Here to write Stony, and chew gum

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.

how do you distinguish grey from other colours beyond black and wite?

Distinguishing features of moral beige:

The protagonist is constantly agonising over Hard Choices; however, circumstances always conspire to prevent them from actually having to make those choices, so in practice they're just angsting over stuff they might have done.

The text exhibits a recurring pattern whereby the protagonist seems to to have made a Hard Choice, but new information is reliably revealed shortly thereafter which retroactively establishes that whatever they did was the morally upright course after all.

The protagonist's moral impulses are straightforwardly heroic, except in one specific context which lacks any clear real-world analogue; for example, being prejudiced against telepaths.

The protagonist's actions are consistently reasonable based on the information available to them – they're merely operating on bad information basically all the time due to a bizarre conspiracy and/or a series of increasingly implausible misunderstandings.

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Write it badly or it'll never be written

Sure, it's the “simple”, “surface-level” things that people tend to think of, like

In your culture, how many meals a day are you generally expected to eat, and when are you expected to eat them?

In your culture, which clothes are considered “formal”, and when would you wear such clothes?

But it's also so much more:

If you were dating someone, at what point in the relationship would you be expected to introduce them to your parents? That's culture!

How much respect is given to artists? Are people like poets or musicians revered as an integral part of society, or is the predominant attitude “get a real job”? That's culture!

How much value is given to education? What's considered more socially embarrassing - academic failure, or academic achievement? What's the intellectual landscape? Do people tend to respect experts, or denigrate them as “elitists”? That's culture!

Which things are generally considered to be “high culture” or “low culture”? Which kinds of media and art are considered “for the masses” versus “for the elites”? That's culture!

How are politicians treated? Do people tend to respect them as their “betters”, their “leaders”? Or are they assumed to be lying, conniving, corrupt, the worst of society? What kind of thing would end a politician's career? That's culture!

What's considered more egregious behaviour - bothering other people, or asking someone to stop bothering other people? That's culture!

If you were attending a job interview, how would you want to come across? How would you be expected to dress and behave? Would it be better to come across as very bold and confident, or humble and subservient? That's culture!

If you found yourself in a tricky situation - say, broken down at the side of the road - would you confidently expect strangers to come and help you? Or would it seem really weird for some random person to come and involve themselves in your situation? That's culture!

How are you expected to communicate? Is it seen as rude to be very blunt and straightforward, or is it considered rude to beat around the bush and make allusions and try to soften what you're saying rather than quickly getting to the point? That's culture!

I could go on (boy could I go on). This is so not meant to be all-inclusive; this is just a tiny sample of the things that make up “culture”.

To put it bluntly, a lot of the time the word “culture” seems to be used to mean, essentially, “the things that make people of colour different from white people”. Oh, this guy eats this different kind of food; that's culture. This lady wears these clothes to a wedding; that's culture. But we white people, we don't have “culture”; we just do what's normal. But it's all culture! Everything! All of it! And culture isn't just the result of where in the world you come from - class, occupation, rural/urban location, minority status, political affiliation, all these things and more can result in cultural differences even within a small area. Multiple cultures often co-exist, blend, overlap, and borrow from one another within the same place, which is especially noticeable in places with legacies of migration. People bring different cultures from around the world, and these interact with the dominant culture in all sorts of interesting ways. But a culture being dominant doesn't mean that it ceases to be a culture.

so like... what is time?

how close do you stand when you're talking one-on-one with someone? what about when you're talking in a group?

what range of volume is normal for a calm conversation?

what do colors mean? what is an appropriate color to wear to a wedding or a funeral? what's an inappropriate color? what is the color of passion? how about rebellion? purity? holiness? happiness? how many colors even have specific meanings in the first place?

things going from one person to another. gifts, payments, favors, you name it.

a great many cultures have incest taboos - but what is incest in the first place?

pop quiz! think of the grass, the sky, and the ocean. okay. what color or colors are they? are they all different colors, all the same color, or are two of them the same color and one of them a different color? (that comes from language, actually, but language is part of culture!)

are things different? are all things the same things?

when talking about not your worldview but your actions specifically, is your culture defined by where you come from, or by where you are? what should your culture be defined by?

do you tend to think of numbers in base ten, or base twelve, or something else? how many specific numbers do you have? are all of your number-words unique, or can you put them together to mean other specific numbers?

if you have a mug that is yours (either one that you've had for a while or that you just bought, it doesn't matter) and you take that mug and you give that mug to someone else with the intention that now the mug belongs to them, what does that mean?

