Well gang, it finally happened: someone unsubscribed. 😩 We had a good run!

I don’t have an “exit survey” set up so I have no idea what it was that warranted this egregious attack upon my person. Perhaps too many dog pics, or, not enough? Perhaps too much insight into the life and work of a sex worker, without the sexy stuff? Intimidated by my freakishly adept use of semicolons? No clue and, tbh, not sure I care. As I’ve said before, I have become rather anti-data analysis; I’d be happier if Beehiiv never sent me amother email summarizing how well each newsletter “performs” since, IMO, this isn’t a performance. These newsletters are part insight, part kvetching, part shooting-the-shit-with-your-buddies. So to all 58 57 63(?!) of you, hello, and thank you for being here.

Okay but really, I think unsubscribing from newsletters is a Good and Healthy Thing to do, and a kindness to oneself. Email inbox unread count getting overwhelming? Unsubscribe. Annoying emotional guilt-tripping? Unsubscribe. Sending too many fucking emails? Unsubscribe!! I’ve become ruthless. My time is precious and I don’t enjoy it being wasted in an inbox. Newsletter culling and general inbox maintenance is one of my favorite things to do on my low-energy days.

And if you’ve spent much time learning about the business of newsletters, the list segmentation, the funnels, the A/B testing and CTAs and resends… you start to see the patterns of how manipulative some newsletters and email marketing campaigns can be. Open an email and get three more like it; click a link and get a follow up 24 hours later with 10 more similar links, just for you. Sure, I expect that shit from, say, Amazon; I’m not down with some random business influencer trying to 10x her metrics via min-maxing the data analytics. Just… chill. Slow down. Connect.

I don’t want you to feel weighed down by the pressure of this parasocial relationship we’re building through a series of (mostly) one-sided emails. If you’ve been on the fence about staying subscribed but didn’t want to hurt me, now is the perfect moment to unsubscribe. Via the tiny link at the bottom of this email. Go ahead; you have my permission.

You’ll have to at least skim the rest of this very excellent, heartfelt, intentional email to find your way there though. 😉 Entering the third(!) month of merrick:confidential in 3… 2…

✅ Done and Done - Started working on SextPanther again, did tentative planning on my social media and fansite publication calendar for August, got my AllMyLinks page set up, watched a bunch of great business presentations/YouTubes/podcasts throughout the week, got a longstanding tech issue fixed, had some good walkies/runs with Irma.

❌ By the Wayside - The blinds that came in to replace my broken ones ended up being both the wrong size and style, so now we wait (again. It’s actually becoming a legal problem…). Both my social plans for the week got cancelled due to Reasons. For the first time in years, I’ve fallen off my bujo habit so, no end-of-month recap; I have all the notes from each day, just haven’t been writing them IN the journal, oops. I still haven’t bleached my roots but lol nbd bc roots are trending again since we’re all too poor to go to the salon haha fun (I DIY but you get me).

📋 To Do This Week - Paste that AllMyLinks page in where it’s needed, set up some new cat furniture, catch up on filling out my bujo and setting up my August spread, touch up my hair colour, go see Nine Inch Nails(!), maintain momentum.

So, the aforementioned tech issue I finally got resolved was correcting/updating the payment gateways on the live SWRolodex marketplace, as well as the Hustle to Hire test site. Specifically, Stripe and PayPal. More specifically, this was an issue with both the APIs and webhooks. If you don’t know what those are or what they do, you’re in good company cuz tbh neither do I!! 😅 Stripe got borked over a year ago and every attempt I made to get it righted was ineffective so I thought, well okay just having PayPal is fine for now. But then the PayPal gateway went funny and/or needed to be updated and again everything I did to try to fix it was ineffective. It became, in my mind, a full-day project, or something that I needed to hire support for.

It’s been such a curious point of frustration and also embarrassment that I, a reasonably intelligent, technologically-informed person just… couldn’t get these payment gateways to fucking work. I started building websites from scratch just before Y2K, and even did so professionally into the 2010s up until everything got super complicated and fancy; still, I knew my way around a backend (giggity). Well-meaning friends reassured me, “you’re smart, you’ll get it figured out!” Am I tho? Am I. 😑

Honestly I have no idea why this time, this week, I was able to sit down and just… do it?Question mark?? Payment gateways on both the live and the test site were installed, updated, tested and confirmed, all in under an hour. Why? How?! During Mercury retrograde??!

While I have some theories, your guess is as good as mine. Having two large monitors does give me room to spread out and really visualize a problem as I work through it. But also I do think that both these payment platforms have been making improvements to the user experience (UX) to the degree that the technical stuff is becoming more accessible for your average Internet user (me!) to navigate and implement. Whatever it was that got me there, it’s a huge relief that it’s done.

This one small task has been such a hurdle, and now the challenge becomes: following through on alllll the other stuff I was blocked from doing until this was fixed. Fortunately, the completion of this was such a lovely little dopamine boost that now I’m like, “ah, finally I can do these other things!” I have a shortlist of tasks, mainly security-focused, and then I’ll be sending out that long-awaited, oft-delayed newsletter update. With an actual changelog.

