#what even is this. why am I getting ads from seemingly the fucking App Store

[speedruntechnically]

Hey tumblr or apple or whoever just put this on my fucking screen I mean this 100% seriously: you should kill yourself for this

[krisroley]

February 8th 2021

It might just be the time of year, but I find myself getting discouraged easily. It’s compounded by the fact that we’re coming up on a year since my job sent me home and everything that’s happened since then. The simple fact of the matter is I’m not where I want to be at almost any category of life you care to name. I’m currently making about half of what I was pre-May 2020, I’m struggling with staying in a creative mindset, I’m not necessarily hopeful that I will be able to realize a key hope of mine to regain the position I was previously in, and I’m not finding anything equivalent out there that I can do despite the experience. It leaves me in a pretty depressing place, and I’m not sure what my next move is. So when this happens, I try to move out of the mindset of what I can’t do to figure out what I can accomplish. I believe it starts with talking about the things I am passionate about. Demonstrating some knowledge. Possibly not being so unassuming about it?

A lot of the past year had to do with how my friends stayed creative and productive during the pandemic, and now I may be best served by turning this camera inward. Let’s see what happens.

After I wrote the above, I fired up my Feedly reader, and Seth Godin’s post today is very timely indeed.

So, let’s consult the imp in the back of my head that wants to know what the bleep I’m going to do to turn YET into DONE. I think first we have to define what DONE is, and I’m finding that a little hard to do at the moment. It’s a Jackson Pollack splatter of thought about what I don’t want to be doing anymore, and very little thought about what it is I would rather be doing, and whether I can do it for a living. Nothing new here, this has pretty much been the case for a few years now. I need to put these thoughts together. I don’t want to take phone calls anymore. I do want a job in a creative field. I want what I create to be able to help people. I want to be able to live comfortably on the fruits of that effort, which means not only the bills are paid, but that the wife and I are not worried about health insurance, and that the kids are taken care of.

So, maybe that’s what done is. If that’s true, then the next question—my favorite—is ‘What’s Next?”. What I’m about to write is the first time I’ve ever written this answer: I don’t know. I don’t know what the first step is, and if I don’t know what the first step is, I can’t figure the next one. Marie Forleo likes to say “Everything is Figureoutable”. I sure hope so, because being stuck in this place is a goddamn exhausting place to be.

Of course, as I said at the beginning, it could just be that it’s January and it’s cold, and that I hate everything right now. It feels like more than that, but maybe it always does and I’m not remembering it.

Oh, You Didn’t Know?

Joe Budden, who up until a few months ago had an exclusive deal with Spotify, is moving his podcast to Patreon. The Verge has some comments from Budden:

He says he proved the model, along with the potential of his audience, but didn’t want Spotify to use his fans and reach to prove the platform’s own worth and make money. 

“For many years, the record labels and the system that I come from tricked us into thinking they were doing us a favor by capitalizing off our talent and basically loaning us money, and that’s been the standard the entire time,” Budden says, adding that he already knows how that system worked out for creators. 

When Budden announced his split from the tech company, he said Spotify was “pillaging” his audience and only cared about how his show contributed to Spotify overall, not about his actual podcast.

Budden was a recording artist before he was a podcaster. If he’s aware that the record labels played games, I can’t believe he didn’t see the obvious. Streaming Services aren’t exactly known for treating artists differently, for a start, but let’s address what I think is the elephant in the room, which is the question of whether or not what you had was actually a podcast, because I think that question is fundamental to the problem Budden experienced. A podcast is not exclusive to a platform, and I’ll argue that point until I’m blue in the face. If I can’t subscribe to your show on a different platform than Spotify, then you don’t have a podcast, you have a show on Spotify. Spotify might have a big user base, but that user base is all you have. Spotify’s Q4 2020 earnings state that they have 345 million active monthly users, and that only 25 percent of those users listen to podcasts on the platform. That’s around 86.5 Million, and trust me, they’re not all listening to Joe Budden. Yes, he’s got a lot of downloads, but what he’s got on Spotify is all he’s going to get by staying there. Patreon is a huge and smart play, I wouldn’t be surprised if he goes 3x on listeners and money at the very least.

(Note to self, get back on Patreon, it’s about to blow up.)

The Clothes Suck Anyway

Ah, exposure. SO great for paying bills, only the complete opposite of paying bills.

One of my favorite Twitter accounts is @forexposure_txt, and they receive posts every day from creatives who receive requests, demands, and straight-up meltdowns from people who believe it’s ok not to pay a creative for their work. However, in some cases, there’s the odd post about a company that lifts a picture, alters it, and uses it on their social media without attribution. Take, for example, Meg of Margate, a photographer who discovered a fashion brand called Ted Baker (no link, I’m not enabling this behavior) lifted a photo, photoshopped it, and post it on their Instagram “for engagement”. When called on it, they offered Meg a 200 dollar gift card from their store, which she declined. They then stated they didn’t have the budget to pay photographers, so they deleted the image.

