#the only reason i think they’d decline it is because i have unpaid time off the following sunday; but i will HAPPILY cancel that so i can

[fingertipsmp3]

Would it be stupid of me to request time off on the day after the Eurovision final

[junkyardlynx]

i feel like oversharing right now

it was always just me and my dad since i was very young. my mom was never in the picture, she passed when i was very young due to narcotic abuse, so he took care of me himself. his family shunned him for the most part and by extension, me.

we moved from the west coast to the midwest and settled down. at this time my father was already struggling with a few medical issues (a drop foot from an incident back in ‘89, a left hand near-permanently stuck in a claw shape due to an infection after a drywalling accident, a thumb that was torn off and re-attached on his right hand, chronic pain from rheumatoid arthritis) but he was capable of work. he worked at a die shop. on saturdays i’d end up at his work, napping on a forklift or playing a game on my gameboy. 

after that die shop closed, he got a job at a steamer / griddle manufacturer and moved up slowly. he eventually headed the shipping department and got a job that mostly consisted of being at desk and managing other people. since he needed the money, they gave him some extra to come in saturday and take care of a bunch of cleaning and odd jobs around the cubicle farm. i’d end up there, and played a metric fuckton of Diablo II on his computer. sometimes i’d help out, but he never made me. if i did, he’d throw me a few bucks for some cards and we’d go get lunch. 

i was happy. he did everything in his power for me. he raised me right, he taught me love and respect, he’s honestly the reason i get people i deliver to saying shit to me like “I just wanna look out for you because you remind me of my son.” he taught me compassion and kindness. also taught me some snark and gave me a love for sci fi. i still fondly remember him telling me i’d probably have the day off from school, so i could hang out in his room with ice cream and watch x-files all night.

of course, happiness doesn’t last in stories like mine. when i was 12, going on 13, my father was involved in an accident at work. he’d been taking care of things at a warehouse and a steamer fell and crushed his hip. it caused part of his hipbone to break off. being the stubborn man he was, he refused to go to the hospital until he couldn’t walk. turns out he was suffering from spinal cord compression and ended up accruing permanent nerve damage. 

my 13th birthday was spent with my dad in an understaffed, underfunded nursing home. i brought my ps2 up there so we could watch movies on DVD. a coworker of his picked me up late at night and asked if i wanted to get food. i declined. she took me home and said she’d be staying the night. i told her it was fine and she didn’t have to. i just wanted to be alone. she relented on the terms that if anything happened, i called the police immediately and then her. 

my dad was my man. he was my hero. still is, honestly. it just shook me. i’m not trying to brag or anything, but i was a pretty smart kid - blind as a bat by the time i was in third grade so i got sucked into reading and other shit that involved being close up so my idiot eyes could see. i knew things would never be the same. in the last three months i’d seen my father cry out of fear and pray to god. god never answered. 

eventually, he came home. he used a walker from that point on. before, due to his drop foot, he always wore a sort of leg-boot-brace that supported his foot and ankle, but he could still play catch and everything with me. ah, he fucking hated that walker. my dad was only 60 when he died, so from the time he was about 48 until he was 60, he used a walker or a wheelchair. the image of my father swearing and burning with embarrassment on the few times he tried to go to the store with me is burned into my mind. it makes me so sad i feel like i want to puke. my dad was a handsome man and had a budding romance with the woman who’d taken me home. it didn’t go anywhere after his accident. 

as i turned 14, i ended up driving around town for all of the errands and groceries, only letting dad drive for his doctor’s appointments so they wouldn’t ask questions. i matured relatively quickly, i had facial and chest hair in my freshman year. thankfully i was never pulled over or anything. 

my dad and i felt guilt towards each other and it showed. we were overly cautious of each other’s space as i turned 16. for me, i basically blamed my dad’s poor health on my entire existence, reasoning that if i had never been born, he would still be out on the sunny west coast, living life to the fullest, probably happy and in love. for him, he confessed years later that he felt like he’d failed me because i never ended up going out much in high school, always being at home to make sure he was okay. i just wanted him to be okay. comfortable. happy, if possible.

