u/AbusementPark10

I don’t think it’s talked about enough but all the “gurus” out there (both marketing and sales gurus) teach these awful tactics that everyone then pivots towards and it becomes unoriginal and stale. A lot of people watch one video and think they suddenly can build an entire email campaign that gets a 5% reply rate a 15+ appointments a month. Then they get frustrated when the reply rate is 0.9% and stuff is landing in spam.

All my clients have a 5%+ reply rate and most of it was from doing what I learned as a sales rep over 6 years and not what the talking heads tell you. I learned very quickly that personalization/signals are fantastic but only if it’s RELEVANT. People will put {{JobTitle}} and think that’ll do it.

Overall point here, the people who are doing this the best aren’t sharing their secrets on the internet that would create competition for their business. They purposely put out bad tactics so you fail and then have to pay them to help. Its basic business.

The screen in the control room flickered like it was breathing.

That was the first thing I noticed when they brought me in. Not the guards outside the door. Not the badges I did not recognize. Not the fact that half the people in the room looked like they had not slept in weeks.

The screen.

It brightened, dimmed, brightened, dimmed.

A steady rhythm.

Like an inhale.

Like something alive.

The room itself smelled stale, like coffee, sweat, old carpet, and panic. There were empty paper cups on every desk. Someone had spilled an energy drink near one of the workstations and no one had bothered to clean it up. That scared me more than the armed men in the hallway.

NASA people clean things up.

That is what they do. They organize. They label. They contain.

But nobody in that room looked like they had anything contained.

For all we knew, the fate of humanity had been reduced to four words pulled from a dead probe.

HEAT
SWELLING
CUTTING
CHILDREN

I need to back up.

Pulsars are dead stars that emit beams of radiation at extremely regular intervals. Scientists use them like cosmic clocks because they are so reliable. You can set your instruments by them. You can measure the universe with them.

At least, that was the idea.

Over the past month, several pulsars had started to stutter.

Not randomly. Not independently. Not in a way that fit any model NASA had, classified or otherwise.

They stuttered together.

The universe’s most reliable clocks all skipped at the same time.

At first, that was the official language. A timing irregularity. A measurement conflict. A cross-instrument anomaly.

Then the observatories started reporting the tremor.

A faint, low-frequency pressure wave showed up in the data. It was weak enough that anyone could have dismissed it as background noise, except every facility picked it up within the same window. Gravitational-wave detectors, deep-space arrays, radio observatories, even atomic clocks registered something.

The strange part was not that they detected a tremor.

The strange part was where it came from.

Nowhere.

There was no source point. No collision. No black holes spiraling into each other. No supernova. No region of space they could point to and say, “There. That is where it started.”

It came from every direction at once.

That was what they told me after they picked me up from my house and drove me to Washington, D.C.

I say “picked me up” because that is the polite version. The real version is that two men in suits arrived at my door at 4:11 in the morning and told me I needed to come with them. They did not threaten me. They did not have to. One of them showed me a badge. The other said my full name, my astronaut candidate number, and the exact time of my last neurological exam.

Then he said, “Commander, we believe you may be connected to an ongoing cosmological event.”

That is not the kind of sentence you ignore.

NASA Headquarters was quieter than I expected. I had been there before, but never like this. No tours. No press. No interns moving in packs. Just locked doors, low voices, and people who stopped talking when I walked by.

They brought me into a conference room three floors below the main level.

There were twelve people waiting.

I recognized two of them from briefings. One was Dr. Elaine Voss, a physicist whose papers I had pretended to understand during training. The other was Dr. Jonah Patel from Flight Medicine. The rest were unfamiliar. Astrophysicists, engineers, a woman from JPL, a man from the Department of Defense who never introduced himself, and one older woman at the head of the table whose silence made everyone else look nervous.

Dr. Voss was the one who explained the pulse.

She started with the pulsars. Then the observatories. Then the atomic clocks. Then the low-frequency tremor that came from no direction and every direction at the same time.

She kept calling them anomalies.

Pulse anomalies. Timing anomalies. Gravitational anomalies. Resonance anomalies.

Then someone near the back of the room said what every person in there had clearly been trying not to say.

“It’s a heartbeat.”

Nobody corrected him.

That was when the room changed.

You could feel it. Like the air pressure dropped. Like something had been named and naming it made it real.

A heartbeat.

The universe having a heartbeat could mean a lot of things. Too many things. Ridiculous things. Religious things. Career-ending things. Species-ending things.

But that was not the reason they brought me in.

They brought me in because when the universe pulsed, I felt it.

That sounds insane. I know it does. If I were reading this from someone else, I would think the same thing.

