Rin Challenges You

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.

Okay, I read something today about a person making french toast by pouring batter over a tray of bread and baking it for an hour, and it was so alien that I figured I should write down my family’s french toast recipe for comparison and posterity.

(Side note, I tend to hate recipes that say “eyeball it” or “a splash of” instead of actual measurements, but this is literally the only way I know how to do it. I’ll try to approximate but you will be winging it and may have to adjust the amounts to get a result you like. Good news is, you can do tiny batches of this at a time and adjust on the fly.)

Ingredients:

Egg(s) Milk Bread (~2 slices per egg) Vanilla extract

Toppings:

Powdered sugar/cinnamon mix Syrup

1. Wash your hands, you’ll be using your fingers for this.

2. Using a fork, whisk the eggs and milk in a pie tin or other shallow dish large enough to fit a slice of bread into. There should be enough milk to dilute the egg color to a pale yellow, usually a few tablespoons or so per egg. Balance is key, too much milk and it won’t hold together, too little and you’ll have scrambled egg on toast. The yolk should be completely blended with the milk, but don’t fret about blending in the white too much, it adds a nice varying texture.

3. Mix in a few drops of vanilla. Don’t overuse, literally just a few drops per egg.

4. Heat a pan, I like to do this on a skillet but a frying pan is alright too. Use cooking spray before you heat it OR grease with butter right before you put the toast on. About medium heat is fine, go a little lower if you want to be sure you don’t burn it.

5. Dip a slice of bread in the egg mixture, then flip over. You don’t want the bread getting soggy, so just a few seconds on each side should be enough. If some egg white sticks to the bread try to keep it on top, it’s slippery as heck and you don’t want it falling off the bread and onto your feet.

6. Place the bread in the pan, cook until golden brown and then flip with a metal spatula. If you have egg white on that side it should be solid white, maybe with a little brown. Don’t give yourself salmonella, it’s better to overcook this than under.

7. Repeat until you have as many slices of french toast as you like. Dust with sugar/cinnamon mix, top with syrup.

And that’s it!

I present to you: the floating ao3 comment box!

From what I've seen, a big problem for many people is that once you reach the comments at the bottom of a fic, your memory of it miraculously disappears. Anything you wanted to say is stuck ten paragraphs ago, and you barely remember what you thought while reading. This fixes that!

I'll give a little explanation on the features and how it works, but if you want to skip all that, here's the link.

Edit: Yes, this also works on mobile!

The extension is visible as a small blue box in the upper left corner.

(Side note: The green colouring is not from the extension, that's me.)

If you click on it, you open a comment box window at the bottom of your screen but not at the bottom of the fic. I opened my own fic for demonstrative purposes.

The website also gives explanations on how exactly it functions, but I'll summarize regardless.

insert selection -> if you highlight a sentence in the fic it will be added in italics to the comment box

add to comment box -> once you're done writing your comment, you click this button and the entire thing will automatically copied to the ao3 comment box

delete -> self explanatory

on mulitchapter fics, you will be given the option to either add the comment to just the current chapter or the entire fic

The best part? You can simply close the window the same way you opened it and your progress will automatically be saved. So you can open it, comment on a paragraph, and then close it and keep reading without having the box in your face.

Jax doodles (TADC escape au)

Went to go see the movie bout some pretty amazing digging

this was my favourite part

Ya'll couldn't even handle HER.