Bad Decisions Inc.

They/Them - Adult Heya, call me Chaos. Sometimes I draw things, sometimes I try to write, but overall, this blog is for fanfics and other writing. If you have any questions, concerns, or need something tagged, feel free to shoot me an ask.

[chaosxwrites]

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Lake Trio Aspects AU Masterpost 

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[digitalkiddo]

If you're writing anything involving cons, scams, heists, or morally questionable characters who are very good at lying, here are some free resources I've been using for research. Saving you the "why is this in my search history" anxiety.

1. The FBI's Famous Cases & Criminals archive (fbi.gov/history/famous-cases) has detailed breakdowns of real fraud cases, Ponzi schemes, and confidence operations. The language they use is clinical and precise, which is perfect for getting the procedural details right.

2. The FTC Consumer Sentinel Network publishes annual reports on the most common fraud tactics in the US. Great for understanding how modern scams actually work and what makes people fall for them.

3. The Smithsonian's American Art Museum has a free digital collection of forgery case studies. If your character forges documents or art, this is gold.

4. Court Listener (courtlistener.com) is a free legal database where you can read actual court transcripts from fraud trials. Want to know how a real con artist talks under oath? This is where you find out.

5. The Internet Archive's collection of old newspaper crime sections. Search for "confidence man" or "swindle" in papers from the 1920s through 1960s and you'll find incredible real stories that would feel too dramatic for fiction.

Bonus: The Psychology of Fraud section on the Association for Psychological Science website has accessible articles about why people trust, how deception works cognitively, and what makes someone a convincing liar. Essential reading if you want your con artist characters to feel psychologically real.

Reblog to save for later. Your WIP will thank you.

[dungeonmalcontent]

Fantasy world where the dwarven language is largely non-verbal. It consists of making tapping noises on a series of different materials all dwarves of a community wear on their person and occasional low throat tones that are sub-audible to most other fantasy peoples. This communication system reduces the amount of times that dwarves need to open their mouths while working and limits the amount of particulate matter and natural gases they inhale (it can also be used to communicate through lengths of solid material in cases such as cave-ins). They have a totally separate dialect for feasts which is vocal and more typical, as feasts involve singing and loud banter. The feast dialect is what most people consider dwarven language, because it's all they're ever exposed to since outsiders are largely banned from mines and workshops.

[true-neutral-kobold]

Dwarven syncopation.

They also have a song that beats in time with Earth’s heartbeat every 26 seconds. Outsiders are too impatient to hear.

[heyhoneyfox]

"I'm lying to you but this sentence is technically the truth without context" is such a good trope. Like yes the way that I am spinning these words forms a lie but if you squint I'm actually not lying.

[poetry-protest-pornography]

Oh, I love this an inordinate amount.

This guy covers children's songs in the style of various artists, and he's incredible.

I'm weirdly emotional about it?

[thisdiscontentedwinter]

This is amazing!

[nitrogennightmare]

This is the exact opposite energy of the "what happens after the camera cuts and you've destroyed you labtop for 5 seconds of entertainment"

This guy not only wrote a whole song but dressed up and FILMED it! For what! For 1 and a half seconds of MY entertainment! That must have been HOURS of shooting and editing! I'm touched, this is art

[prismatic-bell]

I feel it’s important you all know this is actually a group of five dads, and they started this as a way to entertain their kids. The bands on the band wheel are their favorite bands, while the songs on the songs wheel are their kids’ favorite songs.

[creatingblackcharacters]

THE LONG-AWAITED WEBSITE!!!!

It's not perfect- Strawpage's design tools are... not great- but I did my best to bring you all a Tumblr-free transcription of all my lessons. This is probably the most labor-intensive thing I've done for this page (next to the character polls). Four months of blood, sweat, and tears... and now, she LIVES!!!!

Some Notes:

I created it with the intent of Desktop use, so Mobile might have some issues. If it's not working on your phone, try desktop.

Out of the multiple browsers tested (Firefox, Google, Edge, Brave, Safari), Firefox had some issues sporadically.

I'm still going to post lessons on here, first. This page is priority to me, and the website is more of an archive.

The fonts are normal past this opening page.

I will be adding a portion to send funds soon, if'n you are feeling kind and generous.

Thank you all for your patience while I worked on this. It was a labor of love and I hope that it shows. 🙏🏾 Happy scrolling!

[rowanisawriter]

write insane shit that’s way beyond your perceived ability and skill level even if you don’t finish it even if you think it sucks

[chaosxwrites]

like my gods a little eldritch and my protagonists reveling a bit in divine madness ngl

[str-ngeloop]

you will struggle to say the unsayable thing for five years straight. and then it will suddenly become easy on a Wednesday morning

[luna-azzurra]

The thing about a good character flaw is that it has to be the same thing as their greatest strength just turned up too high. the person who loves deeply and therefore controls. the person who sees everything and therefore trusts nothing. the person who is so loyal they lose themselves. there are no clean villains and no clean heroes and once you understand that in fiction you can't unsee it in people. everyone is just their best quality at the wrong volume.