But my medical records lined up with the pulse events.

Not vaguely. Not “close enough if you squint.”

Exactly.

Every migraine. Every episode of ringing in my ears. Every burning sensation that crawled down my right arm like someone had pushed a hot wire through the vein. Every night I woke up with my heart racing for no reason.

The dates matched.

The time frames matched.

During one of the stronger pulses, I collapsed in my kitchen and told the urgent care doctor it felt like something enormous had moved inside my chest.

He told me it was probably stress.

NASA disagreed.

Dr. Patel showed me my own scans on the wall. Brain activity. Heart rhythm. Nerve response. Sleep data. Then Dr. Voss overlaid a second line in red.

The cosmic pulse.

The two patterns matched closely enough that, for a few seconds, I forgot how to speak.

“We do not know why your body is reacting to it,” Dr. Patel said.

“But you believe it is reacting,” I said.

No one answered quickly enough.

That was answer enough.

According to Dr. Voss, they had also detected something near the outer solar system. Officially, they called it HBA-1.

The Heliospheric Boundary Anomaly.

It was located beyond Neptune, in a region of space where the solar wind begins to thin and the sun’s influence starts to lose its grip. At first, they thought it might be dark matter interacting with the heliosphere. Then they considered some kind of deep-space radiation fold. Then a gravitational lensing effect. Then something worse.

No one in the room wanted to say wormhole.

Dr. Voss called it a resonance point.

She said the pulse was stronger there.

That was why they sent the probe.

Its official name was Lumen-1, but nobody called it that anymore. Not after it came back.

Probe One entered HBA-1 and disappeared from every tracking system NASA had.

For three minutes and seventeen seconds, there was nothing. No telemetry. No signal. No beacon. Nothing.

Then it returned.

Or something returned it.

From NASA’s perspective, Probe One had been gone for a little over three minutes.

Its internal clock said it had been gone for sixteen months.

The room was silent when Dr. Voss told me that. I remember hearing the fluorescent lights hum overhead. I remember someone tapping a pen against a folder, then stopping as soon as they realized they were doing it.

Most of the probe’s data was corrupted. That was expected. What was not expected was the pattern inside the corruption.

It appeared across every system.

Thermal sensors. Radiation logs. Pressure readings. Camera static. Gravitational measurements. Even hardware diagnostics that should not have been capable of recording anything meaningful.

The same four concept clusters repeated over and over.

Not English words. Not exactly.

NASA translated them as best they could.

HEAT
SWELLING
CUTTING
CHILDREN

They did not know what it meant.

They did not know who sent it.

But that was not the worst part.

The worst part was the probe itself.

Probe One had not simply recorded the message. It had been altered to carry it.

Dr. Voss showed me the images.

The antenna had folded inward, not broken, folded. The exterior shell was covered in hair-thin grooves that looked less like scratches and more like veins. The metal had been changed at the molecular level. Parts of it were warm, which made no sense because it had been drifting beyond Neptune with no functioning power core.

The memory system contained more information than its physical storage should have allowed.

And even though the probe was dead by every engineering standard, it was still transmitting.

Dr. Voss looked at me and said, “The message was not sent to the probe.”

She clicked to the next image.

A close-up of the grooves appeared on the wall.

They curved around the probe’s surface in branching patterns, delicate and awful, like something had grown them there.

“It was written through it.”

That was the first moment I understood why no one in that room looked tired.

They looked haunted.

Everyone’s first theory was alien contact. It had to be. What else could it be? Something on the other side of HBA-1 had received our probe, changed it, and sent it back with a message.

That alone would have been the greatest discovery in human history.

But we were wrong.

Not completely wrong, maybe. Just too small in our thinking.

It was contact.

But not with aliens.

Not the way we understand them.

This was something much larger.

I am going to tell you what happened from the beginning, or at least as close to the beginning as I can get. I will try to keep the science simple. Not because I think you are stupid, but because I barely understand half of it myself, and I was there.

All I know is this:

The universe has a heartbeat.

Something beyond Neptune answered us.

And whatever it is, it called us children.

Just started my 5th week of 25mg and I literally just can’t get hungry anymore since starting this dose.

Even when I do, i eat half a grilled chicken wrap (a lot of protein) and put it in the fridge because I feel so full I can’t take another bite. It’s so nice to be hungry and not overeat when it does happen.

When I don’t eat protein i notice i can eat more that day (like 1,700 calories) but on days i get a lot of protein i can’t eat more than 1,200-1,500 calories a day. For a 5’8 male in his 20s that is pretty low, especially burning 300 calories at the gym daily.

