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by kpodd@uxbridgeshimoda.com (Dan Kennedy and Benjamin Harrison)
Happy New Year! It's 1-1-98 and Maggie Serota from SPIN and Rolling Stone joins Machine Bolt and El Farto in the studio. Dateline made the guys look like idiots, Machine Bolt and Steph are in love/Steph is seeing someone else. Apple FM Broadcast Audience Card reviews from listeners! Your calls/injury claims, Fullerton Municipal Airport: Orange County's Regional Relief Airport! Plus, Slash's baby mountain lion, and more! Epic!
Welcome to the second episode of the Cinemassacre Podcast!! The crew of Cinemassacre (James, Kieran, and Justin) are out of the Nerd Room and into your ear-holes. They chat about their lives and the stuff they love: movies, games, and making videos. You’ll also hear about behind-the-scenes antics, anecdotes about being long-time YouTubers, and a ton of obscure pop-culture crap. It’s the off-the-cuff banter from Rental Reviews mixed with an AVGN panel, every Tuesday around 3pm ET... or find it on https://cinemassacre.com or wherever you get your podcasts shortly after.
Cinemassacre Podcast #2 - Worst Gaming Nightmares, Art School, and Urkel’s Weed
by Perla Trevizo, The Texas Tribune and Propublica, LEXI CHURCHILL, THE TEXAS TRIBUNE AND PROPUBLICA, Mike Hixenbaugh, NBC News, SUZY KHIMM, NBC News
Following a 911 call about a family that had fainted, first responders arrived at the house and knocked on the door. No one answered, so they left. Inside, an entire family was being poisoned by carbon monoxide.
The following contains spoilers for season two, episode two of 'Star Trek: Lower Decks.'
I’ve been a Star Trek fan for most of my life, and yet I still chuckled at this Onion video released after the first J.J. Abrams installment came out back in 2009: “Trekkies Bash New Star Trek Film As 'Fun, Watchable.’” Star Trek isn’t to a lot of people’s taste, J.J. Abrams’ among them. He’s said in interviews he never really liked Trek and was trying to make it more like Star Wars. (This was six years before The Force Awakens came out.) The reboot films were a breath of fresh air after four years of no original Trek content, and they did get some new fans into the franchise. Some of those novices would later dip their toe into the water of TV Trek and found that they did actually enjoy it a lot, despite its slower pace.
However, despite the franchise’s strong TV track record with shows like TNG and DS9, the Paramount+ era has been taking its cues from the Abrams films, which isn’t surprising with executive producer Alex Kurtzman at the helm. Alongside Roberto Orci, he’s one of the two screenwriters behind 2009 Star Trek and 2013’s Star Trek Into Darkness, as well as a J.J. Abrams collaborator on Alias and Fringe. Given the box office numbers of the Abramsverse films it makes sense to put him in charge, but it still made a lot of long-time Trekkies groan as we had hoped for a return to the kind of shows we grew up on.
After three seasons of heavy action on Discovery and the jaded grimdark of season one of Picard, the first season of Lower Decks injected some levity back into the franchise, with parody that went up to, but not quite over the line. It couldn’t, since it was intended to be canon. It had to fit alongside TNG, DS9 and Voyager. So it packed in plenty of references to keep the wiki addicts over at the Star Trek-centric Memory Alpha busy, while indulging in old tropes like drunk Klingons, arena battles and the occasional omnipotent being. It also took some direct swipes at the live action Trek shows, like how crew members always seem to die in the most low-tech ways like being impaled by spears or how of course the holodeck is used for sex stuff.
CBS
But those references were always in a more general sense, framed in a “wouldn’t X be ridiculous” way that only long-term fans with deep knowledge of the franchise would fully understand. Until this week’s episode, that is, where crew members of the USS Titan specifically call out the Enterprise D and its galactic cruise ship mentality. Shakespearean plays and string quartets? Peace conferences? How utterly boring compared to the constant run-and-gun that the Titan seems to have been stuck in since last season. They judge the value of their work based on how exciting it is, and think that William Riker must have been bored to tears being stuck on that ship for seven years.
Of course, TNG fans know it was anything but boring for Riker. He’s been locked in a mental institution, trapped in an alternate future and even had god-like powers for an episode. And he likes performing in jazz concerts with his trombone!
CBS
None of this slander sits right with new crew member Brad Boimler, who transferred over from the USS Cerritos at the end of last season. The Titan’s pursuit of the dangerous Pakleds has the young lieutenant junior grade in a constant state of panic as he mans the flight conn position, a big change from quietly toiling away on the lower decks of his old ship. But he’s recognized that this is where the opportunities for promotion are, and soon finds himself on an undercover mission with his fellow bridge crew. At least, it’s supposed to be undercover — the other Titan members quickly get them embroiled in a shootout and facing certain death.
That’s when Boimler takes the opportunity to tell his crewmates how he really feels. “I’d love to be in a string quartet. I love that when Riker was on the Enterprise he was out there jamming on the trombone and catching love disease and acting in plays and meeting his identical transporter clone Thomas. That stuff might not seem as cool as what you guys do, but it’s Starfleet, all the way.” His confession elicits similar confessions from the other team members, before they manage to find a way out in classic technobabble fashion.
CBS
For years Star Trek has always danced around the question of whether Starfleet was a military force. It employs naval ranks and the ships are outfitted with phasers and photon torpedoes for defense. But its stated purpose was exploration and other activities that help tie the vast Federation together. The Abrams films spent all their time reacting to one crisis after another — the crew didn’t start an actual mission of exploration until the very end of Beyond, and there hasn’t been another film since to follow up on that.
Both DS9 and Discovery engaged in wars with the Klingon Empire. On Enterprise the crew ended up hunting down the Xindi with a cadre of trained soldiers on board for its third season. Even Voyager had to deal with the constant accusations that they were a conquering force as they struggled to get home. Lower Decks is our first look in a while at a Starfleet dedicated to exploration, with the crew of the Cerritos specializing in “second contact,” that is, getting communication and trade set up with the planets that flashier ships like the Enterprise meet in their adventures.
So Lower Decks has always been a sort of commentary on the greater Star Trek philosophy, but it’s never been as blatant as Brad Boimler saying, “I didn’t join Starfleet to get in phaser fights. I signed up to explore, to be out in space making new discoveries and peaceful diplomatic solutions. That’s boldly going.”
CBS
The Onion video takes old school Trek fans to task for being gatekeepers, for wallowing and fetishizing things that other folks find boring. The new era of Trek has stretched the definition of what Star Trek could be, expanding into new genres and injecting a little action to sate the appetites of modern audiences. But Lower Decks is the first time I’ve seen pushback from within the franchise itself. The show is basically saying, “Sure, Star Trek can be exciting, but there’s a reason it became popular in the first place!” Let’s hope that with future programs like Strange New Worlds, Alex Kurtzman is listening.
With the massive volume of emails sent each day, coupled with the many methods that attackers use to blend in, identifying the unusual and malicious is more challenging than ever. An obscure Unicode character in a few emails is innocuous enough, but when a pattern of emails containing this obscure character accompanied by other HTML quirks, strange links, and phishing pages or malware is observed, it becomes an emerging attacker trend to investigate. We closely monitor these kinds of trends to gain insight into how best to protect customers.
