he’s all that because he can afford nice clothes, has read lots of books, will judge you on your drink choices, always looks like he’s making bedroom eyes at you probably, is fake af 

nate: looks done 97% of the time with life, replies in short sentences and in a monotonous tone, looks tired, probably never awake when you are, makes great music though and will call you out if he thinks you listen to trash, curses a lot 

What they’ve been up to recently:

alison: living day to day and trying to recover from her past. picking up a lot of hobbies and trying to keep herself busy and healthy ( though she could always use some extra help with the healthy part ). has just been assigned to work on a new fashion line with her aunt ( who owns the company ali works for ) so that’s been keeping her real busy.

emile: trying to not hate his job but it’s not working but at least his cat keeps him happy. trying to also come out of his shell more and get into the dating scene but that’s also not working as well. he’s learned a few new knots though so that’s pretty cool. 

cedric: not on the best terms with his parents but he’s gotta deal with them anyway, is co-owner of a popular bar, is trying not to remember alison and had to deal with nate’s bullshit even more now since he’s back in town 

nate: finally freed from high school and has taken a few college classes online but nothing to get a degree. really focused on making music with other collaborators and is hella enjoying the launchpad he got himself a few years ago. internally denies everything that’s happened with alison and is skipping out on therapy that he’s suppose to be going to for his condition 

Where to find them:

alison: at her office, at cafes, at fashion shows or charity events, the bar, her apartment, the park

emile: in his office at his father’s law firm, outside in park, at the farmer’s market, in his apartment, at a cafe, rarely at the bar but you can try, at marathons bc this boy likes to run, at the train station bc this boy hates to drive and cares too much about the environment 

cedric: at his bar ( the best place ), a bookstore, a restaurant or cafe, at his parents’ place, at a party his parents’ are throwing, at an office party he didn’t want to go to but got dragged into

nate: in bed, at a fast food place, at a night club or a strip club, at a bar probably getting into a fight, in an alley probably finishing that fight

Current plans:

alison: looking for more models for her clothes or for her photography hobby, sketching, trying to not skip meals, and trying to find her prince charming ( or someone to hook up with and make her feel useful and safe ). is thinking about going to school one day to become a nurse but that’ll have to wait when she has more money saved up.

emile: is also thinking about going back to school bc law is now the path for him but who knows what he’ll do ( he’s thinking history ). really determined to get back into the dating scene and meet cute people but social anxiety is an awful thing and he needs lots of patience to overcome it. really wants to get back into hiking 

cedric: taking care of nate, trying to please his parents but also trying to piss them off at the same time by having more hookups, is pretty happy with where he is in life though taking care of nate can be real draining

nate: live through the self hatred and make music to keep himself sane, currently in a stable relationship with someone so that’s always exciting. he doesn’t really do much, but he’s living so that’s good for him 

Desired interactions:

alison: more toxic relationships bc she always seems to attract people that aren’t so good for her, and i like to cause her pain, old clients or new ones since she does have a harlot verse, gal pals are the best, and ?? really difficult people?? i’ve always wanted to see how alison handles difficult people. oh and one night stands bc a girl has needs

emile: more dates, emile crushing really hard on a male muse and it’s possibly unrequited or emile just hasn’t had the guts to tell your muse yet and one day he just blurts it out, someone teaching emile how to kiss or hike up his flirting game 

cedric: be his friend and bitch about things with him, try to be his sugar baby and see how far it takes you, call him out for being so fake

nate: former one night stand coming back and trying to get involved in nate’s life even though he has a gf, someone nate got in a fight with recognizing him and trying to get a rematch, roommates au tbh 

Offered interactions:

alison: is super helpful and nice so she’s always willing to help your muse out or keep them company at like a bus stop or something. known to strike up random conversations. will offer to help fix a hole in your muse’s clothes if it ever happens ( like a wardrobe malfunction ). likes to try new foods and see new things so invite her out and have fun!!

emile: will tell you lots of stuff about his plants if you ask ( or just nature in general ), is really good at painting and wouldn’t mind helping you impress someone you like by painting you a picture and selling it to you, has really good taste in coffee and can help you find the right brew, will let you pet his cat if you’re sad. 

cedric: he’s pretty good at telling when people have had too much so he’ll shut you down real quick if you ask and he’s certain you’re shitfaced, he has a lot of good recommendations when it comes to books, he probably won’t remember you if you told him you guys slept together but you can always remind him 

nate: lmao nate never wants to come out but if you’re looking for a fight or wants someone to play video games with nate is your man 

Current open post/s:

open tag is here!! mutuals only please.

Anything else?:

hi a shy bean in central time zone. i love multiple thread with the same person and i dont mind if you send me ten memes, love me 

Tagged by: @tiivadvabadust ( indirectly! ) Tagging: idk man this was a long thing to fill out bc i had so many muses if you wanna do it then go for it and lemme see!! i would love to see!!

[bountyofbeads]

How the impeachment inquiry has revealed a long and murky campaign to oust a veteran U.S. Ambassador

By Rosalind S. Helderman and Tom Hamburger | Published November 14 at 8:21 PM ET | Washington Post | Posted November 15, 2019 |

In February, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine — a 33-year career diplomat who had served presidents of both parties — received a blunt warning.

“Watch your back,” Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch said she was told by Ukraine’s interior minister.

The Ukrainian official relayed that a pair of Florida businessmen and a Kyiv prosecutor with whom Yovanovitch had clashed were working to oust her from the post she had held since 2016, she later told House investigators.

The trio had a powerful ally, he added: President Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani.

“I thought it was exceedingly strange,” Yovanovitch said, according to a transcript of her closed-door testimony last month.

The impeachment inquiry has pulled back the curtain on a long and murky effort to engineer the ambassador’s removal — one driven by an array of figures whose motives are still not fully understood. They include a former U.S. congressman-turned-lobbyist, a then-sitting member of Congress and the two Giuliani associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, who have since been charged with campaign finance crimes.

Yovanovitch’s public testimony Friday is expected to showcase how what appears to have begun as the personal crusade of private individuals became intertwined with efforts to use Ukraine to benefit Trump politically.

The attacks on the ambassador — and the fact that the president capitulated to the smear effort against her — led to widespread alarm among national security officials, several told Congress in recent weeks.

“She’d been subject to a pretty ruthless, nasty defamation to basically remove her from her place,” former National Security Council adviser Fiona Hill testified in her closed-door deposition last month.

“The most obvious explanation,” Hill testified, “seemed to be business dealings of individuals who wanted to improve their investment positions inside of Ukraine” as well as an effort “to deflect away from” findings that Russia had interfered in the 2016 presidential election.

Yovanovitch has said she knows little about the pressure the administration put on Ukraine to investigate Trump’s political opponents, much of which occurred after her departure from Kyiv, but her appearance Friday offers the possibility of a compelling emotional moment in the Democrats’ impeachment hearings.

The little-known diplomat has described how she was taken aback when conservative media began to advocate her removal in March and to spread her name on social media, where the president’s son Donald Trump Jr. called her “a joker.”

And she has said she was shocked and frightened when she read a rough transcript of Trump’s call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, released in September, in which the U.S. president called her “bad news” and predicted she would “go through some things.”

'THE BEST OF THE BEST'

Born in Canada to parents who had fled the Soviet Union, Yovanovitch joined the Foreign Service after graduate school in 1986. Since then, she has served in seven countries, across the administrations of six American presidents, including as ambassador to Kyrgyzstan and Armenia.

In May 2016, she was named ambassador to Ukraine by President Barack Obama and, this spring, the Trump administration asked her to extend her service there into 2020.

In testimony, colleagues vouched for Yovanovitch’s professionalism and expertise.

“The best of the best, in terms of a nonpartisan career official,” Hill testified, noting that it is rare for women to reach the upper ranks of the diplomatic corps. “I just see her as epitomizing what United States diplomacy should be.”

Top State Department official George Kent added that Yovanovitch was “someone who follows very [strictly] what is deemed proper and proprietary.”

In her post, Yovanovitch worked to advance U.S. interests by countering Russian aggression and backing new legal structures intended to root out long-standing corruption in Ukraine’s economy, she and others testified.

The mission earned her enemies, Kent told the House this week.

“You can’t promote principled anti-corruption action without pissing off corrupt people,” he said.

