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.
The other day I was surfing the internet and I found this specialized painting colour wheel, it shows how real paint colours relate to each other.
Outside: the purest/brightest colours from the tube.
Inside: naturally muted or earthy colors, like browns and ochres.
The Center: dark neutral tones used for mixing shadows.
The Lines: two equilateral triangles. One shows the triad of primary colors, and the other shows the triad of secondary colors. Triads are traditionally used to create vibrant yet perfectly balanced compositions.
Complementary colors: are those located directly opposite each other on the wheel.
Shadows I:
If you want to achieve rich, dark neutrals, the standard rule is to mix a color with its direct complementary (opposite) tone. However, doing this can often make your shadows look flat or muddy.
Instead of using the exact complementary color, the real trick is to use one of the colors right next to it (either to the left or the right). By doing this, you avoid a dull mix and introduce a beautiful, subtle color bias into your shadow, keeping it clean and full of life. You can see an example of this in the second image.
I want to share this with you because I think it is really illustrative!
Reference: “Quiller Wheel” by Stephen Quiller (👈link)
we gotta get back to torrent distribution, i just watched someone eat eight grand in bandwidth charges because they ran a direct-download piracy site with local file hosting through cloudflare. torrents were invented literally for this exact reason
i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3
unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it
i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map
i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs
this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.
crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.
Hey artists, C. Spike Trotman, founder of Iron Circus Comics, just posted an invaluable thread on depicting different types of black hair. I’d do the thing where you screencap the whole thread and post it but it’s just too long (which is great because it’s a whole lot of useful information!) Give her a follow while you’re there.
Anyway, go check it out. I just wanted to save it and share it because I didn’t know how much I didn’t know!
This is an amazing resource, not only for artists, but for writers too! I love this!
{ID - tweet from @/Iron_Spike that reads, “Black Hair for Non-Black Artists: a Cheat Sheet Thread. Hi, folks! Just spur-of-the-moment decided to put together some reference for folks who want to draw/model black characters in their work, but arent confident they won’t make simple, obvious mistakes w/r/t black hair. END ID}
If you have money, but not time to learn a skill, please consider purchasing IFAK supplies and distributing them to your more rowdy friends. They're not prohibitively expensive to buy one or two, but that cost quickly adds up when you're trying to continuously supply medical kits to other individuals.
The three items your medic friends will thank you for getting:
casual reminder that this museum has their entire collection digitized and available free for public use: https://art.thewalters.org/ and they have armor/weapons there
[ID: Post by WarpaintJournal. Text reads: "Teaching people how to regulate their emotions is crime prevention. It's addiction prevention. It's suicide prevention. It's generational healing. It's how we stop raising adults who explode, implode, or shut down at the first sign of discomfort. Emotional regulation is not just a soft skill. It's survival. It's the foundation of a society where people can disagree without dehumanizing each other, where accountability isn't seen as an attack, and where conflict doesn't always have to mean violence. You want a better world? Start with emotional education." End ID.]
I love lying to my landlord. “We’re currently looking at a comparable unit in the area at $[a hundred dollars less than our current rent]/month, so if your offer has any flexibility to come down on the rent, that would help us reach a decision about whether or not to renew our lease here” and the comparable unit exists only in my own beautiful mind
Actually, no! And since several people have replied asked for my script for negotiating lower rent, I’m gonna share that below, as well as the philosophy behind it. Full disclosure that I’m not a leasing office person or a realtor or god forbid, a landlord—I’m just someone who has been a renter for 10+ years across different states, and I know for a fact that I have saved myself thousands of dollars by successfully negotiating a lower monthly rent on almost every lease I’ve ever signed. (Also, I’ve only ever rented in the U.S., so this advice may not be as applicable elsewhere.)
Step 0: Know Thy Enemy
The key thing to understand about all residential landlords, whether they’re corporate conglomerates or Just Some Asshole, is that their asset—the property—is a Cinderella carriage that magically turns back into an expensive ass pumpkin of a liability any time it’s sitting empty. The property taxes, insurance, mortgage, HOA fees, and maintenance costs all still come due every month/quarter/year whether they have a tenant to cover it all and then some, or not.
Because of this, at the end of the day, their ultimate goal is to fill every unit at all times with someone who will reliably pay the rent on time and in full. And because everything else is secondary to that goal—and because with the exception of Just Some Asshole landlords, the person responding to your emails and writing up your lease paperwork is several degrees of separation removed from the shareholders who profit off your rent money—they’re almost always willing to negotiate with you. As long as it gets the liability converted into an asset faster or keeps the carriage from turning back into a pumpkin for longer, then in the long run, it’s actually in their best interest to give you a better price.