we continued like this until i got out of high school. i had very poor credit when i was 18 due to bills being put in my name and then subsequently being unpaid due to my father losing his disability benefits several times over, and even then, i felt like i couldn’t really devote myself to my studies because his health was always getting worse. he was constantly plagued with MRSA and cellulitis in his legs among other things, leading to weeping sores on his frightfully small-but-swollen legs that never went away. i never ended up going to college. 

i got a job, and i’m still at that job. i’ve managed to grandfather myself into a somewhat ridiculous hourly rate while still working delivery, so other prospects are incredibly noncompetitive. i started paying the rent for him and trying to do what i could to help, but we could never get ahead. copays and equipment costs piled up, culminating in him requiring a nurse to come by every week and check on him. 

i remember coming home to our apartment one day to find a box of my dad’s medical supplies unceremoniously ripped open and scattered along the stairway outside of the apartment proper. all that was in the box was gauze, medical tape and a bunch of xeroform patches (commonly used to treat burned flesh, but used for my dad’s sores). the upstairs neighbors apparently thought he’d had some drugs delivered right to his door or something. i think that was the most murderous rage i’d ever felt in my life. i did nothing about it, other than stuffing the contents into the box and telling my dad that i’d accidentally ripped it open, laughing it off. 

things continued like this until i was 23, with my father sliding further and further down the scale of healthiness. i tried to live my own life. i fell in love. it was good. i had a bout of almost dying of sepsis at this time and even in the hospital, my main concern was my dad. i made sure that nurse showed up once a day to check on him instead of once a week. it took my entire tax return but it gave me peace of mind.

a few months after i got out of the hospital, my father went back in. he’d been passing out for periods of time and his lungs were heavily degraded along with the rest of his body. they shuffled him around to a few nursing homes, but eventually, there was no chance of recovery and they sent him to hospice.

i still remember the call. i was playing destiny and eating dinner alone in my new apartment that i’d been forced to relocate to (it’s where I live now) after they refused to sign the apartment lease over to my name where i was. i was doing good. i didn’t know they were about to give up on my dad. 

he called me. went a little like this.

“hey buddy”

“hey pops, how ya doin’?”

“i’m alright, are you playin that one game? still having trouble with that deathmatch stuff?” 

“nah, i finished that. what’s up? did you need me to run something down? you want some more peanut butter m&ms? i picked some up at walgreens on the cheap.”

“nah buddy. you don’t have to worry about that anymore. they’re gonna put me in hospice.”

his voice broke; i lost mine. it was a solid minute before i could speak. my fingers kept moving out of sheer rote muscle memory.

“hospice? but i thought you said you were doing okay.”

“i am buddy. i don’t wanna live in pain anymore, and i had a good life. i’m really proud of you, and i love you. i gotta get off the phone now, but you’ll be okay. they’ll call you in the morning to tell you where i’m being moved. i love you so much, spencer.”

that was the last time i ever really got to talk to my dad while he was lucid. we had a few rambling conversations while he was drowning in pain medicine, and i ended up leaving just a few short hours before he passed one morning. i still regret it.

i miss him so fucking much. my girlfriend broke up with me the week my dad died, telling me i was “too sad about it” and that “she couldn’t help me deal with that.” turns out she was cheating. 

i lost everything i ever loved two years ago. i nearly died the year before that. i’m not okay, really. i’m still not. i’ve been pulling the broken pieces back together but all i am is a collection of scars and bruises. i can’t find the places that don’t ache anymore. 

it was just my dad and i, and i still feel like i ruined his glorious, brilliant, shining life by being born. i know it’s not what he believed at all. it just hurts. it hurts so bad and it’s hurt so, so long. 

i wish you guys could have met him.

he was so fucking funny. he said the craziest things and always had a witty reply. he liked to mess with me and others. 

he was tender. the face he made when he met Kitty Pryde (my cat that i drove an hour to pick up) was the first real spark of joy i’d seen on his face in years. they were joined at the hip. she basically just settled for me after we left - if she had a choice, it’d always be snoozing on dad’s lap. when i’d leave for work and they’d be asleep on the couch, curled up together, i felt like things were gonna be okay. 