FIRST:

The easiest way to get rid of the majority of the bullshit that Windows is forcing on us, as of October 2025, is this one-stop-one-click debloat solution from a modern day hero:

It's very easy, even if you're not tech savvy or get scared of pop up windows saying "ARE YOU SURE?" Yes, you are sure, I promise. This program takes maybe two minutes and will save you SO MUCH pain, time, and money (and exploitation).

Now that you've done that, here's the cleanup, to catch the little shit that the debloat might have missed (most of this will already be done by debloat, but hey, it's good to double check).

Even just reading about some of these features makes me angry. Fucking Copilot and "Discover" AI scrapers are in Notepad. NOTEPAD. And then there's this uncanny valley garbage:

No uncanny valley video calls for me, thanks! (Also, what else is it doing while it scans your face and listens to your calls? What else, microsoft? Because there was a lot of memory being assigned to this program for a simple "smooths your skin" add on).

The truly insane number of places they have stuck ads on your own home computer is sickening. Become Unmarketable.

Bonus:

Some background programs you probably don't need that are taking up space and how to remove them (Microsoft forums, 2024)

Your Samsung Galaxy Phone comes with 22 apps you don't need (Android Police, 2025)

Level 1: browser extensions

This one is basically impossible to get wrong, or at least to get wrong badly enough that it causes any problems.

Get Firefox, or a Firefox fork like Waterfox. If you use a fork, make sure it's one that will let you use add-ons. On a PC, pretty much any Firefox fork will take add-ons, but on mobile devices, many don't. Iceraven is one that does.

Get the add-ons uBlock Origin, YouTube Sponsorblock (if you use YouTube), and FBCleaner (if you use Facebook).

uBlock Origin comes with a built-in list of filters to block ads and trackers, but you can add your own filters to block any specific element of a website you don't like. You know those goddamn floating frames on fandom.com sites that block half the screen? Now you can zap 'em.

Sponsorblock uses crowdsourced timestamps to automatically skip sponsor spots and self-promotion in YouTube videos. Never listen to anyone say "hit like and subscribe" or "Raid Shadow Legends" again.

FBCleaner hides all content from your feed except posts from people, groups, and pages you've actually chosen to follow.

Level 2: leaving enshittified services

The software that's become standard over the years in a lot of fields is steadily selling more of your data, showing you more ads, and pushing you to buy more expensive subscriptions. Time to tell them to get fucked.

Dump Adobe apps for Affinity or Krita. Drop Microsoft for LibreOffice. Change your default search engine from Google to DuckDuckGo or Qwant. Use OpenStreetMaps instead of Google or Apple Maps.

Level 3: network-level DNS fuckery

DNS, or Domain Name Service, is the thing that tells your computer where www.website.com is actually located. By hacking your network's DNS you can force it to tell your devices that ad-hosting domains don't exist at all. Some of the steps on this one can get pretty technical, but because you're doing all the difficult stuff on a dedicated device, you can't really fuck up anything that seriously.

Get yourself a Raspberry Pi (a cheap older one like a model 3B will work just fine for this purpose), and follow a guide like this one to get it set up running AdGuard Home. AdGuard, like uBlock, has built-in filter lists, but you can also add your own if there are specific domains you want to block.

Once it's up and running, you'll need to change the DNS settings on your router to point to your AdGuard service. This is different for every router but will always start with logging into the admin panel with a password printed on a little sticker somewhere on the router.

With that done, every time a device on your home network looks for ads.website.com, it'll get back a message that says "sorry, can't find it", so it won't be able to load any ads.

Level 4: Android-specific DNS fuckery

Because AdGuard runs on your home network, it can't block ads on your phone when you're away from home - and what's worse, your phone will sometimes remember the addresses it got when you were out and about, and ads will get past your AdGuard wall even when you're home.

To avoid this, get AdAway for DNS-based ad-blocking directly on your phone. The easy, but less seamless, way of using AdAway is the "local VPN mode", which doesn't require you to do any mucking about with your phone's operating system.

Level 5: automated media piracy

The best way to stop seeing ads on all your streaming services is to stop using streaming services. There are loads of ways to do this, but the best ones involve setting up what's called an "arr stack" (Google that for setup guides) along with nzbget and a usenet account. Most of the time you'll want to set this stuff up on a dedicated device - an old laptop gathering dust in the closet is a great option, or you can grab something used from a charity shop or a local electronics recycler.