This blog shines a light on techniques that are prominently used in many recent email-based attacks. We’ve chosen to highlight these techniques based on their observed impact to organizations, their relevance to active email campaigns, and because they are intentionally designed to be difficult to detect. They hide text from users, masquerade as the logos of trusted companies, and evade detection by using common web practices that are usually benign:
Brand impersonation with procedurally-generated graphics
Text padding with invisible characters
Zero-point font obfuscation
Victim-specific URI
We’ve observed attackers employ these tricks to gain initial access to networks. Although the examples we present were primarily seen in credential theft attacks, any of these techniques can be easily adapted to deliver malware.
By spotting trends in the threat landscape, we can swiftly respond to potentially malicious behavior. We use the knowledge we gain from our investigations to improve customer security and build comprehensive protections. Through security solutions such as Microsoft Defender for Office 365 and the broader Microsoft 365 Defender, we deliver durable and comprehensive protection against the latest attacker trends.
Brand impersonation with procedurally-generated graphics
We have observed attackers using HTML tables to imitate the logos and branding of trusted organizations. In one recent case, an attacker created a graphic resembling the Microsoft logo by using a 2×2 HTML table and CSS styling to closely match the official branding.
Spoofed logos created with HTML tables allow attackers to bypass brand impersonation protections. Malicious content arrives in users’ inboxes, appearing to recipients as if it were a legitimate message from the company. While Microsoft Defender for Office 365 data shows a decline in the usage of this technique over the last few months, we continue to monitor for new ways that attackers will use procedurally-generated graphics in attacks.
Figure 1. Tracking data for small 2×2 HTML tables
How it works
A graphic resembling a trusted organization’s official logo is procedurally generated from HTML and CSS markup. It’s a fileless way of impersonating a logo, because there are no image files for security solutions to detect. Instead, the graphic is constructed out a specially styled HTML table that is embedded directly in the email.
Of course, inserting an HTML table into an email is not malicious on its own. The malicious pattern emerges when we view this technique in context with the attacker’s goals.
Two campaigns that we have been tracking since April 2021 sent targets emails that recreated the Microsoft logo. They impersonated messages from Office 365 and SharePoint. We observed the following email subjects:
Action Required: Expiration Notice On <Email Address>
Figure 2. Sample emails that use HTML code to embed a table designed to mimic the Microsoft logo
Upon extracting the HTML used in these emails, Microsoft analysts determined that the operators used the HTML table tag to create a 2×2 table resembling the Microsoft logo. The background color of each of the four cells corresponded to the colors of the quadrants of the official logo.
Figure 3. Page source of the isolated HTML mimicking the Microsoft logo
HTML and CSS allow for colors to be referenced in several different ways. Many colors can be referenced in code via English language color names, such as “red” or “green”. Colors can also be represented using six-digit hexadecimal values (i.e., #ffffff for white and #000000 for black), or by sets of three numbers, with each number signifying the amount of red, green, or blue (RGB) to combine. These methods allow for greater precision and variance, as the designer can tweak the numbers or values to customize the color’s appearance.
Figure 4. Color values used to replicate the Microsoft logo
As seen in the above screenshot, attackers often obscure the color references to the Microsoft brand by using color names, hexadecimal, and RGB to color in the table. By switching up the method they use to reference the color, or slightly changing the color values, the attacker can further evade detection by increasing variance between emails.
Text padding with invisible characters
In several observed campaigns, attackers inserted invisible Unicode characters to break up keywords in an email body or subject line in an attempt to bypass detection and automated security analysis. Certain characters in Unicode indicate extremely narrow areas of whitespace, or are not glyphs at all and are not intended to render on screen.
Some invisible Unicode characters that we have observed being used maliciously include:
Soft hyphen (U+00AD)
Word joiner (U+2060)
Both of these are control characters that affect how other characters are formatted. They are not glyphs and would not even be visible to readers, in most cases. As seen in the following graph, the use of the soft hyphen and word joiner characters has seen a steady increase over time. These invisible characters are not inherently malicious, but seeing an otherwise unexplained rise of their use in emails indicates a potential shift in attacker techniques.
Figure 5. Tracking data for the invisible character obfuscation technique
How it works
When a recipient views a malicious email containing invisible Unicode characters, the text content may appear indistinguishable from any other email. Although not visible to readers, the extra characters are still included in the body of the email and are “visible” to filters or other security mechanisms. If attackers insert extra, invisible characters into a word they don’t want security products to “see,” the word might be treated as qualitatively different from the same word without the extra characters. This allows the keyword to evade detection even if filters are set to catch the visible part of the text.
Invisible characters do have legitimate uses. They are, for the most part, intended for formatting purposes: for instance, to indicate where to split a word when the whole word can’t fit on a single line. However, an unintended consequence of these characters not displaying like ordinary text is that malicious email campaign operators can insert the characters to evade security.
The animated GIF below shows how the soft hyphen characters are typically used in a malicious email. The soft hyphen is placed between each letter in the red heading to break up several key words. It’s worth noting that the soft hyphens are completely invisible to the reader until the text window is narrowed and the heading is forced to break across multiple lines.
Figure 6. Animation showing the use of the invisible soft hyphen characters
In the following example, a phishing email has had invisible characters inserted into the email body: specifically, in the “Keep current Password” text that links the victim to a phishing page.
Figure 7. Microsoft Office 365 phishing email using invisible characters to obfuscate the URL text.
The email appears by all means “normal” to the recipient, however, attackers have slyly added invisible characters in between the text “Keep current Password.” Clicking the URL directs the user to a phishing page impersonating the Microsoft single sign-on (SSO) page.
In some campaigns, we have seen the invisible characters applied to every word, especially any word referencing Microsoft or Microsoft products and services.
Zero-point font obfuscation
This technique involves inserting hidden words with a font size of zero into the body of an email. It is intended to throw off machine learning detections, by adding irrelevant sections of text to the HTML source making up the email body. Attackers can successfully obfuscate keywords and evade detection because recipients can’t see the inserted text—but security solutions can.
Microsoft Defender for Office 365 has been blocking malicious emails with zero-point font obfuscation for many years now. However, we continue to observe its usage regularly.
Figure 8. Tracking data for emails containing zero-point fonts experienced surges in June and July 2021
How it works
Similar to how there are many ways to represent colors in HTML and CSS, there are also many ways to indicate font size. We have observed attackers using the following styling to insert hidden text via this technique:
font-size: 0px
font-size: 0.0000em
font-size: 0vw
font-size: 0%
font: italic bold 0.0px Georgia, serif
font: italic bold 0em Georgia, serif
font: italic bold 0vw Georgia, serif
font: italic bold 0% Georgia, serif
Being able to add zero-width text to a page is a quirk of HTML and CSS. It is sometimes used legitimately for adding meta data to an email or to adjust whitespace on a page. Attackers repurpose this quirk to break up words and phrases a defender might want to track, whether to raise an alert or block the content entirely. As with the invisible Unicode character technique, certain kinds of security solutions might treat text containing these extra characters as distinct from the same text without the zero-width characters. This allows the visible keyword text to slip past security.
In a July 2021 phishing campaign blocked by Microsoft Defender for Office 365, the attacker used a voicemail lure to entice recipients into opening an email attachment. Hidden, zero-width letters were added to break up keywords that might otherwise have been caught by a content filter. The following screenshot shows how the email appeared to targeted users.
