Long Reads

[rass]

[DaveInSeattle]

Inside an OnlyFans empire: Sex, influence and the new American Dream (gift link)

The attraction of financial freedom and the challenge of standing out have led many OnlyFans creators to run themselves like tech start-ups. Adams’s operation is registered in state business records as a limited liability company and offers quarterly employee performance reviews and catered lunch. It also runs with factory-like efficiency, thanks largely to a system designed in-house to track millions of data points on customers and content and ensure every video is rigorously planned and optimized.

The strategy is working: Adams and her employees, who spoke with The Washington Post on the condition that their real names and location be concealed and stage names be used to reduce the risk of harassment, have ascended to OnlyFans’s highest echelon of earners, which the platform calls its “top 0.01 percent.”

Since sending her first photo in 2021, Adams’s OnlyFans accounts have earned $16.5 million in sales, more than 1.4 million fans and more than 11 million “likes.” She now makes about $30,000 a day — more than most American small businesses — from subscriptions, video sales, messages and tips, half of which is pure profit.

They've industrialized OnlyFans...and turned it into a multi-level-marketing scheme.

[DaveInSeattle]

Long article/interview with Stephanie Courtney...aka "Flo" from the Progressive Ads

(Gift Link) Everybody Knows Flo From Progressive. Who Is Stephanie Courtney?

The year the ads premiered, the company’s chief marketing officer, Remi Kent, told me, Progressive’s stock price was under $15. It recently closed at $157.67. “While I can’t give Flo all of the credit,” Kent said, “I think she has really become synonymous with the brand.”

In fact, the human face, voice and bearing that constitute “Flo” are associated far more strongly with Progressive than with the 53-year-old woman who provides them: Stephanie Courtney. Courtney did not intend to sell insurance. She meant to star on Broadway and then, following wish revision, to support herself as a comedic actress. Instead, she has starred in the same role for 15 years and counting, becoming in the process a character recognizable to nearly every American — a feat so rare her peers in this category are mostly cartoon animals.

[rass]

Been a decent amount of Flo content on this board. Including this:

Flo did some weird shit before she got the progressive gig.

[DaveInSeattle]

Heart-breaking story about a mom in Colorado Springs who fell down the FoxNews/QAnon rabbit hole, and moved "off the grid" with her sister and her 13 year old son...

“Please I Will Give Anything for You to Come Back”

Talon Vance, 13, lived in an apartment complex in suburban Colorado Springs with his mom and Aunt. Other relatives lived nearby. Typically, he spent much of the week with his father, half brother, half sister, and grandparents, all of whom lived together not far away in a different town. All of that would change in August 2022: Talon’s mother, Rebecca Vance, had hatched a plan to disappear from Colorado Springs and go permanently off-grid.

[Nonlinear FC]

Inside an OnlyFans empire: Sex, influence and the new American Dream (gift link)

The attraction of financial freedom and the challenge of standing out have led many OnlyFans creators to run themselves like tech start-ups. Adams’s operation is registered in state business records as a limited liability company and offers quarterly employee performance reviews and catered lunch. It also runs with factory-like efficiency, thanks largely to a system designed in-house to track millions of data points on customers and content and ensure every video is rigorously planned and optimized.

The strategy is working: Adams and her employees, who spoke with The Washington Post on the condition that their real names and location be concealed and stage names be used to reduce the risk of harassment, have ascended to OnlyFans’s highest echelon of earners, which the platform calls its “top 0.01 percent.”

Since sending her first photo in 2021, Adams’s OnlyFans accounts have earned $16.5 million in sales, more than 1.4 million fans and more than 11 million “likes.” She now makes about $30,000 a day — more than most American small businesses — from subscriptions, video sales, messages and tips, half of which is pure profit.

They've industrialized OnlyFans...and turned it into a multi-level-marketing scheme.

I will never understand why people pay money for porn.

[Shirley]

Heart-breaking story about a mom in Colorado Springs who fell down the FoxNews/QAnon rabbit hole, and moved "off the grid" with her sister and her 13 year old son...

