on a related note i read this article the other day and it scared the living shit out of me
From the age of 4, Annie LeBlanc has had every major milestone in her life documented on YouTube. Her parents are what are known as “family vloggers,” and since 2008 they have dutifully recorded every moment of her childhood along with their family’s life on their YouTube channel, Bratayley.
Fans have seen Annie throw temper tantrums, lose her first tooth, begin school, learn to ride a bike, and enter puberty. Naturally, when she began spending time with a boy for the first time at age 12, her online fanbase of nearly 20 million followers across social platforms freaked out.
the truman show except you’re a twelve year old girl and the villainous showrunners forcing you into a manipulated romance for publicity are your mom and dad
Though Annie has lived her entire life online, even her father, Billy LeBlanc, was amazed at the level of dedication teens showed to perpetuating the idea of a “Hannie” relationship.
“Fans immediately began sending Instagram edits,” he said. “These kids are very good at Photoshop. While Annie and Hayden’s relationship has always been innocent, the fans would take the two in certain poses and photoshop them together so it looked like an authentic photo.”
Fans constructed an entire false narrative of Hayden and Annie’s life as a couple, photoshopping them out on dates together, at the movies, attending fictional parties.
“They’ve photoshopped them together at prom,” Billy said, despite the fact that neither Annie or Hayden has ever attended prom.
“You’d see these images all over Instagram, thousands of them, and you’re like, I know that didn’t happen!” he said. “In the beginning [the shipping] was driven by a lot of photos that weren’t real, but as they began hanging out with each other in real life, kids would edit photos of them together. They’d take the two sitting next to each other, for instance, and scoot them closer together.”
like imagine knowing this is happening to your twelve-year-old child and rather than recognize it as a serious invasion of privacy and a major threat to her emotional health and well-being, you sign her up to star in a tv show created solely to stoke the mania around her friendship with another twelve-year-old
When Tom Fowkes tells his friends in Pennsylvania that he commutes to work in Oakland, they all tend to react in the same way:
“You work in California? Are you nuts?!”
And he couldn’t disagree more. The Kaiser pediatric nurse began his bi-weekly trip to work 9 years ago, and, he is happy to report, it “has changed my life.”
When Fowkes was working as a nurse in Pennsylvania, he had to work three jobs, barely made ends meet and never saw his son because he was working all the time. Now that he works at Kaiser, he says, “I am making California money and I live very nice.”
Those in the Bay Area who find it a challenge often forget wages in this region are much higher than many parts of the country. At SFGATE, we’ve been telling stories of locals who have moved to distant states where they can afford to buy a home, or even rent a place that doesn’t cost over half their salary.
But Fowkes feels like he can have it all, the California money and Pennsylvania’s cheaper cost of living. The difference in wages is so big that even with the cost of flying across country four times a month, it’s a no-brainer.
“These are the highest paid nursing jobs on the planet,” he says, referring to his job at Kaiser. “I make more than some doctors do back home.”
He got his first taste of California several years ago when he came out on a travel assignment with an agency. After his agency job ended, a friend introduced him to Kaiser, where he had an interview and got hired the same day.
In his early days at Kaiser, he would work six -12-hour shifts in a row and then fly back to Pennsylvania for two weeks. But “that would be kind of brutal. By the sixth day, I was kind of burnt out.”
At the time, he was sharing a trailer in Concord with a nurse from Mississippi. The trailer was small but all he needed was a place to sleep and shower since he was spending all his time working.
Nowadays, his schedule has softened a bit. He works 12-hour shifts on Monday and Tuesday every week and then 12-hour shifts every other weekend. It works out to 36 hours a week and after he has worked his 72 hours, he heads back to his home near Pittsburgh.
Fowkes says other nurses are living the long-distance commuter’s life. On the floor he works on, Fowkes estimates that 10 percent of the workers travel from other places. Most are like him, Kaiser employees who work on a per diem basis, which gives them greater schedule flexibility but no benefits.
Fowkes took the Kaiser job for the money. But he wasn’t sure he could take all the flying. “Now it has become so routine I don’t even think about it,” he says.
“I can’t believe I’ve been doing it for 9 years. It seems like 4 or 5. It’s changed my life. I spend more time with my son. And when I’m home and I don’t work, we can do things because I have money now.”
And, he adds, he also has a new $160,000 swimming pool.
Blaesospira is a genus of land snails with an operculum, terrestrial gastropod mollusks in the family Pomatiidae. This is a land snail species endemic to Cuba.
