*chewing noises*

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.

(Fair disclaimer: I lost close relatives to lung cancer and pneumonia worsened by long term smoking damage, so I was never going to like it. But I'm just talking about the aesthetic.)

The yellow cigarette butts everywhere, killing wildlife and making everything messy and ugly--it was the most common litter. The way nicotine coats furniture and windows in a sickly film. The stench of it, the way if you went to a nightclub Saturday night you would wash your hair three times Sunday morning and it would still stink from absorbed smoke. The way food tastes different/worse when the smell of people smoking fills the room. What it tastes like to kiss someone who has been smoking. Ash trays full of ash and butts. The way a smoker's perspiration smells funky, and then being on a bus or train on a hot day surrounded by people smelling like that.

It was all just really grim, and every now and then I am struck with how much cleaner and more pleasant it is to be in an outdoor mall or university campus or pub, places that used to be crammed with people smoking. God, even the relative lack of cigarette butts alone is miraculous.

Fascinating question. I really appreciate the implication that I'm not still learning to write.

The short answer is by reading and watching and overall consuming stories written by other people. The stories that move you are also the stories that inspire you, and inspiration is direction that helps you figure out what you want to pursue. When a story hits you with a moment that cuts right to your core, you might want to figure out why that moment hit you so hard, what parts of it worked, what parts of the rest of the story built up to it, how it's doing that. Possibly even more vitally, when a story is absolutely losing you, chase down what's broken about it and why that might be happening. Once you start seeing how stories are put together, it becomes a lot easier to build your own.

It's not enough just to read. Writing can't be done in a vacuum. You have to read what other people write in order to write your own works, but you have to also go out into the world and experience it in order to build worlds of your own. Writing is an act of creation, but it's also an act of consumption; you the writer are consuming the things that you've learned and experienced and turning them into something new. You can't do that on an empty stomach. Step zero of writing is touching grass.

Writing makes you hungry, and hunger gives you direction. If fantasy inspires you, that might give you the direction of researching folklore and mythology and the other pillars that inspired the great works in the fantasy genre. A love of battle anime might turn into a pursuit of martial arts. Mystery novels might lead you into forensics or psychology or anatomical study. The things you love reading about are connected to other things you'll probably love learning, and once you learn them they'll become foundational substrate in your mind from which your own stories can grow.

Sometimes the harder question isn't how to write, it's how to stop writing. Storytelling is a hard habit to break, arguably impossible. The majority of us do it mostly unconsciously or in times of stress - catastrophizing, fears, anxieties are us telling ourselves scary stories about worst case scenarios. What if the worst possible thing happened, or this nightmare played out; what if I fell here, what if this killed me, what if they hate me, what if they gave me reason to hate them, what if I woke up and a scary guy was there? Our minds concoct stories constantly and compulsively, usually unprompted. Learning to recognize this for what it is is a very useful first step in the pursuit of writing on purpose.

It's easy for these stories to compel us when we spin them, because we're our own captive audience. The hard part of writing is figuring out how to take that story out of our heads and get it into someone else's instead. This is where the craft of writing comes into play, and it's again best learned by reading. How do the stories you experience influence your thoughts and feelings? What methods of phrasing and framing do they use to comfort you, intrigue you, gutpunch you? What matters to the writer to communicate with specificity, and what are they leaving up to you, their audience? Why did the writer choose to do it like that? How would you do it?

Once the story is out of your brain and into a first draft, editing and constructive criticism become possible. Step one was "make it exist", steps two through forever are "make it good." You intend your story to impact in a certain way, but you won't know how well you've succeeded until you see how other people take it. Not all critiques are equally useful, so at this stage it's mostly good to find people whose perspectives you trust and value and listen to them. Once the story exists in its final form, disregard this step and stay out of your story's reviews. Those aren't criticism of your writing process, they're buyer testimonials for readers. They're not useful for you.

it's a shame how the audience of agott's constant aurafarming are just her two teachers-slash-parental figures, two best friends-slash-sisters, and her crush who has too many things on her mind to even consider romance

One of the only asexual activists is Yasmin Benoit, a Black woman. She has raised so much awareness for the community. She was the first asexual person to lead Pride in London, she started the #thisiswhatasexuallookslike movement and is THE leading voice for the community.

And you all will celebrate international asexuality day on April 6th but we wouldn't even have that if she hadn't cofounded it.

did an unnecessarily deep dive into the layout of the atelier for Art Reasons and thought i might as well draw it out if i ever need it again so . here is how the atelier works to the best of my understanding

hope it can help other people too 👍 adding some more stuff below for extra reference

Discovered last year I couldn’t look at my 2015 MacBook Air without it triggering nausea and migraines, and figured the screen died. Have been getting by on my phone, but concluded I really need a laptop again.

Saved up, realised I could afford a brand new MacBook Neo, and got one.

-And I couldn’t spend more than five minutes looking at the screen without massive eye strain, nausea, vertigo, and if I pushed it, I-need-to-lie-down-in-a-dark-room-for-hours migraines.

Looking up MacBook and Eyestrain explained what is going on. The liquid retina displays that Apple currently has uses Pulse Width Modulation or PWM. In order to give the screens a deeper depth of colour and contrast, PWM flickers between several hundred to thousand times a second.

And there is currently no way to turn it off. There are settings and apps to reduce it, but there is no way to stop the screen from flickering. Checked Apple forums, called Apple Support, and the time I could look at the screen kept shrinking. Got the laptop Tuesday, returned it Friday, today is Sunday and I’m still dealing with a vertigo migraine.

For MacBooks, it seems to vary on the computer model and the software it uses. In retrospect, the issue with my MacBook Air started after a major software update.

And it’s not just an Apple thing. Current Windows and Android screens do the same thing. There’s even a Reddit for people who are sensitive to PWM flickers to help find computers and screens that won’t trigger eyestrain and headaches.

So, yeah. This week has been a learning experience. But for those who are prone to headaches and migraines, this may be something to be aware of, cause I was not.