“Please I Will Give Anything for You to Come Back”

Talon Vance, 13, lived in an apartment complex in suburban Colorado Springs with his mom and Aunt. Other relatives lived nearby. Typically, he spent much of the week with his father, half brother, half sister, and grandparents, all of whom lived together not far away in a different town. All of that would change in August 2022: Talon’s mother, Rebecca Vance, had hatched a plan to disappear from Colorado Springs and go permanently off-grid.

Damn. The depth of people's stupidity never fails to amaze me.

[DaveInSeattle]

Nice story about people's last day of work before retirement (gift link): Imagine Your Last Day of Work Ever. Here’s Theirs.

Among life’s major milestones — think graduations, weddings, even annual events like birthdays and anniversaries — the retirement day is notably lacking in cultural convention, shared ritual. (Even the ceremonial gold watch today seems more the stuff of myth than reality.) It mostly tends to fall to co-workers, family, even retirees themselves to conjure, ad hoc, a celebratory send-off. Here’s a look at how a range of new retirees marked the end of their working days.

[wlu_lax6]

https://www.texasmonthly.com/style/live ... ympic-time

[DaveInSeattle]

Behind the mask: How a soccer star became a cocaine trafficker

Quincy Promes was on his phone, again.

The soccer star was constantly fielding messages: about his role on the most famous team in the Netherlands, his place on the Dutch national squad, the endorsement deals that netted him a small fortune.

But this time, Promes was texting from a burner phone about his secret life off the field. It was early 2020. One of the country’s most famous athletes was finalizing the import of a shipment of cocaine arriving at a Belgian port.

“My boys are on their way to Antwerp,” wrote Promes, a forward at the time for Ajax Amsterdam. His phone records were obtained by Dutch law enforcement and were used to convict him of drug trafficking in an Amsterdam court this year.

Promes paid intermediaries — his “soldiers,” he called them — to secure 2,850 pounds of cocaine that had just arrived from Latin America in a shipping container packed with bags of salt.

The other traffickers seemed perplexed by Promes’s role.

“Is he definitely that footballer?” one asked in a separate text.

[DaveInSeattle]

Heard this story mentioned on the Guardian Football Weekly podcast:

Has poppymania gone too far?

The first match where Leicester’s strip would feature poppies was a week before Remembrance Sunday, against Blackburn Rovers. It was going to be aired live on Sky Sports, and it struck Mace that if only one team was wearing poppies, the other team would look bad. “We didn’t want a situation where we had ourselves as a club on TV wearing poppies, showing up the other team,” he told me, his slightly incredulous tone indicating how outrageous this would have been. Blackburn hastily commissioned its own poppy patches.

The match was the first time remembrance poppies had been worn by all the players in a Premier League game. “I don’t think I ever heard a single complaint, and universal praise is very rare in football,” said Mace. He was proud to see veterans parading on the pitch at half-time, proud of the positive press coverage and proud to raise more than £5,000 for the RBL. “If I look back on 13 years at Leicester, this was probably the best decision I ever made,” he said.

The best part is this picture:

"At the peak of centenary poppy fervour in November 2016, the Cookie Monster – a character from Sesame Street, “essentially a blue rug with ping pong ball eyes” according to one viewer – appeared on The One Show, a BBC chatshow, with a red poppy pinned to its blue fur. Sitting alongside him, another guest, Chris Tarrant (poppy present and correct) gamely attempted to feed the furry puppet with cookies as the hosts (also wearing poppies) gabbled away. @GiantPoppyWatch tweeted stills of the show with the caption “ME REMEMBER FALLEN”. Comedian Dara Ó Briain tweeted: “I am choosing to regard this as satire and thus genius.”

[DSafetyGuy]

The Invisible Man.

[HaulCitgo]

Would you say this is a story of poverty or psychological problems? His homelessness is almost certainly caused by his disability. Solution is health not economic right? I'm interested in the girlfriend. What and why have things gone so horribly wrong for her. On one hand I get it the small business she works for is failing but shouldn't her skills be transferable to a business that is successful?

[DSafetyGuy]

I think various cities have done enough pilot programs of giving money to people that are struggling with positive results that poverty is the root issue for homelessness on a wide level. In this case, the profile subject was spending much of his budget on gas to keep his car running, in part for heat at night so he can sleep. Providing people with a place to stay (or the money to pay for a place to stay) goes a long way toward enabling them to handle other facets of their life (such as spending money on other things, like gas to get to doctor's appointments, medication, etc.).