he was kind. even to those who treated him poorly, like the doctors that ignored his pain and refused to treat him like a human being. 

he taught me how to cook. he’s the reason i’ve been able to function like an actual person since i was young - he believed in self sufficiency but not pointless pride. 

he never once berated my interests. my dad grew up in the 60′s and 70′s and his spheres of interests were pretty far from mine until later in his life - man, i got to burn my dad a CD of my favorite music. and he loved it. and made me put all my favorite tracks on his phone. he watched anime stuff on netflix. he wishes he could have played games with me more, but his hands were so bad.

my dad was the best person i’ve ever met. if i turn out half as kind and giving as him then maybe i won’t waste the life he’s given me. 

i just. miss him. i had a good dad. he was the only family i really had, but he was all i needed.

and now he’s gone. 

and i’m alone, struggling to make ends meet, struggling with my creative outlets, struggling to make sense of everything in the calm waters of absence and loss.

[makistar2018]

How to succeed in business by being a Taylor Swift fan

Fandom can be an expensive hobby, but there are also ways to get paid for your time and affection.

By Kaitlyn Tiffany Nov 7, 2018

Taylor Swift’s very popular snake jewelry. Big Machine Records

Twenty-two-year-old financial analyst Zainub Amir moved to New York City from Albany last June, around the time that her Taylor Swift news account @SimplySFans celebrated its seventh birthday on Twitter.

The account has 124,000 followers as of this writing, but when Amir started it at the end of eighth grade, there was almost no demand for it. She was alone on Twitter as a Swiftie, she says, with “maybe 30 other fans.” It’s that early adoption of the platform that she credits with her success, and with her permanent place at the top of the Swift fan account hierarchy — it’s too late for anyone else to get this big.

Now Amir has a full-time job and responsibilities to her employer. Also: responsibilities to the 124,000 people who depend on her for news, as well as the management and tour sponsors and brand partners for the biggest pop star in the world, which regularly ask her for help promoting awards shows, limited-edition Keds, and Swift’s every move.

“It’s hard,” Amir tells me, sitting on a corner sofa in her Midtown office building, after most of the lights have gone down but the granola bar wrappers and Lipton tea bags have yet to be scooped from the floor. “The thing is it’s, like, the same thing as texting someone while you’re at work; you just have to be really fast. The whole point of an update account is getting the news first.”

“EVERYTHING COMES DOWN TO SOMETIMES THE SECOND OR MINUTE YOU POST”

To help, Amir has push notifications set up from fan accounts on Tumblr and Twitter, for Swift’s friends and management and publicity team, and, obviously, for Swift herself, who has made a tentative return to social media in recent months after conspicuously vanishingand deleting thousands of posts last August.

“As soon as she posts, I make sure I put it on Twitter. You just have to be quick about it. After a while, it becomes second nature,” Amir says. She does not use Google Alerts, which are too slow. “Everything comes down to sometimes the second or minute you post.”’

That’s because Amir isn’t alone on Twitter talking about Taylor Swift anymore. There are dozens of update accounts, plenty of fans who are willing to take on the job of fandom as a second full-time position. And Swift is far from the only celebrity who draws this kind of cottage media industry around her.

Last summer, I spoke to 19-year-old Yucatán resident Armin Lizama, who runs one of the biggest Lorde fan accounts on Twitter and regularly helps professional music journalism outlets fact-check fan rumors and news items.

Last spring, Harry Styles fans organized to teach each other how to download VPNs and fake US streams of his first solo single “Sign of the Times,” hoping to game the Billboard charts. One account, @StylesPromoTeam, put out a public application to join them, which was longer than a traditional job application and required applicants to state whether they’d be able to dedicate up to 20 hours per week to the cause. This is just how modern fandom operates.

Most of these fans are not doing it to be compensated, but there is compensation to be found nonetheless — like any account with substantial followings, they can charge for sponsored posts and retweets; like any influencer a brand wants to woo, they can expect gifts and trips and special treatment; like any ambitious young person situated in an economy that celebrates optimizing every moment of your life, they can try to use hundreds of hours of self-managed, largely unpaid “fun” labor as a line item on a résumé.

