Cosplay, Tips, and Tricks

To overexplain what I mean: If you didn't know the term "cosplay" until you were older, when you learned the term, did you then retroactively consider any previous costumes of pre-existing fictional characters to be "cosplays"? Such as dressing as a Disney Princess or Darth Vader in 3rd grade, etc. If you knew the term from a young age, same question applies.

I wish I could get more granular and overlapping statistics, like "your age" and "how long you have actively considered yourself a cosplayer" because I have a feeling that would change the way the results are read a LOT. (I suppose also "how long you have been going to cons/cosplay events" and "if you parents are cosplayers" to catch outliers like my friend in roughly my age group whose mom wrote a still really good furry tutorial in the 80s LMAO) I actually went back and forth on "how long you've been cosplaying" and "how long you've known about cosplay" but I feel like the latter is more to the heart of what I'm asking?

Back in my day (lmao), pretty much no one would have considered that type of thing cosplay. I first learned the term circa 2002? and did my first cosplay in 2003 (at a con), but things are VERY different these days. I've noticed that at least in help spaces, it's much more common for parents to be asking about making or buying cosplays for their kids or helping their kids with Halloween cosplays, etc., and I'm curious about how the term has been used over the years.

You're being targeted by one of the cleverest scams going right now, and the reason it works is uncomfortable: the email genuinely came from PayPal.

The trick is in the subject line, not the email

When most people think "phishing email," they picture sketchy senders, broken English, and links to weird domains. This scam is the opposite. The email passes every authenticity check — SPF, DKIM, DMARC, all green. It comes from PayPal's actual mail servers. The fonts are right. The footer is right. The unsubscribe link works. If you forwarded it to a security expert and asked "is this really from PayPal?" they'd have to say yes.

So how is it a scam?

Scammers have figured out that PayPal lets anyone send small amounts of money to anyone else, and that PayPal will dutifully email the recipient a notification. The scammer sends you a payout of, say, one Hungarian forint — about a quarter of a cent. PayPal's system then automatically generates and sends you a real, legitimate, fully-authenticated email confirming the transaction.

Here's the catch: the email's subject line is whatever the scammer typed when they set up the payout. PayPal doesn't sanitize it. So they write something terrifying like "Pending charge of USD 987.90 — call this number with questions" and PayPal's servers cheerfully deliver that subject line straight to your inbox, wrapped in a perfectly legitimate-looking notification.

This thing has been out of print for like, 26 years and some of us want to make chubby classic pikachu so uh... I figure it's okay to share bc it's kinda hard to get your hands on the remaining physical copies.

Bonus points: Aelith made some embroidery/applique files for it too

This is FREE, please don't pay for the pattern.

Only the EMBROIDERY is paid.

YOU DO NOT NEED TO START A NEW HOBBY!

STEP AWAY FROM THE TEXTILES!

YOU DON'T NEED MORE YARN!

Pick a topic you like, and that's what you're going to read about. Set a minimum word count, and read until you get to it. Start small. Smart easy. First try, it might actually be agonizing.

That's it for the day. Just hit the word count.

Next day, read to the word count again. Read something new! It will be easier today.

And easier the next.

On top of being scammed, receiving accurate medical treatment relies on you knowing how to do your own research, and too many doctors take illiterate patients less seriously.

If you become a victim of a crime or are accused of a crime, you need to be able to read the papers a cop or lawyer puts in front of you. They can happily take advantage of your ignorance if you give them a chance.

This list goes on! Landlords, real estate agents, accountants, car mechanics, bankers, phone companies, customer service, contractors, childcare workers, e.g. any other human you rely on just to live your life will expect you to be literate and capable of making smart decisions. It is not their job to supplement your ignorance. It is not any well-meaning individual's job to make sure you paid attention in the same classes they did. And most of them know this and will not wait for you to figure things out.