[Nonlinear FC]

Huh... https://longreads.com/

Sorry if I missed someone else posting this. Not as extensive as the now-shuttered longform, but it's got some great stuff.

[DaveInSeattle]

Story about a vegan comedy writer going hunting.

The Vegan Hunter

My ex-boyfriend was always trying to get me to eat his meat. Shockingly, this isn’t a euphemism. He was a hunter; I was a vegan. Hunting was important to him, and he wanted to share it with me.

When I met him, it had been a dozen years since I’d read Eating Animals, and yes, the only thing more embarrassing than being a vegan is being a vegan because Jonathan Safran Foer told you to. Like his, my reasons were related to factory farming and global warming, to suffering and compassion, to being the kind of person you want to be. They were pretty good reasons, now that I think about it, and I still believe in them.

After a year of dating, my ex and I broke up. Nine months later, I flew to Montana to learn how to hunt.

[P.D.X.]

The Militia and the Mole

Would make a great podcast series.

[Nonlinear FC]

Oh man, thanks for sharing that. Not only is that a good topic, it flashed that Noa app with a bunch of longform articles from a ton of media outlets I like to I can listen to them as podcasts.

[P.D.X.]

Yeah discovered that as well.

[DaveInSeattle]

Got this from the MIB Friday newsletter...

My Final Days on the Maine Coast

The subheading:

Diagnosed with advanced lung cancer, a writer meditates on life, death, and beauty from his small seaside cottage down east.

A bald eagle visits me every day. I have learned to recognize his voice as he approaches, a querulous complaint against the crows that usually accompany him like a desperate ring of courtiers vying for his attention. To people who will listen, I have mentioned that to be an eagle is to be harassed from sunup to sundown. If the crows leave him alone for a moment, their place is taken by herring gulls cursing his existence. No one likes an eagle except other eagles, it seems, and the eagle shrinks down when the birds dive at him, this bandit among the large pines. Half amused, half ashamed of his bulk and thieving nature, he settles on the topmost rim of branches, a Billy Budd foretopman, his eyes scanning the cold waters of the Pennamaquan River as it merges with Cobscook Bay.

I count on his visits and keep two sets of binoculars nearby, wanting to have a pair within reach wherever I happen to be on my two acres of land in Pembroke, a small community that once took its living from the sea. I am aware that the eagle has become something of a project for me. My son, when he calls from his home in New Hampshire, asks if I have seen the eagle that day, and I know that he is asking out of kindness, out of an acknowledgement of my age and the emptiness of my daily calendar, and yet I can’t help playing my part and relating to him the itinerary of the eagle’s visit. Yes, I tell him, the eagle came early this morning, stayed for nearly 15 minutes, and yes, it was on that perch on The Eagle Tree, the name I have for the bird’s favorite pine. Last year, a storm took down the tallest pine overlooking the water, and I worried that the eagle would find another place to rest while the crows and gulls hectored him. But the eagle has taken to the new tree, and so it is a safe, light topic that my son and I can explore without any of the weightier subjects that circle around us. We both know that this beautiful land overlooking this vibrant estuary is the place I am making my last stand. I live here with stage-four lung cancer, each motion, however minimal, underlined by a dry cough, my fist to my lips, my heart and head and breath paused for a moment while I wonder if and how I will continue.

[DaveInSeattle]

In the mood for a long read about ?

A multi-part series where the author of "Into Thin Air", Jon Krakauer, takes on a you-tuber who is trying to trash him and his book about the 1996 climbing disaster on Everest.

The YouTuber on a Mission to Trash My Book: Chapter One

In August 2024, I began to receive comments in my Instagram feed warning me that a YouTuber named Michael Tracy had been aggressively maligning my book, Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mount Everest Disaster. One commenter observed that Tracy’s defamatory statements were “getting out of hand. The man really has an agenda against you, and most people just don’t question it.”

Michael Lion Tracy, I learned, is a middle-aged lawyer based in Irvine, California. He’s posted more than 100 videos on his YouTube channel, which has 130,000 subscribers. He gained approximately 30,000 of these subscribers after he started posting inflammatory videos about my book.