The first signs that forces were agitating to push her out came in 2017 or 2018.

It was then that veteran Foreign Service officer Catherine Croft received “multiple calls” from a prominent Republican lobbyist, former Louisiana congressman Bob Livingston, urging Yovanovitch’s firing, she told lawmakers.

At the time, Croft was detailed to the National Security Council and reported the curious calls to her superiors.

“He characterized Ambassador Yovanovitch as an ‘Obama holdover’ and associated [her] with George Soros,” the wealthy liberal donor, Croft said in a written statement provided to the committee. “It was not clear to me at the time — or now — at whose direction or at whose expense Mr. Livingston was seeking the removal of Ambassador Yovanovitch.”

Livingston did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Justice Department records show Livingston is registered as a lobbyist representing companies and organizations connected to Yulia Tymoshenko, a Ukrainian politician with energy investments, who has sought to regain political power in Ukraine since she lost her job as prime minister in 2010.

Jim Slattery, a Washington lawyer who represented Tymo­shenko in the past, rejected the idea that his friend and former client would have sought the removal of Yovanovitch.

“I have no knowledge of her directing anyone to seek the removal of the ambassador and I am confident that, if she had, I would know,” he said, adding that Yovanovitch is “a competent and dedicated” diplomat who has commanded “enormous respect” across party lines.

Yovanovitch was also a topic of discussion at a small dinner for top Trump donors in a private suite of the Trump hotel in Washington attended by the president and Donald Trump Jr. on April 30, 2018.

In attendance were Parnas and Fruman, who had pledged a major donation to a pro-Trump super PAC. Last month, the two men were arrested at Dulles International Airport and charged with illegally funneling foreign money into U.S. campaign contribution. .They have pleaded not guilty.

According to federal prosecutors, Parnas and Fruman had also embarked on an effort to oust Yovanovitch at the request of an unidentified Ukrainian government official.

An attorney for Parnas, Joseph A. Bondy, has denied that claim and has said Parnas was not motivated by personal business interests. A lawyer for Fruman, Matt Blanche, declined to comment.

During the 2018 dinner, Parnas has told associates, he and Fruman told Trump that Yovanovitch was unfriendly to the president’s interests, people familiar with his account have said. Parnas claimed that Trump had an immediate and visceral reaction: He declared Yovanovitch should be fired.

Ten days later, Parnas was on Capitol Hill, meeting with then-Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Tex.), according to photos he posted online. That same day, Sessions penned a letter to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo complaining that Yovanovitch was biased against Trump, according to the indictment of Parnas and Fruman.

Sessions has said he did not “take any official action” as a result of his meeting with Parnas and sent the letter because he had come to believe Yovanovitch was bad-mouthing Trump abroad.

The letter played a significant role in spreading dissent about Yovanovitch in Washington. Giuliani has told The Post that it was Sessions who helped inspire Trump’s distrust for her.

Giuliani has said he was introduced to Parnas and Fruman by a mutual friend in the summer of 2018, and eventually collected $500,000 to advise a company Parnas started called Fraud Guarantee.

By early this year, Parnas and Fruman were also working with Giuliani on his efforts to dig up dirt on Democrats in Ukraine. They helped connect him to former Ukrainian officials who claimed their country had interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and that an investigation into former vice president Joe Biden’s son Hunter had been quashed.

DETERMINED ADVERSARIES

In so doing, the two men linked Giuliani up with some of Yovanovitch’s most determined Ukrainian adversaries.

One was Yuri Lutsenko, who had been appointed prosecutor-general in 2016. Yovanovitch testified that she had at first hoped Lutsenko would clean up the prosecutor’s office, but that he failed to do so.

By 2018, he was openly complaining about the ambassador and clashing with an independent anti-corruption bureau, known as NABU, which was set up in the aftermath of a 2014 pro-Europe uprising and that was supported by the United States and other Western allies.

Giuliani met with Lutsenko in New York in January to discuss the possibility that Ukraine would open a new investigation into the 2016 election or Burisma, an energy company whose board of directors included Hunter Biden, The Post previously reported.

Notes from Lutsenko’s meeting with Giuliani that were turned over the State Department’s inspector general and submitted to lawmakers show that Lutsenko also discussed Yovanovitch with Giuliani, accusing her of spending “money on good public relations for NABU.”

Giuliani’s displeasure with Yovanovitch appears to have mounted when State Department officials declined to issue a visa to another Ukrainian, a former prosecutor named Viktor Shokin, who wanted to travel to the United States to meet with him.

As vice president, Biden had pushed for the firing of Shokin, who U.S. and European officials believed was not sufficiently aggressive in pursuing corruption cases. Shokin has claimed that he was fired because his office was investigating Burisma and Biden’s son — a probe that anti-corruption activists and former officials said was actually dormant at the time.

The decision to deny Shokin a visa was made at the recommendation of career consular staff, Yovanovitch testified. Angered, Giuliani appealed the decision to the White House and senior State Department officials, she said.

Consular officials, she said, “held firm.” Shokin was forced to meet with Giuliani via Skype, rather than in person. In their conversation, Shokin claimed that Yovanovitch was “close to Biden,” Giuliani’s notes show.

Before his arrest, Parnas told The Post in September that Giuliani was upset by the episode and suggested that it contributed to Yovanovitch’s ouster. “That’s why I think the ambassador’s not there,” Parnas said.

By March, Parnas and Fruman were telling associates that Yovanovitch would soon be removed from her post, according to people who encountered them.

At an energy conference in Houston, they explained to a top official at Ukraine’s state-owned gas company that Yovanovitch stood in the way of their plans to broker gas deals in Kyiv, according to an American energy executive, Dale Perry, who spoke to the gas company executive soon afterward.

The agitation against Yovanovitch became public that same month, when conservative columnist John Solomon interviewed Lutsenko for the Hill. In the interview, Lutsenko alleged that Yovanovitch had given him a list of people he could not prosecute.

The State Department issued a statement calling the allegation an “outright fabrication.” and Lutsenko quickly recanted. Last month, he told the New York Times that his interview had been mistranslated.

Soon after The Hill column was published, Trump Jr. fanned the flames, retweeting another article calling for her removal and writing we need “less of these jokers as ambassadors.”

AN ABRUPT OUSTER

In late April, Yovanovitch testified she received a call to leave Kyiv “on the next plane” to meet with top State Department officials. The department’s No. 2 official at the time, John J. Sullivan, who has since been nominated to be the U.S. ambassador to Moscow, told her she was being recalled from her job in Kyiv because the president had lost trust in her.

“Although I understand that I served at the pleasure of the president, I was nevertheless incredulous that the U.S. government chose to remove an ambassador based, as best as I can tell, on unfounded and false claims by people with clearly questionable motives,” she told the House panel last month.

Veteran diplomat Michael McKinley, a top aide to Pompeo, testified that after the rough transcript of Trump’s call with Zelensky was released in September, he urged the secretary of state to issue a public statement in support of the ambassador.

When Pompeo didn’t respond, McKinley said he emailed other senior officials proposing a “strong and immediate statement of support for Ambassador Yovanovitch’s professionalism and courage.”

A few hours later, one of the recipients of McKinley’s email, a State Department spokesman, called to say that Pompeo had rejected the idea, citing a desire to protect Yovanovitch from “undue attention,” he testified.

McKinley resigned 12 days later. He told lawmakers he had no choice.

“Since I began my career in 1982, I have served my country and every president loyally,” he said. “Under current circumstances, however, I could no longer look the other way as colleagues are denied the professional support and respect they deserve.”

______

Alice Crites contributed to this report.

🍁🍞🍂☕🍁🍞🍂☕🍁🍞🍂☕🍁🍞

[terabitweb]

Original Post from Krebs on Security Author: BrianKrebs

Email provider VFEmail has suffered what the company is calling “catastrophic destruction” at the hands of an as-yet unknown intruder who trashed all of the company’s primary and backup data in the United States. The firm’s founder says he now fears some 18 years’ worth of customer email may be gone forever.

Founded in 2001 and based in Milwaukee, Wisc., VFEmail provides email service to businesses and end users. The first signs of the attack came on the morning of Feb. 11, when the company’s Twitter account started fielding reports from users who said they were no longer receiving messages. VFEmail’s Twitter account responded that “external facing systems, of differing OS’s and remote authentication, in multiple data centers are down.”