The great thing about usenet is that unlike with torrents, you don't have to do any sharing from your computer, so you're in a lot less legal jeopardy - legally speaking, distributing pirated content is waaayyy more serious than accessing it. I pay about £3 a month for a secure, high-bandwidth usenet service.

Once you start getting your own collection of media on your own computer, use the open-source media library manager Jellyfin to browse and play things from basically any device.

Oh, and don't be a dick. Pirate all you want from big corporations, but please pay independent small-time creators for their work.

Level 6: fucking with Android

Android phones are a lot more locked-down than they used to be, but depending on the device you own you can still do a lot of messing around under the hood. Note that if you get something wrong while doing this, there is always the possibility that it will turn your device into a paperweight.

Before you buy a device, check where it sits on the Bootloader Unlock Wall of Shame. Once you've bought it, check the xda-developer forums for guides on how to unlock it and "root" it (gain admin access) with Magisk.

Once Magisk is installed, you can add modules to do all sorts of cool stuff, including using AdAway in "root mode" which makes it basically invisible.

You can also install YouTube ReVanced, which will do all the ad- and sponsor blocking stuff we took care of in your Windows browser a few paragraphs ago. Be careful: there are a lot of fake sites out there pretending they're associated with the ReVanced project which might be injecting malware into their downloads. This Reddit post has the official instructions and links.

Also, try out the modded version of Facebook from APKmoddone, which will block most of the same shit as the FBcleaner add-on from earlier. There's always a possibility that modified apps like this are doing something dodgy, but I've never had any issues with this one personally.

Level 7: fucking with Windows

This one is scary because it can seriously fuck up your shit if something goes wrong, but some really cool people have actually made it very simple to strip all the bloat, ads, and spyware out of Windows. The tool I use is ReviOS. Start reading at https://www.revi.cc/docs. Basically, you'll need to download a tool called AME Wizard and the ReviOS "playbook" that tells AME what to do. Read the documentation before you do any of this.

Level 8: switching to Linux

I'm not going to pretend this is an option for everyone. Half the software I use on a weekly basis isn't available on Linux. But if you can switch? Do it. These days, Ubuntu - one of the most popular flavours of Linux - is built with people switching from Windows in mind, and a lot of things will be pretty intuitive. It also has great documentation and a huge community you can go to for help if you're confused about stuff.

(a worldbuilding roast. with love.)

So. You’re building a fantasy world, and you’ve just invented: → Three types of ceremonial jewelry → A spice that tastes like cinnamon if it were bitter and cursed → A holiday where everyone wears gold and screams at dawn

Cute. But that’s not culture. That’s aesthetics.

And if your worldbuilding is all outfits, dances, and spice blends with vaguely mystical names, your story’s probably going to feel like a cosplay convention held inside a Pinterest board.

Here’s how to fix that—aka: how to build a real, functioning culture that shapes your story, not just its vibes.

─────── ✦ ───────

🔗 Culture Is Built on Power, Not Just Style

Ask yourself: → Who’s in charge, and why? → Who has land? Who doesn’t? → What’s considered taboo, sacred, or punishable by death?

Culture is shaped by who gets to make the rules and who gets crushed by them. That’s where things like religion, family structure, class divisions, gender roles, and social expectations actually come from.

Start there. Not at the embroidery.

─────── ✦ ───────

2.🪓 Culture Comes From Conflict

Did this society evolve peacefully? Was it colonized? Did it colonize? Was it rebuilt after a war? Is it still in one?

→ What was destroyed and mythologized? → What do the survivors still whisper about? → What do children get taught in school that’s… suspiciously sanitized?

No culture is neutral. Every tradition has a history, and that history should taste like blood, loss, or propaganda.

─────── ✦ ───────

3.🧠 Belief Systems > Customs Lists

Sure, rituals and holidays are cool. But what do people believe about: → Death? → Love? → Time? → The natural world? → Justice?

Example: A society that believes time is cyclical vs. one that sees time as linear will approach everything—from prison sentences to grief—completely differently.

You don’t need to invent 80 gods. You need to know what those gods mean to the people who pray to them.

─────── ✦ ───────

4.🫀 Culture Controls Behavior (Quietly)

Culture shows up in: → What people apologize for → What insults cut deepest → What people are embarrassed about → What’s praised publicly vs. what’s hidden privately

For instance: → A culture obsessed with stoicism won’t say “I love you.” They’ll say “Have you eaten?” → A culture built on legacy might prioritize ancestor veneration, archival writing, name inheritance.

