welcome to my candy store

I've always been a big non-fiction reader, and I'm particularly fond of frauds, scams, and white collar crime. Ever since I finished White Collar last year, I've been meaning to pull together a collection of related books. As you'll quickly learn if you dive into this list, the truth is often wilder than fiction. (A lot more FBI agents yelling FUCK YOU!! at each other across board room tables, for one thing.)

IMPORTANT! Please don't pirate! It hurts authors. Most of these books are available through your local library, including as e-books. You can help local bookstores by purchasing through bookshop dot org, or as audiobooks through libro dot fm.

Category #1: Stand Outs and All-Time Favorites

Bad Blood reads like a thriller, and I genuinely mean that. It's gripping, it's incredible reporting, it's just a jaw-dropping story. Theranos was one of the biggest corporate frauds in history, and Carreyrou masterfully details its rise and fall. Not to spoil what could be considered the book's big twist, but there's no one better to write it, either.

Empire of Pain is also masterful reporting by a well-regarded journalist, but it leans more family drama than thriller. This details the personal machinations that helped create the opioid crisis in America. [Leverage: Redemption 1x1, which IIRC was actually written before the Met removed the Sackler name from their exhibits. Also goes well paired with The Fall Of The House Of Usher.]

Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks is a collection of Radden Keefe's writing for The New Yorker. It explores wine crime (Leverage 5x13 and White Collar 1x12 directly draw from this), a passionate defense attorney, whistle blowers, hit men, and international organized crime. While I recommend the book, much of this content is available for free at newyorker dot com / contributors / patrick-radden-keefe (you can use paywallreader dot com to legally get around the paywall).

Number Go Up moves quickly and is full of fascinating characters and unexpected celebrity cameos. You've got your cringe rappers, your coke-on-a-yacht billionaires, your Harry Potter rationalist poly cult. Seriously, I wish I could read this again for the first time.

Category #2: Odd, "Cozy", Strange

The Feather Thief covers a unique crime by a 20-year-old obsessed with fly fishing.

The Art Thief tells the story of Stéphane Bréitwieser, the most prolific art thief of all time. He stole during the day, from museums full of people, again and again - over 200 times, in fact. He kept his treasures in his bedroom. A fascinating portrait of a strange criminal.

Category #3: Grab Bag

Including stuff that's more adjacent to the topic but still of interest, books I got part way through, and books that are still on my TBR.

Chickenshit Club I'm part way through and enjoying, Never Split the Difference is GREAT and includes lots of true hostage negotiating stories, Fancy Bear Goes Phishing I couldn't get into but that could be because I don't need two pages of text explaining what a string is. (I'm planning on giving it another go.)

Anansi's Gold and The Corporation are both on my TBR; Con Queen of Hollywood is a riveting con story for the first half but gets a little bogged down in biography in the second half.

The Confidence Game is on my TBR and is a classic of the genre, Molly's Game is one of my partner's favorite books, and The Gospel Of Wellness does a great job at exposing how scammy the entire wellness industry is.

So I'm compiling a list of people in movies/tv shows who are helping the police. Let's see which one is most idiotic. This is only the ones I've seen, so feel free to add your stuff.

So far I have:

Anthropologist (Bones)

Writer (Castle)

Cleaning lady (High Potential)

Schizophrenic neuroscientist (Perception)

Fake psychic medium (Psych)

Cannibalistic therapist (Hannibal)

Devil Himself (Lucifer)

Alleged art forger (White Collar)

High functional sociopath (Sherlock)

Every superhero ever

Blood analyst/serial killer (Dexter)

Human lie detector (Lie to me)

https://github.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist

Install this blocklist using the instructions on the GitHub page. For Firefox, you will need to install uBlockOrigin for this. Google Chrome no longer allows the uBlockOrigin extension, so I'm assuming you're at least primarily a Firefox user - or about to be (see browser alternatives below).

For Google Chrome or mobile browsers, this will work with uBlacklist. See the GitHub page for full details on compatibility.

Remove AI Widgets:

If you go to your uBlockOrigin Filter lists page, you can select to filter out AI Widgets - this should completely remove the 'AI Mode' widget/button from your Google search page, in addition to the work done by the Huge AI Blocklist.

Using the uBlockOrigin Huge AI Blocklist filter has made my Google searches look like they used to, and gives me genuine search results.

Look at this. It's beautiful. It's informative. It's not a heap of burning trash bloated with fake information made up by a hallucinating chat bot.

We can go even further: return to the old school search results.

Now, the above results are great and should be free of generative AI junk, but some people would rather not see any of the summary widgets or 'people also ask' box at all. Fear not! You can remove all that by using the 'Web' mode in the Google search bar. Click the 'More' drop down menu and select 'Web'.

Huzzah! Incredible. It's like a functional search engine again.

You can make this the default Google search mode in Google Chrome using Method 1 from this page (https://allthings.how/how-to-turn-off-ai-mode-in-google-chrome/). Unfortunately, I don't know if there's a way to do this in Firefox too. This is why for the most part I still use DuckDuckGo (see below) as my default search engine, and only use Google to supplement my searches on the rare occasion I'm just missing something.

Remember, if you clear your cookies, your search engine preferences will reset, including any settings you enabled/disabled to avoid AI. This applies to DuckDuckGo as well; check your settings every time you clear your browser!

Extra filters (optional):

I've also added four filters (their order doesn't matter) to the My Filters page. Full disclosure: I'm not sure they still work, or may only work on Chrome, but I'm keeping them anyway, just in case.

