Doodles and Thoughts

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.

If YOU use any RPG Maker engines or are considering using one, YOU should let them know that we don't want decades of RPG Maker support and history taken down. Especially when the intention seems to be discouraging people from using older versions. I personally still use RPG Maker MV because privately made MZ plugins are often made with AI, and the more recent RPG Maker versions they've released are Unity plugins and not their own seperate program, and I'm not interested in Unity at all.

Let them know you want an archive here:

And contact the admins on the new forum:

There are still people working on archiving it privately, and someone else has offered their own forum as a new hub (because not many people like the new forum site that GGG has set up, and neither do I). Decent's site if anyone's interested: https://forum.electricairship.com/

Drop by for the shenanigans, stay for the laughs as I stumble about all willy nilly in which ever video game I decided to explore!

Stream sessions Monday, Wednesday and Friday, 8:30pm EST.

Like sorry should everyone have been shitting on her for getting tricked? Should they have escaped Mabel-land and Dipper just started yelling at her. After Stan got his memories back should she just have been shat on? Should more of the finale been given to Mabel feeling bad she caused it?

You want the entire finale to be restructured so there's less focus on the eldritch god threatening the end of the world and more focus on the 13 year old learning her lesson like this is an episode of Sesame Street.

but it's an entirely new level of tragic when somebody you've actually spoken to gets turned into a bot account. it's like peeking at a zombie apocalypse through the window and realizing one of the shambling corpses was your friend.

and then the zombie catches sight of you, lurches up to your window, and shouts through the glass that they accidentally reported your account to tumblr and you'll be deactivated unless you click this link.

if you get something like this ↑ they're gonna follow up by instructing you to contact tumblr support on discord and give you contact info; or they're gonna link a website that looks sort of like tumblr support and say you have to email them; or any variety of "you must now contact tumblr, here is how you contact tumblr."

whatever they send you, it Does Not lead to tumblr. it leads to the master zombie that bit them and inducted them into the ranks of the undead, and will bite you the second they have your email and password. i might be confusing zombies and vampires. anyway,

it's easier to fall for these messages because the blog doesn't LOOK like a bot blog, because it ISN'T a bot blog. it's a normal person's blog that got accessed by a bot, meaning the blog's content CLEARLY looks like a real active user when you click on it. and yes—it might even be a blog you already know. sometimes bots like this go down a blog's DMs or reblogs and message people they've previously interacted with.