Two hours later, VFEmail tweeted that it had caught a hacker in the act of formatting one of the company’s mail servers in The Netherlands.

“nl101 is up, but no incoming email,” read a tweet shortly thereafter. “I fear all US based data my be lost.”

“At this time, the attacker has formatted all the disks on every server,” wrote VFEmail. “Every VM [virtual machine] is lost. Every file server is lost, every backup server is lost. Strangely, not all VMs shared the same authentication, but all were destroyed. This was more than a multi-password via ssh exploit, and there was no ransom. Just attack and destroy.”

In an update posted to the company’s Web site, VFEmail owner Rick Romero wrote that new email was being delivered and that efforts were being made to recover what user data could be salvaged.

“At this time I am unsure of the status of existing mail for US users,” Romero wrote. “If you have your own email client, DO NOT TRY TO MAKE IT WORK. If you reconnect your client to your new mailbox, all your local mail will be lost.”

Reached by KrebsOnSecurity on Tuesday morning, Romero said he was able to recover a backup drive hosted in The Netherlands, but that he fears all of the mail for U.S. users may be irreparably lost.

“I don’t have very high expectations of getting any U.S. data back,” Romero said in an online chat.

John Senchak, a longtime VFEmail user from Florida who also has been a loyal reader and commenter at this blog, told KrebsOnSecurity that the attack completely wiped out his inbox at the company — some 60,000 emails sent and received over more than a decade.

“I have a account with that site, all the email in my account was deleted,” Senchak said.

Asked if he had any clues about the attackers or how they may have broken in, Romero said the intruder appeared to be doing his dirty work from a server based in Bulgaria (94.155.49[9], username “aktv.”)

“I haven’t done much digging yet on the actors,” he said. “It looked like the IP was a Bulgarian hosting company. So I’m assuming it was just a virtual machine they were using to launch the attack from. There definitely was something that somebody didn’t want found. Or, I really pissed someone off. That’s always possible.”

This isn’t the first time criminals have targeted VFEmail. I wrote about the company in 2015 after it suffered a debilitating distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack after Romero declined to pay a ransom demand from an online extortion group. Another series of DDoS attacks in 2017 forced VFEmail to find a new hosting provider.

In December 2018, Romero tweeted that service had been disrupted by a DDoS attack that he attributed to “script kiddies,” a derisive reference to low-skilled online hooligans.

“After 17 years if I was planning it shut it down, it’d be shut down by me – not script kiddies,” Romero wrote on Dec. 8.

Attacks that seek to completely destroy data and servers without any warning or extortion demand are not as common as, say, ransomware infestations, but when they do occur they can be devastating (the 2014 Sony Pictures hack and the still-unsolved 2016 assault on U.S.-based ISP Staminus come to mind).

It’s not clear how or whether VFEmail will recover from this latest attack, but such actions are an unsettling reminder that although most cybercriminals have some kind of short- or long-term profit motive in mind, an intruder with privileged access to a network can just as well virtually destroy everything within reach as they can plant malware or extortion threats like ransomware.

Go to Source Author: BrianKrebs Email Provider VFEmail Suffers ��Catastrophic’ Hack Original Post from Krebs on Security Author: BrianKrebs Email provider VFEmail has suffered what the company is calling “catastrophic destruction” at the hands of an as-yet unknown intruder who trashed all of the company’s primary and backup data in the United States.

[jennifersnyderca90]

Email Provider VFEmail Suffers ‘Catastrophic’ Hack

Email provider VFEmail has suffered what the company is calling “catastrophic destruction” at the hands of an as-yet unknown intruder who trashed all of the company’s primary and backup data in the United States. The firm’s founder says he now fears some 18 years’ worth of customer email may be gone forever.

Founded in 2001 and based in Milwaukee, Wisc., VFEmail provides email service to businesses and end users. The first signs of the attack came on the morning of Feb. 11, when the company’s Twitter account started fielding reports from users who said they were no longer receiving messages. VFEmail’s Twitter account responded that “external facing systems, of differing OS’s and remote authentication, in multiple data centers are down.”

Two hours later, VFEmail tweeted that it had caught a hacker in the act of formatting one of the company’s mail servers in The Netherlands.

“nl101 is up, but no incoming email,” read a tweet shortly thereafter. “I fear all US based data my be lost.”

“At this time, the attacker has formatted all the disks on every server,” wrote VFEmail. “Every VM [virtual machine] is lost. Every file server is lost, every backup server is lost. Strangely, not all VMs shared the same authentication, but all were destroyed. This was more than a multi-password via ssh exploit, and there was no ransom. Just attack and destroy.”

In an update posted to the company’s Web site, VFEmail owner Rick Romero wrote that new email was being delivered and that efforts were being made to recover what user data could be salvaged.

“At this time I am unsure of the status of existing mail for US users,” Romero wrote. “If you have your own email client, DO NOT TRY TO MAKE IT WORK. If you reconnect your client to your new mailbox, all your local mail will be lost.”

Reached by KrebsOnSecurity on Tuesday morning, Romero said he was able to recover a backup drive hosted in The Netherlands, but that he fears all of the mail for U.S. users may be irreparably lost.

“I don’t have very high expectations of getting any U.S. data back,” Romero said in an online chat.

John Senchak, a longtime VFEmail user from Florida who also has been a loyal reader and commenter at this blog, told KrebsOnSecurity that the attack completely wiped out his inbox at the company — some 60,000 emails sent and received over more than a decade.

“I have a account with that site, all the email in my account was deleted,” Senchak said.

Asked if he had any clues about the attackers or how they may have broken in, Romero said the intruder appeared to be doing his dirty work from a server based in Bulgaria (94.155.49[9], username “aktv.”)

“I haven’t done much digging yet on the actors,” he said. “It looked like the IP was a Bulgarian hosting company. So I’m assuming it was just a virtual machine they were using to launch the attack from. There definitely was something that somebody didn’t want found. Or, I really pissed someone off. That’s always possible.”

This isn’t the first time criminals have targeted VFEmail. I wrote about the company in 2015 after it suffered a debilitating distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack after Romero declined to pay a ransom demand from an online extortion group. Another series of DDoS attacks in 2017 forced VFEmail to find a new hosting provider.

In December 2018, Romero tweeted that service had been disrupted by a DDoS attack that he attributed to “script kiddies,” a derisive reference to low-skilled online hooligans.

“After 17 years if I was planning to shut it down, it’d be shut down by me – not script kiddies,” Romero wrote on Dec. 8.

Attacks that seek to completely destroy data and servers without any warning or extortion demand are not as common as, say, ransomware infestations, but when they do occur they can be devastating (the 2014 Sony Pictures hack and the still-unsolved 2016 assault on U.S.-based ISP Staminus come to mind).

It’s not clear how or whether VFEmail will recover from this latest attack, but such actions are an unsettling reminder that although most cybercriminals have some kind of short- or long-term profit motive in mind, an intruder with privileged access to a network can just as well virtually destroy everything within reach as they can plant malware or extortion threats like ransomware.

from https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/02/email-provider-vfemail-suffers-catastrophic-hack/

[amberdscott2]

Email Provider VFEmail Suffers ‘Catastrophic’ Hack

Email provider VFEmail has suffered what the company is calling “catastrophic destruction” at the hands of an as-yet unknown intruder who trashed all of the company’s primary and backup data in the United States. The firm’s founder says he now fears some 18 years’ worth of customer email may be gone forever.

Founded in 2001 and based in Milwaukee, Wisc., VFEmail provides email service to businesses and end users. The first signs of the attack came on the morning of Feb. 11, when the company’s Twitter account started fielding reports from users who said they were no longer receiving messages. VFEmail’s Twitter account responded that “external facing systems, of differing OS’s and remote authentication, in multiple data centers are down.”

Two hours later, VFEmail tweeted that it had caught a hacker in the act of formatting one of the company’s mail servers in The Netherlands.

“nl101 is up, but no incoming email,” read a tweet shortly thereafter. “I fear all US based data my be lost.”

“At this time, the attacker has formatted all the disks on every server,” wrote VFEmail. “Every VM [virtual machine] is lost. Every file server is lost, every backup server is lost. Strangely, not all VMs shared the same authentication, but all were destroyed. This was more than a multi-password via ssh exploit, and there was no ransom. Just attack and destroy.”