From https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/1i7kg83/comment/m8lllwr/: see which solution in the list works for you, it seems to be different for everybody.

google.*##div[jscontroller]:not(:has(div[jscontroller].YzCcne)):has(.YzCcne)

From https://allthings.how/how-to-turn-off-ai-mode-in-google-chrome/:

www.google.com##.Beswgc

www.google.com##.olrp5b

www.google.com##.hdzaWe

Make sure you hit the apply changes button when you add filters.

Browser alternatives: escaping Google Chrome.

If you haven't jumped ship from Chrome yet, I'd recommend doing so. Sometimes Chrome outperforms Firefox for niche purposes or because a website doesn't bother to fully support non-Chrome browsers, but the days of Chrome being the superior browser are long gone — by about 10 years. If you're trying to escape Chromium browsers, beware that a lot of the popular Chrome alternatives are just Chrome in a different hat.

Firefox has been the most popular non-Chromium browser for years, and for good reason. However, the company running Mozilla Firefox has annoyed their users, me included, by refusing to take an anti- generative-ai stance, and even included AI features in the Mozilla Firefox browser. Most Firefox users specifically use it because they hate Google's enshittification and want a privacy-focused, clean browser that doesn't hog their RAM and CPU for no reason. So, you can imagine that Mozilla's attitude has pissed us all off recently. You can turn off the AI features in Firefox with the built-in settings, but the company has recently steered straight into the burning garbage heap by saying they want to make the browser based on AI.

Waterfox and LibreWolf:

There are really good alternatives based on Firefox (open-source) which are not affiliated with Mozilla (the company), if you don't like how it operates. Waterfox and LibreWolf are even more trimmed down and privacy-focused than Mozilla's Firefox, and don't use AI. Anti-ai statements: Waterfox and LibreWolf.

From this page: https://programming.dev/post/42546774

In short: LibreWolf is for those who want a “locked-down” fortress out of the box, while Waterfox is for those who want a privacy-conscious browser that still feels like a normal, convenient daily driver. Choose LibreWolf if: You want the highest level of privacy without having to manually edit config files, and you don’t mind occasionally “fixing” a broken website or re-logging into accounts. Choose Waterfox if: You want a privacy-respecting browser that supports Firefox Sync, has an Android counterpart, and handles streaming sites/logins without any extra friction (it supports WideWine out of the box, which lets you stream DRM protected content (netflix, hulu, disney, etc). — [email protected]

I've heard good things about both of these browsers and will investigate them further to decide whether to personally switch from Mozilla Firefox.

DuckDuckGo:

I would also recommend installing the DuckDuckGo extension to your browsers and setting it to be your default search engine.

I've had DuckDuckGo installed on my browsers, Chrome or Firefox, for like 10 years now. It is a good search engine, it's unobtrusive, and blocks trackers, cookies, and does not save any data about you. I've also used it as my default mobile browser for years, along with Firefox mobile, which you can add the AI Blocklist to (see again the GitHub page). I haven't tried the DuckDuckGo desktop browser yet, but I imagine it works just fine like the mobile version. I think DuckDuckGo's browser is also Chromium-based, at least indirectly. I use Firefox with the DuckDuckGo extension so I can have a widely-supported, non-Chromium browser, but include all of DuckDuckGo's anti-tracking features.

Note: DuckDuckGo has included AI in its browser product, however you can opt-out of all AI features with the built-in settings and they will not push it on you like Google does. I hope they remove AI features entirely in the future, but for now I am comfortable with the barriers in place to keep AI out of my face. Firefox also has AI features like Chrome does, which you can turn off with the built-in settings.

There's also noai.duckduckgo search, an alternative version of its normal search engine which removes AI-generated images and turns off AI results/assists by default. Even though DuckDuckGo's inclusion of any AI features annoys me, its policy to make these features 100% optional builds trust with this browser/extension/search engine.

You can always use Google search if you need to, but with uBlockOrigin and the AI Blocklist filter added on, at least you shouldn't have AI-altered search results or the AI overview anymore.

Other browsers exist, probably:

There are certainly more non-Chromium alternatives out there, but Firefox, Waterfox, and LibreWolf are the top three recommended to me. That link to alternatives, plus this ComputerCity page are the best lists I could find in a brief search. If you google "non-Chromium browsers" you'll get a lot of mixed results which require a bit of digging to realise they're not really recommending you what you looked for at all.

I've heard about Ecosia over the years, and while I like the idea of a search engine that plants a tree for each query, I don't think that's actually what happens — at least, that's what they used to be reputed to do, but I believe that's an unsustainable business model which has likely changed. In 2026, Ecosia says it uses 100% of its profits for the planet and runs its search engine off clean energy. That's cool! It's still Chromium-based. And it also uses generative AI for chat bots, so I don't trust its principles on environmentalism. I need to do more reading on this to form a stronger opinion about it.

I hope this post has helped at least some of you have a better experience browsing the web and googling your questions.

Every day tumblr users get closer and closer to saying you can only be trans in a god honouring way.

These screenshots are literally just white supremacist, right wing talking points about conformity to the status quo being more "transgressive" than people who actually transgress social norms. It's quite literally no different than Christians, MAGA, the right wing, etc. thinking they're the ones who are actually oppressed despite engaging with ideas, values, and presentations that have actually been the ruling class status quo for centuries. It's all taken from the same self victimization playbook.

"The America I loved still exists, if not in the White House or the Supreme Court or the Senate or the House of Representatives or the media. The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries."

Not dead, just haven’t had a good place to do calligraphy for a while.