oops! accidentally learned another new fiber art instead of making progress in any of the other fiber arts i only kinda know

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.

oh so the Yankees made their bats thicker and hit 20 runs bc of it and the league is just like yeah they're allowed to do that?? this whole time apparently it's been perfectly legal to just change the bats to make it easier and no one tried it until right now?? 150 years this sport has been around and suddenly someone had a bright idea??

look at this shit man

just learned about farming simulator

I mean, I already knew about it, but I just learned about it

Did you know that the target audience for Farming Simulator is actual real-world farmers? Because I didn’t. I just assumed that farmers probably don’t want to go home from a day of farming to do some (presumably highly inaccurate) virtual farming?

Like, imagine if the target audience for Power Washing Simulator was actual professional power washers.

Farming Sim gets sponsored by companies and shit to put ads in their games. But since the game is for farmers, all of the ads target farmers. Advertising products that, realistically, only farmers would be interested in. Aka John Deere tractors and shit.

There’s a fucking farming sim esports league. Where do they play? Agriculture conventions. not gaming conventions. agriculture conventions.

post cancelled this is way funnier

My buddy who is a farmer has the type of planter that drives itself across the field using GPS at a steady speed, and he just needs to turn it around at the end of each row. He added a little folding desk to his chair and plays farming simulator on it while he plants.

okay playing farming simulator while farming is crazy

Look, people hate the real world and come home and play The Sims.

I love seeing list memes where someone makes a "le cool people vs le cringe" and they obviously skew it so they barely scrape by into the cool kids club

You just KNOW this dudes 5'11"

I'm 5'11, but in most casual conversations I'll say I'm 5'9. I do this purely for the chaos that it creates. Because everyone assumes that men only exaggerate their height up, it makes me look like the only person honestly describing their height and thus knocks at least 2 inches off everyone else's description. The panic that the 6'1 guys feel at the thought of being described as 5'11 is hard to understate. I have had people run back to their cars to grab tape measures. If I could get away with describing myself as 4'6 I would.

you are the diametrical opposite of the aforementioned guy. you are a demigod walking among mortals

ID/ A series of screenshots of a twitter thread by @/vaspider. It reads, "Let's talk about safewords. There's a story I've been telling since my kid (now 22) was small. She LOVED to play ticklefight, and she loved to yell "No, stop!" and then sneak-attack tickle right afterwards. She thought this was hilarious

"Kiddo," I said, "it's not fair and not nice to say 'no, stop' and then start tickling again. When someone says stop, we stop." "But it's fun!"

"It's only fun if it's fun for everybody. Do you want to make a rule that everybody in the family knows for tickling where you can say 'stop' and keep playing?" "Mmmhmm. That is fun." "Okay, but then how do you say to stop when you really want to stop, or I do?"

She was stumped, and we talked it out. It's only fun if everyone knows the rules, and everybody can stop if they want to stop. She decided she wanted a different way to say stop. "Great! Now remember, this rule only works if people know about the rule."

"I know! If everybody doesn't know the rules, we're not playing the same game." "Right. So if you're playing with someone who doesn't know these rules and they say stop…" "…we stop."

And so 'pink elephants' was born. From roughhousing to teasing to conversations as she got older, 'pink elephants' expanded its use to mean "I am not joking and I want this to stop right now." It didn't inhibit our conversations about consent - it supported them.

When she was about 10 or so, I took her for an annual checkup. At one point the doctor was checking her stomach and she put her hands on his hands and said, "no, no, pink elephants!" He understood "no" if not "pink elephants."

"What does pink elephants mean?" "It means I don't like it and it has to stop and I'm not kidding." The doc looked at me, amused: "Your kid has a safeword?" I mean, yes! "No" can get lost in kids yelling, in the chaos of play, but "pink elephants" is much harder to miss!

But what happened bc of her safeword, because of the fact that she HAS a safeword to use, a way to help her enforce her boundaries when she might feel intimidated by an authority figure, exposed, or nervous, and might have difficulty being clear about her boundaries?

The three of us had a convo about the necessity of the exam, that we understood it was ticklish, and the doc would make the exam quick in order to alleviate the ticklishness. That it should only last about as long as it took her to count to 20 in her head.

Safewords are not just sexual. They are communication tools. In this case, they helped a 10yo kid set boundaries about how she wanted to be touched by a medical caregiver, helped reinforce to her that she has a right to say no, a right to protect herself.

Whether you're saying pineapple or pink elephants or Bigfoot or 'no', a means of communicating your boundaries is only as good as the people you're with, and only as good as the self you bring to a situation. Talking up front and setting boundaries is healthy.

This is true whether you're dealing with a sexual situation, a friendship, a professional relationship, or playing a tabletop RPG. I have devoted literally thousands upon thousands of words in 5 different game lines talking about negotiating and respecting boundaries.

Using the Stoplight System or X Card during a TTRPG is another form of safeword. It creates a mechanism by which all play ceases, for the health and safety of all parties.

Yes, people SHOULD stop and do a check-in if someone says no or stop, unless you have already agreed that not stopping when you say stop is part of the game. That's true whether you're talking about playing ticklemonster with a 5yo or monsterfucker w/her mom later."