Figure 9. Sample email that uses the zero-point font technique
Those with sharp eyes might be able to spot the awkward spaces where the attacker inserted letters that are fully visible only within the HTML source code. In this campaign, the obfuscation technique was also used in the malicious email attachment, to evade file-hash based detections.
Figure 10. The HTML code of the email body, exposing the use of the zero-point font technique
Victim-specific URI
Victim-specific URI is a way of transmitting information about the target and creating dynamic content based upon it. In this technique, a custom URI crafted by the attacker passes information about the target to an attacker-controlled website. This aides in spear-phishing by personalizing content seen by the intended victim. This is often used by the attacker to create legitimate-seeming pages that impersonate the Single Sign On (SSO) experience.
The following graph shows cyclic surges in email content, specifically links that have an email address included as part of the URI. Since custom URIs are such a common web design practice, their usage always returns to a steady baseline in between peaks. The surges appear to be related to malicious activity, since attackers will often send out large numbers of spam emails over the course of a campaign.
Figure 11. Tracking data for emails containing URLs with email address in the PHP parameter
In a campaign Microsoft analysts observed in early May 2021, operators generated tens of thousands of subdomains from Google’s Appspot, creating unique phishing sites and victim identifiable URIs for each recipient. The technique allowed the operators to host seemingly legitimate Microsoft-themed phishing sites on third-party infrastructure.
How it works
The attacker sends the target an email, and within the body of the email is a link that includes special parameters as part of the web address, or URI. The custom URI parameters contain information about the target. These parameters often utilize PHP, as PHP is a programming language frequently used to build websites with dynamic content—especially on large platforms such as Appspot.
Details such as the target’s email address, alias, or domain, are sent via the URI to an attacker-controlled web page when the user visits the link. The attacker’s web page pulls the details from the parameters and use that to present the target with personalized content. This can help the attacker make malicious websites more convincing, especially if they are trying to mimic a user logon page, as the target will be greeted by their own account name.
Custom URIs containing user-specific parameters are not always, or even often, malicious. They are commonly used by all kinds of web developers to transmit pertinent information about a request. A query to a typical search engine will contain numerous parameters concerning the nature of the search as well as information about the user, so that the search engine can provide users with tailored results.
However, in the victim identifiable URI technique, attackers repurpose a common web design practice to malicious ends. The tailored results seen by the target are intended to trick them into handing over sensitive information to an attacker.
In the Compact phishing campaign described by WMC Global and tracked by Microsoft, this technique allowed the operators to host Microsoft-themed phishing sites on any cloud infrastructure, including third-party platforms such as Google’s Appspot. Microsoft’s own research into the campaign in May noted that not only tens of thousands of individual sites were created, but that URIs were crafted for each recipient, and the recipient’s email address was included as a parameter in the URI.
Newer variants of the May campaign started to include links in the email, which routed users through a compromised website, to ultimately redirect them to the Appspot-hosted phishing page. Each hyperlink in the email template used in this version of the campaign was structured to be unique to the recipient.
The recipient-specific information passed along in the URI was used to render their email account name on a custom phishing page, attempting to mimic the Microsoft Single Sign On (SSO) experience. Once on the phishing page, the user was prompted to enter their Microsoft account credentials. Entering that information would send it to the attacker.
Microsoft Defender for Office 365 delivers protection powered by threat intelligence
As the phishing techniques we discussed in this blog show, attackers use common or standard aspects of emails to hide in plain sight and make attacks very difficult to detect or block. With our trend tracking in place, we can make sense of suspicious patterns, and notice repeated combinations of techniques that are highly likely to indicate an attack. This enables us to ensure we protect customers from the latest evasive email campaigns through Microsoft Defender for Office 365. We train machine learning models to keep an eye on activity from potentially malicious domains or IP addresses. Knowing what to look out for, we can rule out false positives and focus on the bad actors.
This has already paid off. Microsoft Defender for Office 365 detected and protected customers from sophisticated phishing campaigns, including the Compact campaign. We also employed our knowledge of prevalent trends to hunt for a ransomware campaign that might have otherwise escaped notice. We swiftly opened an investigation to protect customers from what seemed at first like a set of innocuous emails.
Trend tracking helps us to expand our understanding about prevalent attacker tactics and to improve existing protections. We’ve already set up rules to detect the techniques described in this blog. Our understanding of the threat landscape has led to better response times to critical threats. Meanwhile, deep within Microsoft Defender for Office 365, rules for raising alerts are weighted so that detecting a preponderance of suspicious techniques triggers a response, while legitimate emails are allowed to travel to their intended inboxes.
Threat intelligence also drives what new features are developed, and which rules are added. In this way, generalized trend tracking leads to concrete results. Microsoft is committed to using our knowledge of the threat landscape to continue to track trends, build better protections for our products, and share intelligence with the greater online community.
Is it ever ok to stop being GGG? I’ve been with my husband for 26 years. Shortly after we got together, my husband disclosed a major kink: MFM threesomes. I was young and a virgin and up for anything then, but we didn’t start hooking up with other men until around year six of our relationship. Over the last twenty years we’ve been on-and-off with this. We had children, we took a break, and we found the time to go wild now and then. My husband's interests expanded into dominance play—owning me and sharing me—but I’m in my late forties now and my husband is in his fifties. I’m approaching menopause and my sex drive has decreased. There were also instances where I was basically sexually assaulted—or at the very least, my boundaries were not respected on more than one occasion. Long story short, I want to be done being kinky. I want my body to be mine. My husband and I have been having other marital problems, and he thinks my rejection of his kinkiness is a rejection of him. I’ve told him I’m still interested in sex, I’m just tired of being GGG. He says he isn't interested in vanilla sex with me because he is “disappointed.” When I told him to outsource his kink, he said, “Good luck finding that as a married man.” Am I ever allowed to retire from his kink? Am I the asshole here?
We’ve recently added someone to our team who is a project manager. At my workplace, this is an entry-level position, usually filled by people just out of college. They manage the projects, setting deadlines and sharing client feedback. It’s not an unimportant position by any means, but it is sort of at the bottom of the rung, here.
Recently, we hired a more seasoned project manager who, before this position, worked in another country, where I suspect the term “project manager” meant something quite different from what it means here. He literally thinks he’s in charge. I say this because he’s micromanaging me and others (constant messages asking how we’re doing on projects or even just “What are you working on?” which is something no one else does), because he’s ordered higher-ups around (“It’s okay you missed the meeting, but try to be there next time”), and because I’ve heard him on client calls saying, “I’m managing this project.” It’s true he’s … managing the project, as in handling it, but he isn’t our manager.
This is something I’d normally talk to my boss about, but the problem is we don’t have one at the moment. Our ACTUAL manager just left for greener pastures, and another executive is sort of vaguely watching over us till we get a replacement. Talking to him would seem absurd, given our culture and the understanding that he’s just there for true emergencies, not a situation like “It’s annoying having to tell this dude what I’m working on.”
Is there anything I can say to subtly let this guy know he’s not my boss, nor is he in charge of our work? Our team is only four people total and two are new, including this new guy. The other experienced person on the team is with me on thinking it’s odd.
My biggest worry is that your new manager, once hired, will assume this is what the role is supposed to be, since this guy is (a) more experienced and (b) acting like this is his job. And even if you explain at that point, your new manager may just decide it’s fine to let an experienced person continue with this model, leaving you stuck with the situation long-term.
