You Banbury Cheese!

Bucky: hey, steve babe, ur umm, ur gonna be keeping that outfit right?

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.

Take a moment and ask yourself, a project like this requires a lot of time, money and dedication of resources, why would scientists dedicate that time to something that could just be done by a tree?

The answer is they wouldn't. So that means this claim requires further investigation!

This project is called LIQUID 3, and it's not meant for cities with wide open spaces, it's meant for cities like Belgrade in Serbia. These cities are densely populated and heavily polluted, to the point where pollution actually chokes out current trees and makes creating green spaces difficult.

Liquid 3 was a PhD scientists answer to these problems. The microalgae tank is intended for spaces where you either:

Don't have enough space to plant full trees, or

Don't have enough time to plant trees and wait for them to grow up.

The tank is extremely efficient when you consider the amount of space needed compared to the amount of CO2 turned into oxygen. The tank can operate throughout the winter. And most importantly, it can be quickly set up in areas that desperately need relief from air pollution NOW not in 10 years when trees are done growing. Children currently suffocating on polluted air can't wait for trees to grow, they need to be taken care of now, and Liquid 3 is one of the ways to take care of them. Depending on the species of microalgea used, a number have shown a pretty amazing capacity to pull heavy metals out of the air which is something trees can get choked up by.

The tanks aren't just tanks either! Liquid 3 have solar panels placed on top, they have lighting and mobile phone charging, and they work as public benches. The designers of it want to encourage green spaces where there's room, but where there isn't room or time, Liquid 3 can step in. Realistically, this isn't a replacement for trees. It's replacing boring metal city benches with new, cooler benches that also clean the air (and have at least some heating during the winter).

Not only that, but the microalgea that grows is native to Serbia and all that microalgea has a ton of great uses! It makes for great fertilizer, compost, wastewater treatment, cleaner biofuels and even for helping create new tanks for further air purification. They only require a quick algae divide once a month, and the produced algae can be carted off to where ever it's needed. This makes them effective solutions for areas that can't sustain complex installations.

✦ "Never tell the full truth. But never tell a full lie either. That's the art."

✦ "I've worn so many faces I sometimes forget which one is mine."

✦ "You're good. You almost had me. Almost."

✦ "Trust is a tool. Use it carefully and never let anyone use it on you."

✦ "The plan changed three times before breakfast. Keep up."

✦ "I've conned kings and criminals. You're somehow harder to read than both."

✦ "Don't get attached to the role. The role ends. You have to keep living."

✦ "Everyone has a tell. Yours is that you breathe differently when you lie."

✦ "I wasn't supposed to feel guilty. That's new for me and deeply inconvenient."

✦ "We got in fine. Getting out is the part that always costs something."

✦ "You trusted me knowing what I am. That's either brave or foolish."

✦ "I lied about everything except one thing. Figure out which one."

v "The best cons make the mark feel like they won. Remember that."

✦ "I've stolen a lot of things. You're the first thing I wanted to keep."

Like. I’ve always sorta understood that things grow moldy or stale or sour or such if left out, but I never really internalized it in a meaningful way.

But now I’m just like.

Yeah. The hungering dust. There exists omnivorous dust in the air that will eat my food if I don’t.

Those bagels have been sitting there for a week. Are we going to eat them soon or are we leaving them for the hungering dust?

Pizza’s been sitting out on the counter for an hour. Everyone’s enjoying the pizza, but if we don’t want “everyone” to include the hungering dust then we should probably put it away soon.

That’s just. That’s how food works to me now. There exists an invisible predator in the air that hungers for your yummies, and it will not hesitate to eat your food if you don’t make the effort to protect and preserve it. And eat what can’t be preserved before the dust can.

“go bad”, it just gets eaten

by something else first

"Why do you ship Steve and Bucky? They're friends!" "You can't ship Stucky. They're friends."

I know this might be completely shocking to some people, but in a healthy relationship, people who are together usually like each other. I know. Absolutely shocking.

People who are in a relationship can consider their partner their friend. Just because they started having romantic feelings for each other and having sex didn't mean the entire friendship suddenly vanished.

Just because Bucky and Steve are best friends only makes their relationship better.

Just because they go to a baseball game together doesn't mean they can't have sex later. Just because they go on a date together doesn't mean Bucky can't mock Steve for almost puking on his shoes on the carousel once. Just because they love each other and want to spend the rest of their lives together doesn't mean they can't call each other idiots like they're five years old again. Why do some people think those are mutually exclusive...?

And then there's the famous one: "Steve and Bucky are friends, so I see them as siblings. They can't be lovers."

Inspired by my recent love of the Raven Thrower (it looks like a corvid that you chuck at things!)

Also obligatory reminder that it’s the final week on my Bluminarmour fundraiser. If you want to see me test dumb stuff in proper historical armour please consider pitching in and/or sharing!