Fine, but let’s be clear about what really happened here. A fashion brand that declared revenue of 617 million pounds in 2019 used a picture that didn’t own to drive traffic to their brand. They got likes and engagement for hours on that post. Then they told the photographer, sorry we can’t afford it, and just deleted the post. Ted Baker made money off that stolen picture, and they probably will have no liability for screwing a creative because it costs money to take people to court.

If this doesn’t make you angry, it should.

This seems like a good place to link to one of my favorite talks by Mike Montiero, “Fuck You, Pay Me.”

More Instagram Stuff

Instagram is now conducting a test to remove the ability to share feed posts within Stories:

You would assume that a lot of Stories updates are re-shared feed posts. The fact that Instagram is willing to reduce this seems like a positive sign for its development focus - but it might also indicate that people are viewing Stories less as a result of such shares, which has prompted Instagram to take action.

I can tell you that many of my stories are photos from other accounts that I think are amazing, and I do that to encourage my followers to follow them. If you remove the ability for me to do that, then I have to resort to a third party program—Repost—to post them to my feed, and I don’t want to do that. My feed should be for my pictures. I hope what they’re driving at is removing the ability to share one’s own feed posts as Stories, and I would completely understand why they feel it’s redundant. That’s not how I read this story.

In other Instagram news, it looks like IG and Twitter might be burying the hatchet soon and allowing integrations again:

That's an even bigger integration. As noted by Jane Manchun Wong, Instagram hasn't provided direct Twitter integration since it disabled Twitter card preview support back in 2012, which makes it annoyingly difficult to share content between the two apps. Now, it seems they're mending bridges, which could facilitate not just tweets in Stories stickers, but wholly new integration options which would enable direct sharing of Instagram posts to Twitter as well, fully integrated and formatted in-line.

That's not part of this proposal, and it may not ever be. But it would definitely be handy - and with Twitter seemingly now more open to such, it could pave the way for improved connection.

If true, this would look a lot cleaner than the screenshots we’re all doing right now anyway. Honestly, this horse has been out of the barn so long it’s dying of exposure.

Shot of The Day

[shadesofjoe]

Down Under

It’s wild what a difference a year can make. I’ve not spoken publicly of things I’m about to share, though those closest to me are well aware of these events. It’s recently been suggested to me, however, that writing more openly about the situation would be a good final step in releasing the negative energy surrounding it, thus closing this path of catharsis I have traveled for the past few months. And if nothing else, it could serve as a cautionary tale for someone else who might be able to avoid some of the pitfalls I fell into.

I met her last January. Her name was Emily… at least that’s what she told me her name was. In retrospect, I’m guessing that was just another of many things that wound up not being true. But in my memory she will always be Emily, and for the purposes of this exercise, it’s probably best to leave it that way. She reached out to me through a post I made on a personals subreddit. She purported to be from Australia, which will no doubt ring a bell for those of you who were curious as to why I suddenly became very interested in Australian facts around this time last year. She claimed to be a veterinarian and, near as I can tell, there may have been a hint of truth to that. I don’t know. It’s all still kind of difficult to parse through, unfortunately.

Be that as it may, there seemed to be this instant chemistry between us. We spent a lot of time texting, talking on the phone, exchanging pictures and voice messages. I liked her. A lot. I thought there was this energy we had going on. It was the kind of authentic vibe I hadn’t felt in a very, very long time. I was attracted to everything about her, and better yet, she seemed to actually be attracted to everything about me. In retrospect, I should have perhaps been more skeptical of a seemingly beautiful woman from a foreign country being interested in someone of my portly stature, but even my well-developed self awareness still has its blind spots.

The trouble came, of course, a couple of days before our first scheduled video call. I don’t want to get into too many details, because honestly there’s just no way for me to know how much of what I was told was true, and how much wasn’t… which is its own problem. The important part is that the video call didn’t happen for reasons that were portrayed to me as very dramatic. There was about a two-week period of radio silence where the only interaction I had from her was the recognition that she was viewing my Instagram stories. I started posting stories every day just to see if she was still thinking of me during what she had laid out to me as a very difficult and emotionally challenging situation for her. I haven’t used Instagram since all this went sideways. I still can’t bear to open the app on my phone. I honestly have considered deleting it altogether. But I digress…

After the radio silence, Emily got back in touch with me and said that she wanted to come over for a visit to see if we would still have the same chemistry in person. Then she would know if this was something she could truly move forward with. Of course I was ecstatic. So plans were set for her to come in the early spring, which in retrospect would have been just about the time the coronavirus began to spiral out of control here in the United States. I sometimes wonder what life would have been like if things had turned out to be real. It wasn’t long before travel was restricted leaving the country, so she likely would have been stuck here for a while. It would have meant more time together discovering each other, showing her around Kentucky, introducing her to my friends, and maybe, just maybe, building something meaningful and lasting.