This stuff? Way more immersive than giving everyone matching earrings.

─────── ✦ ───────

5. 🏠 Culture = Daily Life, Not Just Festivals

Sure, your MC might attend a funeral where people paint their faces blue. But what about: → Breakfast routines? → How people greet each other on the street? → Who cooks, and who eats first? → What’s considered “clean” or “proper”? → How is parenting handled? Divorce?

Culture is what happens between plot points. It should shape your character’s assumptions, language, fears, and habits—whether or not a festival is going on.

─────── ✦ ───────

6. 💬 Let Your Characters Disagree With Their Own Culture

A culture isn’t a monolith.

Even in deeply traditional societies, people: → Rebel → Question → Break rules → Misinterpret laws → Mock sacred things → Act hypocritically → Weaponize or resist what’s expected

Let your characters wrestle with the culture around them. That’s where realism (and tension) lives.

─────── ✦ ───────

7.🧼 Beware the “Pretty = Good” Trap

Worldbuilding gets boring fast when: → The protagonist’s homeland is beautiful and pure → The enemy’s culture is dark and “barbaric” → Every detail just reinforces who the reader should like

You can—and should—challenge the aesthetic hierarchy. → Let ugly things be beloved. → Let beautiful things be corrupt. → Let your MC romanticize their culture and then get disillusioned by it later.

─────── ✦ ───────

📍 TL;DR (but like, spicy): → Culture is not food and jewelry. → Culture is power, fear, memory, contradiction. → Stop inventing spices until you know who starved last winter. → Let your world feel lived in, not curated.

The best cultural worldbuilding doesn’t look like a list. It feels like a system. A pressure. A presence your characters can’t escape—even if they try.

Now go. Build something real. (You can add spices later.)

—rin t. // writing advice for worldbuilders with rage and range // thewriteadviceforwriters

Sometimes the problem isn’t your plot. It’s your first 5 pages. Fix it here → 🖤 Free eBook: 5 Opening Pages Mistakes to Stop Making:

🕯️ download the pack & write something cursed:

The best way to avoid internalizing conspiracy theories is to improve your critical thinking and research skills, and to research them from a critical or academic perspective and to learn real history and science. Avoiding "bad" fiction is neither a good nor realistic plan, given that tropes associated with conspiracy theories are found in probably the majority of science fiction and fantasy, and frequently pop up in other forms of fiction as well.

(Avoiding "bad" fiction is the puritan/reactionary's answer to social problems, and it has never fixed a single thing because it's about giving in to a gut reaction telling you to avoid confronting the problem instead of carefully analyzing it to find the actual best solution.)

Here are some resources:

Information Literacy Basics

Critical Thinking Skills: Definitions, Examples, and How to Improve Them

11 Characteristics of Pseudoscience

Six Ways To Debunk Any Conspiracy Theory

Miniminuteman

ESOTERICA

Angela's Symposium

BS-Free Witchcraft

Digital Hammurabi

Misquoting Jesus with Bart Ehrman podcast

It's Probably (not!) Aliens (this is the YouTube page for the podcast, but if you search for it you can find it on other platforms)

Behind The Bastards

Tales of Times Forgotten (you can search the blog for topical words like Atlantis, aliens, antisemitism, conspiracy theory, witch, or whatever)

Jason Colavito's blog (again, you can search for topics)

Conspirituality Podcast

“You can, you should, and if you’re brave enough to start, you will.” — Stephen King

“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” — Louis L’Amour

“Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very.’ Your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.” — Mark Twain

“Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.” — Anton Chekhov

“A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” — Richard Bach

“You fail only if you stop writing.” — Ray Bradbury

“I hate writing, I love having written.” — Dorothy Parker

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.” — Robert Frost

“The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” — Albert Camus

“Write what should not be forgotten.” — Isabel Allende

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” — Ernest Hemingway

“Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about. It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.” — Kurt Vonnegut

“The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.” — Gustave Flaubert

“I’m not a very good writer, but I’m an excellent rewriter.” — James Michener

“Write what you know. Write what you want to know more about. Write what makes you feel. Write because you have to. Write because you want to. Just write.” — Cecelia Ahern

I just read a book by one of my favorite authors whose plots are essentially airtight, but the MC was walking on a country road on a cold winter night and she was knocked down and fell into a drainage ditch covered in ice, broke through and got covered in icy mud and water.

