Artist By Yue

mentally taking a drag of my mental cigarette because I don’t smoke but life has been very smokable lately

Not “Only my reading of canon is correct” or “Interpretations are subjective and all valid” but a secret third thing, “More than one interpretation can be valid but there’s a reason your English teacher had you cite quotes and examples in your papers, you have to have a strong argument that your interpretation is actually supported by the text or it is just wrong and I’m fine with telling you it’s wrong, actually.”

If the text says the curtains are blue you can argue about what that means; but if you’re going to claim they’re actually yellow you’d better have a really good argument.

Sometimes I’m reminded that in universe Chilchuck is an actually influential figure who like. Made huge advancements for his people and community. Like as in gave them rights and protections. And who is widely known by half-foots because of that. Like. He’s not just some guy.

Idk For some reason that just makes his role in canon really funny to me. Like this older, extremely important and accomplished figure is just willingly putting himself thru it for the sake of this random autistic 26 year old.

imagine you get eaten by a dragon and the peo-le coming to rescue you are your brother, your lesbian lover, cesar chavez, and bear grylls

can you take my white ass to funkytown

absolutely no one is thinking this

I humbly suggest that true crime freaks should get into learning about scammers instead of serial killers. I LOVE reading about fraud and grifts and pyramid schemes. true crime ppl have all this paranoid energy about murder, which is rare in the grand scheme of things.....maybe instead that could be channeled into some productive rage toward capitalism.

And u know a side effect of learning about scam artists is that you start to understand certain things about economics, and just how STUPID these systems are and how easily they are taken advantage of....and I'd much rather people gained a passing familiarity with economics than whatever armchair psychologist shit these true crimers get on. We need fewer people who think they're experts on "sociopaths" and more people who understand how people like Elizabeth Holmes and the WeWork guy were able to do what they did

Here are some of my favorite books about financial scams:

The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust by Diana B. Henriques.

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis (about the 2008 stock market collapse).

The Caesar's Palace Coup: How a Billionaire Brawl Over the Famous Casino Exposed the Corruption of the Private Equity Industry by Max Frumes and Sujeet Indap. (I admit I've never finished this one; the writing is hard to read.)

The Great Beanie Baby Bubble: Mass Delusion and the Dark Side of Cute, by Zac Bissonette. I bought this book because of the subtitle and I have never regretted it. You must read it.

Catch Me If You Can by Frank Abagnale. They turned this one into a movie! The book was very different and is worth reading.

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion, by Elliot Brown and Maureen Farrell. I haven't read this one yet, but it's on my tbr pile!

Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy Inside the Catholic Church, by Gareth Gore. I'm reading this one right now. The author is a financial journalist who stumbled onto this story by unraveling a bank failure in Spain.

And here's a list of more non-fiction books about fraud and financial scams. The first book on this list is about Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes, which I also haven't read yet.

Enjoy!

If you are a podcast fan, I recommend Scam Goddess, which is run by Laci Moseley who is fucking hilarious and frequently approaches the trade from a pro-scam perspective. She is also having a Moment: she's published a memoir and recently got a television show of her own with a limited run on Max. The episode on Dixon, IL is my favorite: that small town was scammed out of $53 million by Rita Crundwell, who pissed the money away into her small empire of western pleasure quarter horses. Laci is very much an indoor cat and goes in for a fairly hyperfemme fashion style, complete with long fake nails, and she is hilariously visibly bewildered about why anyone would pay money to ride horses. And skeptical of the entire concept of horses, for that matter. As someone who quite likes horses, it was incredibly funny to watch--and the scam itself is one hell of a humdinger, too.

Stolen World by Jennie Erin Smith is a slight change of pace: it's about the early acquisition of herps (reptile and amphibian species) by zoos and museums, which was cartoonishly corrupt and involved a lot of animal smuggling. It was truly fascinating.

I would also love it if more people got into medical scammers and grifters, because boy howdy, if you want to look at a death count, those folks often beat the serial killers all hollow. In that vein...

Charlatan by Pope Brock is all about the goat balls-themed radio empire of Charles R. Brinkley, who made himself cartoonishly wealthy by selling surgeries in which he would cure whatever ailed you by tucking freshly-removed goat testicles alongside your own testicles, nestled nicely in your sac. (If you did not come with your own ready-made testicles, he did not have a lot of thoughts unless your problem was infertility. In this case, he would tuck some goat balls or some goat ovaries--your choice depending on what sex of kid you wanted to have--right alongside your own ovaries instead.) Brinkley was so successful he inadvertently spurred the creation of the American Medical Association, which lead to getting knocked off the airwaves and spurred him to run for Kansas governor as a write-in candidate on the platform of "give me my medical license and also my radio show back", and he nearly won.

In fifth grade a boy tried to impress me by swallowing a whole tadpole live and I punched him so hard that he puked and the tadpole was fine.

I kept it in a terrarium and it became a normal 🐸 despite everything. About a year afterward (I thought) it died, so I sadly put it in a shoebox in the shed until the ground thawed enough for a proper funeral but when that day came I opened the box and the frog was fine.

This is funnier than anything I have ever said.

This post is to Easter what a Geiger counter is to radiation.

Girl, help.

Current Status

I never watched BBC Sherlock or engaged in the fandom and being into original Sherlock Holmes in the year 2024 feels like frolicking in a meadow that’s grown up over a battlefield. Occasionally a war weary veteran with shadows in their eyes will find me. “Don’t you know what happened in this place?” they ask me. “I literally don’t,” I reply, and go back to drawing guys from 1895.

yeah that's gonna become a heritage post up there with "decay is an extant form of life"

Me leaving comments on fics.

Buns

How I think about the original design vs the more modern equivalent