i liked ur post :-)

reblogs that don't fit the learnelle blog vibe

[zyu10]

Matsue, Japan, 2018

[why-the-heck-not]

studying for the degree you voluntarily signed up for out of your own pure free will and interest

[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.

[florealist]

More here

[smsomah]

She is holding an orange. Warszawa, Poland, 1956. Wolfgang Schröter

[smashtheshell-deactivated202405]

[spectrumcore]

[dreamstars]

[chantssecrets]

Visitors gather to watch giant gushes of water released from the Xiaolangdi dam on the Yellow river in Jiyuan, China.

[sailermoon]

all my life I’ve felt like this guy

[bookish-insanity]

Scientific ladies and dragons. It’s awesome.

[worldworldworldworld]

"No more writing.", 2007

[2009rad]

Lenu: No matter what I do, Lila’s always going to be better than me. She’s always one step ahead of everyone, and I’ll never catch up to her. All she’ll have is her brilliance while I’m stuck trying to recreate it, because she’s part of everything I do

Meanwhile Lila:

[holyterrainn]

Rosamund Pike in die another day (2002)

[fforsythiaaa]

Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as “problematic” in class and our professor was like, “That’s cool, but ‘problematic’ doesn’t really mean anything. It means that the thing you’re describing has a problem, and in and of itself that’s not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else it’s not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like you’re trying to say that this is bad, but you don’t want to say ‘bad.’ Is that right?”

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I can’t help but think of this professor being like, “Good starting point, now let’s get specific.” I think when we have to commit to saying “that’s ___” it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever we’re claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes it’s art, and it should be full of problems, because that’s what art is.

[loveridden1999]

takeshi kaneshiro on the set of fallen angels (1995)

[ambxtxo]

donna tartt’s reading list

In an interview, Tartt lists her favorite authors and the names of a few works. I have listed the most popular works from each author and the specific ones she recommended as well.

Homer

The Iliad

The Odyssey

Greek Poets and Tragedians

Argonautica

Antigone

Prometheus Bound

The Oresteia

Medea

Oedipus Rex

The Bacchae

The Frogs

Dante

Inferno

Purgatorio

Paradiso

Shakespeare

“I went back and read Macbeth and Hamlet during the pandemic”

Macbeth

Hamlet

Dickens

“Dickens was a part of my familial landscape, the air I breathed.”

A Tale of Two Cities

Great Expectations

Nabokov

Pale Fire

Lolita

Proust

In Search of Lost Time

Swann’s Way

Dostoevsky

Crime and Punishment

The Brothers Karamazov

Yeats

The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

Irish Fairy and Folk Tales

Borges

Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings

Edith Wharton

The House of Mirth

Ethan Frome

Evelyn Waugh

Brideshead Revisited

Helena

Salinger

Catcher in the Rye

Virginia Woolf

Mrs. Dalloway

Orlando

Edward St. Aubyn

The Patrick Melrose Novels

Haruki Murakami

Kafka on the Shore

Norwegian Wood

Olga Tokarczuk

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

Don DeLillo

White Noise

Underworld

W.G. Sebald

Austerlitz

The Rings of Saturn

Joan Didion

The Year of Magical Thinking

The White Album

Other Specific Books

Memoirs d’Outre-Tome by Chateaubriand

Jigsaw by Sybille Bedford

All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski

A Balcony in the Forest by Julien Gracq

[feytouched]

i gotchu @mybloodyvalentina !

gaiwan - lidded bowl; your brewing vessel.

gongdaobei / fairness cup - pour tea from gaiwan into this first before serving so that everyone's cup of tea gets the same concentration of tea.

tea tray - catches water spills.

teacups - variable sizes, usually small.

cha he - a tea scoop, for measuring out your tea and presenting it before brewing. has a pick so you can push the tea into the gaiwan / teapot without touching it.

tea tools / 'six gentlemen' - most important here are the small scoop and the tongs. mine also have a teacup holder, a brush, and a pick for prying apart tea cakes.

strainer - this one is just a normal ceramic strainer, others may be metal mesh or even skeletonized leaves. you put it on top of the gongdaobei before you pour from the gaiwan into it, so small leaf bits don't get into the liquor. it has a teacup-shaped stand underneath that catches any drips when it's not in use, you can see different angles of it in my tea tag.

tea towel - just a tea towel, to wipe spills and the bottom of cups before serving.

tea pet - gets the first rinse and any dregs or leftovers poured on it. just for fun.

everyone's gongfu set is different, some people use teapots instead of gaiwans, some people don't bother with half of this stuff. theoretically you could downsize to just a gaiwan and teacup especially if you're just brewing for one. if you want to see how they're used, though, you can find example videos on youtube like this one.

i have more info about where i got all my pieces here!

[halos2deac-deactivated20260223]

yep