“I don’t really care about how much money I make with it,” Amir says.

Nevertheless, she’ll readily call her account a business.

And as with any business, there are challenges. One is copyright: “Any time a video goes over 30 seconds and it has music or media, anything from Taylor or any of her sponsors, it usually gets picked up by copyright,” Amir explains. “Same thing with photos that photographers are taking, even if it’s Taylor’s own photographers with Getty Images.” They’ll get flagged and removed, and it only takes six or seven violations to get an account suspended, which is a challenge for accounts updating three or four times a day while an artist is on tour, or dozens of times a night when they’re performing and talking and raking in trophies at an awards show.

“Screen record has become my friend. Mainly when it’s YouTube or DirecTV Now, but I have to be careful, which is why I’ve resorted more to retweeting from the source,” she says. She tries not to push it, usually taking clips of around 10 seconds and asking permission whenever she can.

“You want to grow your reach as much as you can, but is it worth getting that copyright notice at the same time?”

All this is why Amir, like many of the other proprietors of major news accounts, has a separate account just for media, which she’ll retweet into her main account’s feed, giving up maximum engagement on her main page in favor of preserving it.

She’s had to learn how to streamline the process, trying to provide a good product without running herself off the road. “There are all these paparazzi pages you can go on and get the image itself, and then you have to delete the watermark,” she explains. “But it’s not worth [the effort] really, because someone’s just going to post it two seconds faster than you.” She’ll ask permission to repost GIFs and videos from fans at tour shows, but only if she’s sure they’re sharing something Swift hasn’t done before. She’ll engage in trending topics only if she has something to add, an image and a great quote, or a video clip short enough to not get pulled. “Otherwise, I’m better off retweeting from the actual source, even though I’m going to lose engagement.”

She had to figure all this out on her own, since other pages are competitors, jockeying for the same audience and the same engagement.

Swift is counting on her, for real. In 2012, before there were very many other major fan accounts, and before Swift’s team really used or understood Twitter, they asked Amir to be the official promotional account of the Red tour.

When Swift joined her favorite social media platform, Tumblr, in 2014, the account was run by her management and only followed five accounts — all update accounts, and one of them Amir’s. “I posted something about the fall, apple picking or something, and I had no idea anybody was reading it,” Amir recalls. “Taylor reblogged it and it was her first reblog of Tumblr, and she ended up adding this whole paragraph about how she loves the fall. So every fall, late August, September, I get so many notifications because people start reblogging that again and again and again. It’s a ritual.”

Being early to two platforms guaranteed that both Swift and her team would be aware of Amir, which means they regularly come back to her — to include her in special fan activities and to do promotion work. (She’s spent time with Swift in person three times in the past six years.)

“FOR ME, IT’S COMMUNITY FIRST; I DON’T REALLY THINK ABOUT THE MONEY.”

Amir says Swift’s management has a list of popular and reliable update accounts that it gives out to her sponsors and brands regularly dole out exclusive content or giveaway items to her and her update account competitors. Dick Clark Productions, for one, will fly fan account operators to awards shows to post updates live, as well as provide them with a stipend to support a vacation day in Los Angeles afterward.

“Either I get compensated through money or through free items,” Amir says. “Or it’s things like free tickets or perks or just being on the inside or being able to go to a release party. Sometimes it’s not directly money-related, but when it is, it’s per post or how many engagements it gets. That’s why stats or using Twitter analytics is so important — so you can say what your worth is. I’ve had it be $300 for retweeting someone before, because it’s a lot of followers and it’s huge engagement. I think the lowest I’ve done is $50.”

“It’s like another job, basically,” she says. But “it isn’t as stable as people think it is with a fan account like this. For me, it’s community first; I don’t really think about the money.”

Madame Tussauds’ Taylor Swift figure, revealed in 2014. Chelsea Lauren/Getty Images

It’s not all profit. “I bought the [last] album five times without really meaning to,” Amir says when I ask about how much fans typically spend to put their affection into practice.