So I think if you want to ward that off, you’ve got to address it now and firmly.
If that weren’t the case, I’d say there was time to try a softer approach … meaning that when he tries to “manage” you, you’d push back in the moment. When he asks how you’re doing on a project, you’d say, “I’m set — was there something you needed to move forward with your stuff?” or the distinctly peer-like “I’m good, how are you doing with your pieces?” If he asks what you’re working on, you’d say, “Oh, a bunch of things — was there something specific you’re asking about?”
But this feels more urgent than that, so I think you and your other experienced coworker need to sit down with him and have a direct conversation where you set the record straight. As in: “You’ve been asking us to update you on our work the way we might with a manager, so we wanted to make sure there wasn’t any confusion about our roles in relationship to yours. The job you’re in manages projects but not people, meaning that you’re responsible for things like XYZ but your role doesn’t have oversight or authority over either of us or our work. If there’s something you need from us, we of course want to know and see how we can help, but there’s no chain of command relationship here and so it doesn’t make sense for you to check in on our work in the way you’ve been doing.”
If that goes okay, then great. But if it doesn’t, I do think you need to consider escalating it to the exec who’s covering your team until a new manager is hired. I know they’re just vaguely involved, and if it would truly be absurd in your culture to do this, then don’t … but normally it would make sense to go to that person, explain there’s a rogue new person with significant confusion about their role, say you’ve attempted to address it directly without success, and ask them to intervene.
But also … one really big caveat before you do any of that: Are you very sure that this guy’s idea of his job isn’t actually the correct one? I know the job has been entry-level in the past, but is there any chance that someone above you changed that when he was hired? Particularly with your boss leaving, is it possible they decided they wanted someone with more authority in this role? And that’s why they hired someone experienced for the job? It would odd for them not to share that with you if so, but that does happen sometimes. If there’s any chance that happened here, that’s another reason to go higher up with it and see what’s going on.
Names, Social Security numbers and birth dates were compromised; phone numbers, account numbers, passwords and financial information were not. T-Mobile is offering free identity protection services.
Gov. Greg Abbott — who announced Tuesday that he had tested positive for COVID-19 despite being fully vaccinated — has been fighting with local governments over masks for months.
(Image credit: Bloomberg/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
The incentive will give $100 to all residents who are eligible to receive their first dose of the vaccine by Harris County Public Health through Aug. 31.
Nastassja Swift with her work in progress. Image via Galveston Arts Center.
Nastassja Swift is a multimedia artist whose layered installation, Caanan: when I read your letter, I feel your voice, on view at Galveston Arts Center (GAC), explores Swift’s personal experience in navigating her brother Caanan’s incarceration. Addressing themes of absence, erasure and the impact of mass incarceration in an intimate, reflective space, the project includes a 40-foot glass-beaded and fabric quilt looped through a steel armature the size of her brother’s cell. Swift is currently at a residency in Cleveland, working on a community youth outreach project.
Installation view. Image via Galveston Arts Center.
Colette Copeland: Your current exhibition at GAC represents a shift in your work both conceptually and materially. Your previous work emphasized fiber-based figurative sculptures and addressed themes of Blackness, the aftermath of slavery, imagined ancestral memories, and performative activism. This current work is much more personal — a collaboration with your brother, Canaan, who is incarcerated. Materially, you are still working with fiber/fabric, but the pictorial plane has been flattened into 2D form.
Installation view. Image via Galveston Arts Center.
Nastassja Swift: I originally had a dream about this piece last summer, and it was one of the most vivid dreams I can remember. I could tell you what I was wearing, how my hair was styled, that I had on no makeup, that I told those present that I wouldn’t censor Canaan’s words, and how I reacted to reading the letters out loud. I journaled that dream in July 2020.
I knew that I wanted this work to be the concluding solo exhibition for my residency with the CAN Foundation in Newport News, VA — they just felt like the right group of people to bring about such a personal project. In January 2021, when it came time to start sketching and planning out this project, my thoughts kept pushing me further and further away from wool. I tried to draw felted fiber details with little success and tried to make sense of how to materially make the piece. I started drawing a canopy shape, which led me to thinking about a blanket. And then a security blanket, and the meaning behind that phrase. It felt connected to the question, “What does my cell look like?” The work started to take shape with the idea of Canaan’s prison cell, and eventually the image of the large quilted blanket draped through that structure came to be.
I think deep down, I understood that this subject deserved a big shift from me. As I think back on the planning and sketching phase, I can’t help but think about how much it felt like I was painting with fabric, and how Canaan is most familiar with my art in the form of figurative painting. It was like the work needed something familiar to both of us, while still allowing me to work in textiles.
Detail. Installation photo via Galveston Arts Center.
Detail. Installation photo via Galveston Arts Center.
CC: The security blanket with both of your portraits is such a powerful symbol — one of safety during stressful/anxious times, but also it is symbol of resilience and hope for the future. The images of the quilt evoke so many thoughts and emotions for me; quilting has historically been associated with domesticity and comfort. You’ve created a safe space within the gallery for a visitor to sit and contemplate, read and listen.
The quilt is visually magnificent. The use of color, pattern and non-traditional design elements remind me of some Gee’s Bend quilts, yet, your attention to design is detailed with a cacophony of color, shapes and lines. The regal and powerful depiction of your brother, who is larger than life here, looks like he stepped out of a painting. In addition to the personal narrative, what artists have influenced your work?
NS: Stemming from the question of my personal cell, as someone who’s probably closer to Canaan than anyone else, creating a physical space felt important. Because we’re so close, I feel the responsibility to make sure, by any means, that my brother makes it home, and that he’s okay mentally, emotionally and spiritually. And that’s a lot for one person to hold. Yet, I also feel like I need to hear from Canaan. I can’t know if he’s okay unless he calls, or writes, and I need him to be okay. So communicating with him, as you said, both comforts and consumes me. The quilt is a metaphor for many things, but largely it represents my feelings towards maintaining a relationship with Canaan throughout his incarceration.
Regarding my inspiration, I looked at a LOT of quilts, but also figurative paintings. Gee’s Bend for sure, Bisa Butler, Faith Ringgold, Amy Sherald, Jordan Casteel, Sanford Biggers, Ambrosia Murray, Basil Kincaid, and Theaster Gates became an arts bible for me during the entire making process. I studied their use of color, the subject’s interaction with negative space, sense of storytelling, and the presence of the figure.
To understand what I wanted my quilt and figures to do and how I wanted them to feel, I sourced all of my family photos. Looking at color and print from the early -’90s comforter sets, my grandmother’s wallpaper and couch, old curtains and dresses my mom styled me in, all from 4 x 6-inch photos. The color and patterning from older-Caanan’s pants was inspired by the bedding in a photo that he and I were laying on when we were maybe one and a few months old. Canaan and I are 13 months apart — I’m the oldest.
Installation view. Image via Galveston Arts Center.
CC: It adds additional layers of context and meaning to know that the color and patterns were inspired by old family photographs and that you incorporated detailed patterns/design from domestic familiar objects such as wallpaper, couches, curtains and clothing.
