Another X-men Panel Redraw… Predictably I’m Obsessed With This Visual From Inferno #3

Something to watch for, which I learned from stage magic but which is extremely relevant to detecting scams as well:

The magician or scammer will *tell you* how he is going to prove his honesty.

The magician rifles through the deck until you say "stop", then he says, "Are you sure? I'll keep going if you want." and asks "Now, you agree that you could have stopped anywhere you wanted, so there's absolutely no way I could know which card you got" and because it's a magic show and you aren't paying close attention you didn't notice he didn't deal a card from where you stopped, he dealt the bottom card of the deck.

The magician doesn't ask you, "What would it take for you to believe this" because you might say, "I'd need you to use a sealed deck" or "I'd have to personally shuffle the deck" or some other proof that would make the trick impossible.

Magicians say "You agree that if I did *this*, it would mean *that*, right?" and you say yes, and it feels like you are the one who got to verify things, but of course the magician is lying and the proof is nothing of the kind.

Scammers do the same thing. A really concrete example is phone scammers pretending to be working for the government will say, "Look, I see you're skeptical if I'm who I say I am, I'm going to hang up and call back, and you'll see on the caller ID it says, 'FBI' and that tells you that I'm really working for the government."

Now, caller ID can be spoofed pretty easily, so it doesn't prove anything at all.

But it *feels* to you like you demanded proof and the scammer was willing to give you the proof.

But you didn't tell the scammer what out would take to prove it to you, the scammer told you what the proof would be.

This is actually like a really basic thing to look for if you want to start decoding magic tricks and scams.

Fighting the demons (urge to rewrite Topsoil)

21 & 32 for the writer's asks :3

hi ezra! thank you for the ask :3

21. What stops you from writing more in your free time?

you guys all know me too well.... i even have a tag on my blog talking about how i never write. im ngl i have a lot more free time than it seems but i spend a lot of it doing... tbh idek half the time. my motivation is quite the fickle creature and its pulled in a thousand different directions at any given moment. that is further compounded by the fact that i get really easily stuck when writing. i envy the people who can whip things out quickly, even just as a first draft. even when i tell myself to just write whatever i almost always end up getting bogged down in some sort of dilemma about word choice or filler action or something probably not actually as significant as im making it. also the projects im most invested in (and therefore actually have enough motivation to push myself to write) either are long works or require further development before i can really get to the meat of it and well. what can i say i have an instant gratification monkey in my brain that is extremely good at getting what it wants, and what it wants is very much not conducive to getting writing done.

32. A character you enjoy making suffer.

now this is a really interesting one. i very much have favorites. i like them for many reasons, but one of them is probably that they’re fun to put into situations. do those situations sometimes involve what the character would consider suffering? yeah. so i don’t really enjoy making a character suffer so much as i enjoy throwing them into a new environment and seeing how they react. im splitting this into two parts, one for oc and one for like. fic stuff because if you know me you know that no one can compete with my most beloved oc, evelyn. she’s very fun to put into situations because she reacts to things in a nonstandard way. shes not afraid to break things (unless she’s imposed a rule on herself to be a good tourist and not break things). she gets annoyed in an extremely entertaining manner at “minor inconveniences” (her definition may not match most people’s). I don’t think I can really do my love for her justice without breaking it out into an entirely separate post complete with a cut.

anyways, as for fic… well, pulling from one of my current fandoms, it might be a bit of a boring choice but I really do love putting fein in situations. Or at least, my conception of c!fein. I think part of what makes a character situationsable is how solid of a grasp I have on them, and he’s definitely one of the more solid ones. he also works really well with a concept I like to play with a lot—godhood. (now who saw that one coming?) and if my explorations of those concepts happen to not end in the most ideal way for our focus character? well sucks for them i guess, but it’s very fun for me. so yeah id say i put him through the wringer (mostly in my main ongoing). also he’s fun to knock down a few pegs. thinking about how there’s always a bigger fish.

Commenting fanfiction is the easiest thing in the world once you start doing it. 

Art by xiaoyu huang

织金大峡谷zhijin daxiagu, guizhou province of china (photo by 拍照叶)

y'all know that whole left-brained/right-brained thing is fake right? and the "brain fully develops at age 25" thing? and the "we only use 10% of our brains" thing? yeah they're all complete horseshit please yell at anyone who says them

Yup returning to necromancy, I’m so back. And you’re so back, and you’re so back, and you’re so back, and you’re

Writing mcyt fanfic feels so silly because the names are on a spectrum from "normal human name" to "semi-plausible" to "Sausage"