Step 1: Identify Your Leverage
If you understand how supply and demand works, you can figure out how much leverage you have pretty easily. High supply and low demand = you have more leverage, and vice versa. Do they have an “AVAILABLE NOW - MOVE IN TODAY” sandwich board on the sidewalk or a web banner that says “First month free”? Does their website and/or Apartments.com show a bunch of currently open listings? Do you already live there and know at least two families on your floor have moved out in the last several months with no one new moving in to replace them? These are all indications that they have more than one unit currently sitting empty, meaning higher supply and lower demand. No sandwich board and a website that just says “call for availability”? They might just suck at marketing, but more likely, supply is lower and demand is higher.
You have the least leverage if you’re a prospective tenant looking to move in somewhere that has a waitlist. They have no reason to offer you a discount if six other people are already in line to pay full price for apartments that aren’t even vacant yet (but you can still ask!). You also have no leverage to negotiate if you’ve already signed a lease and you’re in the middle of the lease period; you legally agreed to pay $X/month for Y months, so you’re stuck with that until the lease is up.
At the other end of the spectrum, you have the most leverage if you’re a current tenant who has always paid your rent on time and you’re being offered a renewal on your existing lease with higher rent than you're currently paying, especially if they already have some units that have been empty for a while. If you move out, not only is your unit going to sit vacant for at least part of a month, they’re also probably going to have to put in some work to “turn” the unit (repainting, professional cleaning, etc) to get it in move-in condition for the next tenant.
All of this means that if you move out, even if they can fleece you out of your security deposit and find a new tenant the very next month, it’s still gonna cost them at least a few thousand dollars to turn that pumpkin back into a carriage again. They’re probably willing to come down by $100-$200/month or so on the renewal offer rent if you ask, because they know it’ll actually save them money in the long run. Similar situation if you’re a prospective new tenant—if they can’t get you or anyone else to sign a lease and move in this month, that’s $[whatever the monthly rent is] down the drain, and they’ll never get it back. It’s a perishable item about to spoil.
Step 2: Get Their Opening Offer
This is the first number they’ll quote you for the rent—the sticker price that you’ve always just accepted as set in stone. The truth is, they’ve built some buffer into that number. There’s almost always some room for them to come down, and depending on your leverage, they will if you ask nicely. But for reasons that baffle me, most people don’t!
Step 3: Wait, Research, & Counter
Don’t reply to their initial offer right away—unless there’s a waitlist (in which case, you have little haggling power anyway), wait a few days. It makes them sweat a bit, and it shows you aren’t desperate. The person who is rushing to reply is not the one who has more leverage in the negotiation, and making them wait reminds them of that. In the meantime, use Apartments.com or Zillow to get an idea of what similar units in the same area are currently going for. Then you come up with your counteroffer.
As a general rule, anything more than about 20-25% below their opening offer (or below market rates) will probably just piss them off or make them take you less seriously. But when we’re talking about your monthly rent over the course of a year or two, even a 10% discount adds up to a lot of money!
When I negotiated our original lease for my current place, I also asked for and got a two year lease term instead of the standard one year. But whatever automated calendar event system they use to remind their leasing office staff when it’s time to send out renewal offers didn’t get the memo about that, so they mistakenly sent me a renewal offer the following year, meaning I got to see how much they would have jacked up the rent if they could’ve. For that second year of the lease alone, my negotiating saved us $3,000!
Step 4: BDE (Big Dick Emailing)
Here’s the tricky part. You need to write an email—always negotiate over email if you can, it’s too easy for a salesperson to bowl you over on the phone and anything they say that isn’t in writing means nothing—which simultaneously makes it sound like you would sign a lease with them in a heartbeat and like you are actively flirting with five other apartment complexes right now who all want you so bad it makes them look stupid, because you are just so sexy and fun and your credit score is eight inches flaccid. You need to make them believe you are both highly motivated and ready to sign on the dotted line and willing to just walk away from the table at any second, but if they could just come down a little bit on that number, you’d delete those other hoes’ numbers forever! Here’s the rough script I use every time:
“ Thank you for [your email/the tour/sending over the offer letter/etc]. I have had a chance to review and consider it. I think [name of apartment complex] would be the perfect fit for me, but I am also exploring and touring other options in the area, including a comparable unit nearby at $[a little below your counteroffer number]/month.