[chaosxwrites]

you know, i feel there's a general surprise or perhaps digust sometimes with how many people have the common thought line of "cannibalism as a metaphor for love" and associated inspirations for their media (either to make or consume). i also feel isee it come on the waves of some very holier than thou highhorsing about media sanitiztion often

but let's all be honest there's only a certain amount of times you can tell a kid "eat this bread and juice that's the flesh and blood of a person who loves you very much" before things get a little weird with it in the developing brain!! and i've seen a lot of people that like this theme in their works that were ex-christians or raised with communion practices! i don't know what else to tell you but that the brain gets a little funny with it sometimes with the wire crossing!! not that the themes are not fascinating as fuck regardless of outside influences for me some people of course

[inkskinned]

this is just my opinion but i think any good media needs obsession behind it. it needs passion, the kind of passion that's no longer "gentle scented candle" and is now "oh shit the house caught on fire". it needs a creator that's biting the floorboards and gnawing the story off their skin. creators are supposed to be wild animals. they are supposed to want to tell a story with the ferocity of eating a good stone fruit while standing over the sink. the same protective, strange instinct as being 7 and making mud potions in pink teacups: you gotta get weird with it.

good media needs unhinged, googling-at-midnight kind of energy. it needs "what kind of seams are invented on this planet" energy and "im just gonna trust the audience to roll with me about this" energy. it needs one person (at least) screaming into the void with so much drive and energy that it forces the story to be real.

sometimes people are baffled when fanfic has some stunning jaw-dropping tattoo-it-on-you lines. and i'm like - well, i don't go here, but that makes sense to me. of fucking course people who have this amount of passion are going to create something good. they moved from a place of genuine love and enjoyment.

so yeah, duh! saturday cartoons have banger lines. random street art is sometimes the most precious heart-wrenching shit you've ever seen. someone singing on tiktok ends up creating your next favorite song. youtubers are giving us 5 hours of carefully researched content. all of this is the impossible equation to latestage capitalism. like, you can't force something to be good. AI cannot make it good. no amount of focus-group testing or market research. what makes a story worth listening to is that someone cares so much about telling it - through dance, art, music, whatever it takes - that they are just a little unhinged about it.

one time my friend told me he stayed up all night researching how many ways there are to peel an orange. he wrote me a poem that made me cry on public transportation. the love came through it like pith, you know? the words all came apart in my hands. it tasted like breakfast.

[candiedcuspids]

apple flavored cereal experiments

[unbloodiedmartyr]

i gotta say i really do love a character who is both profoundly haunted by guilt over their past actions to the point of considering themself irredeemable and deserving of punishment for them and at the same time is completely incognisant of some of the worst things they've done or just considers them nbd, especially when they can't even comprehend why theyve drawn the lines the way theyve done so.

[beggars-opera]

I'd still trust you with my life doctor tbh

[scrollingdown]

[jessepinwheel]

there’s a thing I think about sometimes when I’m writing that I call ‘the rabies condition’

by which I mean: there are no contraindications to getting the rabies vaccine for post-exposure prophylaxis.

every other vaccine usually has a few contraindications like ‘don’t take this if you’re allergic to it’ or ‘if you’re pregnant discuss the risks and benefits with your doctor’ or ‘don’t give to children below age 6′ or something, but not the rabies vaccine. if you’ve been exposed to rabies, there is literally no medical reason that can justify not getting the rabies vaccine–you can be deadly allergic to literally every single ingredient and the correct decision is still to administer the vaccine, because if you don’t, you’re 100% guaranteed to die of rabies. even the life-threatening allergies are a step up in survival rate (especially since anaphylaxis is something that can be managed, even if there are risks associated with it)

which is to say, the rabies condition: if a character has been ‘exposed to rabies’, aka, in some impending absolute worst-case scenario, like the apocalypse or some death curse or the destruction of their entire city via demons or whatever, then that character has to take action and the consequences and risks no longer matter, because literally any other outcome would be better, and 1% chance of survival is still better than 0%. that doesn’t make those actions necessarily good, the same way that injecting yourself with something you know you’re deadly allergic not a good thing to do, but it’s still better than dying horrifically of rabies. desperate times and desperate measures etc

and then, after your character’s prevented some horrible thing by doing some almost equally bad thing, they should absolutely experience the consequences of those choices.

[asmuchasidliketo]

Source

[siggymcpissyface]