Swift combated the ongoing industry-wide decline of album sales by selling two versions of a limited-edition magazine to go with Reputation last fall, each going for $20 exclusively at Target and each coming with another copy of the album. Buying extra copies of her album also helped fans improve their place in line in Ticketmaster’s controversial Verified Fan program, which sorted fans into a queue to buy presale tickets to her stadium tour.

“EVERY TIME SHE LETS YOU INTO HER LIFE, IT’S A NEW MARKETING SCHEME, BECAUSE IT’S A NEW PART OF HER LIFE THAT YOU DON’T KNOW”

“You want the magazine because you want to see into Taylor’s life; she had to have two different volumes for some reason,” Amir says. “You want the album for the code to put in your Verified Fan thing; that’s your first incentive. And your second is that you want to read these poems that Taylor never released to the world, or pictures that have never before been seen during her two-year [social media] blackout.” The Reputation merch was “trendier” and more expensive than previous Taylor merch, but “as a fan, you tell yourself that you’re just going to compromise and buy it, and you do it without thinking.”

She says she doesn’t want to criticize anyone, but she noticed that Verified Fan tickets were more expensive than regular sale tickets, and says she paid $160 (plus TicketMaster fees) for a decent seat, electing not to spend the nearly $800 it would cost to be in what Swift called “the Snake Pit” at the front of the stage.

“Every time she lets you into her life, it’s a new marketing scheme, because it’s a new part of her life that you don’t know,” Amir says. But again, none of this is criticism. Why shouldn’t a pop star also be a savvy business manager? Why wouldn’t intimacy with her be commodified? These are not contradictions, Amir argues. It’s also not a contradiction that she loves Taylor Swift and benefits financially from loving Taylor Swift.

Taylor Swift with Australian fans in 2012. Brendon Thorne/Getty Images

Because it involves people, business is almost always personal, but when it involves heroes, it’s even more so.

Amir is Muslim, and she says that made it difficult for her to watch Swift’s quiet refusal to engage with a swirling national debate about basic human rights in the wake of the 2016 election. “I really wanted her to say something, because she does say stuff at her concerts, or to you personally, and she’ll like things on Tumblr.” It’s not as if she didn’t know Swift was on her side. Still, “she never said stuff out there, outside the community, where it makes a difference.”

Swift’s longtime silence on political issues — which ended with an October Instagram postendorsing Democratic candidates for several key midterm election races in her home state of Tennessee, seemingly spurring a massive increase in voter registration in the state — was always in tension with her near-constant willingness to speak up on her own behalf. She has been more publicly involved in her business interests than any artist at her level, championing the 2016 battle against the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which she argued gave YouTube a free pass on copyright infringement, and sitting at the center of the debate about Spotify (and music streaming payment practices in general) for years.

That’s a chapter she closed (somewhat awkwardly) during the lead-up to the release of Reputation last year, but she is still known for her litigious spirit, which she demonstrates by trademarking the names of her cats, attempting to copyright phrases like “look what you made me do,” and sending cease-and-desist letters to Etsy sellers who put her lyrics on homemade apparel.

In each of these cases, Swift isn’t really doing anything other artists wouldn’t (or don’t) do — but because she’s built a reputation as a ruthless capitalist, further news items that fit that narrative are easy to package. Each time she adds a brand to her portfolio — be it American Express or New York City — it looks cynical.

Amir doesn’t see it that way. Swift “reinvents herself just like companies innovate products, and that’s what keeps things exciting,” she says, swirling Swift’s musical evolution and personal brand metamorphosis and business strategy into one blanket compliment. She would understand, as an aspiring businesswoman who worked at a bank all through college, graduated early, moved to New York after interning at PR firms, was briefly the social media manager for a folk-pop duo, and is now looking for a way to blend financial analysis with the marketing skills she’s been honing since middle school.

“Taylor’s been a huge part of my life and the [fandom] community’s been a huge part of my life,” Amir says. “But you mature after a while; you get older. You can’t take days off work to be at an awards show.”

Vox