NS: Yes, it made the history and memory a part of the work in the way using Canaan’s actual clothes would have done. By the way, Canaan would never, ever, let me cut up his clothes. So that was never an option. Being inspired by the photos was the next best thing, offering a stronger sense of nostalgia in my opinion.
CC: It’s salient that this work is currently on view in Texas. It’s well documented: 13% of state residents are Black, yet 27% of the jail population and 33% of the prison population is Black. Texas has the highest execution rate in the country. Since 2015, the state has executed 54 people, 2.5 times more people than any other state.
It’s easy for people to ignore or overlook statistics. Through your brother’s and your family’s story, your project humanizes the issue of the communal impact of mass incarceration. What do you hope the viewer might experience within the work, and how might their ideas about incarceration shift?
NS: I hope that those visiting take the time to sit in the space filled with Canaan’s and my relationship and our love, and reflect on their own families, and loved ones. I hope there’s room to enjoy, laugh and smile at the way in which we interact with each other. I hope that, with an open mind, those visiting understand that Canaan is not his crime, and there’s so much more to him and his life and story than any actions from a few years ago. And that goes for any incarcerated individual.
Someone close to me said, “If we were all judged to the highest extent of the law for the worst thing we’ve ever done, a lot more of us would be in prison.” It’s easy to judge, until it’s someone you love. I hope people take the time to think about all those souls, who are still alive, yet so easily forgotten because of our carceral system, and attitude towards incarcerated people.
Photo by Marlon Turner.
CC: Much of your work incorporates a performative element. In Remembering Her Homecoming, you and eight dancers, wearing your sculptural wool masks, walked along Richmond, Virginia’s trails of enslaved Africans. In your artist statement about the current work, you states that the work is a collaborative performance. The work includes both yours and Canaan’s voices, your physical body in the installation photograph and the representation of his body in the quilt. What’s the role of performance and importance of the body/embodiment in your work?
Photo by Marlon Turner.
NS: Working with wool over the past six years has widened my sense of material and the way I think about space, and movement and composition. Mask-making led me to think about seeing my work on the body, and loving how the work becomes activated through someone’s movement outside of my own hands. I think overall, fiber has challenged me to think of the number of ways I can push and alter my use of wool.
I never thought I’d consider myself a performance artist, but in many ways, I am. The use of one’s physical space that they consume in this world, in my work, feels like it holds so much power, presence and energy. Watching someone else give that part of themselves — you can literally feel it. And my work conceptually compliments that, so it feels necessary to think through the pairing of the two.
For this installation, it’s clear that I couldn’t have Canaan physically be a part of the work. But his presence is woven throughout in a number of ways. The recorded conversations, taken over the first few months of this year, present a part of me and my brother (but especially me) that we don’t give to everyone. Or anyone, really. I feel like the folks listening to these conversations that know me, are being introduced to a Nastassja that they don’t really know. There’s a lot of vulnerability in that. In the entire show.
Initially, I thought I wanted a blended clip of these conversations to play aloud in the space. But I thought about how they were recorded, how the calls themselves took place — and it was all on the phone. It felt appropriate that visitors would be able to hear these interactions on the same devices that they originated from. There’s also a level of voyeurism and lack of privacy that exists, which is very similar to the reality that these conversations are typically screened anyway.
Installation view. Image via Galveston Arts Center.
CC: Tell us about your current residency in Cleveland and what you’re working on.
NS: After such a big project with Canaan, I was no longer interested in having a traditional exhibition to conclude my Cleveland residency. Instead, I am planning a youth-centered parade and performance that celebrates Black youth and community in the city, asking, “How do we bring joy to our spaces?” The project allows me to partner with some local organizations in Cleveland and work collaboratively with youth directly in their neighborhoods.
I’ve begun these pop-up workshops where I visit Black neighborhoods with all my wet felting supplies and invite the kids to take part in the process and see the felted masks being used in the parade. But more importantly, how the masks for the parade are being made. I’ve been writing poetry (inspired by Sonia Sanchez) which is something I’ve never done. The title for the project is a haiku, and a part of the project statement is a poem as well:
blue/Black/baby smiles,
singin’ to an old river-
we hear you coming.
The parade route is set to begin at Saint Johns Epispocal Church, also known as “Station Hope,” one of the final stops on the Underground Railroad. And end at Whiskey Island, the site where enslaved Africans set sail to Canada in search of their freedom. With an interest in navigating spaces of Black life, both past and present, the parade will also move through and involve youth living in Lakeview Terrace, one of the oldest Public Housing Projects in the United States. It is set to take place August 28, 2021.
Nastassja Swift’s “Canaan: when I read your letter, I feel your voice” is on view at Galveston Arts Center through Oct. 3, 2021.
We first released the Space City Weather app a little more than two months ago, and I wanted to give you an update on where we are, and where we hope to go. As a reminder, you can download the app on Apple devices here, and Android devices here. The app is free, and there are no ads, no in-app purchases, and no tracking or hoovering of your personal information.
The App so far
First of all, we could not he happier with the response. More than 75,000 people have downloaded the app on Apple and Android devices since its launch. This is a pretty phenomenal response, and we appreciate your interest. We also appreciate your patience as we know the app launched with bugs on both mobile operating systems. We think we’ve now squashed most of them, so be sure you’ve updated the app on your device to get the latest version. After updating, you can report bugs by emailing us.
Plans for the App in 2022
Since the release of our initial app we have received a lot of feedback and feature requests. And we definitely hear you. To create the initial version of our app we exhausted all of our available funds, with the goal of creating a simple, functional app ready to go in time for the 2021 Atlantic hurricane season. We delivered that.
Now we are contemplating our next steps. After we hold our site’s annual fundraiser in late October and November, we’ll be able to set a budget for upgrades to the Space City Weather App in 2022. Our initial priority is to work with our developer Hussain Abbasi, to include some of our most requested feature upgrades:
A better radar: larger, time stamps, improved resolution
Increased number of locations: I.e. Sugar Land, Tomball, Beaumont-Port Arthur, Baytown, etc.
An hourly percent chance of rain
Metric unit option
Then, depending on the—cough, cough—robustness of our fundraiser later this year we hope to include some of these additional upgrades later in 2022:
Dark mode
Ability to comment on posts within the app
Tropical weather tab
Plans for the App beyond 2022
Beyond these, we have ideas for future upgrades. We’re still not yet sure how to implement some of these, and some will require a lot of back-end work. So we want you to know we’re considering these ideas, but don’t have immediate plans to include them:
Pollen counts
Barometric pressure and trends
Portrait/horizontal mode
Apply watch support
Apple and Android widgets
As always, thank you for your interest in Space City Weather, and for your kind words about our efforts. Matt and I continue to feel as though it is a privilege to serve you all, and we greatly value the trust you place in us.
I’m in a role that is relatively new to me but I like quite a bit. However, due to a lot of factors, I am disenchanted with my employer. I am underpaid (getting my salary to the market range would be a 30-40% increase), have many internal blockers to success, and am overall just unhappy with my management and role. I am actively looking for a new position and have two promising options.
However, as we all know, hiring doesn’t happen in a day. So while I feel confident I’ll get at least one offer, I won’t count my chickens before they’re hatched. But it’s become increasingly hard to perform in my current role on a day-to-day basis. I’m burnt out for many reasons. My managers expressed concern today with several areas – some of which I could definitely work on, but I just keep screaming in my head “I DON’T CARE!”