In April 2024, Tracy posted the first of at least sixteen videos (thus far) claiming to have identified numerous errors in my book about the 1996 Everest disaster, most of which he claims are lies intended to promote a deliberately false narrative.

Almost all of Tracy’s allegations are demonstrably untrue, and the sheer volume of prevarication in his videos is astounding. Although he holds me and others he criticizes to the highest standards of accuracy — as he absolutely should — he fails to hold himself to the same exacting standards. His videos don’t adhere to any standard of truth whatsoever.

[P.D.X.]

Nice. Finally just read Into Thin Air... oddly enough have read all his other books but took awhile to get to that one. (Also realized that I share the same Corvallis > Portland > Boulder places-lived path as him.)

[DaveInSeattle]

Not really a long read, but a fun story about Grace Slick: Grace Slick on sex, drugs and Jefferson Airplane: ‘I was sober in the 80s. That was a mistake’

Rock’n’roll might not be advertised as being good for your health, but it’s worked out all right for Grace Slick. The former Jefferson Airplane singer is talking me through a life story that spans psychedelic drugs, free love, alcoholism, house fires and a high speed car crash. And yet, even at the age of 85, she sounds as perky, full of mischief and hilariously coarse as any interviewee I can remember.

“Rock’n’roll people are spoiled brats,” she says at one point with a throaty cackle. “We don’t know anything about anything except having fun, how much money we can spend and who we can screw.”

Love this story...

Did she get a kick out of being naughty?

“I don’t know if naughty is the word,” she says, before adding with another guffaw: “Illegal is probably a better term.”

Had her plan to spike Richard Nixon’s tea ever come to fruition, it certainly would have been illegal. In 1970 she received an invitation to meet the president at the White House – she knew his daughter Tricia from her time at Finch – and arrived with about 600 micrograms of LSD in her pocket. Nixon never got to experience the fourth dimension. At the door, security were alerted to the fact that the respectable-sounding Ms Barnett Wing was actually Grace Slick, a radical rock’n’roller and security risk, and she was barred from the event.

[DaveInSeattle]

About a month ago, at a sailboat race out on Puget Sound, two people went into the water (my boat was not on the race...we should have been, but had a mechanical issue at the dock that morning).

Anyways, here's the write-up about the whole experience from one of the people who went overboards. I don't know her very well, but the guy who also went into water with I know really well, and sailed a lot over the years with his father.

Breaking the #1 Rule: An Overboard Survival Story

I watched the first bit of the wave come over the bow and thought, “Gosh darn it, I’m about to get soaked.” I knew it was going to go right down the front of my jacket, and I would have to spend the rest of the day soggy… Ah well, that’s the nature of the bow. But the water that hit me was so much more than a bucket to the face. Instead, I was instantly underwater. I felt myself sliding along the deck, cursing that I hadn’t grabbed onto something sooner. I thought I’d hit a stanchion any second, or the mast, or Brent, or a shroud… It wasn’t meant to be.

I later learned that the jib had gone over with the same wash of water, and removed everything in its path, snapping half the bow pulpit and two of the stanchions on the starboard side clean off. The next thing I knew, I was in open water. My first thought was, “Shoot, there goes my stellar track record of never falling off a boat.” My arms and legs were free, by some miracle, and I realized instantly there was officially nothing I could do to help my crew. I was now a problem for them, a man overboard. I had no control of anything other than keeping myself alive, and that was the best thing I could do for them.

It’s amazing how fast your mind works in these situations. I’ve been asked how long I was underwater, and I can’t even begin to guess. It might have been 10 seconds, a minute, a year, who knows. Logically, I’d say about 30-45 seconds from sitting on the bow to popping up in the waves. But my gosh did I think about a lot in that moment. I thought about the last hugs that I’d given my friends and family. I thought about everything I should have said to my husband that morning beyond the paltry, “I love you, hope you have a nice relaxing day.” I thought about my dad, still on deck, and what he would go through when he saw me in the water (one way or another). I thought about my crew and the fact that now more than ever, my life was in their hands. Mostly I decided that I really wanted to live.

She mentions that Brent was the last to put on his PFD. One thing she didn't mention was that the race committee that morning had put up the Y flag, which means wearing a PFD is mandatory. That almost never happens around here.