In an update posted to the company’s Web site, VFEmail owner Rick Romero wrote that new email was being delivered and that efforts were being made to recover what user data could be salvaged.

“At this time I am unsure of the status of existing mail for US users,” Romero wrote. “If you have your own email client, DO NOT TRY TO MAKE IT WORK. If you reconnect your client to your new mailbox, all your local mail will be lost.”

Reached by KrebsOnSecurity on Tuesday morning, Romero said he was able to recover a backup drive hosted in The Netherlands, but that he fears all of the mail for U.S. users may be irreparably lost.

“I don’t have very high expectations of getting any U.S. data back,” Romero said in an online chat.

John Senchak, a longtime VFEmail user from Florida who also has been a loyal reader and commenter at this blog, told KrebsOnSecurity that the attack completely wiped out his inbox at the company — some 60,000 emails sent and received over more than a decade.

“I have a account with that site, all the email in my account was deleted,” Senchak said.

Asked if he had any clues about the attackers or how they may have broken in, Romero said the intruder appeared to be doing his dirty work from a server based in Bulgaria (94.155.49[9], username “aktv.”)

“I haven’t done much digging yet on the actors,” he said. “It looked like the IP was a Bulgarian hosting company. So I’m assuming it was just a virtual machine they were using to launch the attack from. There definitely was something that somebody didn’t want found. Or, I really pissed someone off. That’s always possible.”

This isn’t the first time criminals have targeted VFEmail. I wrote about the company in 2015 after it suffered a debilitating distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack after Romero declined to pay a ransom demand from an online extortion group. Another series of DDoS attacks in 2017 forced VFEmail to find a new hosting provider.

In December 2018, Romero tweeted that service had been disrupted by a DDoS attack that he attributed to “script kiddies,” a derisive reference to low-skilled online hooligans.

“After 17 years if I was planning it shut it down, it’d be shut down by me – not script kiddies,” Romero wrote on Dec. 8.

Attacks that seek to completely destroy data and servers without any warning or extortion demand are not as common as, say, ransomware infestations, but when they do occur they can be devastating (the 2014 Sony Pictures hack and the still-unsolved 2016 assault on U.S.-based ISP Staminus come to mind).

It’s not clear how or whether VFEmail will recover from this latest attack, but such actions are an unsettling reminder that although most cybercriminals have some kind of short- or long-term profit motive in mind, an intruder with privileged access to a network can just as well virtually destroy everything within reach as they can plant malware or extortion threats like ransomware.

from Amber Scott Technology News https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/02/email-provider-vfemail-suffers-catastrophic-hack/

[nedsvallesny]

Email Provider VFEmail Suffers ‘Catastrophic’ Hack

Email provider VFEmail has suffered what the company is calling “catastrophic destruction” at the hands of an as-yet unknown intruder who trashed all of the company’s primary and backup data in the United States. The firm’s founder says he now fears some 18 years’ worth of customer email may be gone forever.

Founded in 2001 and based in Milwaukee, Wisc., VFEmail provides email service to businesses and end users. The first signs of the attack came on the morning of Feb. 11, when the company’s Twitter account started fielding reports from users who said they were no longer receiving messages. VFEmail’s Twitter account responded that “external facing systems, of differing OS’s and remote authentication, in multiple data centers are down.”

Two hours later, VFEmail tweeted that it had caught a hacker in the act of formatting one of the company’s mail servers in The Netherlands.

“nl101 is up, but no incoming email,” read a tweet shortly thereafter. “I fear all US based data my be lost.”

“At this time, the attacker has formatted all the disks on every server,” wrote VFEmail. “Every VM [virtual machine] is lost. Every file server is lost, every backup server is lost. Strangely, not all VMs shared the same authentication, but all were destroyed. This was more than a multi-password via ssh exploit, and there was no ransom. Just attack and destroy.”

In an update posted to the company’s Web site, VFEmail owner Rick Romero wrote that new email was being delivered and that efforts were being made to recover what user data could be salvaged.

“At this time I am unsure of the status of existing mail for US users,” Romero wrote. “If you have your own email client, DO NOT TRY TO MAKE IT WORK. If you reconnect your client to your new mailbox, all your local mail will be lost.”

Reached by KrebsOnSecurity on Tuesday morning, Romero said he was able to recover a backup drive hosted in The Netherlands, but that he fears all of the mail for U.S. users may be irreparably lost.

“I don’t have very high expectations of getting any U.S. data back,” Romero said in an online chat.

John Senchak, a longtime VFEmail user from Florida who also has been a loyal reader and commenter at this blog, told KrebsOnSecurity that the attack completely wiped out his inbox at the company — some 60,000 emails sent and received over more than a decade.

“I have a account with that site, all the email in my account was deleted,” Senchak said.

Asked if he had any clues about the attackers or how they may have broken in, Romero said the intruder appeared to be doing his dirty work from a server based in Bulgaria (94.155.49[9], username “aktv.”)

“I haven’t done much digging yet on the actors,” he said. “It looked like the IP was a Bulgarian hosting company. So I’m assuming it was just a virtual machine they were using to launch the attack from. There definitely was something that somebody didn’t want found. Or, I really pissed someone off. That’s always possible.”

This isn’t the first time criminals have targeted VFEmail. I wrote about the company in 2015 after it suffered a debilitating distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack after Romero declined to pay a ransom demand from an online extortion group. Another series of DDoS attacks in 2017 forced VFEmail to find a new hosting provider.

In December 2018, Romero tweeted that service had been disrupted by a DDoS attack that he attributed to “script kiddies,” a derisive reference to low-skilled online hooligans.

“After 17 years if I was planning it shut it down, it’d be shut down by me – not script kiddies,” Romero wrote on Dec. 8.

Attacks that seek to completely destroy data and servers without any warning or extortion demand are not as common as, say, ransomware infestations, but when they do occur they can be devastating (the 2014 Sony Pictures hack and the still-unsolved 2016 assault on U.S.-based ISP Staminus come to mind).

It’s not clear how or whether VFEmail will recover from this latest attack, but such actions are an unsettling reminder that although most cybercriminals have some kind of short- or long-term profit motive in mind, an intruder with privileged access to a network can just as well virtually destroy everything within reach as they can plant malware or extortion threats like ransomware.

from Technology News https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/02/email-provider-vfemail-suffers-catastrophic-hack/

[search-engine-optimization-stl]

Ten Marketers And A Bunch Of SEO Tips I’ve Picked Up From Them Along The Way

Blog First Found On this blog . You can reach the original post here Ten Marketers And A Bunch Of SEO Tips I’ve Picked Up From Them Along The Way.

***First of all the above picture is me doing the (Steve) AOKI jump. I wanted to prove that I might just be a ninja, so I’m qualified to talk about a bunch of SEO tips. Wrong type of Ninja huh?***

I haven’t written a blog post in a long time, mainly because I haven’t had the time to do it. Let’s face it when one works at an agency and has multiple clients that they are developing and implementing marketing strategies for, there really isn’t much time for anything else.

Last week I broke my hand which probably has you asking shouldn���t he have less time then? The answer is YES! But, blogging and doing SEO (Whatever That Means) are still 2 of my favorite things. So, here we are, I am writing a blog post about my favorite tips that I’ve learned from some of my favorite marketers, SEO Ninjas, PPC Gurus and everything in between.

By the way that took me about 20 minutes to type due to the broken hand. MAYBE I DON’T HAVE TIME FOR THIS?

The tips nor the marketers are in any specific order and are simply tips that stood out to me when I heard them. There is no real time period here. Some are old tips and some are from 2018. But, you all get a GOLD STAR in my book!

A Bunch Of SEO Tips From My Favorite Marketers

Danny Sullivan – @dannysullivan

This is really simple now that I think about it, but at the time I never thought about how big of an impact local SEO could/would have.

Danny said, “Show up right in local SEO”. He spoke about the importance of having your information correct in Google My Business, monitoring Yelp and other review sites, because those sites would become important in local searches.

This is obviously right on point and it reminds me of a few services (hmmm) such as YEXT, Bright Local, White Spark, and Moz Local. Were they listening to you, Danny?

Rand Fishkin – @randfish

I remember when Rand said something about how SEO people or the “SEOs” on the team need to be involved with branding, design, and development. This way you’re taking advantage of your offerings before the end product goes to market.