Of course, my response to them was that I hear their concerns and I’ll work on a high-level action plan that we’ll review this week, but this is worse than running through molasses. I don’t really have a financial net to just quit, though obviously that seems to be the best answer for everyone. Do I just do the bare minimum moving forward and maybe even hope I’m let go, in case I need unemployment? Do I really have to psych myself up to perform at my normal standards while I continue to look elsewhere, in another industry? I’m actually not sure what’s best to do when I’m so unhappy but unable to just leave.
This July, Bumble settled a lawsuit brought by a man that claimed the app’s “ladies swipe first” policy discriminated against male users. In addition to publicizing to the world that he is not getting laid, the man’s lawsuit won the men of Bumble twenty “Super Swipes” in damages. That’s all well and good, but how about some remedies for the indignities of being a straight woman on a dating app? We have drafted some proposals for women to receive compensation as well.
For a woman who received “hey hottie” as an opening message: One “Super Dislike.”
For a woman who was asked if she’d like to go on “a date in my pants”: Free Guess jeans. Not the white ones. Nice ones.
For a woman who received an unsolicited dick pic: A Georgia O’Keeffe painting. Also, the next dick pic you receive will automatically be rerouted to the sender of the previous dick pic, and so on, forever. The recipient of a redirected dick pic will not get a Georgia O’Keeffe painting. Just the pic of the dick.
For a woman who received a solicited dick pic: This doesn’t happen.
For a woman who matched with an aspiring stand-up comedian trying out new material: Tickets to Ali Wong’s next taping.
For a woman who had to read the word “sapiosexual” forty-two times in one sitting: A copy of Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider.
For a woman who matched with an ad for discounted dry-cleaning and kept talking to the bot for months because it was the most polite user on the app: Discounted dry-cleaning, obviously. Also, a therapist.
For a woman who can now eyeball the weight of a fish: Sushi.
For a woman who was told her new match “wasn’t looking for anything serious” before she had said anything at all: You will not have to have anything serious with that man, or anything at all, in fact.
For a woman who matched with six guys named Matt in a row: A date with Matthew McConaughey.
For a woman who messaged with a man who would only list his initials for “Me Too-reasons”: His SSN. Also, some cash, why not?
For a woman who received a long string of emojis but no words:
For a woman who was asked if she was fatter in person: $10 million.
For all women who matched with straight men: My deepest condolences.
What a ride for RomUniverse and its owner, Matthew Storman. By way of background, 2019 saw Nintendo start an all out assault on ROM sites, websites where users could download ROMs of old Nintendo games to play on emulators. When the company set its eyes on RomUniverse, Storman attempted to crowdfund a legal defense, which failed, only to represent himself in court and make a lame argument that somehow first sale doctrine allowed him to commit mass copyright infringement. When that all failed miserably and RomUniverse lost in court, Storman was ordered to pay $2.1 million in damages in monthly $50 installments. He failed to make even those payments.
A California court has ordered RomUniverse owner Matthew Storman to keep the website permanently offline and to destroy all illegal Nintendo ROMs.
As reported by TorrentFreak, he has until August 17 to comply with the order. The publisher had filed a request for a permanent injunction in May to keep the website offline, but the court at the time denied it. Nintendo however asked that the decision be reconsidered in June as Storman didn't specifically dispute that the website would be revived.
To be clear, everyone in this story is somewhere on the spectrum of dumb. Storman's defenses were laughable and the fight he attempted to put up in court pitiful. When Nintendo specifically brought evidence that Storman had been directly involved in some of the infringing content either appearing on his site, or with him pushing rewards for uploaders to induce them, his argument of first sale doctrine was incredibly weak.
Nintendo, for its part, has buried what mostly amounts to a current non-threat. Nintendo's sales of older consoles and older games, including on new consoles, has been wildly successful. It buried this site not because it acted as some major threat to Nintendo, but rather because it could. That is very much the Nintendo way, as is the total lack of acknowledgement as to how ROM sites like this, whatever you might want to say about their legality, certainly served for decades to keep interest in classic Nintendo games alive.
But instead, Nintendo has gone through this entire process, spending whatever money it had to and cannot extract from Storman, just so RomUniverse is no longer online. If that's how the company wants to spend its money, mission accomplished, I suppose.
See, I’m no maximalist, but I’m kind of a sucker for walls. They leave a little something to the imagination, y’know? Yet I live in a place with an open-concept floor plan because it was my only option. As my realtor explained, demanding separate rooms in 2021 is “quixotic.”
Join me on a walk-through and see what your sick creation hath wrought:
Upon entering, the front door is behind you, and everything else is directly in front of you. No, I’m not hiding a living room out of sight somewhere. This is my one room, in all its singular glory. When I’m feeling optimistic, I call this the Great Room; when I’m realistic, I call it Hell.
Notice how I set up the furniture to appear like a series of individual rooms? It really makes each space feel totally separate. To your left is the office/living area, which triples as a guest corner. On the opposite end of the Great Room is my dining table. It conveniently juts directly into the middle of the kitchen like a makeshift island, but worse.
To be clear, I’m not describing a studio apartment. No, I live in a 970-square-foot condo with the price tag of a single-family home and the feel of a studio apartment, which I’m told is good for some reason.
“But Alice,” you might protest, “an open floor plan is ideal for entertaining!” Hmm, you may be onto something there, Mr. Architect. Let’s plan the perfect gathering, shall we?
Imagine: It’s party time! I’ve invited you and my seventeen closest friends, and everyone’s having a blast. The charcuterie board is a hit, and I notice you particularly enjoy my vast array of cheeses. You even tell a story about the time you accidentally swapped blueprints with your toddler’s construction paper scribbles, and no one noticed until after you laid all the subflooring.
You step away to check your phone. Now we’re thirty-nine feet apart on opposite sides of my house.
No, wait. We’re right next to each other, mere inches apart. At least, that’s what it sounds like since there’s nary a wall blocking out the sound of two guests whispering about you:
“Who invited the architect? That dude’s such a bummer.”
“Ugh, I know. Talk about Frank Lloyd Wrong-place-to-tell-that-boring-story, buddy!”
“Fallingwater? More like I’m falling asleep. And I’m pretty sure he single-handedly ate all the Camembert.”
You look around, but you can’t identify the culprits from all the way across the room. Now you have to return to the party without knowing who exactly thinks you’re dull as dirt, and your social anxiety kicks into overdrive. If only this house had walls, you’d never know how deeply despised you are!
I’m sorry, was that hypothetical too cruel? Do you want me to keep these thoughts to myself? Too bad, bucko! This is a wall-free, open-concept letter design, and I’m getting all up in your business.
Sucks, doesn’t it?
Maybe I’m not giving you enough credit, and you’re actually making a greater political statement with your design. Perhaps you believe citizenship as a general concept is a colonialist and nationalist scourge, and the open floor plan’s lack of walls symbolizes a world without borders. But while I theoretically admire your metaphorical architectural gesture towards progress, in practice, your leftist foreign policy doesn’t block out the sound of my husband’s ceaseless humming from the opposite end of our home.
You may dismiss me as some ignorant simpleton who doesn’t understand the architectural nuances of an open-concept floor plan—and that may be true. However, I also don’t understand the scientific and medical nuances of the human body, but I’m pretty sure it’s a good thing my blood stays in my veins and my brain will never meet my buttocks (unlike yours, which has been firmly lodged there for years).