If we could come down to $[your counteroffer number]/month on the rent, I would be prepared to sign the lease today. Let me know your thoughts. Thanks! "
Step 6: You Win Either Way
Sometimes they really do just accept your counteroffer without question and send you over a revised lease to sign. (When this happens, I make a note for next time that my counteroffer was probably too high and I should’ve asked for more!) More often, they get approval from The Powers That Be and come back with a number that’s higher than your counteroffer but lower than their initial offer. Assuming I can afford it, I always accept this offer; you’ve achieved your goal of saving yourself money from sticker price, and they’re likely to lose patience if they have to keep going around and around with you. And sometimes (though only very rarely), they may come back and say the price is firm—in which case, guess what? You still didn’t lose anything by asking!
THIS!!! Exactly this. I didn’t mention it above because I just couldn’t fit it neatly anywhere, but once while negotiating a lease renewal, I got as far as receiving their counteroffer, which was basically “price firm :(”, but then life happened, so I forgot to respond and accept. The email sat in my inbox for a week. And then, completely unprompted, they magically replied again saying, “actually, nvm, how’s $[number that is lower than our opening offer] sound?”
To them, it looked like I was staring them down cold as ice like
I was literally just busy with other stuff! and they were sweating!!! BULLETS!!!
it's honestly a lot simpler than it looks, you're just connecting corners and drawing lines where they intersect. I really recommend you just grab a scrap piece of paper and try it and i'm certain it'll click! It's one of those things that makes more sense when you try it yourself.
The perspective examples I showed above look complicated, but the underlying technique is very simple. You just keep splitting the rectangle until it's divided up evenly as many times as you need it to be.
The stairs were split in half multiple times to divide it into 8, the cell door was divided into thirds and then those thirds were split in half to give 6 lines.
I have received an unholy number of requests for my recipe. So here it is, at long last.
Disseminate at your own discretion!
Preparation and baking time: 3-5 hours
Feeds: One really hungry person; two moderately hungry people; three or four normal-hungry people; or maybe five peckish people.
Warning: Dangerously delicious.
1. Ingredients
1.1 Dough:
500g/1lb flour
100g+20g (3.5oz+1oz) sugar (or more, to taste. I occasionally pig out and add ALL of the sugar)
250ml/½ pint milk (I use semi-skimmed, but recipe calls for full. This is up to you)
21g/0.75oz yeast
1 egg
½ tsp salt (this is not necessary)
80g/3oz butter (salted, preferably)
Optional ingredients:
Cinnamon sugar (cinnamon + sugar + shaking; quantities are flexible and mostly up to you. Warning: this makes your hefekranz taste a lot like magic. Add in step 14)
Vanilla (vanilla sugar or pod seeds; add early for maximum effect)
Raisins (add when the moment feels right)
1.2 Glaze:
1 egg
1.3 Frosting
milk and powder sugar (amounts depend on dough size… it’s complicated. See step 21).
Optional:
Thinly sliced almonds to sprinkle over the top.
2. Preparation: (it’s really not as complicated as it looks, I promise!)
1. Prepare ingredient quantities as outlined above. It’s good to have the butter quite warm, but will work with cold butter too.
2. In a large mixing bowl, mix together 100g/3.5oz sugar and the flour.
3. Warm your milk to lukewarm. DO NOT OVERHEAT; the yeast will die a horrible death and instead of bread you will wind up making a rock. A delicious rock, but a rock nonetheless.
4. Add 20g/1oz sugar to the milk. Stir well to dissolve. Then add yeast. Leave this mixture to activate for at least five minutes.
5. While you wait, heat your butter in a microwave until it is basically delicious yellow liquid.
6. After activation of yeast, the container with the milk should be frothing like a rabid dog. Add butter, yeast mixture, and an egg to your flour.
7. Knead into a dough. Add flour as necessary (I usually have to add about 150g/5oz of flour at this stage, but it depends on your flour). Continue to knead for 8-10 minutes. Work those muscles.
8. When your dough is smooth and relatively dry to the touch, but still malleable, flour the base of your bowl, put in the dough, and put it aside to let it rise (N.B. if you do this in the open, cover with a clean dishcloth to avoid nasty things landing in your delicious dough). I recommend putting it in an oven at 40-60°C/100-140°F, if you can, to rise. Rising can take anywhere from 1-3 hours, depending on temperature.
9. When dough has become enormous, remove from the bowl, and knead for another minute or two.
10. Set your oven to 160°C/320°F (or thereabouts).
11. Test your dough. You know you want to. MMMMmmmmm. Yeah, that’s right.
12. Divide dough into three or four equally sized balls (four is easier because… halves).
13. Take each of these balls and rub it between your hands (hoho, saucy) to elongate it into a noodle shape (let’s be honest, this is the phallic part). Best results come from fairly thick and short strands (this is not getting any better, sorry).