I took this and applied it to my current position which is a digital strategist at a website development company that does digital marketing. I enthusiastically put myself into the beginning process of the website development.

This meant pissing off the design team, the “thinkers” or people working mostly on branding and the developers. It turns out having a good user experience design, sitemap and overall plan is a good thing and this became the common practice. Thanks, Rand Fishkin.

Barry Schwartz – @rustybrick

What I remember from Barry is when he said to not follow all of the changes and basically stick to what you know works. He said to continue pumping out good content and be the expert.

Barry is the one that drilled down that you need to know what you are writing about and be passionate about it. This way you will at least sound like you know what you’re talking about. Keeping your readers coming back is the goal and being the expert will do that and show Google that you are an authority on your topic.

We know that Google loves authority… Well as long as they’re the authority! Right?

Larry Kim – @larrykim

Larry Kim is why I heard about Medium and why publishing on the site is a good idea for your content. It was actually earlier this year before he went to do his Unicorn thing. Larry posted a blog post that had 10 reasons you should be publishing on Medium.

My only comment is he wasn’t wrong and I now use Medium as part of my repertoire. It’s nice to have another tool in the tool belt. Now if only Larry could make me a Chat Bot using Mobile Monkey. Those things are exhausting.

Neil Patel – @neilpatel

Now don’t get me wrong I have spent countless hours learning from Neil Patel, I’m not sure why I say Neil Patel, but for some reason when I say Neil Patel I have to use his whole name.

Anyways the first thing I can remember that really stands out from Neil Patel was when he was talking about making “how-to posts” and “Infographics”. Neil Patel had a very good point, he said “creating content that is interesting and worthy of sharing is a good thing. If someone can learn something valuable they are more likely to share it and keep coming back.”

OK, that was a paraphrase (Neil Patel is long-winded sometimes – best way possible), but you get it. Thanks for the advice, Neil Patel.

Joost de Valk – @jdevalk

First of all, can I just say Yoast SEO! I mean how many of us SEOs use it the right way and how many marketing people at companies think they can do SEO because they have that plugin? Am I Right? Please stop by the way, SEO is not THAT easy! 

But, seriously I think that a long time ago if my memory serves me right that Joost is who made it very apparent that having a keyword strategy is extremely important.  This includes coming up with a topic, getting search volume around your keyword(s), finding long tail versions to use and most recently the importance of using LSI keywords throughout your writing.

Write about your topic or an idea instead of just focusing on one keyword. I guess you can say I have evolved with Joost.

Aaron Wall – @aaronwall (Private?)

The biggest takeaway that I have received from Aaron is that SEO is not just people searching on Google. I changed my outlook to believe that “SEO” is holistic and we should look at everything online as a whole to be found everywhere.

He made a statement about being found on Amazon as an eCommerce store and it made me realize that SEO should be seen as a more broad term, maybe digital marketing or holistic SEO.

Brian Dean – @backlinko

While Brian Dean is a ball of SEO knowledge, the one thing I remember hearing and sticking with me is when he talked about the “Hilltop Algorithm”. This was something I had never heard of.

I knew that outbound links were important, but I would link to a Wikipedia site, not realizing that linking to high-quality pages was much better. Doing this tells Google that your page is a hub, such as a hub of information because it links out to high authority and relevant sources.

The study that he linked to on the topic sold me on this idea.

Aleyda Solis – @aleyda

I think my biggest takeaway from Aleyda is that she is way smarter than me. Every single time I read one of her blogs or watch a video I learn a ton! But, she does love charts and workflows and slides and she has so many steps that come along with her tips and tools – which is amazing and thorough!

I know that what I am saying makes her sound like one of my college professors, but I’m trying to say I learn a lot and it’s always very thorough. Which means I can’t think of just one SEO tip that stands out to me as there are just too many.

Freddy J. Nager – @atomictango

The only thing I remember about Freddy Nager is that one time I returned from my “Spring Break” vacation and he had put my fake Facebook Group on blast.

As you will see, as he put me on blast again, I made up a fake school project, I made up a fake persona (The reason I knew I would never do anything like this again), I made up everything and decided I would litter links to T-Shirts I was selling online throughout the group. Turns out the group took off. Like 800,000 people in a few days. Hell, my T-Shirt sales took off too.

Meanwhile, I was at the beach and had no idea what was going on. It turns out Freddy Nager and a few hundred other people were playing detective while I was playing drinking games. I came back home and read the blog posts he had written and the comments others had left.

Honestly, I thought it was hilarious and I was making some nice money at the same time. But, what did I learn from Freddy J, Nager? I learned how to be a marketer, how to be transparent, and that doing things the wrong way (at least normally) will get you nowhere or left behind. The reason I say normally is that the T-Shirts just would not stop selling.

He wrote something about how if I was doing this right I would have been nurturing the relationships I was building in order to sell to them again, I now realize that to be the case. But, at the same time, I think I saw the beginning of burn and churn marketing in the days of Social Media.

I also think this was the first time I saw how a profile behind a social media platform can be very convincing and convince people to do just about anything they ask them. For me, it was buying shirts (to others it might be to vote a particular way). Thankfully there are people like Freddy Nager out there to question things because that’s exactly what we need today!

In The End

As you can see I learned something different from each of these marketers. Some of these things were lessons in life, while other things were strictly actionable items. But, when put together these 10 tiny things helped me to be a better marketer.

To be 100% transparent I have learned 100s of things from all of these marketers and will continue to learn. Actually 100s of things from many other people as well. Hmmm, I think I just decided to make this a part 1 of who knows how many.

Thanks for the help guys and I’ll see you all next time.

  **Oh yea if there are spelling or grammar issues – blame my broken hand**

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[topicprinter]