I hope you don’t mind me airing these grievances publicly in an open letter. After all, you don’t exactly seem like the kind of person who values privacy.
With hatred from one room over (i.e., the same room), Alice Lahoda
the_insult_dog writes: Some 10 years after the final Microsoft Silverlight release, some developers still fear being 'Silverlighted,' or seeing a development product in which they have invested heavily be abandoned by Microsoft.
Microsoft will tell you that official support for Silverlight will end in less than two months, on Oct. 12, 2021. Anyone in the industry will tell you it effectively died around 2011 when the last version, Silverlight 5, was made available for download. Speculation about its demise arose around the same time.
Certain plants, like azaleas and rhododendrons, like moisture but they don’t like long periods of standing water. There is a delicate balance between adequately hydrating plants and drowning their roots, which can cause disease. But you can prevent root rot and keep your plants moist for longer—you just need a few…
I hope that you and everyone you know or have ever known is safe. As you are likely aware, the COVID-19 pandemic has upended our lives in many, shall we say, unprecedented, ways. We used to live in normal times, but now we are living in times that are not normal. But there is reason to be optimistic. And that reason is that soon everything will return to normal. Maybe.
To prepare for our return to normal, we have set a date that exactly one month from now, everything will be back to how things were. We think. It is also possible that we need to push back the date for the return to normal to two months, but, for sure, it is pretty likely we will be back in person like we were before in the next three to six months. Unless we are not, and then we won’t. But for now, please plan for everything to go back to how things used to be within the next year. Or maybe two years or maybe decades.
So, in order to support our plan for the return to normal, please review the attached 3,647-page document on new policies that will ensure our return to normal is easy. Our new normal will be just like our old normal, but there will be policies that we have to follow, which will feel normal. The policies for our new normal will be followed so that we can feel like we felt in the old normal. But it will be the new normal. And soon, we think, this will feel perfectly normal.
Still, as you are all aware, it is possible that things will not go back to normal. That is OK. But for now, we would like all things to look like we are going back to what things were like. Like in 2019. Do you remember that? I remember.
In closing, I would like to reflect upon and celebrate this important moment in time. We have learned so much from this year and will surely go back to normal with new things we have learned. For example, staring at a wall is actually not a waste of time, but a healthy break from the computer screens we have lived behind for the past several days, months, years, etc. When we are back to normal, we will not allow people to stare at the wall as this will not be normal.
In anticipation of our new normal, please, stay safe.
Some areas along the Southwest Freeway and Loop 610 saw very heavy rainfall on Monday, with storms briefly producing about 1.5 inches in 15 minutes. While overall totals for much of this area were only 2 to 4 inches, the intensity of this rainfall nonetheless produced significant street flooding. This is a testament to the power of rainfall rates, which are just as important as rainfall totals. A rate of 2 inches per hour, or more, will quickly back up streets. A healthy chance of rain will remain until the weekend, when high pressure should yield more sunny skies across the region.
Monday’s rainfall totals. (NOAA)
Tuesday
Skies should be partly to mostly sunny, with highs pushing into the mid-90s. High resolution models indicate that storms should again form in the metro area this afternoon and evening, before waning around sunset. I suspect about 40 percent of our region will see showers, with storms likely not as intense as on Monday. Winds will be light, out of the southeast at 5 to 10 mph.
Wednesday
Slightly higher moisture levels and more of an impetus for rising air should lead to better rain chances on Wednesday, with perhaps 60 percent or more of the area seeing showers or thunderstorms during the afternoon and evening hours. Highs will probably slot into the low 90s, with partly sunny skies.
Thursday and Friday
These should be mostly sunny days with highs in the mid-90s. Afternoon shower chances will remain, with perhaps one-third to one-half of the area receiving some rainfall each day.
NOAA rainfall forecast for now through Friday. (Weather Bell)
Saturday, Sunday, and beyond
As high pressure establishes itself more firmly, rain chances will fall back to about 20 percent for this weekend. As rain chances fall, temperatures will go up, and I expect a hot weekend with highs pushing into the upper 90s for inland locations. This hot and sunny trend likely continues into next week with August-like weather for our region. The good news? August is now more than half over, my friends.
Tropics
There are three named storms active in the tropics this morning. Tropical Depression Fred has moved inland into the Southeast United States. Tropical Storm Henri is swirling around Bermuda, and will stay away from the United States. And then there’s Tropical Storm Grace, which is nearing Jamaica. Confidence is now high that this system will continue traveling due west, across the Yucatan Peninsula, into the Southern Gulf of Mexico, and ultimately into Mexico. It is not a threat to Texas.
I have a very small company with only two employees plus my business partner and my wife, who does the accounting. The most senior of my two employees is Jean, whose husband is a very highly paid professional and her family is wealthy. Before working for me, she dabbled but had never had a real job.
Jean is quite brilliant, but has made it clear several times in the four years she’s been with us that she doesn’t work for the money, but works because she loves the job.
I feel that we have no leverage over her at all. Recently she decided that she wanted to be home with her teenage children for a whole month before one of them goes out to boarding school, and she announced that she was taking a month of unpaid leave. I realized that had I refused, she would have simply quit, and that would be disastrous for the business because of the institutional knowledge she holds and all our clients love her and always sing her praises. We would also probably have two hire two people to replace her, because she’s very versatile (graphic design, copywriting, strategy, account manager, etc). This situation makes me uncomfortable and I don’t know how to go about it. What do you think I should do?
You should manage all of your employees as if they don’t “need” their jobs and have other options — whether those options are family money or the ability to go out and get another job with their skills.
There are two reasons for that:
1. Assuming you’re hiring good people, it’s very likely they do have other options. It might be a pain for someone to leave and find another job, but generally it’s something people are able to do.
2. Using someone’s paycheck as your primary leverage might be effective in the very short-term, but it’s rarely a way to build or retain an engaged, invested staff in the long-term.
The way you motivate someone who doesn’t need the money is the same way you should motivate people who do need the money: by giving them meaningful roles with real responsibility where they can see how their efforts contribute to a larger whole, giving them an appropriate amount of ownership over their work and input into decisions that involve that work, providing useful feedback, recognizing their contributions, helping them feel they’re making progress toward things that matter to them, and — importantly — not doing things that de-motivate people (like yelling or constantly shifting goals or generally being a jerk).
It sounds like your concern is that Jean might feel she can do whatever she wants, including things like just announcing she’s taking a month off rather than asking (and not giving you any real choice if you want to retain her). And maybe you’re worried about how else that could play out — for example, what if she decides she’ll only stay if you fire Client X (or Employee X) or if you use her sister’s catering business for the office party or if she can work just three hours a day and wear a sparkly dragon outfit to work.
But the thing is, everyone who works for you has deal-breakers, things that they’d leave over if they don’t get what they want. Jean probably just has more of them than other people, because she doesn’t need the paycheck. The choice for you, though, is the same as it would be with any other employee: you’ve got to decide if what she wants is something you’re willing to accommodate in exchange for being able to keep her working for you.