The last tweet is a gif of Morticia Addams sipping from a teacup. /End

small cultural & Colombia/Latin related details from Encanto 🇨🇴

the flowers on Isabela’s dress and in her hair - cattleya trianae orchids (may lilies), national flowers of Colombia

Camilo snapping his fingers when he is excited

Mirabel using her lips to point

flowered balconies (like in Cartagena)

ruanas (ponchos) that Bruno and Camilo wore

Dolores’ “squeaks”

inviting the whole town/neighbourhood to a party

sombrero vueltiao - traditional Colombian hat

Isabela being covered in the colors of Colombian flag (🇨🇴) during her song

and many many more!

(this is for all the people who still say Encanto is not about Colombians ; sorry about the quality of the gifs)

🇨🇴 🥰

This is lovely, but don't forget your safety gear! A hot dye pot needs proper ventilation- dye outside, or with the vent fan on over your stove. Use gloves when handling freshly dyed fabrics- you can dye your skin by mistake. I usually like to gear up like a scientist- goggles, gloves, labcoat.

Above all, dye pots are not food pots! Do not use the pots you cook in for dying fabrics unless you know they are food safe dyes.

OSHA rules are there for a reason.

okay so i work in the deli of a grocery store, yeah? and today i got this guy who came up with his two twin children, around five years old. he walks up to the counter, carrying one kid in each arm, and loudly goes "oh, no, i forgot what i wanted!" and turns to the boy in his left arm and, in a perfect blues clues style voice, goes "caleb, do you remember what i wanted?" and the boy goes "half pound of yellow cheese!"

i, obviously, say "you've got it little sir!" and slice up half a pound of yellow american cheese, handing it to the little boy, who looks it over, nods, and tucks it in his lap.

then the man goes "well, we can't just have cheese on our sandwiches. but what else can we put on there?" and the little gurl in his other arm goes "half pound of ham!" so i nod and say "yes ma'am! what kind?" and she points at a random cut of turkey, so her father nods and says "like she said, honey ham!" i cut half a pound of honey ham, hand it to the little lady, she looks it over, nods and puts it in her lap.

then the man goes "now, what should we have for the side?" and the kids both simultaneously start cheering "macking cheese!!!" and the man spins on his heel and marches off, presumably to find the macking cheese.

later, the little boy comes wandering back to the counter while his father looks on and loudly and proudly proclaims that he wants to know where the mustard is. i point him to the correct aisle, he nods, says "thank you mister deli woman" and walks away.

Dutch longsword fencer Tosca Beuming

Photographed by Martin Philippo and Andress Kools

This sounded too good to be true, so I did a little bit of fact checking.

Mike Ilitch did in fact pay Rosa Parks' rent for years, but it wasn't because she was laid off. She needed a safer place to live after she was assaulted in her own home at the age of 81. He paid her rent from that point onward, for the rest of her life.

The more you know 🌈⭐

When you fact check and it turns out even better than the original story.

100% dog thinks it is a big cat

contrary to popular belief not everyone has an innate sense of internal gender or care to have one or seek a name for it, some people go their whole lives without questioning their occupation in one of two gender roles, but for some people, if pressed, they don’t feel that internal sense of ‘i am a woman’ or ‘i am a man’, and in that case i feel the switch over to transgender vs cisgender relies on active identification of a gender other than the one they were assigned. if someone’s like ‘idk dude I just work here’ then that’s valid

#i would describe my gender as not exactly ‘idk dude i just work here’ #more like…..when someone assumes you work somewhere that you don’t #but you know how to help them so you do it anyway #my gender is wearing a red shirt at a target

These are the best tags

A portion of people in the notes are like ‘but that makes you trans. That’s called being agender’ and another portion of people are going ‘this is how the majority of cis ppl feel and it’s NOT agender’ and personally I feel like both of them are missing the point here. Yes a lot of people identify as agender because of this feeling. Yes a lot of people with this same feeling still identify as cis. These are not mutually exclusive experiences and it doesn’t mean the agender people are secretly cis or the cis people are secretly agender. It just means they have very similar experiences of gender that they choose to conceptualize and label differently, and neither of them are mistaken or wrong to do so.

A young girl walking eagerly toward the outstretched hand of of Harriet Tubman. "I thought, why don't I just do that moment when an enslaved person trusts her to take their hand to freedom." Artist Michael Rosato The Harriet Tubman Mural is located on the Harriet Tubman Museum and Educational Center in historic downtown Cambridge, Maryland.

The artis is amazing

Good news that we deserve 😌

for people who can’t watch the video: THE AMYGDALA CHANGES TRADITIONALLY FOUND IN MOTHERS SHOW UP IN ALL PRIMARY CAREGIVERS REGARDLESS OF SEX

Changes in this part of the brain were previously used to previously used to argue that women are the ideal primary caretakers of children in all cases. And apparently, it’s false. The reason they found these changes in women was that women were already the primary caretaker in almost all cases, not because there’s something inherent to women that makes them better parents.

this is big news for SAHF and single dads!

This is also big news for adoptive parents and queer couples! Many people try to argue that adoptive parents aren't real parents because of biology and blah blah blah. Bigots will also argue this case against queer people. So, to all my traditionalists: it's not science! It's bigotry and sexist!

Nervously, I pull from the tarot deck. It’s the Nine of Clocks. My fate is revealed to me: It’s my bedtime, and I gotta go to sleeps