We’ve all faked our own deaths, right?

Scams is back, baby!

First a little bit of housekeeping: If the feds ask, no, you have not seen me around these parts, no, you won’t be answering any more of their questions without a lawyer present and no, they can’t come inside unless they come back with a warrant ;) 

I guess that answers all of the outstanding questions that may have been raised by seeing this newsletter appear in your inbox after what I assume was a brief, reinvigorating nap for all of us.  

Have y’all seen the Blind Side? I watched it on a plane circa 2010. There were approximately 12 minutes left in the movie when we landed, and the airline shut off the entertainment system before spending somewhere between one and seven hours looking for a parking space at JFK. Very, very airline of them. I never read the book (can’t read) or finished the movie (why would I?), but a few weeks ago, I found out how it ended. I knew Sandra Bullock earned that Oscar. 

^ This paragraph is reworked from around the time this news broke a few weeks ago, and I attempted to write about it. Maybe you think it’s hacky to dust off joke material that should have stayed in a drafts folder weeks after I filed it away there, but I promise it’s less hacky than the conclusions I was drawing like “was our appetite for white saviors the scam all along?” and “racism, dang.”

Sometimes the spark’s just not there. You don’t get to choose what inspires you, and for some people it’s BJD. “BJD?” you ask. “Is that some sort of weird sex thing?” 

Oh, honey, yes. Yeah. Or maybe it’s not. I honestly can’t tell. Like true weird sex things, both “weird” and “sex” are in the eye of the beholder. BJD, if you’re not in the community or blessed with the kind of internet¹ that introduces you to such things, is ball-jointed doll. I’m not gonna put a picture here because what you do with your eyes is your choice, but I think they’re kind of neat looking. 

Personally, I’m a fan of ball joints and grateful for the ones that function like they’re supposed to. The most notable event of my 2023 so far is that I had surgery (my second one, sad) on my shoulder to make it work normal and not dislocate in my sleep as it had been doing. The surgery included a bone graft, which is exciting for me because I have a formerly living person’s bone in my body now. No one will tell me whether it was a serial killer’s or how hot they were, objectively speaking, but there’s only so many formerly living people who attested on their driver’s licenses that they wanted me to have their bones after they shuffled off this mortal coil, so, you know, process of elimination. 

The magic bone in my shoulder is not so much the point as to say that I get the appeal of working joints. Dolls are not really for me, and the idea of giving them human mobility makes me uncomfortable for all the obvious “hauntings” and “robot takeovers” reasons, but that too is irrelevant. Even my strongly held belief that people should be able to pursue their joy and/or weird sex stuff without my judgment so long as they’re not hurting anyone doesn’t matter right now. 

What is important is that JJ Doll Lab, an artist in the BJD community, took a bunch of money for preorders, didn’t fill them, invested in a whole unrelated chicken situation, faked her death, got caught, mixed it up in the DMs, and I am truly sorry for the pain this has caused, but this is the glue that holds the scam fam together.

My sincerest admiration and gratitude to Instagram user Coyote Moon Dolls who has chronicled all of this in posts and stories I urge you to read. An excerpt, if you’re not yet sold: 

“In April 2023 [JJ Doll Lab] posted a lengthy apology claiming she had made a very terrible decision that she would “have to live with the rest of her life” but gave no further details or explanation. In the same post she claimed she could not financially afford to give any more refunds, but promised the dolls would be made and she would not ghost her customers again. After that, she posted one chicken picture and then vanished.”

As an outsider, I find it impossible to read that caption and feel anything other than alive. And it is important to note that I’m an outsider. Everything I’ve learned about BJD culture is gathered from googling mostly while doing other very important stuff over the last week or so. It’s not what anyone would call a thorough examination, but I can tell you that pretty much every cursory search for “JJ Doll Lab” is one click away from comments like this one on Reddit:  

“i feel like every "niche" community has a handful of faked deaths at this point. like, anywhere that there can be trading or sales, there will be people that underestimate their project and then fake their death to get out of it.”

Or this one on Twitter: “Hah, amusingly something similar ended up happening in the anime bobblehead cosplay community. Seems to be pretty common for a hobbyist to try making the jump to commercial, accidentally bite off way more than they can chew and then just running away with everyone’s money.”

And another: “Shades of the model horse community scandals again!! I think the moral here is TRUST NO MINIATURES MAKERS” 

Is that the moral here? Because the way I see it, the moral is the artisans who make these beloved ball joints, bobbleheads and horses know a proportional solution when they see one. The scam community may be less kind and supportive than those that bond over their shared love of intricate models, but we all know that when the debts start piling up and people get mad online, staging one’s own death is the move. JJ Doll Lab’s only mistake was posting about the chickens, but who can blame her? Like I say, we don’t get to choose what inspires us. 

Scam like your clientele can’t tell their coworkers they bought your wares, 

Ruthie

My Week in Consumption 

• I’ve never liked an audiobook, but on a recent roadtrip I listened to Gabrielle Union’s We’re Going to Need More Wine and then followed it up with Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking, and I’m revising my stance to I’ve never liked an audiobook that wasn’t primarily gossipy vignettes read by a charismatic celebrity. 

• While we’re on the topic of celebrity memoirs, please know that I am a die hard Club Kid. 

• On the Strategist: odes to my compost bin and my Shibumi. 

• I will watch anything Hugo Blick makes and The English is no exception. 

• Since we last spoke, I’ve purchased many expensive things, but the two that make me look as rich as I wish I was are this Oroton tote (not to be the worst, but it was $100 cheaper when I bought it) and this Babaa sweater.  

Thank you for reading this, and for signing up, even if you don’t remember doing it. If you’re wondering what this is, it’s a newsletter about scams that I haven’t written since the beginning of 2021. Will Scams be back again next month? Next year? Never? You and I will both have to live in the mystery. You can always write back to alert me to scam news or tell me how much you loved reading this. My relationship to praise is healthy and definitely not desperate, thanks for asking.

1. The blessed internet that introduced me to this story was Today in Tabs, a newsletter I admire so much that I ripped its name for this puppy while it was on its own brief, reinvigorating nap.