The best thing you can do, for both you and Jean, is to be very clear-eyed about what you are and aren’t willing to work around. That doesn’t need to start as an absolute statement of “You cannot do X”; it usually should start as a conversation — something like, “I know that taking a month off is important to you. I’m concerned about the timing because we won’t have a way to cover Y while you’re out, and I’m concerned that we’ll be setting a precedent where if we approve it for you, we’ll have to approve it for others. But at the same time, you do great work and we want the job to be one that fits in with your other priorities in life. Is there a different way we could handle this so we’re both getting what we need?” Who knows — maybe Jean will say she could still handle Urgent Thing Y from home that month, or come up with another solution that makes it more workable for you. Or maybe she’ll say no, this isn’t something she’ll compromise on. If that’s the case, then you’d need to decide if it’s better for your business to have her away for a month or to lose her entirely.
And that’s always going to be a complicated question because you employ other people. They’ll be watching what Jean gets to do and potentially feeling resentful if she has a different set of rules than everyone else. So you need to factor the impact on other people’s morale into the overall calculation you make about what’s right for your business.
But the point is to have an honest conversation with Jean when this stuff comes up — here’s what she wants, here’s what you need, and is there a path forward that works for everyone? If there’s not, that’s okay.
That part — the “if there’s no path forward, that’s okay” part — is really, really important. Right now it sounds like you feel held hostage by Jean — that she can do whatever she wants and you have to accept it because it would be disastrous if she left. That’s a bad place to be, and you can’t stay there if you want to run things effectively. Jean will leave at some point, because all employees leave at some point. If that means you’ll have to hire two people to replace her because of the amount of work she does, start planning for that now. If your business relies on having one magical person who does the work of two people, that’s not sustainable no matter how committed they seem — because things change. People get sick, are hit by buses, move, take on new family obligations, get better offers, change their goals in life, etc.
Similarly, if Jean’s institutional knowledge isn’t documented anywhere, make it a priority to change that. If clients love her and would be upset if she left, start building your network of other people with great client service skills so that you’re not starting from scratch when she leaves (because again, she will leave at some point). Your business plan can’t be “keep person X at all costs” because that will always, always fail at some point.
And this isn’t just about Jean. The best thing you can do is to assume everyone will leave at some point and plan accordingly, and get in the habit of having honest conversations with all of them about what you can and can’t do to accommodate the things they want from their jobs and the company. The framework you want isn’t “how can we keep this person/control this person at all costs” but rather “let’s see if we can figure out a way for our interests to continue to align.”
Subject: Your Beanie Babies may be worth millions! Find out how much you could earn TODAY!
Does Platti the Platypus still have her plastic tag protector? You could be very rich! Download our Beanie Baby Resale Guide to see if Chocolate the Moose, Princess the Bear, and the Teenie Beanies from your McDonald’s Happy Meals secured you an early retirement.
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From: lawsuits8@SealinoAndBarns.com
Subject: Did you lose your eyesight in a Hollister circa 2004? You may be eligible for a settlement
Hello,
Did you visit a Hollister location between 2001 and 2005? Did you spend hours squinting in total darkness while searching for your size in endless piles of XXX-Small? Do you now wear corrective lenses? You may be entitled to compensation.
Find out how much you may be owed by logging into our Secure Lawsuit Portal. Your username is your email address, and your password is your social security number.
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From: themall@bringbackthemall.com
Subject: FLASH SALE! Butterfly clips, slap bracelets, and free ear piercings from a sixteen-year-old at Claire’s
Act fast before this sale is over! Enter your debit card and pin number here to redeem.
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From: SeparatedAtBirth89@aol.com
Subject: Do you dip your Oreos in peanut butter and have a picture of your mom ripped right down the middle? We may be long-lost twins
This might sound wild, but I think we’re twins separated at birth! If you wire me money for a plane ticket, I’ll explain everything in person. Act fast—our dad is about to get remarried to a twenty-year-old gold digger!
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From: maryevans78@AOOOL.com
Subject: Prepare to have all your old away messages published online, xOSpAcEJaMLoVeR90
Greetings,
I hacked your AIM account and am prepared to release the damaging information I have found.
Reply with your credit card info today.
If you don’t cooperate, I will publicly reveal which Creed lyrics you chose to capture the pain of not being added to your middle school crush’s Top 8 on MySpace.
Best Regards.
- - -
From: Carl.Blockbuster001@yahoo.com
Subject: It’s me, the founder of Blockbuster & I’m trapped in the Bahamas with no money—help!!!
This is Urgent!
Can you wire me the late fees you owe from when you rented every available Mary Kate and Ashley movie in the summer of 1999, including It Takes Two, Billboard Dad, and the one where they go undercover fifty times and finally end up in Australia?
The total comes to $3 million, adjusted for inflation. But I will forget the whole thing if you just send me $500 today.
Please help! Bank transfer info attached
Sincerely, Carl Blockbuster
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From: thedonnerparty22@msn.com
Subject: INCREASE LENGTH… of time you can last on the Oregon Trail before dying of dysentery
Our gruel-based supplements give you the strength to make it over Donner Pass and please your pioneer girl. $10/pack, $100 if you buy a month’s supply now. Reply with your Venmo password.
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From: TheRealWillSmith@YesThe1FromMenInBlack.com
Subject: I finally got your fan letters, can you call me?
I’d love to see the dance you and your BFF created for the Fresh Prince theme song. Also, we’re rebooting the show and there’s an overeager neighbor role. Any chance you act now? Here’s a Google Vo1ce link we can use.
Smell you later.
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From: jack@tiiiiiitaniic.com
Subject: I would have stayed on the door for you, {NAME}!
Let’s cut to the chase: We hacked into your TV’s video camera and have footage of you watching Titanic for the first time as an eleven-year-old at your birthday sleepover party.
Pay me $250 in cryptocurrency. Let’s consider this a donation.
Send me the bitcoin within 24 hours, or I’ll send the video of you kissing your pillow like it’s Jack after he drew you like a French girl to your boss, family, everyone in your contacts.
Deal?
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From: HelloLunchables@netscape.net
Subject: Spice up your cubicle salads with HelloLunchables, our new food delivery kit
Tired of spending your days in a beige cubicle, eating sad desk salads, and wishing you worked as a slime-machine operator at Nickelodeon?
GOOD NEWS! You’ve been selected to try HelloLunchables, the subscription kit that makes it easy to prepare a meal in three seconds that just misses the public school cafeteria nutritional standards.
We’ll mail you crackers, thick slices of American cheese, and weirdly symmetrical ham so you can make a satisfying meal.
Hurry now and we’ll include a Ring Pop, s’mores dippers kit, AND a Fruit Roll-Up that won’t go bad until 2055. Submit your iPhone password and a 3-D scan of your face here.
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From: The90s@bestdecadeeva.com
Subject: LIMITED OFFER… this time machine totally works but it can only take you back thirty years
Escape the hell hole of late-stage capitalism, impending climate doom, and the return of low-rise jeans that is the 2020s and return to the 1990s. Tetris, Lisa Frank Trapper Keepers, and the blissful limitations of dial-up internet await.
Just reply with your birthday, your mother’s maiden name, and the model of your first car! LYLAS <3
Submitter: Footy Fan – no not that type of podiatric lover – is a magazine from down under for Australian Football. It was dropped off as a donation to this American local public library. This will be kicked over to the for sale cart where I am sure it will walk out the door.
Holly: These are cool, although I doubt most American public libraries have a collection need for them. Yeah – someone will snag them in a sale, though.
Footy fan