But of course none of that happened, because she never came. It was never real. And if I’m honest, I still feel like an idiot for ever believing it could have been.

Emily dropped out of contact again about a week before she was supposed to arrive. She resurfaced long enough to once again outline a very dramatic situation that involved her family. I will refrain from specifics because if it was a lie, then it’s an unspeakably awful one… but if for some strange reason even some of it was true, then it’s just as unspeakably awful. Either way, it was soul-crushing. In a single moment, I had gone from planning out a two-week whirlwind vacation to the reality that this woman was now disappearing from my life.

I am so unbelievably stupid sometimes.

Looking back with the benefit of not feeling that devastation again, it seems clear that the potential of a face-to-face encounter, just like a video call, had made her realize that she couldn’t keep up whatever this thing was. So cue the drama and then exit stage left.

I’m not so proud of this next part…

I asked the catfish subreddit for help determining just how badly I had been bamboozled. In doing so, I linked the Instagram account she was using for our correspondence. For all of my intellect, it genuinely never occurred to me that people might send nasty messages. I wasn’t thinking very clearly at all, truth be told. But lo and behold, the next day I get a pretty spicy message from Emily on Google Hangouts (she had blocked and unfollowed me on Instagram and Discord with nary a word about it) telling me that people had been sending her some really mean things.

That’s when a friend of mine who had managed to infiltrate her Instagram, unbeknownst to me, sent me a screencapped photo of a woman on a beach, legs intertwined with another man’s with champagne glasses in both their hands. It was a first-person perspective photo, so I couldn’t see faces. But obviously it made this already strange situation seem a million times worse. I called Emily out on this, and the only thing she could say in reply is that she had “made the right choice.”

I spent the next few months floundering, trying to make sense of the million little pieces my heart had been shattered into. I really opened up to this person. I trusted her. I believed her when she said that she had feelings for me. But none of it was true. As you can imagine, I’ve spent a good amount of time dealing with this in my therapy. It’s hard to not have answers. Even in a brief email exchange some months later, Emily said it was all a big misunderstanding and that she hadn’t whisked off on some romantic getaway. But honestly those pictures likely weren’t even of her, either. There’s literally no way to know what the actual truth behind his whole fucked up situation, and that has been the most difficult thing to navigate over this past year. The utter deceit of it all reaches depths I could never have imagined in my wildest dreams.

So am I foolish? Yes. Of course I am. I think that’s just part of my personality. I don’t necessarily view it as a character flaw, per se. But it certainly bit me in the ass here. This was definitely a lesson in how to temper that naiveté with a healthy amount of skepticism. I don’t do so well with balance though, so the pendulum swung hard in the other direction for quite a while. It’s closer to the middle now, but I still have more than my share of moments where I wonder if love is a real possibility for me.

I’ve done so much inner work. I’m very proud of the person I’ve become on the inside. I’m kind, thoughtful, generous, empathetic, funny, intelligent, and possess a host of other intangible qualities that make me a very compelling person. But I am also fat and there’s no getting around it. (Pun somewhat intended?) And a woman of Emily’s purported beauty and social status dating a fat guy, no matter how amazing, is just not indicative of the reality in which we live. It’s the kind of situation you would only ever see on a television show or in a movie. But that’s not real life. And perhaps if I had understood that better, I wouldn’t have had my heart broken into a million little pieces.

But this isn’t a sob story. I’m legitimately okay now. Therapy has been a godsend and I’ve done a lot of really important work to heal from it all. But of course there are… remnants. It’s not the kind of thing you can ever completely wipe from your memory. It happened. It’s over. And I’ve moved on. Part of that is accepting that being a bachelor for the rest of my life is a distinct possibility, and perhaps may be a likelihood. At some point you have to face facts, you know? When you can confront yourself with that kind of honesty, the likelihood of someone being able to pull the wool over your eyes again dramatically decreases. Besides, I’ve got children to raise. A life to lead. I don’t really have time for childish fantasies of serendipity anymore. If I’ve learned nothing else from this ordeal, it’s that such fairy tales just aren’t real.

If you have read this far, thank you for indulging me. I really hope there’s something of value for you here. I guess I feel that if being open my mistakes can somehow help someone else avoid the same pitfalls, then it gives an added layer of meaning to them for me. So perhaps it’s a bit of a selfish pursuit intertwined with an altruistic one. That’s probably a question best left for the philosophers and dime-store psychologists among us.