Look for the purple Fedora

When I turned 17, we ordered a cake at the grocery store for my party, as we’d done many times before. If you wanted something written on the cake you’d write it into a section of the order form. We requested, very simply, “Happy Birthday Courtney”. When we went to pick it up the day of the party, this is what we got.

The bakery employees had absolutely no explanation for this. The order form, attached to the box, very clearly did not contain any of those extra names. Whomever had done the writing was no longer in, so there was no one to ask how this had happened. The fact that the name ‘Juan’ is misspelled bewilders me to this day. (I’ve never seen ‘Miley’ without the E, either, but it’s believable that someone might spell it that way.) Did this cake slip in from an alternate universe where I’m one quarter of a set of Hispanic quadruplets? Dyslexic Hispanic quadruplets, maybe?

This cake became the focal point of my party. At least two of my friends regularly called me ‘Courtney Mily Jaun Pablo’ for years to come. My siblings and I still reference it sometimes, eleven years later. It is probably the funniest thing ever to occur at any birthday celebration of my life, and may well remain so for the rest of my days.

No One Like You

now, it took us a while to realise it meant "(there is) no one like you". at first, we all parsed it as a botched "no one like(s) you"

all the blatantly pornographic ads on tumblr were provided by google. all the ads for scam mobile games w ai-generated footage that looks absolutely nothing like anything ingame were provided by google. all the ads for social security scams on the weather app that i cant uninstall from my phone were provided by google

in other words, google does advertising for identity thieves and fraudsters in exchange for a cut of the stolen money. it isnt exaggerating to say that google is the linchpin of an entire industry of cybercrime that wouldnt exist if they were expected to moderate the ads they approve like any other advertising service does. billboard companies and tv stations dont get to profit from running ads for scams, why does google get a pass?

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.

The guy who says “I have the power to ruin the world with my mistakes or save it with my correct actions” is on some level SUPER prideful. And you can tell how prideful he is by how much weight his actions give to the above statement.

If he makes mistakes and intensely punishes himself for them, he’s making himself judge, jury, and executioner. Over himself. It’s like “I made a big mistake but nobody else is equipped to deal with what a big deal I am except me.” 🙄

If he sees the opportunity to do something and jumps right into it while actively ignoring other people’s advice or ideas, obviously that’s egotism. But if he’s doing it while preventing them from helping him, that’s stepping into “I think I’m some kind of legend who has so much power I get to be in charge of not only what I do, but what everybody else does to some extent, too.”

If he makes a mistake and then decides it’s all over and gives up, what he’s saying is that he’s so incredibly influential and powerful that nobody else is powerful enough to undo what he’s done. If he tries to fix it himself and stops at nothing to accomplish that goal—look, he’s still saying nobody else is powerful enough to undo what he’s done.

Now pretend he was trying to do something big and legendarily good—and it blew up in his face—so then he self-imposed exile because taking himself off the chess board of the universe was obviously the only thing to do. After all, nobody else is as big a deal as he is, so if he, the big deal, subtracts himself, then he, the big deal has actually saved the day. He’s probably the kind of character who’s been putting great emphasis on his own actions his whole life. Launching himself at every scenario where people need help, even when he’s unequipped to help them. Placing the greatest emphasis on his own relationships and his own role in those relationships, maybe to the exclusion of any outside parties.

This character has a huge pride issue. Even by giving up, he thinks he’s making some kind of universe-saving-statement. When the humble thing to do would just be, “I messed up, and although I bear responsibility for fixing what I can, the very fact that I am the one who messed up has humbled me enough to learn that I am not the one who can fix it, alone. I won’t give up, because that would mean I think my mistakes are more powerful than they actually are—but I won’t rely on myself, either. I’ll do what I can, acknowledging that I’ll need to trust others to do what I can’t.”

Humility. Which leaves a lot up to others, without being uninvolved entirely. It all takes a great deal of faith.

oh look

I've been buying books for decades, and I remember when the plague of slick, stiff paper ads inserted in the middle of paperbacks fell upon the book buying public. Usually cigarette ads, as I recall, probably because that was after cigarette ads were forbidden on television and radio. They were annoying as hell because they tended to make the book open to that point by default--and you couldn't cleanly pull them out, either.

Fortunately, this plague on book buyers was fairly temporary, probably because it wasn't a good investment for the advertisers. A given book's ad can only reliably be expected to be read by ONE reader, and there was no way of tracking who it was, whether it influenced their buying habits, etc.