Rachel Presser

Elder millennials have been taught several absolutes about entrepreneurship during their formative years. One is that you start a business to become flush with cash, and your goal is to make the leap from working out of a modest office to leading a Fortune 500 corporation. Along the way, you should achieve rapid growth, seek investor funds, and then go public or be acquired by a titan of industry.
The old guard in the startup realm clings to an image of relentless growth: putting your head do...

The minute you mention being a woman in tech or games to a total stranger, their eyes typically shine with awe, tinged with a little pity.
There are some assumptions people tend to make, with varying degrees of accuracy: First, that you must work for a big studio and receive a handsome salary (not necessarily); next is that you’re blessed to “have such a cool job where you just play games all day.” (No.)
Another is that you’ve had to fight through a web of sexism in an indisputably male-domin...

Webpages are meant to be fairly evergreen content that entail fewer updates, such as an About Us page or an overview of the services that your brand offers. Landing pages however have a deeper context that requires far more communication with your writer. Here’s what you need to do about succeeding with landing pages and how you need to instruct your writer.
Provide Context of the Customer Journey
Writers need more than a simple description of what should be on the landing page, which is a hi...

Back in 2015, I started my own consulting business and soon added writing for hire services. With a goal to have a flexible income source that paid more than my last salaried job at a tax law office and let me focus on game development, I knew I couldn’t rely on grinding out business plans and articles all day.
Or at the very least, didn’t require as much ongoing hustling online and in person while also cementing me as an expert in my field.
Enter the very first tax law book by and for indie ...

Part 2 of LA Noire retrospective on postwar misogyny in America and the game being a perfect portrait of the darker aspects of a much-vaunted chapter in history. In this installment, the female characters and their actions are closely examined in this historical context and why Cole and Elsa having an affair makes sense.

Part 1 of an analytical treatise on the underdiscussed historical contexts in LA Noire. The game was praised for its historical accuracy and the misogyny of postwar society is certainly accurate in this game.

A comprehensive legal deep-dive into California's 2019 statewide rent control law, the Costa-Hawkins Act of 1995 that defanged most rent control efforts, and local rent control laws in the City of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County. Everything has been succinctly broken down with the legalese made easily understandable.

MEDIUM STAFF PICK! Everything Everywhere All at Once analyzed in a way that only an ex-tax accountant with severe ADHD could possibly pull off. Dives into perpetual overwhelm, rejection-sensitive dysphoria (RSD), taxpayer rights, and the Internal Revenue Manual!

This article is all about what it’s like living in Koreatown Los Angeles.
Koreatown, Ktown for short, has become one of the hottest neighborhoods in LA in the 2020s. Situated just outside of DTLA and another 20 minutes from Hollywood and Burbank, Ktown is conveniently located in the heart of Angel City. Living in Koreatown, Los Angeles is often touted as great “training wheels” for East Coast transplants from cities like New York, Boston, and Philadelphia who might not be used to LA’s infamou...

People often think that living in Los Angeles without a car is impossible. While this is certainly true in some parts of the greater Los Angeles area where transit is sparser, it’s not true of the entire city. You don’t even need to be downtown anymore for this to be true, either!
The 2020’s are one of the most exciting eras in LA history. Numerous transit projects that commenced earlier in the millennium are being completed one by one, and even more proposals and environmental reviews for ex...

Renowned for its sheer vastness and slalom of sprawling freeways, Los Angeles may not seem like a top contender for a nondriver paradise at first glance.
But believe it or not, the 2020s is the best time to live in LA if you can’t or don’t want to drive. With city, county, and state governments striving to reduce traffic and emissions, there are many exciting new transit projects in the works or that have recently completed. The new Metro K line running down Crenshaw Boulevard opened in late ...

I literally wrote the book on game developer taxes. First on my own through Kindle in 2015 then the book got a second edition through Taylor & Francis' CRC Press imprint in 2022! Visit the link for more details.

With tax season in full swing, millions of people are stressed out by the byzantine process of American tax filing. The last thing anyone wants is to breathe a sigh of relief after filing their tax return by April, only to get a letter from the IRS come summer.
But it actually isn't the IRS that should strike fear into your heart: it's state tax departments.
For decades, the media has portrayed the IRS as an evil, unfeeling entity that will send a hard-nosed agent to cross-examine you over th...

The United States didn't start collecting income tax on residents' incomes until 1913. It largely only affected the wealthy, but the taxes were significant enough to establish a specific court for tax matters in 1924. After World War II was declared two decades into the Golden Age of Hollywood, the pressing need for stable cash flows into federal coffers created the automated tax withholding system we still use today.
With income taxes now affecting a majority of American workers and moviegoe...