Today is too much. I'll come back tomorrow.

“Welcome in what can I get you”

“I want a plain black coffee”

“All rights wha-“

“No sugar or cream or flavor or anything else.”

“Okay, got it, wha-“

“I don’t want no caramachmocha flippy-do’s or frappachina-what-it’s. Just. A plain ol regular black coffee”

“That’s great sir, now please wha”

“Just a old fashioned stright up coff-“

A whistleblower just revealed what DOGE planned to do to 2.7 million living people.

Declare them dead.

Not metaphorically. In the Social Security Administration's Death Master File -- the database banks, employers, and government agencies use to determine whether someone is alive. Once you're in it, your wages stop. Your bank accounts freeze. Your credit disappears. Your benefits end.

The plan, according to former SSA executive Jeremiah Schofield, was explicit. DOGE official Jon Koval stated the goal directly: people would either self-deport, or they would show up at a Social Security office to prove they were alive -- and get arrested by ICE.

"That call was one of the most disappointing calls I've been in in my 25-year career," Schofield told the Washington Post. "I was shocked. I couldn't believe what I was hearing."

Schofield refused to implement it. Agency lawyers warned it would violate federal law. The 2.7 million plan was stopped.

But when Schofield sampled those 2.7 million names, he found U.S. citizens. Lawful permanent residents. Teenagers. Senior citizens. A widow receiving survivor benefits.

And a smaller version already happened -- 6,100 immigrants were marked dead last year. Some showed up at Social Security offices to prove they were alive.

Senators Warren and Blumenthal are demanding answers and records preservation today.

Here is what you need to understand: the Death Master File doesn't ask what country you came from. Anyone with a Social Security number is in it. If this administration is permitted to use this weapon against immigrants, the weapon exists for anyone.

A 25-year civil servant said no. That's the only reason it stopped.

There's generally going to be rooms dedicated to and build for warmth, the living quarters, both for nobles and their servants. This will be the central living tower, or parts of it called a Kemenate (literally 'room with a stove'), the great hall and work spaces around the kitchen. You can put the Kemenate on top of the hall to catch the big fires' and daily living's heat through the wooden floor, but you often can't put wooden stuff on top of the kitchens (that's a fire risk). If you have the money and space, you build a whole separate comfy place for living because you don't have to stay in the most defensible part of the castle all the time. These separate living buildings are also called Kemenate and are often build from wood, cob, brick etc.

People used to wear much more clothes indoors, including while sleeping, and those clothes were much thicker and sturdier than what we largely wear today. Every time you think of how cold those stone walls are, think about everyone wearing a linen shift + two-ish layers of wool on all body parts except hands and head + stockings and shoes + some kind of head-covering. In Ye Old Middle Ages, women are probably wearing a wimple, which is kind of like a modern Hijab in terms of coverage. People wear shifts, socks, and a head-covering to bed.

I think people used to radiators also really underestimate how much a large open fire/tiled stove heats up a room. Also, middle and northern Europe (as well as parts of Northern China) had and to this day have beds and benches build into tiled and cob stoves. Those fuck.

Beds are enclosed so you stay warm in them, either by curtains, in wall niches or with wood. There's also a type of bed that's inside a chest (like a coffin) so you can stuff your stuff inside during the day and put down the lid to use it as a bench. That's also another reason for people to always sleep in groups. Depending on the era, one of the jobs of a lady's maid or a retainer might literally be warming their master's bed. In early times and among servants, people also sleep in large groups in rooms together in general even outside a farming context, often with animals like pet dogs, too, which further warms everything up.

Walls are not bare, cold stone, but covered with a layer of plaster or cob, tiles or wooden panels, sometimes layered, and believe me, this makes such a difference. Source: I lived in a Ye Olde German Farmhouse with 70 cm thick stone walls and flag stone floor and all that converted to modern flats for a while.

On top of that you hang tapestries on the wall, which are not like modern printed cloth but basically wall rugs, sometimes several inches thick, and rugs or rushes (like a light cover of hay) on the floor on top of stone, tile, wooden panelling or a cob floor cover that goes over the heave flag stone. Pillows and blankets on all sitting surfaces, often on top of panelling (in the case of benches build into the stone). The roof of a room is also tiled, panelled or plastered. Upper stories will generally have wooden floors. Stories in a tower heat each other upwards, so the nicer rooms are further up.

The inner stone walls of a castle, even if stone and very thick, will heat up a few degrees in comparison to the outside walls if the castle is continually heated/lived in, and also trap heat inside, and this will make a difference. Inner walls might also be thinner and made of wood, cob or brick. You're defending against the outside, after all.

You put stuff in the windows. Holy shit. Screens of wood, horn, cloth or leather/hide, often treated for extra insulation. Why are these fantasy castles all so drafty.

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.

Crocheted Leaf Sculptures by Susanna Bauer

To truly appreciate the delicacy of Susanna Bauer‘s leaf sculptures, think of crunching a dead leaf in your hand, how it disintegrates into dust with the slightest effort. To work with dry and fragile leaves as a medium for crochet seems nearly impossible, but Susanna somehow manages it with ease, turning leaves into cubes, tunnels, and geometric patterns with techniques that might be more appropriate for the durability of leatherwork. She lives and works in Cornwall, England. You can see more on her website and Facebook. 

Want to keep up with art?  Check out our Twitter feed.

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.

No transphobes allowed, only transborbs.

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