Pit

You're being targeted by one of the cleverest scams going right now, and the reason it works is uncomfortable: the email genuinely came from PayPal.

The trick is in the subject line, not the email

When most people think "phishing email," they picture sketchy senders, broken English, and links to weird domains. This scam is the opposite. The email passes every authenticity check — SPF, DKIM, DMARC, all green. It comes from PayPal's actual mail servers. The fonts are right. The footer is right. The unsubscribe link works. If you forwarded it to a security expert and asked "is this really from PayPal?" they'd have to say yes.

So how is it a scam?

Scammers have figured out that PayPal lets anyone send small amounts of money to anyone else, and that PayPal will dutifully email the recipient a notification. The scammer sends you a payout of, say, one Hungarian forint — about a quarter of a cent. PayPal's system then automatically generates and sends you a real, legitimate, fully-authenticated email confirming the transaction.

Here's the catch: the email's subject line is whatever the scammer typed when they set up the payout. PayPal doesn't sanitize it. So they write something terrifying like "Pending charge of USD 987.90 — call this number with questions" and PayPal's servers cheerfully deliver that subject line straight to your inbox, wrapped in a perfectly legitimate-looking notification.

I have a life-limiting disease that will kiIl me if I am not medicated. I had a suspicious mass removed along with my entire thyroid last May, and I would like to keep living. I have severe hypothyroidism that will lead to myxedema coma, (and eventually death) if I am not medicated, and a heart deformation caused by type II diabetes

I want to keep making art for as long as I am alive, and I need continuous medication for the rest of my life to do so. (Levothyroxine, Calcium & B-complex and metformin-sitaglipin). Please consider buying my prints! ❤️‍🩹 thank you very much.

And I have a 400+ exclusive and early access archive of art on my patreon for only 1 usd a month. I add more every month!

And if you'd like to submit a tip so I can keep making art for myself and my audience, id love it too!

Oh, a human being is seeking a social response? Human being, the social animal wired to make and track social connection? A human desires the vital blood that permitted their species to survive for millennia? The human being who was born completely helpless and primed in every way by nature to seek attention and help from their community?

Above: two different species of fairy bee

Bees of the genus Perdita, also known as fairy bees, are some of the smallest bees in the world. Their tiny bodies can measure as little as 1.6mm long, which is smaller than the eyes of many bumblebees and carpenter bees.

Above: a fairy bee depicted next to a carpenter bee (genus Xylocopa)

The smallest species in this genus is the mini fairy bee, Perdita minima, which is so small that it's often mistaken for an ant.

Above: Perdita minima standing next to a quarter

As this book explains:

With almost 640 species, most restricted to the southwestern USA and adjacent parts of Mexico, this genus forms a species swarm of mostly very small ground-nesting bees. One of its species, the aptly named Perdita minima, shares the record for being the smallest bee in the world at just 1/16th of an inch (1.6 millimeters) in length. Unsurprisingly, it favors similarly tiny flowers, such as those of the whitemargin sandmat (Chamaesyce albomarginata).

Above: close-ups of Perdita perpallida and Perdita heliotropii

Fairy bees are solitary, meaning that they don't form colonies or live together in hives. Each female builds her own nest by creating a small tunnel in the ground and then stocking it with pollen.

Above: a fairy bee standing on a dime and another one standing on a quarter

This article describes the nesting process in greater detail:

Fairy Bees are “mining” bees, referring to the fact that they are ground nesting bees. The females excavate tunnels in the ground somewhere within a short distance of a food source. They then visit flowers, feeding on nectar and collecting pollen on specialized hairs on their legs known as “scopae.”

The females then deliver these pollen bundles to their subterranean nests as a food source for their larva. The larva hatch, consume the pollen bundle, develop through metamorphosis into adult bees and the cycle continues.

Above: Perdita minima on the antenna of a carpenter bee

Most fairy bees are specialist foragers with very short tongues, so they prefer shallow flowers. They typically fly during the summer and autumn, timing their emergence to coincide with their favorite host plant.

Above: Perdita leotola

Sources & More Info:

Minnesota Native Bees: Fairy Bees

Bees of the World: Genus Perdita

Honey Bee Suite: Perdita minima, the Smallest of the Small (PDF)

Field Guide to the Common Bees of California: Genus Perdita

Local News Pasadena: Photographing a Nearly Microscopic Bee You've Probably Never Noticed

iNaturalist: Fairy Bees

so don't get too comfortable.

When looking through recent autism research, I found this very interesting and useful article

It says that research into the sensory aspects of autism has been hamstrung by a basic ambiguity in terminology. Research has used "sensory sensitivity" interchangeably to refer to multiple different things:

how stimuli feel to the person

how the person reacts

activity in the brain caused by the stimuli

Many research articles on autistic sensory issues use the word reactivity to describe sensory sensitivities. "Reactivity" refers to behavior, how an autistic person outwardly responds to sensory stimuli.

Applied Behavior Analysis (or ABA), the main "therapy" used to "treat" autistic children, originates from behaviorism, a school of thought in psychology which holds that thoughts, feelings, and internal experiences can't be objectively measured, therefore studying them is not science. Only behavior can be studied scientifically.

As a therapeutic practice, ABA works by using operant conditioning techniques on autistic people to increase "desired" behaviors and decrease "undesired" behaviors. Change in behaviors being exhibited= treatment. That's behaviorism.

I am conscious of a certain horror in behaviorism. Imagine that someone is screaming in pain. The pain is an internal, subjective experience; the screaming is a behavior.

Now, look again at my three bullet-points describing the terminology problem in autism research. "How stimuli feel" is the pain. "How the person reacts" is the screaming. Researchers have been using the same words to refer to both pain and screaming.

This potentially can cause multiple types of erroneous assumptions:

By stopping the screaming, you are stopping the pain.

If someone is not screaming, they are not in pain.

The screaming is the problem. There is no such thing as pain.

In my (autistic) opinion, autism is fundamentally a disability or difference of internal experience. Autism research has an enduring problem with the concept of internal experience. Autism is described as a collection of "wrong" behaviors, which I guess is useful enough for identifying autistic people, maybe, but it contains no insight. I believe that autistic behaviors are linked to autistic experiences.

I also believe that non-autistic behaviors are linked to non-autistic experiences. I cannot experience what it is like to be non-autistic, but I can observe non-autistic people being relatively unresponsive to stimuli and the world around them, and withstanding overwhelming environments without severe consequences. I observe their genuine, non-malicious confusion at my daily pain, exhaustion, fear, and stress, and at my needs and behaviors. I think that non-autistic behavior makes sense within the experience of being non-autistic.

So imagine that you get home after a long day and your roommate is throwing an extremely loud, raucous party. There are at least 50 people crammed into your apartment, engaged in loud, drunken karaoke and doing lines of coke off of your bathroom sink. You go upstairs and lock yourself up in your bedroom, and no one bothers you but you can still hear the noise downstairs.

In this scenario, your roommate has everything perfectly cleaned up and pristine by morning, and you are not opposed in principle to karaoke or cocaine or 80's pop hits or having 50 people over. BUT, it would still be viewed as an EXTREMELY reasonable boundary to set with your roommate to say "hey, please let me know ahead of time when you're planning on throwing a wild party at our house."

That's intolerance of uncertainty.

Because for an autistic person, a trip to Walmart or an appointment or going to a seemingly benign new place might be similar in intensity to a non-autistic person's experience of coming home to find 50 people singing extremely loud karaoke in their house.

Non-autistic people get extremely stressed from surprising changes and lack of control in their environment too, it just happens at higher intensities.

The art of mindless embroidery.