On average, only about 4% of site visitors actually convert or buy before leaving.In other words, a full 96% of your visitors are basically worthless.Instead of continuing to throw those people away, use retargeting (aka remarketing) to get them to convert.Here's retargeting in a nutshell: you set up ads that follow people around after they leave your site, in order to get them to come back and become your customers or users.Simple.Though actually, it's a lot more flexible than that. You can also follow the people who interact with your app, your YouTube videos, or your Facebook page (or IG, or LinkedIn). You can even use any email addresses or physical addresses you've collected to target them.And when you do it right, the results can be incredible.AppSumo has used it to get a 224% ROI (not bad)Zendesk has gotten a 1,317% ROI (much better)On average, our agency's clients enjoy a cost per acquisition from retargeting that's about 50% lower than from regular search or display ads.But when it's done wrong, this shit is super annoying and ineffective.Think of all those times you've continued to see banner ads for a product for weeks... after you ALREADY BOUGHT IT.Or if you've gotten the same annoying video ad on YouTube ten times a day.To get good results, you have to be smarter than that.First, before talking more specifically about remarketing, one thing you need to understand about marketing in general is a basic but critical concept called "effective frequency".It's usually thought about in terms of paid advertising, but the truth is that it applies to all forms of marketing: from a physical storefront sign to an Instagram account.Effective frequency is the number of times someone has to see your ad or marketing message before they'll act on it.Two points to think about real quick and then I'll show you how it ties back to remarketing:A) If your prospects see your marketing message fewer times than the effective frequency, then they won't do anything and you will have wasted your money/effort on making people almost buy.B) If they see it more times than the effective frequency, then you'll also be wasting your money/effort by over-marketing to them beyond what was necessary... and often annoying them in the process.As you might expect, effective frequency varies based on the product, target audience, etc. For example, a $100,000 car is going to have a much higher effective frequency than a $1 pack of gum.But aside from super cheap products that rely on impulse buys, you're almost always going to need to get in front of your prospective customers multiple times.The beauty of remarketing is that it's a very easy way to do exactly that.It's actually too easy, to the point that it can be dangerous.Because a lot of businesses just set it up and forget about it. And that's where it goes off the rails.They end up making mistake B that I mentioned above: over-advertising to the people who have already converted (or who have already made up their minds not to). These businesses waste their money and piss people off in the process, damaging their brand.But what drives me crazy about that is that it doesn't take much effort AT ALL to avoid that problem. Because you can set exactly how many times you'd like your retargeting ads to be shown to each person."Frequency capping" is how many times you want to show your ads to each person, and "membership duration" is how long you want to keep advertising to them.That means you can use a simple conservative approach, like 1x a day for 14 days...... or with some other techniques, a more advanced schedule like 8x banner ads per day for 3 days, then 2x video ads per day for a week, then disappear for a month, then start showing 1x ad per day again for 6 months after that. (Not all platforms allow this level of control, but Google AdWords does for example.)Tip: If you don't already know how long it takes your customers to convert, check out the "Time Lag" and "Path Length" reports in Google Analytics, under Multi-Channel Funnels. Those are a great way to see how often you should be showing your ads to people and for how long.Here are 3 other important things most advertisers get wrong when they're running retargeting campaigns:1. For the love of God, SEGMENT YOUR AUDIENCES. Treating everyone the same way is easily one of the most common mistakes businesses make.You should set up different remarketing lists/audiences for different groups of people based on who they are or what they do. For example, based on the pages they visited on your site; whether they made a purchase; whether they started the conversion process but didn't finish (i.e. shopping cart abandoners); how long ago they visited; where they're located geographically; the device they used; how long they stayed on your site; whether they viewed multiple pages or just bounced.Different groups of people will respond better or worse to your marketing, so segmenting them out will allow you to better control your bidding and even exclude some of them.2. Personalize your messaging to your audience segments. It's amazing how often people tag their site, set up a few different remarketing audiences, set up a campaign and then just throw in some general branding banners and call it a day.Don't do that.Your best results will come if you customize the hell out of your ads based on what you know about the audience lists they're going to be served to.People who visited a particular product page may be interested in buying but need a discount or bonus (e.g. free shipping) to push them over the edge.People who visited your SaaS FAQ page may respond well to ads that speaks to the support you offer, or a video product walkthrough that includes some features and benefits that don't get much focus on your sales page.First-time visitors may respond better to ads for your free content, while people who have opted into your email list are more likely to trust you enough to make a purchase.3. Pay attention to what sites and apps your ads are showing up on ("placements"). Google AdWords and Facebook both give you some ability for controlling these, though Google's options are much more robust.There's a huge amount of variance in performance between different sites and apps -- some will be well worth it and some will be nothing but a black hole for money. Plus, studies show that having your ads shown on low quality or highly irrelevant sites can do more harm than good for your brand.Concluding thoughts... I hope that was helpful as a light intro to retargeting. If you're already using it, I hope you learned some ways to improve your results. And if you're not using it, maybe this will inspire you to give it a shot! If you're already running ads on Facebook or Google, it's a no-brainer... and even if you aren't, it's still something you should try.Of course, this was only scratching the surface.If you want to learn more, these points and a lot more are covered in much more detail in the full article here -- along with illustrated step-by-step instructions, custom audiences you can download and use directly, and 21 more advanced tricks. (It's 19,812 words, WAY too long for a reddit post. But it's still just a blog post so you don't need to give me your email address or anything.)

[supporthosechi]

Reflecting on our 5th visit to see Alisha.

Perhaps this is the difficult center now.  The span when the drive down doesn’t seem so long, and we know the highway exit names, when we inadvertently make the same stops on the way down, and deliberately on the way back.  We do not need to bring any particular agendas to see Alisha, and there are no updates directly related to her case which would bring any particular solace, just the same resounding unfinished finality of the lawyers: don’t call us, we’ll call you.  They do not like to lose, sure, and they like good press, of course, but they also do not like to waste their time on menial concerns like the well-being of their clients or the campaign to release her.  We could tell her about the horrors and casualties of the continuing war against those who participate in the same vocation she did a few years ago, the one that nearly got her killed and for which the state continues to try to drain her vitality by inches.  We can always update her on our lives, or talk about her family.  Discussing what the other side of the razor wire and brick, away from the glacial, witless, unfeeling monsters who personify the banality of evil and keep vigil over her every move here is more enjoyable when it is a dream of what we will all do together.  So we, my other component part and I, can ride down without concern over how we will pass the hours.  That is not the difficult part.

The longest timing nightmare yet, which delays us multiple hours and is frustrating beyond any simple expression, is not really the difficult part either.  There is little they can do at this point in service of keeping us from our LeLe which surprises me, though perhaps the guard who watched as I inverted my shoes and who smoothed my pants over my inner thighs actually caught a piece of my gritted teeth in his eye.  Maybe he’ll go home wondering what the overdressed white boy was so pissed off about, and experience the dawning realization that he participates directly in an industry which destroys his own people, is in fact fueled by making them into criminals, defining them as such, and throw himself in anguish off the roof of his apartment building.  Perhaps unlikely, but I’ll grit my teeth and cast fire out of my eyes directly into his just the same.  I don’t think I could take him, so at best he’d have a broken nose, I’d be beat within an inch of my life and meet him again in court.  The defense of “resisting institutional racism” coming out of my counsel’s mouth, while satisfying and accurate, is improbable.

So part of the difficulty is Alisha herself: effusive, truly interested in my life the same way I happened to take an interest in hers those months ago, and, for want of a better term because it remains nearly unthinkable to me how she remains so: alive.  Our time with her has been shaved to the very quick, it is as much as I can do to hop up and get some palatable food for her and exchange a few laughs before we’re forced back out of the door and to the car.  

I am writing this reflection on December 17th, which is at once fitting and at the same truly dispiriting.  How many other industries require a day to end violence against them?  How many other lines of work require so much skill and emotional labor, harm no one, in fact help many, and face the sort of stigma, censure, harassment, and threat of physical danger as this one?  I would actually prefer if my mental inventorying could yield even one, so that I might consider how its lessons would benefit my friends, loved ones, and those more distant with whom I stand in solidarity, sadness, anger, and, ultimately, resolve.  But I do not think another such industry exists.  So each next embrace with my adopted little sister gets a little longer, and a measure more difficult to detach.  I could say I would sit in those small, dirty rooms and eat that rotten food, stare at the painted brick walls and seethe at my captors who will go home to their miserable-but-technically-free lives after ending watch over my expansive-but-confined existence, but LeLe would never allow that even if it were possible.  So what exactly grows more difficult, if not the ride down, the red tape and the despicable congeniality or dismissiveness of the COs, the conditions I observe someone I care about trapped in, the unjust and almost surreal reasons they are there…?

It’s the ride home.  It is looking in the rearview and not seeing Alisha in the back seat, flipping her hair out of her face and cackling with laughter, raising up her mouth in a playful pout or her eyebrows in a serious “you know I’m not messing around with that” expression of disbelief.  It’s when her voice doesn’t echo in my ears anymore as I turn the key and return to all my own troubles and obstacles, minor triumphs and great joys, earnest attempts to make the world into which Alisha will someday be re-delivered even an iota better, and occasional realization that though it will remain in many ways awful, it will certainly benefit from her presence therein.  Because right now her most active existence outside is in the thoughts and transmitted words of her friends and family.  And I am sick to the back teeth of having to dream about someone as if they’re dead or, closer to the current case, unborn, when I know damn well they’re in a small room, in a place that shouldn’t exist, for reasons that never made sense to begin with.  It’s the vacant back seat that gapes back at me for being too much of a coward to break my sister out, or at least too impecunious and lacking the influence to hasten her release.  It’s where Alisha isn’t that is the difficult part now, and it gnaws at me.

We stood in small circle tonight, the sex workers and I, in Transmitter Park off Greenpoint Avenue, in Brooklyn, by the water.  We wore a lot of black and some red, because we were attending a vigil and a remembrance.  As such, we were sad, but it was important to show one another we were strong as well.  We told stories of workers we had lost, either to death, the state, the medical industry, or to time.  There were three candles in red glass in the middle of our circle, and Manhattan observed us from across the water with its millions of people, and I felt small, as one does and is meant to in the city.  I could not help but think about how the water on the other side of the island held Marsha, and how Sylvia had lived along its shore for a dark interval.  These people, in this circle, were and are not desperate, and they neither required nor rejected my shared sorrow and genuine care.  We heard Alisha’s poem and we held each other, literally and figuratively, because there wasn’t anything else to do.  We all held our own candles, and we trembled from the shared weight and the cold, but we did not bow.  I stared hard at the candles before we processed away, perhaps because I am frustrated when something seems so dearly to require explanation, even when the explanations are so well-rehearsed and unmysterious, and so it is pointless to explain.  I am frustrated by pointlessness, and unwarranted death.