I’m not complaining. I lost 10 pounds on this dose alone already in 5 weeks, but it’s crazy to me that this is how the medicine works when you hit full dose. I was still at least a little hungry on the first 3 doses, but 25mg is a consistent fullness and zero food noise.

I would say this is how normal people eat but my skinny friends can still house a 12 inch cheesesteak or 20 wings and fries, I physically cannot do that anymore. I will feel sick and probably vomit.

This medication is truly a god send. I would take this any day over being uncomfortably overweight. Overall down almost 30 pounds in 3 months, daily exercise def played a part in this.

I might get slandered for this and that’s totally ok because the best part about creepcast is there’s a story for everyone and everyone has different favorites. I just binged because im a new listener and finally got to Whitefall…

Whitefall was probably, in my opinion, the worst story they’ve read yet. It took entirely too long to get to the bus station scene, and when it did they were instantly tribal about being locked in there. I just couldn’t get into it, I had to stop with 30 minutes left and I’ve never done that with one of their stories, not even happy appy.

I was so lost on the entire concept or point of the story. The phone calls/exchanges were written extremely cringey, and I think the boys went easy on it because of the author. The overly explained “this person leads denver, this person leads” etc was too much.

I hope I’m not the only one who thought this. If I am oh well, I’ll take it and say it just wasn’t for me, but I was shocked that anyone remotely enjoyed it.

EDIT: I phrased this horribly. Not the worst story they read, but one of my least favorite episodes. Some of the worse stories the boys saved with funny bits/crashouts, this one was almost taken too seriously for how bad/cringe it was. If any other author wrote it I think they woulda been more critical.

Is this just a me thing? It has steadily started to do odd things and more things keep happening. Here is the list for me:

1. Notifications delayed by days at a time. Things that were messaged to me 3 days ago i got today

2. Will randomly freeze, both on client side and freelancer side. When i scroll through to look at applicants it freezes every time.

3. Won’t let me send meeting times anymore. I hit the calendar button to send availability and it gives a green circle for a second and then doesn’t pop up. I tried 10 times in a row. This has been over a month now

4. Notifications not going away for messages I read. They just stay for hours at a time.

There’s probably more I’m forgetting but it’s becoming borderline unusable. Is this happening to anyone else?

Hey everyone,

I run a B2B cold email lead gen agency where I cover setup, deliverability, campaign copy, lead list pulling, and campaign monitoring to SaaS clients who have just secured funding.

I prefer a quality over quantity approach. Here’s my lessons so far / what I learned:

1. Set expectations. This one is big for Upwork clients because most of them have small budgets and no idea how this stuff actually works. Anyone who wants a quick 30 day fix for lead gen is an auto DQ. It takes the emails alone 2 weeks to warm up, and then another 2 weeks to ramp the campaign to full sending power. I frame it as a 90 day email outbound email setup/launch project and those 3 months are on retainer, with the option to continue after 3 months if they want me to monitor the inbox

2. Product/Market Fit. A lot of folks i work with are brand new to market. I try to weed out the ones with seemingly shitty products or services but sometimes I think one way and the market thinks another. I’ve had clients blame me for this, but the reality is nobody wants their product/service, and you have to be okay walking away from clients like these.

3. 12 quality clients > 24 clients with 12 annoying ones. Any client who wants to micromanage the process I have no problem dropping, because why pay me, an expert, if you’re going to judge the copy and subject lines? I’m not trying to sound arrogant here, but they hired me for a reason. Let me do my thing.

4. Quality > Quantity. No need to spam, find the ICP you want, speak to their pain point, mention a relevant trigger, and that will work every time over mass emails with no personalization.

5. I Gotta Get Off Upwork. Nobody will pay more than 2k a month retainer there and most want to pay 1-1.5k. My services are closer to 3-4k a month range with the revenue i bring clients, so I have to start using my own expertise (outbound email) to capture client interest.

just wanted to share and see if anyone else made the jump off Upwork or another platform in the space, or if all these things makes sense. Best of luck all :)

Hey everyone,

After having decent progress on 1.5-9MG (was still hungry but not as hungry as before), I can say that 25MG is the real deal. Im down 10 pounds this month and only once this entire month have i eaten over 1,500 calories.

Week 1 was hell. I had every symptom in the book. Nauseous, acid reflux, vomiting, sensitive skin, etc. Over the weeks these all started to dissipate, and now most of them are gone. I still get the occasional nausea but it doesn’t cause me to vomit anymore.

I will preface this by saying I go to the gym almost daily, which has been incredibly helpful to lose weight faster. But overall 25MG is the most consistent ive been so far, I get full very easily (especially when i eat protein) and I feel the pounds falling off.