My thoughts around this business and its structure/model has changed a lot in the time between then (the start of the year when I announced I was rebranding the business) and now. I’ve spent the bulk of these months working with a business coach (affiliate link) who has helped create a container for me to be critical of both the work and my approach to it, while also being less critical of myself. That part is very important! It’s everything, really. And I do have a much better, more thorough understanding of not just what I want to do with the Hustle to Hire website and business, but how to approach the work, in ways that I’ll be able to follow through on.

Perhaps I haven’t been working in isolation as much as I’ve been incubating and working outside of public view, which is both perfectly reasonable and also not always good (because no communication = people think zero work is getting done and trust is lost). While I’ve definitely not hit my initial goal of having the new site ready to (re)launch by summer, I do feel closer every day to having something to present. And overall, I feel more connected to what I’m building.

I still don’t entirely understand APIs or webhooks, but maybe I don’t need to understand them… as long as I can effectively implement them? BUT if you do have any choice educational resources, please hook ya girl up because I would really like to understand them! Frustrating little assholes that they are.

🎞️ Movies - Continuing from last week, I watched Final Destination 4 (2009) and 5 (2011). As it turns out, 4 was actually the only one of the franchise I hadn’t seen—and I can understand why it’s a lot of people’s least favourite. (Legit thought I’d only seen a couple, wtf.) I like the series most when Death is a sort of antagonist they’re trying to understand, and not just ruthless inevitability. Bloodlines should be streaming soon so I’ll let you know. Also worth noting that when I first watched 3 way back when, it was on the “Choose Their Fate” DVD, which was a peak DVD Experience indicative of that era and I do recommend it if you’re a fan of the franchise.

🎵 Musics - I had initially passed over Everything At The End of Bikini Bottom when it hit my Bandcamp music feed a few weeks ago. Sure, I watched Spongebob in my youth, though not quite enough to really care about it/him now as an adult. But, looking (listening) closer I realized this isn’t a mere sample/remix album… it’s an homage to the nostalgia of millennial childhood as much as it’s a parody of Everwhere at the end of time, which is one of the most emotionally-charged albums I’ve ever listened to to the degree that I can’t listen to it or I will cry.

👾 Games - Speaking of nostalgia! I poked around in the demo for No Players Online and… wtf did I just play? It feels like if Myst was about 90s computer games. If you’re the sort who needs a specific goal/directive in your games, this maybe isn’t for you. But if you enjoy exploring for the sake of discovering, experiencing, give it a go.

🎙️ Podcasts - Over the past year(+/-) Creator Science has been one of my favourite podcasts for when I need some passive inspiration to do Business Things. I’ll pull up an episode on whichever platform is convenient for me while I’m doing chores/running errands, maybe make some notes here and there when something stands out. Episode #267 was a listener Q&A and had so many tasty bits I actually played it twice so that I could make more thorough notes; looking forward to Part 2!

💸 Crowdfunds - In April my friends’ car was totaled by an impaired driver. With community support they were able to secure a new vehicle that only needed to last 6 months… it lasted 3. Now they’re crowdfunding a rental car to see them through this last push to GTFO to a safer home, which I think is a great solution. If you’ve ever tried to make a big change to your life and been beset upon by setback after setback, you know how defeating that can feel. Selfishly, I want to see them happily settled into their next country of residence so I have some friends in one of my overseas bucket list destinations.

🔞 If you’ve not yet had an opportunity to do so, it’s never a bad time to YellAt.Money and let all these restrictive, puritanical payment processors and credit card corporations know how you feel about them controlling your access to constitutionally-protected materials (video games, pornography, queer art, take your pick).

🗞️ Whomst among us has not regularly, probably within the past few months, mourned the loss of the once magnificent Google Reader? Most likely you’re in the same boat as me: missing it but not doing a lick about it. Well writer/researcher Molly White put together the excellent Curate Your Own Newspaper with RSS, and it sounds like maybe there’s never been a better time to return to RSS land. This moves it up on my backburner list; might be a nice way to keep up on all those newsletters I actually do want to be subscribed to.

🔍 A+ search engine DuckDuckGo now lets you hide genAI images from search results. No explanation needed about why that’s good and useful! Very glad I set this up as the default search engine on my mom’s iPad (and on my own devices).

👎 Are you critiquing that media or do you just not like it? Are you being insightful, or just complaining? This goes for “professional ‘critics’” as much as the homies… I’ve walked out of too many movie theaters with friends who immediately started tearing into a flick I really enjoyed, and it just brings the mood DOWN. It’s okay to not like something, but read the room before sharing. And if you’re getting paid to do this, maybe try to know the difference between an op ed and an analysis?

If you’re here looking for the Unsubscribe link, you’re so close! It’s still a bit further down. Just keep scrolling; you’ll find it!

And if you’ve arrived here as a natural result of having read through all of the above—hell, if you’ve read through even half of it—that’s pretty cool, thank you. Inasmuch as I want to eventually do some big things with this newsletter, I’m enjoying what it is, and my one day a week spent writing it.

Let’s hang out again next week. Sound good? 💜

xox,