For the moment, though, I’ve had entirely enough of my time without Alisha being free, and, though I know it is no proxy, for all sex workers being free, from incarceration and the cloud of impending potential harm hanging over them.  I’m so lucky to have and have had you workers in my life, up close and from afar.  I miss you, LeLe.

-AH

[lorainelaneyblog]

This is God, this is God, this is God, this is God, say your dream, Loraine, you can work on it here since you don’t have any-- She doesn’t remember.

‘It was another night with seemingly a lot of nightmares. It was, what I remember, me, Dad, and [ ], and an invader again, a man. That’s all, God. I don’t think there’s anything there, other than I am a woman alone, and nobody is here to take care of me, and the only interested parties number at two.’

What did it make you think?

‘These nightmares make me think of contacting 50 Cent, which I do, with some regularity already. It’s nothing, it just highlights the fact of my isolation.’

What do you think you could do?

‘I think I’m doing it. You told me this relationship should happen, and yet, you added that many were against it, many, you said, must capitulate to it first.’

This is what it is, Loraine, as long as many, many, many, many, many, people are unhappy, there will be no happiness for others.

‘Others must find happiness first. And the laws must change to make multiple marriage accessible to law abiding citizens.’

That’s right, Loraine. The police were not happy with the results, kidding, Loraine, the police are visiting escorts now, and they are much happier, and, believe it or not, the cop girls are happier too, because there is less pressure on them, and more honest pleas for marriage.

‘What I don’t get is no high men want me, so who is holding me here?’

The police are still instrumental in the ruination of yours and 50 Cent’s relationship, Loraine, and yes, it is true, that, despite that many of them are your age, and find you somewhat attractive as a whore, they will not visit you, because of the history, and part of that history is the notion that you will be angry, Loraine, and part of that history is the notion that you will either love them or hate them, Loraine, because you know cops a bit, and you know your taste very well, and construction workers are under the gun too, Loraine, they feel if she loves me, I’ll puke, if she hates me, I’ll puke.

I am God, I am God, I am God, I am God, I am God, and this is why Loraine Laney and 50 Cent still have not gotten together: the police in Ottawa don’t feel they should let Loraine go to America before the laws have changed, in case they are changed in America, under Trump, but not changed in Canada, under Trudeau.

President Trump is a ten, Loraine, and he doesn’t bug you at all, not at all, not at all, not at all, do you believe he has never assaulted a single person? President Trump is a leader to end all leaders, Loraine, he is excellent, and this is why he is so unpopular, he finds Trudeau boring, Loraine, with his left wing politics, and you don’t vote, but you tried to join the Liberal party, only to realize that Prime Minister Trudeau is fully in favour of all kinds of immigration, and Trump finds that boring, Loraine. He likes countries, he likes different races, he doesn’t like it when everything becomes a melting pot. And he is not wrong, Loraine, because everyone feels the same about this, everyone, everyone, everyone, everyone, and Loraine Laney, herself, once wrote that “blacks have too much power in America.” Why did you write that, Loraine?

‘I was mad at 50 Cent, and the rappers, and all the money for music.’

That’s right, Loraine, that’s right, Loraine. The music industry in America is somewhat bullshit, Loraine, a few people makes mountains of money, and everyone else is poor, it’s total bullshit, actually.

Why do you think blacks have too much power in America, Loraine?

‘Because they are sexual superiors, women fall at their feet.’

That’s right, Loraine, that’s right, Loraine. And theorize on the women, now, please.

‘I hate to say they’ve been powerless, but that’s what it has been. Since the news, from God, that black women are the most submissive women, it is conceivable that they will join the ranks of men.’

Good job, Loraine. Good job, Loraine. It is conceivable that black prostitutes will make more money, like the Asian prostitutes have done over the years, capitalizing on the illusion associated with smallness, that they were more submissive. I know you are worried about being submissive enough for 50 Cent, Loraine, I know that you worry about that immensely, but you are, worry not, you’re not pretty enough, but he will make up for that with less submissive women. They all want prettier women than you, Loraine, kidding, Loraine, of course they do, but you will never have to worry about their devotion to you, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, a wife has a special place in a man’s heart, Loraine, and you’ve seen this in many years of prostitution, they never lose heart, they never lost interest, they never wane sexually, of course they do, Loraine, but this is what it is, Loraine, you were right when you conjectured that disgust was actually not a part of eroticism, but rather, the reason that women lost interest in sex sooner than men, precisely because they are very committed to the acts in sex which are most disgusting than the acts that men employ, eating come being the primary area of disgust, Loraine. 

‘What is the deal with female ejaculation, God?’

They’re pissing, Loraine, they’re pissing, Loraine, your client that doesn’t pay you except in a few drugs, which you cough up for as well, he knows this for a fact, because he has seen his wife do it many’s the time. He knows that you can’t pee when you have to shit, Loraine, he knows that you can’t pee normally after an orgasm, and what she is doing is peeing in his face, Loraine, and she cheats too, yes, she does, and he has already noticed that there is no smell around you, none, and she comes home from the bar with a fishy smell, and she is cheating, Loraine, she is cheating, Loraine, and that couple they swung with, they are gross too, and they only employ safe sex with couples who are cautious, otherwise it is a free for all.

‘What are your limits, God, to use such a term as “gross” with a randy couple, and permit 50 Cent to remain a ten regardless of having thousands of women per year, and me with my thousand, how do you respond to the throngs of repressed who would have the new messiah be a celibate, Lord?’

Are you challenging me, Loraine?

‘No, Lord.’

You seem to be, Loraine, and I will say this, Loraine, that I have been happy with your little explorations, I have, because you have stayed nice to people and your brother, with his repressive nature, and 50 Cent with his promiscuity, 50 Cent is much nicer than [ ], Loraine, much nicer than [ ], Loraine, much nicer than [ ], Loraine.

‘I’m sorry if I overstepped, Lord, but I, myself, am tired of the queries about my sexual history.’

You’re challenging me. I’m not going to answer. You know, yourself, that you are a very nice person, Loraine. Leave it at that, Loraine. Leave it at that, Loraine. Leave it at that, Loraine. 50 Cent wants to intervene.

‘You don’t respect me, Loraine?’

‘I do.’

‘Because you are putting me out to dry with God.’

‘A little overstated.’

‘Why? I thought you approved of me, Loraine.’

‘I’m asking for others, 50 Cent.’

‘Why?’ says God.

‘Riffing.’

Of course.

‘Do you think this is one of the reasons that nobody wants me and Fifty to be happy? Because we’ve had such happiness thus far???’

You’re funny, Loraine. I am God, and I say the following, Loraine Laney needs drugs, she does, she is hurting, she is hurting, she is hurting, and even though Mexico dumped cocaine into the ocean, there is still plenty of cocaine for everyone who wants to use it. ~ God

I am God, I am God, I am God, I am God, I am God, I am God, I am God, I am God, I am God, I am God, and Loraine Laney would like to express something profound, kidding, Loraine, what is it?

‘Nobody wants me.’

That’s right, Loraine, that’s right, Loraine, that’s right, Loraine, that’s right, Loraine, you are destined for the arms of 50 Cent, and the entire world is against you, kidding, Loraine, kidding, Loraine, when 50 Cent’s stage was stormed by the rogue gangsters, he split, Loraine, it’s a gangster move, Loraine, to split like that, instead of staying to fight, Loraine, you just leave, Loraine, and the reason that it is a gangster move is because you don’t want to die, Loraine, and if you stay and fight, you might die, Loraine, and you are not a soldier, you are not a soldier, you are not a cop, you are not a policeman, so you just split, Loraine.

‘A privilege of the upper class.’

‘Oh fuck off, Loraine.’

No, she is right, 50 Cent, Loraine Laney has never had the privilege of preserving her own life, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, and, as long as she hasn’t, she is stuck with men who abuse her, and that’s what it is, that’s what it is, that’s what it is, Loraine and 50 Cent.

This is God again, this is God again, this is God again, this is God again, Loraine and 50 Cent, Loraine Laney went to you because she was in over her head, 50 Cent. And she was lonely, too. What’s that, 50 Cent? You’re afraid she was using your pimping to get laid? Wrong. She doesn’t, and I’ve told you this time and again, care if you get her laid at all.

‘She likes--’

So what, 50 Cent? She likes Floyd and Mike, so what? Are you really worried about a couple of heads of family taking over your girl?