14. OPTIONAL: Roll these strands out flat (lengthways), sprinkle with magic powder (cinnamon sugar) and then roll them up again to make a cinnamon core to each strand.
15. Braid your strands together. The easiest way to do this is to treat it like a weaving project and start in the middle and work towards each end. But you can also start at the ends and braid from there. Cover your strands in flour if they are getting hard to braid – but don’t overdo it, or your bread will be quite floury.
16. Cover this beautiful creation with a dishcloth, and let it rise for 30 minutes. This seals the gaps in your crappy braids.
17. While you wait, prepare your glaze: Get a cup, and beat an egg in it.
18. After your 30 minutes has passed, with either a paper towel (if you are a poor student) or a basting brush (if you are a swanky monkey), gently glaze your ENTIRE loaf (except the underside, obviously). Make sure to get the egg in the cracks. The whole thing should be shiny by this stage.
19. Throw your bread in the oven!
20. Cook for 25 minutes at 160°C/320°F, or until the outside of the bread is about the colour of Chewbacca. Lower the temperature to 140°C/280°F, and continue to cook for a further 15 minutes or so. Make sure it doesn’t get too dark; some ovens cool down slower than others.
21. While you wait to cook, prepare your frosting: Take about half a cup of powder sugar, and add a dribble of milk to it. Stir with a fork or spoon. Bear in mind that this will become VERY thin VERY quickly. Add sugar or milk as required to make a frosting that is just thin enough that your silverware no longer stands up in it. You want it to flow out of the cup when you frost.
22. Once your bread is done, remove, frost, and let cool for five to twenty minutes, or as long as you can keep your hungry claws off of it.
For maximum pleasure, cut thick slices (nearly 2cm thick or so), and make some hot chocolate. Dip the bread IN the hot chocolate. Let it soak for a bit. Transfer to mouth. Smile and look wistfully out the window.
Important PSA if you have Adobe Acrobat installed on your computer - it installs Microsoft Copilot, even if you've removed it in the past
I went to right-click a file today and was met with an "Ask Copilot" prompt, despite having diligently removed every trace of the scourge from my computer any time it's ever been installed in the past. When I went and looked in the program list and indeed found "Copilot," it said it was installed today, 4/16/26.
Enraged and confused because I have Windows Updates turned off for this machine, don't install anything unless I can check what's in the patches, and haven't ran any updates since the end of March, I went rooting around in the logs and found that the culprit was... the latest update for Acrobat.
I went to their stupid support website, and their stupid chatbot confirmed it:
Honestly Acrobat is a terrible PDF reader/viewer anyway, it's just been installed on this computer since college and I hadn't previously bothered to remove it. But if you're in the same boat, or if you have previously been forced to use it for work/school, please be aware that this POS puts Copilot back on your computer without permission or notification.
Start with a large sheet of cardboard. Stores like home depot have large moving boxes that come flat like this, perfect for this project.
I use a projector to trace my butterfly, but you can also put tracing paper up to a screen and glue it to your cardboard, or ask your library to let you use their projector.
Make sure to trace not just the outside, but also all of the markings and patterns. Doing the antennae as well and keeping the scrap cardboard will allow you to measure out the right length.
2.
Cut around the outside of your lepidopteran and crease where the wings meet each other and the body. I use my hands, but a ruler can help. After bending your wings into a natural position, make the body and head with your clay of choice, mine is foam clay which is cheap and easy to use.
Blend the sides of the body into the wings just enough to stick, this will hold the pose you've chosen.
Prop up the wings with whatever is around and keep in a safe spot to dry. Mine dries overnight at this size. You can see I've used bottles for mine
3.
Once dry and solidified, the clay holds the wings in place in the way you left them.
Measure your antennae wire a little longer than needed and poke it into the clay. If it doesn't stay, add a little dot of super or hot glue at the base.
Glue a mounting bracket on the back. You can angle this however you like to have your lepidopteran upright, sideways, or even upside down
4.
Paint your sections individually so you don't lose your trace lines. I go in with white first to cover up the print on the cardboard, then put the correct colors over that.
If making a high contrast lep like this, go in with black at the end to clean up your edges.
If adding any fur to the body, get a piece larger than you need and hot glue it on, then trim the backing underneath the fibers with tiny snips, as not to cut the fur itself, and carefully glue the edges of the backing to the body as well
5.
Brush a matte finish like mod podge over your final product. Hold your lep up to where you want it to hang, then mount with a nail