Then she had a “miserable” 3 more miles to walk to the inn.

I'm going to try it.

Do you want to put the reader right in the moment? Or do you need some reflection and distance? Does a scene need to be shared with the reader in real time? Or can it be narrative summary instead?

And yes, watch out for passives and filter words and stage directions, 3 of the 4 banes of my existence (the other is repetition). Pay attention, as you edit, to when you’re using them, and why. Sometimes “I loved him” is a gut punch statement that is better than 3 sentences of showing that sentiment.

It depends, it depends, it depends.

Let’s start with an before and after example:

BEFORE: She had just started eating her lunch when there was a knocking at her front door. ‘Who could that be?’ she thought. She had told her neighbor to leave her alone about the stupid neighborhood watch. She wondered if the woman would ever let it drop. The knock sounded again, so she put her silverware down and stood up, then walked across the livingroom to the front door. When she opened it, she saw her neighbor standing there holding a clipboard.

AFTER: She had just started eating lunch when someone knocked at her front door. Who could that be? She’d told her neighbor to leave her alone about the stupid neighborhood watch. Would that woman never let it drop? The knock repeated, louder, driving her from her lunch and to the front door. When she yanked it open, she gripped the doorknob so hard her knuckles hurt. It was her neighbor. And she’d brought her clipboard.

So okay. I did a few things there. But I’ll call out the ones specifically mentioned above.

Stage direction

If you are describing a character moving around in your story, and it has no point, then that’s stage direction. In screenwriting this is called “shoe leather”, because you’re basically telling the actor to walk around the stage.

The sentence “she put her silverware down and stood up, then walked across the livingroom to the front door” is all stage direction that serves no purpose. It doesn’t convey mood, develop character, further plot, affect pacing, or add tension. She didn’t “march across the room” or “throw down her silverware” suggesting she was angry. It was boring, really. I got rid of it entirely, saying “driving her from her lunch and to the front door”.

In your writing, look for words like walked, sat, moved, got up, sat down, crossed the room etc. Search online for: “list of stage direction words” to see them all.

Filter words

Filter words are a block between what the character is feeling and the reader’s experience of it. They filter out the intensity of the experience. “She wondered if the woman would ever let it drop?” is less intense than “would the woman ever let it drop?” You don’t need to say she wondered about it. Just make her wonder it. You don’t need to say that “when she opened it, she saw her neighbor”, when you can say “It was her neighbor. And she’d brought her clipboard”. You’re seeing it with her.

In your writing look for words like thought, saw, felt, heard, seemed, knew. Again, I’d search on “list of filter words” to see them all.

Passives

Passives are something that should be called passive sentences. (Which is a passive sentence.)

There are whole books about the passive tense. It’s a nuanced subject. But basically — If you aren’t saying WHO or WHAT is doing a thing, and instead only saying that THE THING IS/WAS/SHOULD BE DONE, you’re using the passive voice. News outlets love passives when they don’t want to point fingers. “200 people were killed” is a lot less damning than “Mr. Evil Villain killed 200 people.” The passive voice can weaken the impact of your story. It can add distance to what you’re saying. “There was a knocking at the door” is needlessly passive, when I could have written “someone knocked at the door”. The word ‘someone’ is still an actor of some sort, though we don’t (yet) know who they are.

Words like be/are/was/were and there is/there was are often signs of passive voice.

One Last Bit Of Useful Advice

DON’T WORRY ABOUT ANY OF THIS STUFF IN YOUR FIRST DRAFT

DON’T WORRY ABOUT ANY OF THIS STUFF IN YOUR SECOND DRAFT EITHER

Looking for filter words, passive, stage direction, repetition, weak verbs and adverbs, etc. is, like, in the LAST round of editing. It’s the icing on the cake. Don’t do it when you’re still telling yourself the story, or figuring out which pages you want to delete.

Anyway.

in comparison, programs such as qbittorrent and transmission are entirely free and open source and ad free. the great thing about being open source is you yourself (or other people who know more about security) can check the safety of the code, vulnerabilities get patched quickly, and if some bullshit does happen you can always compile it without the bullshit yourself. just make sure youre getting it from official sources, no doubt theres probably 1 or 2 fake sites with modified versions thanks to it being open source

there is literally 0 reason to use utorrent in 20fucking23, theres better options