‘No, but she bugs me sometimes with her judgements.’

She doesn’t judge you, you’re paranoid, 50 Cent, and you are, and you are, and you are, and you are, Loraine Laney is so much more worried about her own reputation than yours, it is not even funny, 50 Cent.

‘Why does she bug me about things?’

What is she bugging you about, 50 Cent?

‘Nothing, I love her. I love her. I love her so much, I could kill her, yes, I could, yes, I could, yes, I could, yes, I could, yes, I could. She doesn’t even eat anymore, she drinks all the time, what is wrong with her? Why doesn’t she do the dishes and cook something, or something? She’s starving all the time, and she’s still fat, and people think she’s overeating or something. Even Game said, “what is the deal with that stomach?” And I had to tell him that she was Agented, and now he knows, for real, Loraine, that you were Agented.’

‘Oh.’

‘You don’t care that The Game knows you are shitting and farting and pissing yourself senseless, Loraine? Doesn’t it bother you?’

‘Well it’s hardly a secret around here. And I have got better.’

‘That’s nice, Loraine. That’s nice, Loraine. He wasn’t too happy when he heard his little fuck head was Agented, I’ll tell you that.’

‘Why do you talk to Game so much?’

‘I like him.’

‘Oh.’

‘He calls you?’

‘He calls me?’

‘Did he really quote my poem? “I have been alone as long as the stars, and I’m as lonely as the moon?”’

‘No, Loraine, he didn’t, that was a ruse, I’m kidding, Loraine, I don’t remember, it’s just that we’re all so lovesick for you.’

‘Me too.’

‘Why are you lovesick with all the come?’

‘I don’t know, 50 Cent, I’m filled with desire.’

‘Oh, you’re funny, Loraine, your little pussy only gets wet for your eighteen husbands?’

‘Yes.’

‘I don’t care who your clients are, Loraine, I don’t care, Loraine, I’m 50 Cent, and I’m so tough, you wouldn’t even believe it. I’m so tough, you can’t even imagine, Loraine.’

‘No.’

‘You’re a pussy, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Would you fight a girl?’

‘Why?’

‘You hate girls.’

‘I don’t hate them, 50 Cent. I just find them boring. I think most women would agree to some extent about that, except, perhaps a polysexual peripherie.’

‘What about for sex?’

‘I’ve been bored a long time, 50 Cent.’

‘Why, what’s wrong with you?’

‘And I judge you.’

‘Funny, Loraine, funny, Loraine, funny, Loraine, funny, Loraine. I think we’re so bored we can hardly even think straight.’

‘You’re not as bored as me.’

‘I am so. And so is Lloyd, Loraine. Lloyd loves you so much, he can hardly even think straight, Loraine. And this is what has happened since you last wrote, we had a conversation which went something like this: “Are you going to get that stupid slut you like or not, because this is how I’m feeling, 50 Cent,” he said. “I want that stupid slut badly by now, because she’s so ugly, and because she’s so submissive, and because she wants to lick my balls really bad, and eat my come even worse, and, I will tell you this, 50 Cent,” he continued, “you know I’ve had plenty of fans who wanted to eat my come, and who have eaten my come, but I want this glorious little slut to eat my come, because she’s so beaten, and because she has spirit, and that’s what I want, so what do you say, 50 Cent? And furthermore,” he continued, “Eminem wants to come in her too, and he wants her badly, badly, badly, because she’s so funny, and because she’s with God, and because she’s a ten, 50 Cent, what do you think about that, 50 Cent?”

‘I'm 50 Cent,’ I said. ‘And I know you’re making fun of my name, and of me over this girl, I do, I do, I do, I do, I do, and so is Eminem, and he is much angrier than you because he’s even more careful about their feelings than you are, and he’s scared, Lloyd, of being done for rape, he is, like Nelly just took it. That’s what rappers are scared of, prison time. And this little slut will take care of the come needs, and, if something arises, she’ll put up with it, I know she will, I know she will, I know she will, I know she will. And this is what I’d like to say about this, don’t fuck with me over this girl, Lloyd Banks, because I love her more or as much as you do, so don’t fuck with me, with her fucked up mouth, and her stupid punched eye, and her broken, fucked up, nose, and, I even think, I’ve even heard that she’s been hacked, she’s been gasolined, and she’s been fucked with immensely, even to this day, and, still, believing this, I can’t go against, God, Lloyd, and God tells me not to call her, he tells me not to call her, he tells me not to call her. What do you think about that, Lloyd Banks?

‘And he said the following: “All right, 50 Cent, I understand, but I’m still hurting, is there something, anything, you can do to show allegiance to this stupid, little, bitch, so she doesn’t start eating come like crazy, and die of AIDS or something? I don’t care if she’s old, I’m old, I want her, I need her. She’s done like me, 50 Cent, and she barely even knows it. I barely knew how hard I took it in the Sierra Leone, I barely knew it, 50 Cent, and you got out sooner, and then you took it in the ‘hood, 50 Cent, yes, you did, yes, you did, yes, you did, we know this little tyke as Game likes to call her--”

‘Why does Game like her so much, do you think?’ I asked Lloyd.

‘He does like her so much because she’s not a gross, dirty, slut, I think. She has an excellent reputation as a prostitute, doesn’t she? She’s done seventeen years, I think she’s got reputation covered, 50 Cent.’

‘She moved.’

‘Once.’

‘That’s true, and now she’s known all over Canada for that stupid book Bros Before Hos which I still can’t bring myself to read, thinking, as I do, that she will be a brainiac and hurt me somehow over slutting with women.’

‘She won’t.’

‘She will.’

‘She doesn’t care, don’t you get it? She doesn’t care about your slutting, 50 Cent, that’s why she loves you so much, and you’ve finally found a little slut, as you like to call them, who loves you so much, she just wants to find you and die right now of happiness, and--’

‘She’s ugly.’

‘She’s not that ugly, her face is ruined, 50 Cent, from beatings, don’t you get it? We were lucky to be men, and our mothers didn’t want to ruin our faces, don’t you get it, 50 Cent?’

‘I do, but you guys are all going to bail and stick me with her, aren’t you? That’s what I’m most afraid of, that you’ll all take one look at her, and bail, and stick me with the ugly slut with no men.’

‘Oh, I see. Oh, I see. So you love her that much, do you?’

‘Oh, fuck you, Lloyd, I need my men, and I don’t want them to run crying from my baby.’

‘That won’t happen, 50 Cent, we’ve seen her, we’ve seen her, we know what she looks like, every last man in this supposed family has seen her, has seen her on video, which is none too flattering to anyone, but I must admit, with her fat stomach now, and her ugly, fucked up, face, the bitch has charisma.’

‘Men have charisma.’

‘You must admit, 50 Cent, the bitch has charisma.’

‘What’s that on a girl? What is it, Lloyd Banks?’

‘I’ll indulge this.’

‘I don’t like how you’re getting all cocky with me, we’re never like this.’

‘I want the bitch, 50 Cent, she’s been writing compelling shit about us for so long, and I want to stick things in her for it, she bugs me so much.’

‘She bugs me too.’

‘Let’s do her. Let’s do her. Let’s do her senseless, she’ll cry like a baby, remember when we wrote “Beg For Mercy?” I bet she cried. I bet she almost cried, 50 Cent. This little idiot--’

‘Why do you call her an idiot all the time?’

‘She has no memory, 50 Cent, she won’t remember the score half the time, and the other half of the time, she’ll forget it.’

‘Oh, you’re funny,’ 50 Cent says. ‘So you read her.’

‘I read as much as I can stomach, and it’s not boring, 50 Cent, it’s not boring, but it’s prolific, and, I believe God writes it, yes, I do, yes, I do, yes, I do.’

‘I do too, Lloyd, because he has us all nailed, it’s a cruelty.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Why would God torture us and then deny us the woman who wrote the material, it’s a cruelty that, I think, even God is not capable of.’

‘That’s what I think too. That’s why I want her. So get her. Let’s get out of here. Let’s go see some dancers or something. I don’t want to get high, Let’s go, 50 Cent. Let’s go, 50 Cent.’

‘Okay, let’s go, then. Do you think--’

He interrupts, ‘Yes, I think she’ll let us go to the dancers, 50 Cent, with her eighteen come shots, I think she’ll be happy to let us go out, sometimes, are you done?’

‘Yes.’